Horror: The 100 Best Books (33 page)

Academic Jeremy Freirs spends the summer in Gilead, New Jersey, renting a house on Poroth Farm, preparing to teach a course in supernatural literature. Along with Carol Conklin, a girl he has recently met, and the dourly religious Sarr and Deborah Poroth, Freirs is manipulated by the Old One, a sorcerer who in the guise of a twinkly-eyed little old man named A. L. Rosebottom or "Rosie", hopes to bring about the reawakening of an unimaginably vast and evil entity. The four characters are tricked into taking part in a series of obscure rituals that pave the way for the return of the monster. Elaborating upon the habitual themes of Arthur Machen and H. P. Lovecraft, Klein here delves deep into folklore and literary history to provide a richly detailed variation on the Return of the Elder Gods theme. The novel grew upon the skeleton of the story originally published as "The Events at Poroth Farm" (1974). Klein has since worked similar shivers in his collection of novellas
Dark Gods
(1985), which also deals with the connections between godhood, monstrousness, and the artistic imagination.

***

The Ceremonies
is a carefully wrought book, excelling in the areas of characterization, style, and plot. Klein assumes a leisurely pace in introducing and fleshing out the principal characters in his book. No sketches or convenient labels here -- you get to know everyone thoroughly and believably. The protagonists become warm, likable friends and the villain slowly assumes a mantle of wonderful despicability. The beauty of this gradual process is achieved through a style and structure which adds layer upon layer of awareness into the story. Klein steadily apprises the reader of the enormity of the evil waiting to engulf our world, but he leaves out just enough to keep things enigmatic, unfamiliar. For a long time, you know there is something terrible about to happen, but you are never told the particulars. By keeping things mysterious, Klein achieves a subtle momentum, which carries you through the novel as effectively as any collection of cheap narrative tricks encountered in many commercially oriented novels. His style is an interesting combination of both modern and traditional elements used in the telling of a supernatural tale. But it is the plot of
The Ceremonies
which most marks it as a distinctive novel. The historical and literary references to the work of Arthur Machen give the story an authentic feel, a true legitimacy. The idea of a cyclic structure for catastrophe and apocalyptic resolution, while not new in horror fiction, is given new meaning in Klein's tale. While there are resonances with Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos and even the Bible, there are also references to other, far more arcane belief-systems and world-views. Klein creates a conception of the world which comprises the simplest terms of Absolute Good and Absolute Evil, but he also suggests a hideously complex set of rules which govern the Universe as it chugs merrily along towards its ultimate fate. In essence, the plot of
The Ceremonies
is unique. It is shot full of menace and a looming sense of inevitability which suggests that Evil is never successfully vanquished. The book's final image of a great and hideous force in the earth is extremely powerful and, for me at least, unforgettable.
The Ceremonies
is a book of many levels. It depends as much on philosophy as it does on suspense. It is written with a standard of craft and care rarely seen in the horror and dark fantasy genres, and deserves recognition as a modern classic. -- THOMAS F. MONTELEONE

Just after the Second World War, Steven Huxley returns to the Gloucester countryside where he grew up. He discovers that his brother Christian has inherited their father's obsession with Ryhope Wood, a vast tract of primal forest he believes to be inhabited by "mythagos". These are folkloric archetypes created by the collective imaginings of the human race, who are compelled to live and relive their legends. Christian disappears into the wood, and Steven sets off after him with the lovely mythago Guiwenneth and ex-flier Harry Keeton in tow. Within the woods, Steven encounters a giant demon pig, Robin Hood, a First World War battlefield mythago, among other creatures, before he confronts his brother in a Neolithic village. Expanded from Holdstock's 1981
Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy
novella,
Mythago Wood
is a fantasy adventure story and an examination of the roots of England's rich native mythology. It won the 1985 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. Holdstock has since returned to the Ryhope Wood with
Lavondyss
(1988),
The Bone Forest
(1991) and
Ancient Echoes
(1996).

***

There is a type of English fantasy story which for me holds a special fascination. It can loosely be described, I suppose, as the "haunted wood" fantasy. The haunted wood is that place where England's most ancient history impinges upon the modern world, where prehistoric spirits still live, sometimes yearning for their old power in the world, sometimes merely content to be left alone to hide from the new creatures, the human creatures, whose religions and realities have overwhelmed their own. In the haunted wood magic still persists. Sometimes it is little more than a faint aura, a hint of what it once was. Sometimes it is concentrated, merely awaiting the right catalyst to set it loose, to wreak revenge upon those who opposed it, imprisoned it or sent it into hiding. Various authors have produced fine examples of this kind of story. Machen, Blackwood and Buchan spring immediately to mind, as well as E. F. Benson, M. R. James and several other outstanding English horror writers. For me, Barrie's
Dear Brutus
has much of the atmosphere I have described. In recent years, however, only Robert Holdstock has been able to recreate this special
frisson
for me, in his marvellous fantasy
Mythago Wood
.
Mythago Wood
has much of the feel of a classic horror story, both in its elegant style and in its choice of form. Holdstock uses traditional devices to draw us into his tale -- mysterious activities, leaves torn from a journal, cryptic letters, discovered objects -- until slowly we are as hooked, as obsessed with curiosity, as the protagonists themselves. By the time we begin our expedition into the magic wood we share the same compulsions to search for the truth. Again, as in the very best stories of this kind, the truth is not immediately definable. Indeed Holdstock uses all these traditional devices to his own ends, to discuss the nature of our perceptions, of our understanding of what truth actually is. While with one hand he offers us an answer to a mystery, an explanation for certain events, identification of shadowy characters, with the other he compounds the mysteries. With every revelation comes a fresh doubt until by the end of the novel we know a great deal about Mythago Wood but are left with an entirely new set of questions. Some of these, one hopes, will be answered in the author's follow-up,
Lavondyss
. The story concerns two generations of the Huxley family, who live at Oak Lodge, an old country house situated at the edge of three square miles of post-Ice Age forest known as Ryhope Wood and which, by chance, has been left uncleared, undeveloped and largely unexplored for centuries. The sons, somewhat embittered with their father, who tended to ignore them and their mother in favour of his obsession with the wood and its "mythago" inhabitants, are gradually also hooked on the wood's mysteries. Their father's journals and letters provide some of the narrative, while the younger brother Steven's first-person story provides most of the rest. The wood has a cryptic geography. Its boundaries expand the deeper one goes into it; it seems impossible ever to reach the far side. Within it dwell the "mythagos" -- whole tribes, whole civilizations, as well as individuals, representing the British racial unconscious. Familiar figures of myth and legend exist here, frequently in their purest or most primitive personae -- Hern the Hunter, King Arthur, Robin Hood and many others -- while the explorer is apt to come upon the ruins of a Tudor manor farm, a Celtic stone fort or an 11th-century castle. And meanwhile, wandering the trails of this infinite place, are men and women, some "real" and some little more than memories, following desires and urges which even they are scarcely able to describe or define. It is a dangerous place, the mythago wood, where it is perfectly possible for an explorer to be cut down by a Stone Age axe or a Bronze Age sword, to be killed by warriors brought into reality by his own racial memory. These archetypes as described by Holdstock have all the power that genuine archetypes should possess. Even the woman whom Steven falls in love with and who, it seems, falls in love with him, probably has only as much substance as his own longings can provide. The genuine pathos of Holdstock's love story again has similarities with the theme of
Dear Brutus
and its heroine's desperate final cry that she does not want to be a "might have been". Holdstock avoids the sentimentality which some detect in Barrie by offering us tougher questions, moral dilemmas, an imagined world far more complex than anything found in the wood's precursors. For me, this is the outstanding fantasy book of the 1980s; something to read several times and to rediscover the same delight with every new reading. -- MICHAEL MOORCOCK

Mary Stevenson ("Stevie") Crye, a young widow trying to make a living as a freelance writer, faces a crisis when her typewriter breaks down. The machine is repaired by Seaton Benecke, a strange young man whose pet/familiar is a sinister capuchin monkey, but it develops the habit of writing on its own, interrupting the narrative with its own additions, side-tracks, dreams and nightmares. Stevie tries to deal with the havoc wrought by the typewriter's imaginings, and becomes convinced that Seaton is horribly involved in what is happening to her. She also retaliates by becoming a writer of fiction herself, and twisting her real life into a fairytale, "The Monkey's Bride". The punch line is a black joke twisting the cliche of the infinite number of monkeys with the infinite number of typewriters. Best known for his idiosyncratic science fiction, which includes
A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire
(1975),
And Strange at Ectaban the Trees
(1976),
Stolen Faces
(1977),
A Little Knowledge
(1977),
Catacomb Years
(1979),
Transfigurations
(1980),
Under Heaven's Bridge
(1982, with Ian Watson), the Nebula Award-winning
No Enemy But Time
(1982) and the collections
Blooded on Arachne
(1982) and
One Winter in Eden
(1984), Michael Bishop here enters the horror genre with a playful, incisive, tricksy novel. Its impact is considerably enhanced by the photographic illustrations of J. K. Potter.

***

Although contemporary horror at its best is a true home for valid insights into the psychopathology of modern life as well as for genuine experimental writing, yet many ghastly events in horror novels are fundamentally absurd if you stop to think. The writerly trick is to persuade readers through mimesis, compelling style, and tension (alias fear) not to think with their reason, their day-mind, but with their night-mind, their dream-mind. The ludicrous still peeps through, and some of the most effective grotesque horror (such as Stephen King"s) actually uses and forefronts the joky ludicrous -- before ripping the carpet of hilarity and sanity away again to commit abominations.
Who Made Stevie Crye?
had a rough ride to publication, being bounced by big American commercial houses as impossible to classify, hence difficult to market. That was because it is a unique parody of the horror genre itself, funny, savage, and compellingly believable rather than flipply comic. Thanks to Jim Turner, astute editor at Arkham House,
Stevie
finally appeared from that vintage source of Lovecraftiana, native home of cherished genre horrors predating the mass cloning of schlock horror -- there to be graced with notably more elegant production than most books.
Stevie
is more than parody. It's meta-horror, perhaps the first application of meta-fiction to horror. It's a fiction which self-consciously constructs itself and critiques itself, and its adoptive genre; wherein the heroine's scary, hallucinatory experiences are written for her by a spooked typewriter, and where a delirious melting of reality occurs akin to Philip Dick's weirdest SF drug-fugues, terminating in the philosophic surrealism of a team of monkeys tapping typewriters in the attic. En route, delicious moments of parody abound, both chilling and archly wry, such as Cujo's vehicle siege re-enacted by a goofy basset hound whose dementia is that of "a desperate rush-hour commuter". Ludic metaphors proliferate as part of the roguish, folksy, though also hyper-literate tone. "Where were today's Faulkners?" complains Stevie after wading through book reviews of such titles as
Afterbirth
and
Shudderville
, irked by the spectre of writers "whoring" into horror for the big bucks. This possible angry motive for undertaking
Stevie
is quite transcended by the author's humour, elegance, serious playfulness, and love, an alchemic transmutation of gut-themes into artistic gold. Yet
Stevie
is truly scary, and the story makes pungent psychological sense even as it swallows its own tail (and tale). It is also decent and empathic, with believable, quirky, three-dimensional, Southern small town characters, especially Stevie herself, courageous, sad, bitterly good-humoured, whose reality may be torn apart, though her flesh and sanity are not ripped. "Not merely horrifying but fundamentally contemptuous of civilized human feeling", is the comment on the hexed typewriter's narrative of Stevie's loved daughter melted in bed, the slasher side of horror; an important distinction, this. As for salvation, the repair of the daughter's gutted toys by the little girl in trance -- out of parodied Disney as much as
Poltergeist
-- is glossed by the motherly black roadside prophetess as a product of "subliterary paranormal energies". Here is a humane, trickster kaleidoscope questioning a genre and a market, and fiction, and reality too -- yet exquisitely spiced with human reality -- and delivering the eerie chill of the occult and the illicit, curdling the blood but also warming the heart. -- IAN WATSON