Horror: The 100 Best Books (20 page)

***

The October Country
is a special place of dark magic where so many discriminating readers have ventured time and time again. It is a terrain where numerous writers and would-be-writers have also gone in search of a touch of Ray Bradbury's cool shadows, and sometimes those writers have enjoyed their visits so much, they have come back with souvenirs of his style and tone. But that is understandable. This October Country is such a marvelous place, for all its fears, one hates to leave it.
The October Country
is, to my mind, Bradbury's finest work. Certainly, it is his most magical.
Something Wicked This Way Comes
touches that dark magic now and again, but fails to sustain it. But here, in this volume of nineteen, perfectly honed stories, it is the status quo. It is a shame and a surprise to me that his later science fiction tales, fine as they are (and it should be noted that Bradbury's so-called science fiction bears about as much relationship to that genre as a live pig does to pork) have overshadowed his ventures into the realm of horror, for it was in this realm that he was at his best. The stories have a feel of youthful enthusiasm, yet they are also the work of a mature artist coming into his own. Fifteen of these tales originally made up his first collection,
Dark Carnival
, published by the justly famous Arkham House. These fifteen stories were reworked by Bradbury, sharpened, and grouped with four others to form
The October Country
, and from that point on, his poetry of shadows has defined the field of short story writing in the weird fiction category, and has had no minor influence on the literary world at large, though his influence here is probably less admitted due to his pulp origins. His direct influence can be seen in the works of such writers as Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, William F. Nolan, and Chad Oliver, as well as more recent wordsmiths like Charles Grant, Dennis Etchison, Thomas Monteleone, Al Sarrantonio and Richard Christian Matheson. Bradbury, like any writer of real literature, was writing about more in these stories than things that go bump in the night. More goes on in the scenes than just the scenes. After reading this collection and laying the book aside, attending to more mundane chores like polishing the woodwork, tying your kid's shoes or feeding the gerbil, the echo of these stories, of that peculiar October Country, continues to bounce inside your head, and its echo does not diminish with time. Bradbury has the knack of making the commonplace mystical. It is as if everything in his stories is alive. The animate and the inanimate. After reading "The Wind", who has not listened to the howling of the wind about the eaves and corners of the house and failed to think that it might not be a random force of nature, but might in fact have intent -- dark intent? And who cannot, when snug in their bed, half-drifting-off, with an infant down the hall, fail to think of "The Small Assassin", and find themselves listening for the murderous slide of scooting baby knees on the carpet. And what about the other things
The October Country
has forever redefined? Hot Mexican nights and cisterns and the insides of strange men as viewed through a pane of stained-glass window; a man with a scythe; a man driving through the Tropic of Cancer, patting the empty car seat beside him; a dog bringing an unusual friend to see his sick master; and a dwarf in love with a funhouse mirror. Bradbury is not without his faults as a writer. Sometimes his style is poetic for poetry's sake. Sometimes his dialogue is too precious. Sometimes his view of childhood too brightly nostalgic. Sometimes the point of his stories too trite. But these faults do not raise their heads in
The October Country
. When Bradbury wrote of shadows and dread, the disappointments and emptiness that all of us experience, his poetry was sharp, his dialogue lean, his visions of childhood bittersweet, his points as simple and effective as the sight of fresh blood on an infant's face. We have many books by Ray Bradbury. Most of them collections of short stories. Novels like
Fahrenheit 451
, his best long work, and the flawed, but still marvelous,
Something Wicked This Way Comes
. But
The October Country was
, and is, his finest hour. Had he written only this one volume of stories, his place in the archives library of the darkly fantastic would have been assured. And his disciples no less numerous. -- JOE R. LANSDALE

First published by Arkham House under the direction of August Derleth, this collection consists chiefly of pieces written for
Weird Tales
in the early '50s. Indeed, the book is dedicated to the memory of the magazine, and the best of Brennan's stories typify the pulp imagination at its most concentrated. Included here are the classic blob-of-hungry-ooze story "Slime" and the highly regarded tale of a cursed stretch of scrubland, "Canavan's Back Yard" together with such lesser but evocative tales as "Death in Peru", "On the Elevator" and "The Hunt". One story, "Levitation", has been adapted for the TV series
Tales from the Darkside
. Despite the narrator's last words, "I have never gone back since. And I never will", Brennan produced a sequel to "Canavan's Back Yard" -- "Canavan Calling" -- twenty-five years later for inclusion in
Night Visions 2: Dead Image
(1985). Brennan, who died in 1990, was also the author of much poetry, the most macabre of which is collected in
Nightmare Need
(1964) and produced series of stories concerning Lucius Leffing, a Holmesian psychic investigator, and Kerza, a lady barbarian.

***

Fairytales apart, this was the first honest-to-God horror book that I ever got my hands on to. I was about nine years old, certainly not much more. It scared me stiff, gave me nightmares that actually shaded into major-league hallucinations, probably warped me for life, and certainly set me on target for what would eventually become a career. I loved it, and still do. How much more can you ask of a book? First let me tell you how I came to get hold of it. The collection had originally been published in an Arkham House edition with a number of the stories already having a
Weird Tales
pedigree, but the version that reached me was a luridly-covered Ballantine reprint . . . and when I say lurid I mean bright pinks, lime greens and purples, with the kind of lettering that they used in the opening credits of
The Invaders
on TV. A huge bulbous spider straddled the artwork from above, while down at the bottom of the cover a tiny naked woman stood amongst Easter Island statues watching the sun rise except that it wasn't the sun, but an immense and inhuman head with wide-staring eyes. Crude, but effective, as the villains used to say of their buzz-saws in the chapterplays. I'm pretty sure it belonged to my uncle. He was an ex-Teddy Boy, ex-army conscript, ex-railway worker, then an employee on the Manchester docks. US paperback imports rarely made it into the shops in those days but a number of titles would make it over as ballast with other cargoes, as used to happen with comic books. Whether or not the Brennan was one of these, it's hard to be sure. It's only when I look back from here that I can appreciate how my uncle filled in some much-needed gaps in my early literary education; when they were making us read
Black Beauty
at school, he was the one who was telling me how the Frankenstein monster was put together. He provided my introduction to Edgar Rice Burroughs with a description of how the Leopard Men tenderized human flesh for consumption by breaking the limbs of their captives with clubs and then tethering them submerged up to their chins in a fast-flowing river. He told me who Doc Savage was. And he lent me
Nine Horrors and a Dream
. Ten stories don't exactly make for a doorstopper of a book. I read it quickly and in a state of awe. The one that I think impressed me most was "The Calamander Chest". It had many of the elements that I've come to think of as characteristic of the genre post-Lovecraft and pre-1970s, when tales of solitary young men and locked-up secrets gave way to a much broader sense of involvement that was more akin to soap opera. Each of the tales (with the possible exception of "Slime", which at 32 pages was a more ambitious novella) was a similarly lean narrative built around a weird hook and calculated to leave the reader with that oddly satisfying sense of having taken a peek into forbidden territory from a place of safety. Did I mention that I was staying the night at my grandmother's house when the book came into my hands? I'd better, because it has some bearing on what was to follow. My grandmother had a modest little place in a well-kept Salford backstreet (bulldozed, now, like everything of value in that city). It wasn't a spooky house at all, by any rational standard . . . but to a child of my age, the gulf of time and taste was enough to make me feel ill-at-ease and a stranger in the home of any elderly relative. I read the last couple of stories in an unfamiliar bed with flannel sheets and heavy blankets -- my own blanket at home had pictures of parachutes and jeeps on it -- and when I finally switched off the bedside lamp, there was still a weak illumination in the room from a streetlight just outside the window. I could see the big, dark shapes of the furniture and, lit from the window like a little stage, I could see the top of the dressing-table. On this dressing-table stood -- or rather, knelt -- two figurines. They were carved out of smooth black stone and they represented an African man and woman, both unclothed but tastefully featureless. Black nakedness somehow seemed to be considered apart from the taboos of the age, which would explain why
National Geographic
was never kept under the counter with all the skin magazines. I must have been lying there for about half an hour before anything happened. So, what
did
happen? What happened was that the male figurine got to its feet, and walked to the edge of the dressing-table and looked down. He seemed to move at double speed, with a flicker like an overcranked film. As he turned away from the edge, the female was standing up with the obvious intention of repeating the action. I tried to close my eyes and look away, but I couldn't. As the woman came forward the male was pacing back and forth behind her, as if trying to get the measure of this surface on which he found himself trapped. Neither of them made any sound. Every now and again they would dash back to their carved plinths for a few moments of rest and recharge. I don't remember anything that ever scared me more. Not then, not since. I know exactly what was happening, of course. My body was on the brink of sleep and my mind was still racing, and the barriers between imagination and perception had dropped. I don't know how long I lay there, watching this bizarre show that my imagination was conjuring out of the available materials, but what I do know is that I believed in it without question. I still do, in a way. You can add all of the later rationalizations that you want, but when you strip these away you're left with one simple certainty: you know what you saw. I returned the book. Didn't see it again for twenty-five years, when I moved some paperbacks while browsing at a convention bookstall and found myself face-to-face with that same Ballantine edition. There had been other landmark books for me in the intervening time -- Wells, Bierce, Levin, Farris, King, Straub -- but this had been the first. I hesitated -- there are few things more elusive and disappointing than past magic -- and then I bought it. How could I do anything else? I felt as if I was welcoming it home. The stories hold up. Styles and fashions have changed, but for me the line back in time stays unbroken. There's only one difficulty that I find myself unable to resolve. I still can't work out which nine stories are the horrors, and which one the dream . . . -- STEPHEN GALLAGHER

Fairvale, California. The obese Norman Bates lives with his domineering mother and runs the isolated Bates Motel. Mary Crane, a young woman fleeing from a robbery she has committed on impulse, is beheaded in the shower by the insane Mrs. Bates. Norman tries to cover up the crime, which is investigated by a private detective (who is also murdered by Norman's mother), and by the dead girl's sister and boyfriend. Finally, it develops that Mrs. Bates has been dead for years, poisoned by her son, and that Norman is a schizophrenic who becomes homicidal when he takes on his mother's personality. Famously filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1960 from a screenplay by Joseph Stefano, with a definitive performance by Anthony Perkins,
Psycho
has become the watchword for a certain kind of violent/suspense/psychological thriller. Bloch wrote a sequel,
Psycho 2
(1982), which was
not
adapted into the 1983 film of the same name. Further sequels include the cinema's
Psycho III
(1986), television's
Bates' Motel
(1987) and
Psycho IV: The Beginning
(1990), and Bloch's novel
Psycho House
(1990).

***

Never mind the movie. Mr. Hitchcock did a masterful job on it, sure. And everyone on the planet who is interested in the horror genre must have seen the movie at least once by now. But Robert Bloch's novel was a masterpiece first. Mr. Hitchcock didn't create Norman Bates and that spooky motel; Mr. Bloch did. And not as any special project, either. Following on the heels of short stories, radio adaptations (of his own work) and at least four other novels,
Psycho
was just another product of Robert Bloch's wonderfully fertile and disciplined imagination. Please note that qualifying word "disciplined". Because much of the strength of
Psycho
is in the writing. From the beginning, Robert Bloch has written with clarity, using the language to communicate, not confuse. Too much of today's writing is intentionally obscure, deliberately aimed at having the reader ask himself on finishing a story, "Now what was that all about?" Too many writers consider their work a contest between themselves and the reader, with, of course, the dice loaded in their favor and the reader bound to feel stupid for not "getting it". Not Mr. Bloch. His prose comes across like the clear, pure trumpet tone of a Bix Beiderbecke, not like a foghorn moan struggling to be heard through thick fog. So what he has to say is instantly understandable and hence all the more powerful. What Bloch had to say in
Psycho
influenced the whole art of horror writing. Back onto dusty shelves went most of the vampires, the werewolves, and other such beasties of the Victorian novelists. To front and centre came a probing of people's minds and an awareness of the frightening things to be found lurking there. Never mind the crumbling old castle, the mad scientist, the ancient, horrid gods we wrote about in
Weird Tales
and other grand old magazines. Those were good stories for their time and will always be fun to re-read or collect; of course they will! But take a good, hard look now at your nextdoor neighbor who goes to an office every day or sells insurance or, in this case, runs a motel haunted by memories of an overpowering mother. With this novel Robert Bloch took us from then to now in one big, scary leap, raising the hair of his readers while they eagerly turned the pages of what was scaring them, and showing writers how to handle a new kind of horror story. Almost every present-day writer of horror has in one way or another been influenced by
Psycho
. Call it a milestone in horror fiction, written by one of the greats. That's what it is and what he is. -- HUGH B. CAVE