"Shatterday" by Harlan Ellison

Okay, so this will be the last Ellison story for a while, I swear. And no, that's not just because I've run out of his stories to read, although that does play a very big part in it.

What better way to leave Ellison, however, than with a really creepy supernatural horror story? And a psychological horror at that, something which, I feel, Ellison really does best. In this particular story, the protagonist, Peter Jay Novin, finds that, somehow, he's been split into two different people. Moreover, it seems that the world only has enough space for one Peter Novin. What follows is the playing out of the battle for supremacy between the two Novins. This battle, in many ways, seems to mirror the sort of internal struggles we all experience; struggles between things like conscience and self-interest; Ego and Id.*

It's a really great premise, frankly, and is masterfully executed by Ellison. I won't tell you how it all turns out. I will tell you, however, that, if you get the chance, you really should read "Shatterday."

*Although Ellison actually uses Jungian archetypes in the story (Shadow, Persona, Anima, and Animus), and might object to my choice to word it differently using Ego, Id, and Superego.

"All the Birds Come Home to Roost" by Harlan Ellison

This supernatural horror story is Ellison at his best. It's creepy, surreal yet somehow streaked through with realism, and somewhat pessimistic about humanity. Seriously, I get the feeling that Ellison is not a very happy human being.

Specifically, this story deals with a man who suddenly finds that he keeps meeting the women with which he's had relationships over the years in reverse order, all inexorably leading back to his first wife, who was not only mentally unstable herself, but was so volatile that she almost drove him insane as well (as is evidenced in the main character's visceral retelling of an extremely disturbing pivotal event in their relationship). Like I said before, the story is certainly surreal and very creepy, with a slow build of tension behind each "chance" meeting with an earlier girlfriend, fiancee, or wife. Yet there's also this level of realism to the story. As the main character deteriorates into a mess of anxiety and paranoia, you begin to wonder if these meetings are some machination of some malevolent force, or if it's all in his mind.

"In the Fourth Year of the War" by Harlan Ellison

I've said this before here, but let me reiterate: I pity every single person that has ever pissed off Harlan Ellison (I believe that they are legion). "In the Fourth Year of the War" is another sort of revenge story in which the main character, now in the fourth year of a war with the homicidal split personality in his head, is driven to murder every person who has done him or his loved ones wrong, including an old neighbour from his childhood that had his dog put down, and even his ex-wife.

The story itself seems to hinge on the idea that we are made up of our memories, including the bad ones, and that, as human beings, we never really let things go (quite disturbingly, Ellison mentions in the introduction from the Shatterday anthology that one of the inspirations for this story was a woman who had his dog put down when he was young, whom he never forgave). Of course, he's not condoning the main characters murderous actions in the story, rather that this is what not properly dealing with the memories we carry with us can lead to, and that, in some way, all people have a similar problem to the protagonist, which only serves to make the story that much creepier.

"The Dead" by Michael Swanwick

Coincidentally, I was flipping through the current short story collection I'm reading (The Best of the Best : 20 years of the year's best science fiction) and came across this story by Michael Swanwick. Since "Triceratops Summer" was still pretty fresh in my head, I thought "Why not give this one a try?"

In no way could two stories by father apart than "Triceratops Summer" and "The Dead." Where one is strangely beautiful, the other is very twisted and bleak. Yet both, in my mind, are great stories, which should say something about the quality of Swanwick's work.

What is interesting about "The Dead" specifically, though, is that it successfully does what I feel "Stable Strategies for Middle Management" doesn't manage: it presents a disturbingly plausible corporate future. In Swanwick's future, not only do zombies exist, but one corporation has just figured out how to use the zombies as blue-collar labour. This means that whole swaths of people will soon be out of work in favour of the walking dead; that their only source of income will be to sell their future dead selves to the highest bidder. Moreover, there's the implication that zombies could also replace people as sexual partners as a sort of living dead concubines, which means the whole concept doesn't just threaten people's jobs, but threatens the future of humanity in general.

It's a truly disturbing thought, only made more unsettling because I could easily see it happening. Most often, in films such as Shaun of the Dead and Fido, the idea of zombies being re-purposed as cheap labour is used as a sort of tongue-in-cheek story point. However, Swanwick is pointing out in this story that there's no reason why this couldn't be executed (excuse the pun) by some corporation in complete seriousness, and that the effects would, in fact be devastating.

"Salvador" by Lucius Shepard

In this short story, Shepard serves up an incredibly distrubing tale of the effects of war with a Science Fiction / Fantasy twist. It follows Dantzler, a Special Forces soldier during a fictional (although not implausible, especially for when this story was written in the 1980s) war of American conquest of South America. There are a few small Science Fiction elements mixed in, largely in the form of government-supplied Ampoules of what appears to be souped-up PCP (again, not entirely implausible), along with, as the story progresses, a heavy mix of Fantasy through the application of the myths and beliefs of the Santa Ana tribesman of El Salvador.

However, if you set the Fantasy and Science Fiction elements aside, you can see that Shepard's true thrust in this story is the inhumanizing effect of the horrors of war. In the character of Dantzler, Shepard shows the effects of war and how a normal person can become so hollowed-out by it, so devoid of emotion, that they become capable of unspeakable acts. Every aspect of this story is tragic, yet, especially if you think of the Fantasy elements as the disintegration of Dantzler's sanity, distrubingly plausible. And that is probably the most unsettling aspect of this story: You can clearly see how Dantzler's experiences make him into the "person" that he is at the end of the story.

"The Music of Erich Zahn" By H.P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft Week Continues?!?

Happy All Saints Day everyone (okay, not as exciting as Halloween by a longshot, but it IS All Saints Day nonetheless). As I said in the original post for Lovecraft Week, I'm also reading a Lovecraft story today, mostly because I like the idea of an entire week instead of six days, and I didn't come up with the idea until Monday, so I was a little late for ending directly on Halloween. So consider this the after show.

And for the after show, we have the musical styling of Erich Zahn on the Viol. What really interested me about this short story was Lovecraft's use of music as a sort of conduit to magic or the unknown. In the story, Zahn's music has a sort of transformative and transportive power, revealing things not previously experienced by the listener. However, in true Lovecraft fashion, these revelations prove dangerous and destructive. Zahn's music is dangerous and destructive, both to Zahn himself and to the narrator. Luckily, the narrator seems to escape with his mind intact (something which seems to be a rarity in Lovecraft's fiction), but, once again, knowledge and revelation is seen as potentially destructive in Lovecraft's story. The music itself has a power to reveal, but, in revealing, is also has the power to destroy.

"The Dunwich Horror" by H. P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft Week Continues!

So I decided that, for Halloween day, I'd read one of Lovecraft's most well-known creations, "The Dunwich Horror." However, I quickly afterwards decided that I should instead eat copious amounts of candy and drink some beer. So, it didn't get read until this morning, leaving me, once again, a day behind schedule. Luckily, thanks to Daylight Savings Time, I have an extra hour to catch up.

As I mentioned before, "The Dunwich Horror" is one of the best-know of Lovecraft's work, having been adapted into three movie adaptations, a radio play, a claymation short, the basis for a quest in the video game Fallout 3, and the inspiration for the song "Goin' Down to Dunwich" by The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets. I'm sure there are others as well. And, as I've found, it it well-known for good reason. It is probably the best of the Lovecraft stories I've read so far. It's dark, atmospheric, and creepy, although, I believe, it stops just short of causing a true feeling of horror in the reader. I think this might me because the horror of "The Dunwich Horror" is so alien, so otherworldly, that, while it could easily drive someone insane in real life, it has a bit of a distancing effect on the reader, allowing them to go "hey, that was weird," while keeping themselves far enough away from it to not truly be scared.

I think this distancing in relation to Lovecraft's work can possibly best be seen in the massive popularity of Chthulhu in pop culture, especially the proliferation of plush Chthulhus and "Little Chthulhus" out there. I think what happens here is that, while something like Chthulhu or the Dunwich Horror is terrifying to those that are actually experiencing them in the story, they just come across as weird, and perhaps even slightly fascinating, to the reader. Now, maybe I'm wrong here. Maybe what's really at work is the age and popularity of Lovecraft's works has made it such a part of popular culture that it is no longer particularly foreign or horrific to the modern reader. Kind of like how vampires have become so commonplace to popular fiction that they're no longer all that scary.

"Beyond the Wall of Sleep" by H. P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft Week Continues. . .

With this little number about a unnamed doctor reporting on his potentially psychopathic patient, a middle-aged man from the Catskill Mountains named Joe Slater. Slater has been having strange dreams frequently wakes in a violent rage, ranting about being a being of light and about how he needs to destroy his adversary, and will burn anything that gets in his way. The doctor tells us that, at one point, these rages became so violent that Slater beat a man to a bloody pulp. Since it appears Slater is unaware of what he says or does in his rages, the authorities assume that he is completely insane. However, the narrator believes that he is actually tapping into something else: a dream-existence that is incomprehensible to us in our waking lives.

This whole concept makes for a terribly interesting story in itself. However, I still had a hard time with this story because of the overt disdain the narrator has for Slater. There is a real racism and classism at work here, with the narrator repeatedly calling Slater a "degenerate" and a "decadent" that is typical of the people of the Catskill mountains. In fact, the narrator goes so far as to say:

Among those old folk, who correspond exactly to the 'white trash' in the South, law and morals are non-existent; and their general mental status is probably below that of any section of the native American people.

Frankly, as a modern reader, I found this pretty shocking, and kind of offensive. Of course, I realize that, when this story was written in 1919, and certainly for the time it is set (1900-1901), these wouldn't be unheard-of sentiments. The word "Hillbilly" came from somewhere, right? Still, it ends up rubbing me the wrong way. Throughout the story, I couldn't help but laugh at the narrator whenever he would make some sort of assertion that what Slater was saying in his rages had to have come from somewhere other than Slater's own mind on account of the "fact" that this degenerate hillbilly couldn't possibly be capable of such feats of imagination. It just seems like such a ridiculous argument for "proving" the presence of a supernatural force. As a result, the narrator comes across as a bit of an ass.

"The Tomb" by H.P. Lovecraft

Okay, now that I'm caught up on my reading, it's time to announce what I'm doing for the next week in honour of Halloween. To commemorate one of my favourite non-holiday holidays, I decided that it would only be appropriate to read some scary stories, and who better to go with than H.P. Lovecraft? So, for the next seven days (including Sunday, aka "All Saints Day,"), I'll be reading and writing on one Lovecraft story a day. And who might be the lucky first contestant, you might ask? Well, it's:

"The Tomb"

I personally think that this story perfectly showcases why H.P. Lovecraft is considered a master of creepy fiction, and it doesn't even contain a single Cthulhu reference. It's a first person account of Jervas Dudley, a young man who has been driven mad by his obsession with an old tomb in the woods near his home, the final resting place of the once great Hyde family. What makes this story great, however, is how Lovecraft makes you question whether the "facts" Dudley recites to the reader are the result of his existing psychoses, or if they are the cause of his current state. He makes the reader ask whether Dudley was mad to begin with, or if there was something else that caused his madness (or if he is even mad at all. . .). It's a creepy, atmospheric read, and a great way to start out Lovecraft week.

"The Man Who Was Heavily Into Revenge" by Harlan Ellison

This story is an elaborate revenge fantasy, and, let me say this right now, I pity anyone who has ever or will ever cross Harlan Ellison, because this is possibly the most inventive revenge fantasy I've ever read (I havn't read many, but nonetheless). It revolves around the idea that sometimes, just sometimes, the cumulative impotent anger of the entire planet (around 4 billion at the time of the writing of this story), reaches such a critical mass and has to find a place to vent; a "lightening rod" who has been so personally wronged and is so deserving of justice that he/she can siphon off some of that rage.

The "lightening rod" in this story if one Fred Tolliver, who has been wronged by William Weisel, as crooked contractor who took Tolliver for thousands of dollars in exchange for a shoddily made guest bathroom. What follows from this cosmic siphoning off is incredibly elaborate and strangely cathartic, although also at times deeply disturbing.

"Perchance to Dream" by David Morrel

There's not much I can tell you about Morrel's short story. It's an engaging, psychological "horror" about one man's descent into madness as seen through the eyes of a doctor that specializes in sleep disorders. I put horror in quotation marks here, because it isn't horrific in the sense of axe murderers, homicidal ghosts, or supernatural monsters. It's more horrific in the sense of what happens to the man. The story is very Hitchcockian in style, actually.

Incidentally, this Hitchcock-esque style is also why I can't say much about it, as any real analysis of the story will completely ruin it for anyone that hasn't read it before. The story itself relies on the surprise of the ending to make it a good story, and revealing that ending would be doing too much of a disservice to readers. So all I can say is: find it for yourself, and give it a read. I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

"Death's Door" by Terry Bisson

Turkey Day Marathon Part Five: I'm too tired to say something even remotely clever

I really liked this story, which generally brings the Turkey Day Marathon score to four out of five, which isn't a bad streak at all. In if, Bisson asks the question of what it really would be like if death just took a few days off. In short, it would be horrific. Since people and animals still become injured, but just won't die, the hospitals become overfull in a matter of days. People that are blown apart in horrible accidents still suffer through the pain, and even a little girl's dog that is hit by a car just won't pass away (although cats somehow still manage to get around the "no death" thing, which seems to be such a cat thing to me).

In a way, the point of the story seems to me to be that, in many ways, we should appreciate death. That, in many cases, death is a relief from pain and suffering. Bisson also seems to be trying to tell us that death is what really helps us appreciate life. That, without death, somewhat ironically, life would be pretty horrible.

There, I'm done. Five posts in one night. Not five quality posts, I'm sure, but the point is that they are complete, and that I have kept up my commitment to the rules. From now on, it's back to a normal post-a-day schedule. In the meantime, I'm going to take a nap.

"The White Man" by Thomas M. Disch

Turkey Day Marathon Episode Four: A New Turkey

Story number four is kind of unusual. In it, Disch deals with how one culture can be woefully misinterpreted by another. It also deals with the exploitation of immigrants in America. It follows a Somali teen, Tawana, who lives with her family in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Through a string of events, and with the encouragement of a local minister, Tawana comes to believe that "White Men," which appears to be an variant on vampires that uses syringes to take your blood and kill you. This belief leads to some very disturbing results.

Equally disturbing, however, is what you learn about Tawana's life, and, through her, the life of a refugee family (Tawana herself doesn't appear to be a refugee, although it is clear that her grandfather and her parents did flee from Somalia to the U.S.). There are several instances where, I think, the reader is supposed to be equally horrified about the everyday things that happen to Tawana as they are horrified by the playing out of the vampire plot. It's an unsettling story, and not one you really want to read while on a long car trip where you have a lot of time to think.

"The Following" by P.D. Cacek

Cacek's ghost story is one of my favourite types of ghost story, because it's really more about the lives of the people involved in the story than about murderous ghosts and cheap scares. The story is a slow, psychological examination of its main character, Lydia Terrell, who has the special ability to capture souls. Essentially, she's a ghost exterminator. But this isn't an episode of Supernatural*, or a similar ghost adventure/horror stories that happen to involve ghosts. It's more about how Lydia copes with her powers and their terrible after-effects.

I think this is really what the best ghost-stories, or stories in general, for that matter, do. They help the reader learn about the characters involved in the story. You get to know them, to identify them; watch them change and grow. So many stories of this genre are wrapped up in interesting conceits or scary sequences that they lose this idea that a story should really be about the characters. It's refreshing to see that Cacek doesn't fall into this trap.

*As a side note, I'm not disparaging Supernatural here. I love its comic-book take on horror and ghost stories. Plus, I think it ofter does just what I'm talking about here, revealing complex stories and characters beneath the top layer of action and gore.

"[Jagged Lines] : Six Hypotheses" by Joyce Carol Oates

I have to say, I was surprised to find a story by Joyce Carol Oates when I flipped to the next story in the current anthology that I'm reading (Flights: Extreme Visions of Fantasy). I thought to myself "what is her work doing here? She's not a fantasy author, right?" Now, I'll freely admit that I've never been too familiar with Oates' work, other than to know that she's been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize a few times now and that she's incredibly prolific. Now, perhaps, if I did know more, I wouldn't have doubted why she was being included in the above anthology, but, as it was, I had no idea that any of her work could be classified as fantasy.

That's why I was surprised to not only find the short story included in Flights collection, but also to find that it was so good! In fact, probably the best story of the Collection so far. Oates crafts a wonderfully creepy story here, chronicling the a single family's descent into madness under the influence of, well, something. Through the six sections of the story, the six "hypotheses" for how the "Thing" invades the minds of the family and subsequently drove them to madness, Oates really gets the reader into the heads of the characters. You can feel their sanity falling apart, and their frantic reactions to the threat of the "thing" as the story progresses. The final effect is a very, very creepy story that leaves you tense and drained. In short a perfect psychological, supernatural horror story. I'll never doubt that Joyce Carol Oates can write a work of fantasy again.

"Flop Sweat" by Harlan Ellison

I'm not sure what to say about this story. It's enjoyable, and deeply disturbing, but not incredibly deep. It takes a serious dig at modern media which I'm starting to recognize as pretty standard for Ellison's work. But beyond that, there's not a whole lot to work with.

This might have to do with how this story was written, however, which turns out to be a more interesting story that the story itself. As Ellison notes in his introduction to this story in his Shatterday collection, this story was written as part of a challenge for an appearance he was making on a Los Angeles radio show in 1977. The host wanted Ellison to read one of his stories on the air. However, the story in question would have been too long, and would have interfered with commercial breaks. So Ellison suggest instead that she will contact him with a topic the morning of the show, and he would have to write a complete story around the idea by the time that the show goes on aid at 8:00pm that night.

Of course, she doesn't call him until 1:00pm that day, which only gives him about six and a half hours to write the story. On top of that, all she gives him to work with is "Write a story about a female talk show host." Ugh.
Needless to say, however, Ellison manages to work something out in short order, and barely gets to the show on time. In addition, since he works in a theme connected to the Hillside strangler, who was terrorizing L.A. at the time, he creeps the hell out of the audience, and the whole thing is a success.

I kind of hate Ellison for being talented enough to pull this off. Nevertheless, the story is worth reading, and pretty damn good for an afternoon's work.

"Jeffty is Five" by Harlan Ellison

Before I talk about this story, I have to say that I've never read any of Harlan Ellison's work before. I'm not sure why, and, frankly, I'm kicking myself for having taken so long, because this story was really good. Maybe my past reluctance to read Ellison has to do with the fact that everyone related to Science Fiction seems to hold that he is an asshole. From what little I know of the man, which is to say, what I gleaned from his introduction to the Shatterday anthology, which contains this particular story, I have to agree. He is a bit of an asshole. But he's a good kind of asshole, in that he doesn't let people get away with being stupid. He says what he feels needs to be said, and I have to say I like him for that. It also doesn't hurt that he seems to be very intelligent and well-spoken (written?).

Okay, so on to the story, which is the exploration of the main character's relationship with Jeffty, an eternally five-year-old boy. The narrator, Danny, grew up with Jeffty, they're the same age. But, where Danny grew up, went to university, and started his own television business, Jeffty hasn't aged a day since he was five. He is completely frozen in time.

Except he also isn't. As time passes, the narrator discovers that Jeffty actually lives in a sort of parallel time; a time of 1940s radio, pulp fiction, and movies. Somehow, in a world that has moved on to other things (much to the narrator's, and, one can surmise, Ellison's, dismay), Jeffty is still able to listen to new episodes of his favourite old shows, pick up new copies of old magazines, and see new movies with all the old stars every Saturday.

But the true thrust behind this story is Jeffty's unsettling ability to exist out of time, but how the present reacts to the existence of the past in its midst. Jeffty is not some kind of Stephen King-like monster child. He's a completely "normal" kid. Instead, the horror of this story, and I would describe this as a bit of a psychological horror, lies in how the past is anathema to the present, and how the present, unthinkingly, comes to hate it and want to destroy it.

This is a truly unsettling thought, but I'm not sure an entirely inaccurate one. Of course, we have a love affair with nostalgia in the modern day (just look at how well the two Transformers films have done and you can see how the modern world is obsessed with its childhood). I'm guilty of this myself (sadly, I did go see both of the aforementioned Transformers films, and even enjoyed the first one on a certain leveel). But I don't think we would act so kindly to a living, breathing past stepping up beside us. It would be unsettling. It would be a constant reminder of what was and is no more; a reminder of our own aging, and, ultimately, our own mortality. In short, if would be really, really disturbing.

Okay, so I've gone on far too long today. I should end this now. I'll be back with another story tomorrow.