Horror: The 100 Best Books (24 page)

In leisurely fashion, but without delay, the head turned and the eyes met mine. They were dark brown eyes with deeply creased lids, thick lower lashes, and arching brows. I also saw a pale, indoors complexion scattered with broken veins to what seemed an incongruous degree, a broad forehead, a long, skewed nose, and a mouth that, in another's face, I might have called humorous, with very clearly denned lips. Then, or rather at once, Dr. Underhill recognised me. Then he smiled. It was the kind of smile with which a bully might greet an inferior person prepared to join with him in the persecution of some helpless third party.

Amis never piles on the agony, using words with his customary care. This coolness also characterizes much of Allington's behaviour, whereas his old father dies of shock when confronted by one of the apparitions. If Underhill was once human, the bird which flies through Allington's hand -- to his terror -- manifestly is not. The green monster, which Underhill once controlled, is even further from human, though it takes on an approximately human shape. It is a destructive force arising from nature, not entirely unlike Theodore Sturgeon's
It
. Last in the apparition queue, most far from humanity, is "the young man". The young man, appearing in the upstairs dining-room when the whole world is struck by temporal paralysis, is God himself. However many times I read the novel, these passages, with the universe stopping and this pallid apparition sitting in a chair, strike me with deep and genuine dismay. Allington's conversation with the young man touches profound depths of ontological discomfort: the Almighty is a petty creature. In all,
The Green Man
is one of Amis's most agreeably rancid novels, packed with disconcerting moments, both human and inhuman, and ending on a memorable note of
Angst
. It's genuinely and enduringly chilling, the real McCoy, and no tomato sauce. -- BRIAN W. ALDISS

This collection assembles the best of Anthony Boucher's short fiction. A major influence on the field as founder and editor of
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, Boucher (the pseudonym of William Anthony Parker White) wrote these stories between 1941 and 1945, mainly for John W. Campbell's
Unknown
. The title story is a classic mix of lycanthropy, private eyes, fiendish Nazi agents and wisecracking humour. In a similar vein, the book also includes such witty variations on old horror themes as "Snulbug", about a deal with a demon, "Mr. Lupescu", about an imaginary friend, "The Ghost of Me", a doppelgdnger with a twist, and "We Print the Truth", about a newspaper editor given the power to change the world. "They Bite", a rare straight horror tale about desert-dwelling mutants (perhaps an influence on
The Hills Have Eyes
) is one of the most often-anthologized and praised '40s horror stories. Boucher's other work includes fine, traditional detective novels like
The Case of the Seven of Calvary
(1937),
The Case of the Crumpled Knave
(1939),
Nine Times Nine
(1940),
The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars
(1940) and
Rocket to the Morgue
(1942).

***

I saw one of the most distressing newspaper headlines of my life last month; someone was reading
The Sun
at Haywards Heath railway station, and the headline blared out from the cover and it made my heart sink and my fingers cross. "Oh
no
," I thought. "They
haven't
!" The Headline read:
Werewolf Captured in Southend
. The concept was terrifying. If there really were werewolves -- and Southend did seem the kind of place they'd find one -- then werewolves would be reduced to reality, be codified and counted, make TV appearances, be explained away. No longer could shapechanging lycanthropes stalk the darkness outside the circle of firelight that fits into everyday experience and dry textbooks, no longer would they be fair game for any writer with a yen to set someone howling at a full moon. Instead they'd be case histories and oddities and half of the fun would vanish as we learned the facts. Make that all of the fun. Luckily, like much else in the tabloid press, the headline bore no relation to the actual state of affairs at all. The disgruntled gentleman in Southend wasn't actually a werewolf. But it had been a close call. I think I would feel the same way if any of the creatures of Dark Myth actually turned up and became quantifiable: if a Unicorn was caged in Bognor, or a Zombie in Blackpool, or if Count Dracula landed at Grimsby and was detained by Immigration. If they existed then we could no longer invent them, and the world would be poorer by a myth or three. It was Ogden Nash who said that "where there's a monster there's a miracle", but I'd discovered that for myself at the age of ten, when I read
The Compleat Werewolf
by Anthony Boucher. At first glance the book might not seem a prime candidate for a
Best Horror
selection. It's a short-story collection, of which less than half the ten stories could be categorized as strict horror, and three are simply good-natured
Astounding
-type SF. But it contains at least two stories worth their weight in chilled blood, and the title story, which, for me, is special. "They Bite" is one of the blood chillers. On re-reading it I realized that I had forgotten the plot, what there is of it, that I had in memory stripped the tale down to a leaner framework. But the central motif (of the Carkers -- emaciated, brown, desert-dwellers who live in the corner of your vision, moving faster than the eye can follow; cannibals, and they bite) had always stayed with me, as had the final scene, of Tallant, the protagonist, trapped in the adobe hut the Carkers have made their home, blood pouring from his severed wrist, waiting for the returning female Carker to come and finish him off. "We Print the Truth" tells of the town of Grover. The Editor of the local paper, MacVeagh, wishes that his paper will always print the truth; his wish is granted. Whatever is printed in the paper is the truth -- in Grover. The opportunity to play God becomes too much for MacVeagh; he ends the Second World War, marries the girl of his dreams, tries to make a perfect world. But fairytale wishes always have catches, and this has worse catches than most. His wife is unhappy, commits adultery with the man she would have married, eventually attempts suicide by drinking iodine. MacVeagh "fixes" this with a newspaper article but the results are even more unpleasant than he expected. And outside Grover things are even worse; after all, outside the paper's sphere of influence, the war continues. That things resolve eventually, according to the rules, doesn't subtract from the overall feeling that one is watching MacVeagh dig himself further and further into a pit from which there really is no escape -- like the bartender given a wish by the same old wish-granting god (Wayland Smith) who wishes for an inexhaustible beer pitcher, and drinks himself to death. The post-coital moment at which MacVeagh realizes that his wife can never possibly love him is true horror indeed. "Mr. Lupescu" is an elegant variation on a theme, which recalls to mind John Collier's superior short story, "Thus We Refute Beelzy". Both stories involve fathers murdered by "imaginary friends". In the Boucher tale the imaginary friend is more real than might initially be imagined; and the imaginary friend has an imaginary fiend . . . "The Pink Caterpillar" is a time-travel black magic detective story about a man and a skeleton; "The Ghost of Me" is a doppelganger variant, about a man whose ghost turns up to haunt the spot where he was killed, but slightly too early. And then there's the story that changed the way I saw things. "The Compleat Werewolf isn't a horror story. But it's a story that affects how you perceive the icons of horror -- especially if exposed to it early enough. It affects whose side you are on from then on out; I'm on the side of the werewolf, have been ever since. Wolfe Wolf is a professor of old German, hopelessly in love with Gloria, a feckless film starlet. When, during the course of a drunken night, Wolfe discovers from Ozymandias the Great (a real magician who no longer practises, because people want fakes) that he is a werewolf, that he can change into a wolf simply by saying "
Absarka
", he sees glory ahead, a chance to impress and win Gloria. But there are disadvantages -- like the fact that in wolf form it is impossible to say
Absarka
and change back again, or the trouble one has with one's lack of clothes on changing from wolf into human form in front of a classroom of students. He converses with cats, listens to Ozymandias' endless anecdotes of magic in Madagascar, and unfinished tales of Darjeeling, rescues small children, and even begins to understand how people could snack on them . . . Again the plot -- chock-full of fifth columnists, spies, Germans, film people, FBI men and Fergus O'Breen (redheaded Irish private eye) -- matters hardly at all. It's the werewolf. Compleatly the werewolf. And you could ask me why I picked this book, rather than any one of well over a hundred other possibilities, many of them written by authors for whom I have more respect or affection, or books which are more deserving masterworks of outstanding literary or artistic or horrific achievement . . . I suppose it's because they didn't catch a werewolf in Southend last month, and, Fate willing, they never will. -- NEIL GAIMAN

The story of
Beowulf
, told from the point of view of Grendel, the monster who terrorises the meadhall of King Hrothgar until the mighty hero -- nameless here -- slays him in combat. Unlike Michael Crichton's
Eaters of the Dead
(1976), which retells the same myth but rationalizes Grendel and his mother as the last surviving Neanderthals, Gardner's novel accepts the fantastic elements of the original story -- monsters, dragons, heroes -- and re-uses them as part of a meditation upon the nature of humanity, the indifference of God, and the interdependence of heroism and monstrousness in legend and song. John Gardner, an American academic, was also the author of
The Resurrection
(1966),
The Wreckage of Agathon
(1970),
The Sunlight Dialogues
(1972) and other novels.
Grendel
was filmed a little too whimsically as an animated feature in Australia, entitled
Grendel, Grendel, Grendel
(1980), directed by Alexander Stitt, with Peter Ustinov as the voice of the monster.

***

At first literary glance there seems little enough reason to include John Gardner's
Grendel
in a listing of Horror's 100 Best: the short novel contains none of the disturbing
frissons
common to successful dark fantasy, offers no hint of the dark-night-of-the-soul distortion of Lovecraft's twisted lens, and certainly exhibits no sign of the disquieting promise of biological horror which so many of our contemporaries bring to the genre. A critic might say that Gardner's
Grendel
has no place on this list. John Gardner might well agree. Both would be wrong. John Gardner's
Grendel
is a brilliant reversal of the Beowulf tale in which the reader identifies not with the warriors boasting of victory in their mead hall, but with the adolescent monster, his arm torn from its socket by the humorless "hero", dying alone in his cold cave of forest and night. It is fitting that Gardner has reached back to English's oldest epic tale to give us what may be fiction's most sympathetic depiction of
monster
, for it is this very exploration of the reductive inevitability of monster-in-man which has served as a major theme in the best horror fiction . Like Mary Shelley's creature in
Frankenstein
or Thomas Harris's fiend in
Red Dragon
, Gardner's Grendel is a watcher who waits. Gardner's creature describes himself clearly: "Pointless, ridiculous monster crouched in the shadows, stinking of dead men, murdered children, martyred cows". Grendel's observation of mankind is equally clear; he sees a rapacious horde of murderers and earth-destroyers, hiding their ultimate disharmony behind songs of glory, cloaks of religion, and other hypocrisies. Occasionally the thanes will eject a too-obvious murderer into the night, but even among these fellow outcasts the waiting monster can find no fit company: "At times I would try to defend the exile," says Grendel, "at other times I would try to ignore him, but they were too treacherous. In the end, I had to eat them." When Gardner's Grendel falls through time and space to visit the old dragon, we are confronted with one of the great cameo appearances in all of fantastic literature. As old as time and twice as cranky, capable of seeing the far future as easily as the past, Grendel's fearsome mentor is a masterpiece of fire-breathing cynicism, a scaled, Sartre-ish nightmare of nihilism. Gardner commented in a 1978 interview: "As a medievalist, one knows there are two great dragons in medieval art. There's Christ the dragon and there's Satan the dragon. There's always a war between these two great dragons." Grendel is caught in the middle of this war as surely as he is torn between his Conviction that he is a cog in a mechanistic universe and his grudging admiration of the glorious feats of free will exalted in the minstrel Shaper's meadhall songs. For a while the monster protects his precarious philosophical balance by refusing to kill Wealtheow, Hrothgar's lovely queen, thus postponing his own "ultimate act of nihilism". But when the time comes, Grendel's adolescent, romantic ideals prove as fragile as the queen herself: "I would kill her, yes! I would squeeze out her feces between my fists. So much for meaning as quality of life! I would kill her and teach them reality. Grendel the truth teacher, phantasm-tester!" But in the end, of course, it is Grendel who dies, seeing in his unnamed nemesis (Beowulf) overtones of the dragon as well as hints of something even less human. John Gardner's prose throughout
Grendel
is knife-sharp, painfully honest, and faithful to the word beauty of the great poem it celebrates. It is a wonderful book. It should be mentioned that Gardner himself might not have appreciated being listed among horror's luminaries. In his many writings on writing, he relentlessly equated genre fiction with inferior fiction, going so far as to urge young writers to forestall their initial publication rather than succumb to the sirens of ". . . bad fiction (pornography, horror novels, and so forth)". Once, to illustrate contemporary bad writing, he quoted an out-of-context extract from the work of perhaps the finest fantasist North America has yet produced. All of this detracts or adds nothing to the inestimable worth of John Gardner's
Grendel
, but it is oddly fitting that the man's masterpiece lies firmly imbedded in the tradition of dark fantasy. It is equally fitting that when Grendel approaches the dragon with some thoughts of abandoning his career of terrifying humans, the dragon's reproach may apply not only to Grendel but to all doubting practitioners of horror's craft: