31 Days of Halloween: Week 2

~post by Joe T.

Okay, so, due to a vacation, I have missed a week of terror. But do not fear (or, perhaps, fear!), you will get your 31 books of Halloween. For this week, we have selections that haunted The Nightmare Factory book club over the last twelve months. Dracula finally enters the stage, Lovecraft comes closer to the fore, and Robert Aikman gets name checked twice. More terror and more horror fill these fabulous fables of fear, so enjoy!

The White People and Other Weird Stories  by Arthur Machen

Like last week’s Robert W. Chambers, Arthur Machen is one of the formative voices of 20th century horror. And, like Chambers and Lord Dunsany, he was also a large influence on H. P. Lovecraft who proceeded to have a disproportionate impact upon contemporary authors.

Machen, in his stories “Novel of the Black Seal” and “The White People,” presented the idea that the fairy folk of legend were actually the remnants of the original inhabitants of the British isles who lived secretly in the isolated hills of the countryside. Bad things happen to people who investigate too far. “Novel of the Black Seal” forced me to keep my light on as I slept after reading it for the first time and I still get a certain frisson when I reread it. A major influence upon Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu Mythos,” these stories are some of my favorite tales and Guillermo Del Toro, in his introduction, agrees.

Fragile Things  by Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman is a master of genres. After his epic run on the Sandman comic book and his novels Neverwhere and American Gods, he is perhaps known more for his urban fantasy tropes but readers who delve deeper into his work are hip to his darker horror stories. Fragile Things is a short story collection that gives us a fair representation of his more terrifying side.

“A Study In Emerald” rewrites Sherlock Holmes’ “A Study In Scarlet” as a Lovecraftian tale of eldritch horror and hoary tentaculate terror and walked away with 2004 Hugo Award for Best Short Story.

“Closing Time” is my favorite story in this book. It continues to haunt me even though I’ve read it numerous times. An homage of sorts to the ghost stories of M. R. James and the utterly fantastic and completely out of print Robert Aikman, it is a subtle terror of childhood that has a creepy hint of obscenity and blasphemy hiding just out of the corner of the eye.

There are many more tales worth reading in the collection so I encourage you to pick up a copy and dive right in.

Exquisite Corpse  by Poppy Z. Brite

Every Halloween needs at least one tale of bodily horror. My favorite “scary stories” usually tend towards the soul shaking more than the gut wrenching, but sometimes you just need some gore.  Exquisite Corpse is here to give you that gore and also to wrap it within what is, in effect, a certain love story between two serial killers and their victims. Amazingly well-written but most definitely not for the faint of heart, as my book club co-host, Steven described:

“I won’t lie.  The unparalleled brutality of Poppy Z. Brite’s Exquisite Corpse compelled me to fling it across my apartment at one point during my reading.  I have unflinchingly sat through both Hostel movies and five Texas Chainsaw Massacres, but this grimoire of torture was oddly upsetting.  The narrative weaves through the intersecting lives of four uniquely terrifying anti-heroes, culminating in a classic murder party, the grisly details of which Poppy Z. Brite manically splatters onto the page.  Like any other story, this is ultimately a tale about the search for love, albeit the love of murder in some instances.”

Her short story, “His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood,” is a favorite of mine and is featured in the anthology Cthulhu 2000 which is the December 18th selection for The Nightmare Factory Book Club.

Anno Dracula  by Kim Newman

Inspired by Philip Jose Farmer’s Wold Newton universe and a partial inspiration for Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Anno Dracula posits a world where Van Helsing and his companions did not slay Dracula. In fact, it went completely the other way around and Dracula returned to England triumphant and took Queen Victoria as his bride, turning her into a vampire.

Almost every film and literary vampire makes an appearance in this book as they intermingle with historical figures and characters from other works of Victorian literature. More adventure than horror, it still has its unsettling moments and is one of my all time favorite genre books. Out of print for years, it has been lovingly reissued with annotations and additional stories and content. The inaugural entry into The Nightmare Factory reading adventure, the book will be sure to please you.

Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron  by Kim Newman

The follow-up to Anno Dracula, The Bloody Red Baron has also been lovingly reissued with bonus content and illuminating annotations.. Steven described the book thusly:

“This latest re-release from Titan Books picks up thirty years after the terrifying conclusion of Anno Dracula, wherein Count Dracula has been banished from England after having overseen the destruction of warm-blooded Britannia at the hands of his vampiric acolytes and an undead Queen Elizabeth.  We are thrust into a world where, through manipulation of alliances and ancient bloodlines, the Prince of the Undead sits on the Prussian throne in the midst of World War One, vanquishing all who would defy his death-rite as vicious commander of all civilized nations.  The Diogenes Club, a secret society that pulls the world’s strings from behind closed doors, is all that stands in the way of Vlad Dracula’s complete domination, and, in the age of man-powered flight, the battlefield is naturally (or unnaturally) airborne.  This horrendous romp pits an undead Red Baron against an ace flier who exists in a state between life and death.  Snoopy should keep his guard up.  The Great Pumpkin has nothing on The Bloody Red Baron.”

The third book in the Anno Dracula series, Dracula Cha-Cha-Cha, was just reissued this month. I have not actually read this one so I am excited to see it back in print and it will be featured as a Nightmare Factory selection in 2013.

The Darkest Part of the Woods  by Ramsey Campbell

2011’s Halloween selection for the book club was The Darkest Part of the Woods by Ramsey Campbell. Campbell is one of my favorite genre writers, even his lesser works have a certain commanding prose. We will encounter him time and time again as we delve deeper into the nightmare factory.  My thoughts on the book and on Campbell himself from last year’s blog:

“Ramsey Campbell is one of those writers they call “a writer’s writer.” Which means a writer who doesn’t sell but who all  the writers who do sell, read. Of the greatest horror writers of the 20th century, he’s one of the few who are actually in print (and this is not a knock on your favorite writers – even Stephen King is a fan.)

After making his bones as an H.P. Lovecraft acolyte, he diverged (much like Psycho novelist, Robert Bloch) in a way so as to forge his own path. Somewhere along the way, he became the horror writer who’s won the most awards that horror writers are nominated for. He’s that good.

That brings us to The Darkest Part of the Woods. This book returns us to the geography that a juvenile Campbell created as a setting for his Lovecraftian stories. And it is good. But that is not the reason why the book is worth reading.

Thomas Ligotti, probably the greatest horror writer alive today, claims that to write true horror, one can only write short stories, not novels, because short stories can maintain a tone of terror, of horror, and novels can only sustain horror in bits and pieces while the bulk of the novel is really just realism/naturalism.

I believe that Darkest Part of the Woods is Ramsey Campbell’s response to that criticism. Almost every paragraph deals with the woods, the branches, the moss, and all the wooded parts of the world. A mood is created. Whether it fails or succeeds is up to you. Me, I think Ramsey Campbell created as close to a horror novel as we can based upon Ligotti’s definition.”

The Weird  edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer

Every twenty years or so, someone tries to attempt the definitive horror anthology, an almost textbook for students of fear and terror. In the past, David G. Hartwell’s award winning The Dark Descent was that collection. Now the Vandermeers, prominent editors and writers (Ann just concluded a remarkable run as editor of Weird Tales) try their hand with the new anthology The Weird, which attempts to tell the story of 20th/21st century horror. They succeeded

“The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood, H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror,” the unsettling “The Crowd” by Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson’s creepy “The Summer People” are some amazing high points in weird fiction. The much admired but constantly out of print Robert Aikman has a story represented here as do authors one wouldn’t immediately expect in a horror anthology such as Kafka, Borges, and Murakami.

Whether you’ve been reading horror for decades or are new to the genre, this collection is perfect for you. With over 1000 pages of double columned madness-inspiring tales, there has to be at least one story you’ve never encountered before so pick it up and dread!