Danse Macabre (58 page)

The Doll Who Ate His Mother
is not the greatest of the novels discussed here—I suppose that would have to be either
The Haunting of Hill House
or Straub's
Ghost Story
—and it is not as good as Campbell's
The Parasite
. . . but it is remarkably good. Campbell keeps a tight rein on his potentially tabloid-style material, even playing off it occasionally ( a dull and almost viciously insensitive teacher sits in the faculty room of his school reading a paper with a headline which blares HE CUT UP YOUNG VIRGINS AND LAUGHED—the story's blackly hilarious subhead informs us that
His Potency Came From Not Having Orgasms
). He carries us inexorably past levels of abnormal psychology into something that is much, much worse. Campbell is extremely conscious of his literary roots—he mentions Lovecraft (adding "of course" almost unconsciously), Robert Bloch (he compares
The Doll
's climax in the abandoned cellar to the climax of
Psycho
, where Lila Crane must face Norman Bates's "mother" in a similar basement), and Fritz Leiber's stories of urban horror ( such as "Smoke Ghost") and more notably, Leiber's eerie novel of San Francisco,
Our Lady of Darkness
(winner of the Best Novel award at the 1978 World Fantasy Convention). In
Our Lady of
Darkness
, Leiber adopts as his thesis the idea that when a city becomes complex enough, it may take on a tenebrous life of its own, quite apart from the lives of the people who live and work there—an evil sentience linked, in some unstated way, to the Elder Ones of Lovecraft and, more importantly in terms of the Leiber novel, Clark Ashton Smith. Amusingly, one of the characters in
Our Lady of Darkness
suggests that San Francisco did not become truly sentient until the Transamerica Pyramid was finished and occupied.

While Campbell's Liverpool does not have this kind of conscious evil life, the picture he draws of it gives the reader the feeling that he is observing a slumbering, semisentient monster that
might
awake at any moment. His debt to Leiber seems clearer here than that to Lovecraft, in fact. Either way, Ramsey Campbell has succeeded in forging something uniquely his own in
The Doll Who Ate His Mother
.

James Herbert, on the other hand, comes from an older tradition—the same sort of pulp horror-fiction that we associate with writers such as Robert E. Howard, Seabury Quinn, the early Sturgeon, the early Henry Kuttner, and, on the English side of the Atlantic, Guy N. Smith. Smith, the author of paperback originals beyond counting, has written a novel whose title is my nominee for the all-time pulp horror classic:
The Sucking Pit
.

This sounds as if I were getting ready to knock Herbert, but this isn't the case. It's true that he is held in remarkably low esteem by writers in the genre of both sides of the Atlantic; when I've mentioned his name in the past, noses have automatically wrinkled ( it's little like ringing a bell in order to watch conditioned dogs salivate), but when you enquire more closely, you find that remarkably few people in the field have actually read Herbert—and the fact is that James Herbert is probably the best writer of pulp horror to come along since the death of Robert E. Howard, and I believe that Conan's creator would have responded to Herbert's work with immediate enthusiasm, although the two men were opposites in many ways. Howard was big and broad shouldered; the face in those pictures which remain to us is expressionless with, we might think, undertones of either shyness or suspicion. James Herbert is of medium height, slim, quick to smile or frown, open and frank. Of course the biggest difference may be that Howard is dead and Herbert ain't, ha-ha.

Howard's best work—his stories of Conan the Barbarian—are in the mythic country of Cimmeria, far in a similarly mythic past inhabited by monsters and beautiful, sexy maidens in need of rescue. And Conan will be happy to effect said rescue . . . if the price is right. Herbert's work is set firmly in England's present, most commonly against the backdrop of London or the southern counties which surround it. Howard was brought up in rural circumstances ( he lived and died in a small sagebrush town called Cross Plains, Texas); Herbert was born in London's East End, the son of street traders, and his work reflects a checkered career as a rock and roll singer, artist, and ad executive.

It is in the elusive matter of style—a confusing word that may be most accurately defined as "plan or method of attack"—that Herbert strongly recalls the Howard that was. In his novels of horror—
The Rats, The Fog, The Survivor, The Spear, The Lair
, and
The Dark
—Herbert does not just write; as Robert E. Howard did, he puts on his combat boots and goes out to assault the reader with horror.

Let me also take a moment to point out one similarity that James Herbert and Ramsey Campbell do share, simply by virtue of their Englishness: they both write that clear, lucid, grammatical prose that only those educated in England seem able to produce. You'd think that the ability to write lucid prose would be the bottom line for any publishing novelist, but it is not so. If you don't believe me, go check out the paperback originals rack at your local bookstore. I promise you such a carnival of dangling participles, misplaced modifiers, and even lack of agreement between subject and verb that your hair may turn white. You would expect that proofreaders and copy editors would pick this sort of stuff up even if the writers of such embarrassing English do not, but many of them seem as illiterate as the writers they are trying to bail out.

Worse than the mechanical errors, many writers of fiction seem totally unable to explain simple operations or actions clearly enough for the reader to be able to see them in his or her mind's eye. Some of this is a failure on the writer's part to visualize well and completely; his or her own mind's eye seems bleared half-shut. More of it is a simple failure of that most basic writer's tool, the working vocabulary. If you're writing a haunted-house story and you don't know the difference between a gable and a gambrel, a cupola and a turret, paneling and wainscotting, you, sir or madam, are in trouble.

Now don't get me wrong here; I thought Edwin Newman's book on the degeneration of the English language was moderately entertaining but also often tiresome and amazingly prissy, the book of a man who would like to put language inside a hermetically sealed bell-jar (like a carefully groomed corpse inside a glass coffin) instead of sending it out into the streets to jive with the people. But language has its own point and reason for being. Parapsychologists may argue over extrasensory perception; psychologists and neurologists may claim there is no such thing; but those who love books and love the language know that the printed word really is a kind of telepathy. In most cases the writer does her or his work silently, couching thoughts in symbols composed of letters in groups set off one from the next by white space, and in most cases the reader does her or his work silently, reading the symbols and reintegrating them as thoughts and images. Louis Zukofsky, the poet (A, among other books), claimed that even the look of words on the page—the indents, the punctuation, the place on the line where the paragraph ends—has its own story to tell. "Prose," Zukofsky said, "is poetry." It's probably true that the writer's thoughts and the reader's thoughts never tally exactly, that the image the writer sees and the image the reader sees are never 100 percent the same. We are, after all, not angels but were made a little less than the angels, and our language is maddeningly hobbled, a fact to which any poet or novelist will attest. There is no creative writer, I think, who has not suffered that frustrating crash off the walls which stand at the limits of language, who has not cursed the word that just doesn't exist. Emotions such as grief and romantic love are particularly hard to deal with, but even such a simple operation as starting up a car with a manual transmission and driving it to the end of the block can present nearly insurmountable problems if you try to write the process down instead of simply
doing
it. And if you don't believe this is so, write down such instructions and try them on a nondriving friend . . . but check your auto insurance policy first.

Different languages seem particularly suited to different purposes; the French may have gotten a reputation for being great lovers because the French language seems particularly well suited to the expression of emotion (there is no nicer way to say it than
Je t'aime
. . . and no better language in which to sound really lacked off at someone). German is the language of explanation and clarification ( but it is a cold language for all that; the sound of many people speaking German is the sound of large machines running in a factory). English serves very well to express thought and moderately well to express image, but there is nothing inherently lovely about it (although as someone has pointed out, it has its queerly perverse moments; think of the lovely and euphonious sound of the words "proctological examination" ) . It has always seemed to me ill suited to the expression of feeling, though. Neither "Why don't we go to bed together" or the cheerful but undeniably crude "Baby, let's fuck" can touch "
Voulez-vous
coucher avec
moi c'est soir
?" But we must do the best we can with what we have . . . and as readers of Shakespeare and Faulkner will attest, the best we can do is often remarkably good. American writers are more apt to mangle the language than our British cousins (although I'd argue with anyone that English English is much more bloodless than American English—many British writers have the unhappy habit of droning; droning in perfectly grammatical English, but a drone is still a drone for a' that and a' that), often because they were subjected to poor or erratic teaching methods as children, but the best American work is striking in a way that British prose and poetry rarely is anymore: see, for instance, such disparate writers as James Dickey, Harry Crews, Joan Didion, Ross MacDonald, John Irving.

Both Campbell and Herbert write that unmistakable, impeccable English line; their stories go out into the world with their pants buttoned, their zippers zipped, and their braces in their places—but to what a different ultimate effect!

James Herbert comes at us with both hands, not willing to simply engage our attention; he seizes us by the lapels and begins to scream in our faces. It is not a tremendously artistic method of attack, and no one is ever going to compare him to Doris Lessing or V. S. Naipaul . . . but it works.

The Fog
(no relation to the film of the same name by John Carpenter) is a multiple-viewpoint story about what happens when an underground explosion breaches a steel cannister that has been buried by the British Ministry of Defense. The cannister contains a living organism called a mycoplasma ( an ominous protoplasm that may remind readers of an obscure Japanese horror film from the fifties titled
The H-Men
) which resembles a smoggy yellow-green mist. Like rabies, it attacks the brains of the humans and animals it envelops, turning them into raving maniacs. Some of the incidents involving animals are particularly grisly; a farmer is trampled to death by his own cows in a foggy pasture, and a drunken shopkeeper who seems to loathe everything but his racing pigeons ( and one battered old campaigner in particular, a pigeon named Claude) has his eyes pecked out by his birds, who have flown back to their London coop through the fog. The shopkeeper, clutching the remains of his face, staggers off the rooftop where the birds are quartered and falls to his death.

Herbert rarely finesses and never pulls back from the crunch; instead he seems to race eagerly, zestfully, toward each new horror. In one scene a crazed bus driver castrates the teacher who has been his nemesis with a pair of garden shears; in another, an elderly poacher who has been previously caught and "thrashed" by the local large landowner suffers the effects of the fog, goes after the landowner, and nails him to his own dining room table before finishing him off with an ax. A snotty bank manager is locked in his own vault, a gym teacher is beaten to death by his phys ed students, and in the book's most effective scene, almost a hundred and fifty thousand residents and holiday-makers at Bournemouth walk into the ocean in a massive, lemminglike group suicide.

The Fog
was published in 1975, three years before the gruesome events at Jonestown, Guyana, and in many of the book's episodes—particularly in the Bournemouth episode—Herbert seems to have forecast it. We see the event through the eyes of a young woman named Mavis Evers. Her lesbian lover has just left her, having discovered the joys of going hetero, and Mavis has gone to Bournemouth to commit suicide . . . a little irony worthy of E.C. comics at their best. She wades breast-deep into the water, becomes frightened, and decides she will try living a little longer. The undertow nearly gets her, but following a short, tense struggle, she is able to get to shallow water again. Turning to face the shore, Mavis is greeted by this nightmare:

There were hundreds—could it be thousands—of people climbing down the steps to the beach and walking toward her, toward the sea!

Was she dreaming? . . . The people of the town were marching in a solid wall out to the sea, making no sound, staring toward the horizon as though something was beckoning to them. Their faces were white, trancelike, barely human. And there were children among them; some walked along on their own, seeming to belong to no one; those that couldn't walk were being carried. Most of the people were in their nightclothes, some were naked, having risen from their beds as though answering a call that Mavis neither heard nor saw . . . .

This was written
before
the Jonestown tragedy, remember.

In the aftermath of that, I recall one commentator intoning with dark and solemn sonorousness, "It was an event that not even the most darkly fertile imagination could have envisioned." I flashed on the Bournemouth scene from
The Fog
and thought, "You're wrong. James Herbert envisioned it."

. . . still they came on, oblivious to her cries, unseeing. She realized her danger and ran toward them in a vain attempt to break through, but they forced her back, heedless of her pleas as she strained against them. She managed to push a short path through them, but the great numbers before her were unconquerable, pushing her back, back into the waiting sea . . . .