DURR! HORRIR IZ NAWT REEL LIDDER-UH-CHERR! DURR! Part 3:
Actually, now that I think about it, horror isn't real literature. People must be complete morons to read that crap. That Twilight fanboy was right all along!
...........................
Of course, I am just pulling an April Fools. Still got a lot more to review.
4) 100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories by various. Introduction by Al Sarrantonio, stories selected by Martin H. Greenberg.
The fact that I picked this one up for $3.00 back in the late 90's at a mall bookstore sell-out is pretty much a clue to the hit-and-miss quality of the stories contained within. While it's not a waste, certainly worth getting, especially for a newcomer, it also contains some of the lamest horror story attempts in my collection. Hate to say it, especially for a book with so many different authors from all different eras, but this doesn't even approach the batting average of my Bruce Coville books. But it's still worth a run-down, especially for the stories which are worth reading. To be more courteous; I'd describe the book as a whole like a fat, juicy steak from the Outback Steakhouse; there's some great meat in there, but you'll have to add your own condiments occasionally to spice things up, and dig through a lot of fat.
This book in a nutshell.
The book begins, after a corny, pun-filled, metaphor-laden introduction by Al Sarrantonio("YOU will DIE a100 times!") which would make the Crypt Keeper and Uncle Creepy puke, with that old stand-by; Washington Irving's other headless ghost story, The Adventure of the German Student. It's still a masterpiece of the macabre, and everyone knows the ending, but I think it's greatest strength is that it can really put you in the mood of the era in which it's being told, sittting around the hearth, a stern old grandmother nearby knitting, the town drunk slobbering in the background, hoofbeats on cobblestones outside. What helps this sort of atmosphere is that the book includes the oft-omitted wraparound stories The Adventure of my Grandfather and The Adventure of My Aunt. Neither are really horror stories, and are basically humor stories with initially spooky-sounding trappings, still, they're both brief and inoffensive, and lull you into a quiet mood that makes the gruesomeness of Student even more effective.
On a personal note, I once wrote a screenplay combining Legend of Sleepy Hollow with Student called Headless, as I thought it would be the only way to create a serious film adaption of Hollow that would actually pad out to a feature film. I seriously considered either sending it in or at least writing one of those pastiche novels using the same concept. The release of Burton's Sleepy Hollow pretty much guaranteed though that if I did it would be seen as a knock-off or would only be distributed by some rip-off studio like The Asylum. Too bad. And to make it worse, I lost the screenplay.
After a few typical Warren magazine-Stephen King wannabe stories, the book rolls off more stand-bys such as Poe's Berenice, The Oval Portrait and Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, Bierce's The Boarded Window, two Mark Twain stories which, while fun, really don't belong in this book, and three Lovecraft stories: 1)The Evil Clergyman, a short, effective tale which really doesn't make much sense and with a twist-ending that comes off as more a big inconvenience than a terrifying twist, 2) a fun vampire story with overtones of the "Teeny tiny'' or ''Tailypo'' folktale called The Hound, and 3) the legendary campfire favorite The Statement of Randolph Carter, which boasts the most terrifying last words in horror fiction next to Bradbury's The Next in Line. Brrr. In some ways, Carter may actually be Lovecraft's most famous tale amongst the general public. Sure, a lot of pople know of Cthulhu, but not the average person walking down the street. Ask one of those average people about a story with the infamous last words from Carter, and, even if they don't know Lovecraft or the story, they've probably heard some variation of it. The book also boasts some E. F. Benson, Saki, Rudyard Kipling and Nathaniel Hawthorne stories as well.
I mention these classy works by classy authors, even if they aren't very good(seriously, what the hell is Muhammad Din about anyway?) because the vast majority of the rest of the book is made up of either tacky pastiches of famous works, various gross-out stories and ''quickies'' selected for their brevity and gruesomeness. Of these, the most interesting(and effective) quickie author is Gary Raisor; whose three contributions have the following things in common; 1) Brevity: All of his stories are 2 pages, one stretches to three, but with only one sentence on the next page, so for all intents and purposes it's still two pages. 2) Truly sickening attempts at black comedy: Seriously, just the titles are either Ackerman-esque puns, song lyrics(I've seen Old Black hat reprinted as ''That old silk hat they found'' ) or ordinary phrases that are given terrifying new meanings: Cheapskate, The Old Black Hat, and Making Friends. 3) Extremely gruesome violence involving young children. This is Gashley-Crumb Tinies level stuff here. Some may be offended, I say get the fuck out if you are. Curiously, these aren't the only stories in the book involving children and their relationships with their parents gone sour. I counted at least 20 stories involving kids here, most by memory. Greenberg must have really, really not been having the best relationship with his kids when he selected these. While all of Raisor's offerings are interesting, my favorite of his trilogy is Making Friends. This gives a horrifying new spin on the old, debunked urban legend about razor blades in the candy by asking the question; if such a thing happened, how would a kid who was harmed in such an incident cope if he survived? This story not only features what is by far the most sympathetic ''villain'' in the whole volume(the protagonists of Identity Crisis and Night Deposits come close though.), it also boasts one of the most truly frightening mental images I've come across. You will never see the Man in the Moon the same way again, or want to watch that Melies silent film. The vision in question would also make for a killer T-shirt or band logo. What's also cool is that, by and large, this whole story would have made for a much better origin story for Michael Myers in Rob Zombie's godawful remake of the 1978 classic Halloween than the trite, predictable one that was given. Either way, there's the germ for a really cool horror film in this one, but it's so effective I'd rather have it end on the ambiguous note that it does instead.
Which is a bigger Halloween-time crime against children? I seriously can't tell.
Mention must be made as well, that there are two back-to back stories in this volume called Feeding Time, that boast not only the same title, but pretty much the same plot as well. Was this a joke? Were these stories sequels? Plagiarisms? Homages? I get the feeling something bizzare was going on behind-the-scenes when this book was published, but I'll probably never really know. Stranger things have happened.
I've also gotta mention this one story called Dark Wings by Phyllis Eisenstein which totally fried my brain. It's something I wish would happen to every one of those annoying animal rights activists. The only way to convey it's fucked-up-edness is to describe the whole damn thing in detail. A lonely hippie woman sees a BIG eagle. She falls in love(literally) with such eagle. She follows such eagle, and waits for it. And then one night, she sees the eagle, it swoops down, ready to carry her away to a far away, happy world where she will no longer be tormented by us squares. It carries her out to sea, farther away....
And drops her in a nest to be ferociously devoured by it's young.
Oh, and the whole story is written like an orgasming-in-every-word romance novel with poetic, rich, flowing prose that would make both Bradbury and Shakespeare jealous. Then I read a story by Joe R. Landsale with more or less the same plot, the difference is that it's even weirder and called, I-swear-to-god-I-am-not-making-this-up, and it actually is a fair description of the story; Fish Night.
After reading both of these stories, I suddenly looked at msyelf in the mirror and noticed that reading the two works of batshit insanity/brilliance had caused my face to take on a grin quite similar to that of these two chaps: http://www.qfan.cz/images/stories/200812/captain-kirk-demotivational-poster.jpg , http://media.photobucket.com/image/trollface/Takorax/trollface.jpg
I then said to the stories, now looking upon my face with my now squinty-eyes: "I dig".
Then I continued reading until the face subsided, hoping all the while that I would not encounter others like it and end up sharing the same fate as Guy Rolfe in Castle's Mr. Sardonicus.
After that, there's a lot of tedium on display in this book, although the offerings of Joe R. Landsale still add some vigor; particularly his horrifying Duck Hunt, a tale of how for some people, horriffic acts of evil are just a way of life, in some cases, a part of growing up. The other stories range from outright stinkers(Toy, Heading Home, Treats, He Kilt It with a Stick) to good, but incomprehensible and unpleasant(Nancy Holder's Moving Night is a good example. It has a cool, nightmarish feel but never really decides what it wants to be about and how much of it should be interpreted literally) or so borderline in terms of horror content that their place here is questionable (Threshold is a good example. So is The Idea.). There are some pretty good stories here, but since I've read so many of them already and have them in other volumes reviewing them would just be a waste of time.
Of my favorites exclusive to this volume, or which I first encountered here, my first would have to be Eric Frank Russel's Displaced Person. It's a quickie from Weird Tales, and is one of the best Satan stories I've ever read. It may be the first of the ''famous monster who has seen better days'' sub-genre. I really love the eerie, end-of-the-day-when-you're-alone feel. It's a real tear-jerker. My other fave is In The Corn by the obscure Robert Fox. It's another quickie told mostly through dialogue, and proves that what you can't see can be the scariest of all. This story reads like it was just made for Old time Radio. I'd love to see it performed as a one-act radio play. Like Making Friends, this also has the feel of what a Halloween remake made by someone with talent could have been like. Moving from the sublime and into the ridiculous, we have F. Paul Wilson's gross-out comedy story Topsy, about a morbidly obese lotto winner whose hunger has begun to affect his mental health. It manages to be both repulsive and hilarious at the same time, and stands head over heels over similar dark comedy attempts in the book. Yet at the same time, it's also, in it's own way, just as juvenille as anything in the worst of Coville's books.
For scares however, nothing can quite compete with The Grab by Richard Laymon. I'm not saying anymore about this one, except that it's ending will hit you like a bolt of lightning when it's done. You'll never go into a bar while travelling through ''hick'' states again.
So for newcomers, there's much to enjoy in this volume, but some real garbage as well. Still, everything is worth reading in here at least once. Particularly for the novelty of seeing the best variation on Matheson's Long Distance Call, as well as the absolute worst ''villain displays their handiwork in a sensationalistic fashion'' story you will ever read, as well as a tale of an arcade game that makes for a more convincing argument against video games than anything Jack Thompson and Hillary Clinton have ever shit out.
Ah what the hell, as you can see, I'll have to return to this one to review tidbits again and again..~
5) Wolf's Complete Book of Terror by (duh) Leonard Wolf.
This is a relatively recent acquisition of mine, and truth be told, it's kind of a thinking man's version of 100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories. It has a lot of the old stand-by stories from Poe, etc. But the cool thing about this volume is that Wolf has gone out of his way to try and squeeze in the essentials, what he thinks are the first of their kind, and while he's not exactly as successful as he'd hoped to be, it's sure great to get to see much-vaunted and influential but little-read gems like Varney the Vampire, George Langellan's The Fly and Ben Hecht's The Rival Dummy. It also doesn't shrug off more recent contributions(this one was published in '80) like Harlan Ellison's still brain-frying I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. He also manages to include some of the more obscure stories by luminaries such as Lovecraft, and that's a good idea, as there are lots of classics by Lovecraft that I love but am getting sick of. Why re-read The Call of Cthulhu for the 100th time when you already have it reprinted in 3 editions?
After being kicked out of my reading collection, he was unemployed and selling his body within days.
Wolf also knocked himself out to include other works, such as fables, poems, folktales, fairy tales, horriffic chapters and incidents from either non-genre books or from real life accounts(an account of the miserable conditions both of an old folks home and it's tenants is horrifying). He even works in, not kidding, an episode of the Marquis De Sade's Justine. This is such a bizzare grab-bag of the macabre and evil that you almost expect to find Hitler's love notes to Eva or Aleister Crowley's shopping lists!
The downside to all this esoterica is that it's hard to tell how much of it is authentic or unaltered unless you already have copies at hand, for example; Carmilla is included here, but has been re-written with several passages omitted and the climax sped up. It's also a mystery as to why, with all the esoterica collected here, he never found room for some Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith, R. Chetwynd Haynes or Mary Shelley. Weird.
An appealing upside to the content, however, is that the book is decorated with some of the best pen and ink illustrations, tarot cards, engravings and woodcuts possible. It may be crude, but it's a feast for the eyes nevertheless. It may be innaporpriate to a story, it may only tangentially be horror, but these illustrations make this little curio a must-have. It may not boast as much material as 100, but it sure beats it in variety.
My favorite of the tarot images, and not because of the nudity. I just love the designs for the minion's tails.
Worth hunting down if you're a newcomer with loftier tastes than usual.~
...........................
Of course, I am just pulling an April Fools. Still got a lot more to review.
4) 100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories by various. Introduction by Al Sarrantonio, stories selected by Martin H. Greenberg.
The fact that I picked this one up for $3.00 back in the late 90's at a mall bookstore sell-out is pretty much a clue to the hit-and-miss quality of the stories contained within. While it's not a waste, certainly worth getting, especially for a newcomer, it also contains some of the lamest horror story attempts in my collection. Hate to say it, especially for a book with so many different authors from all different eras, but this doesn't even approach the batting average of my Bruce Coville books. But it's still worth a run-down, especially for the stories which are worth reading. To be more courteous; I'd describe the book as a whole like a fat, juicy steak from the Outback Steakhouse; there's some great meat in there, but you'll have to add your own condiments occasionally to spice things up, and dig through a lot of fat.
This book in a nutshell.
The book begins, after a corny, pun-filled, metaphor-laden introduction by Al Sarrantonio("YOU will DIE a100 times!") which would make the Crypt Keeper and Uncle Creepy puke, with that old stand-by; Washington Irving's other headless ghost story, The Adventure of the German Student. It's still a masterpiece of the macabre, and everyone knows the ending, but I think it's greatest strength is that it can really put you in the mood of the era in which it's being told, sittting around the hearth, a stern old grandmother nearby knitting, the town drunk slobbering in the background, hoofbeats on cobblestones outside. What helps this sort of atmosphere is that the book includes the oft-omitted wraparound stories The Adventure of my Grandfather and The Adventure of My Aunt. Neither are really horror stories, and are basically humor stories with initially spooky-sounding trappings, still, they're both brief and inoffensive, and lull you into a quiet mood that makes the gruesomeness of Student even more effective.
On a personal note, I once wrote a screenplay combining Legend of Sleepy Hollow with Student called Headless, as I thought it would be the only way to create a serious film adaption of Hollow that would actually pad out to a feature film. I seriously considered either sending it in or at least writing one of those pastiche novels using the same concept. The release of Burton's Sleepy Hollow pretty much guaranteed though that if I did it would be seen as a knock-off or would only be distributed by some rip-off studio like The Asylum. Too bad. And to make it worse, I lost the screenplay.
After a few typical Warren magazine-Stephen King wannabe stories, the book rolls off more stand-bys such as Poe's Berenice, The Oval Portrait and Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, Bierce's The Boarded Window, two Mark Twain stories which, while fun, really don't belong in this book, and three Lovecraft stories: 1)The Evil Clergyman, a short, effective tale which really doesn't make much sense and with a twist-ending that comes off as more a big inconvenience than a terrifying twist, 2) a fun vampire story with overtones of the "Teeny tiny'' or ''Tailypo'' folktale called The Hound, and 3) the legendary campfire favorite The Statement of Randolph Carter, which boasts the most terrifying last words in horror fiction next to Bradbury's The Next in Line. Brrr. In some ways, Carter may actually be Lovecraft's most famous tale amongst the general public. Sure, a lot of pople know of Cthulhu, but not the average person walking down the street. Ask one of those average people about a story with the infamous last words from Carter, and, even if they don't know Lovecraft or the story, they've probably heard some variation of it. The book also boasts some E. F. Benson, Saki, Rudyard Kipling and Nathaniel Hawthorne stories as well.
I mention these classy works by classy authors, even if they aren't very good(seriously, what the hell is Muhammad Din about anyway?) because the vast majority of the rest of the book is made up of either tacky pastiches of famous works, various gross-out stories and ''quickies'' selected for their brevity and gruesomeness. Of these, the most interesting(and effective) quickie author is Gary Raisor; whose three contributions have the following things in common; 1) Brevity: All of his stories are 2 pages, one stretches to three, but with only one sentence on the next page, so for all intents and purposes it's still two pages. 2) Truly sickening attempts at black comedy: Seriously, just the titles are either Ackerman-esque puns, song lyrics(I've seen Old Black hat reprinted as ''That old silk hat they found'' ) or ordinary phrases that are given terrifying new meanings: Cheapskate, The Old Black Hat, and Making Friends. 3) Extremely gruesome violence involving young children. This is Gashley-Crumb Tinies level stuff here. Some may be offended, I say get the fuck out if you are. Curiously, these aren't the only stories in the book involving children and their relationships with their parents gone sour. I counted at least 20 stories involving kids here, most by memory. Greenberg must have really, really not been having the best relationship with his kids when he selected these. While all of Raisor's offerings are interesting, my favorite of his trilogy is Making Friends. This gives a horrifying new spin on the old, debunked urban legend about razor blades in the candy by asking the question; if such a thing happened, how would a kid who was harmed in such an incident cope if he survived? This story not only features what is by far the most sympathetic ''villain'' in the whole volume(the protagonists of Identity Crisis and Night Deposits come close though.), it also boasts one of the most truly frightening mental images I've come across. You will never see the Man in the Moon the same way again, or want to watch that Melies silent film. The vision in question would also make for a killer T-shirt or band logo. What's also cool is that, by and large, this whole story would have made for a much better origin story for Michael Myers in Rob Zombie's godawful remake of the 1978 classic Halloween than the trite, predictable one that was given. Either way, there's the germ for a really cool horror film in this one, but it's so effective I'd rather have it end on the ambiguous note that it does instead.
Which is a bigger Halloween-time crime against children? I seriously can't tell.
Mention must be made as well, that there are two back-to back stories in this volume called Feeding Time, that boast not only the same title, but pretty much the same plot as well. Was this a joke? Were these stories sequels? Plagiarisms? Homages? I get the feeling something bizzare was going on behind-the-scenes when this book was published, but I'll probably never really know. Stranger things have happened.
I've also gotta mention this one story called Dark Wings by Phyllis Eisenstein which totally fried my brain. It's something I wish would happen to every one of those annoying animal rights activists. The only way to convey it's fucked-up-edness is to describe the whole damn thing in detail. A lonely hippie woman sees a BIG eagle. She falls in love(literally) with such eagle. She follows such eagle, and waits for it. And then one night, she sees the eagle, it swoops down, ready to carry her away to a far away, happy world where she will no longer be tormented by us squares. It carries her out to sea, farther away....
And drops her in a nest to be ferociously devoured by it's young.
Oh, and the whole story is written like an orgasming-in-every-word romance novel with poetic, rich, flowing prose that would make both Bradbury and Shakespeare jealous. Then I read a story by Joe R. Landsale with more or less the same plot, the difference is that it's even weirder and called, I-swear-to-god-I-am-not-making-this-up, and it actually is a fair description of the story; Fish Night.
After reading both of these stories, I suddenly looked at msyelf in the mirror and noticed that reading the two works of batshit insanity/brilliance had caused my face to take on a grin quite similar to that of these two chaps: http://www.qfan.cz/images/stories/200812/captain-kirk-demotivational-poster.jpg , http://media.photobucket.com/image/trollface/Takorax/trollface.jpg
I then said to the stories, now looking upon my face with my now squinty-eyes: "I dig".
Then I continued reading until the face subsided, hoping all the while that I would not encounter others like it and end up sharing the same fate as Guy Rolfe in Castle's Mr. Sardonicus.
After that, there's a lot of tedium on display in this book, although the offerings of Joe R. Landsale still add some vigor; particularly his horrifying Duck Hunt, a tale of how for some people, horriffic acts of evil are just a way of life, in some cases, a part of growing up. The other stories range from outright stinkers(Toy, Heading Home, Treats, He Kilt It with a Stick) to good, but incomprehensible and unpleasant(Nancy Holder's Moving Night is a good example. It has a cool, nightmarish feel but never really decides what it wants to be about and how much of it should be interpreted literally) or so borderline in terms of horror content that their place here is questionable (Threshold is a good example. So is The Idea.). There are some pretty good stories here, but since I've read so many of them already and have them in other volumes reviewing them would just be a waste of time.
Of my favorites exclusive to this volume, or which I first encountered here, my first would have to be Eric Frank Russel's Displaced Person. It's a quickie from Weird Tales, and is one of the best Satan stories I've ever read. It may be the first of the ''famous monster who has seen better days'' sub-genre. I really love the eerie, end-of-the-day-when-you're-alone feel. It's a real tear-jerker. My other fave is In The Corn by the obscure Robert Fox. It's another quickie told mostly through dialogue, and proves that what you can't see can be the scariest of all. This story reads like it was just made for Old time Radio. I'd love to see it performed as a one-act radio play. Like Making Friends, this also has the feel of what a Halloween remake made by someone with talent could have been like. Moving from the sublime and into the ridiculous, we have F. Paul Wilson's gross-out comedy story Topsy, about a morbidly obese lotto winner whose hunger has begun to affect his mental health. It manages to be both repulsive and hilarious at the same time, and stands head over heels over similar dark comedy attempts in the book. Yet at the same time, it's also, in it's own way, just as juvenille as anything in the worst of Coville's books.
For scares however, nothing can quite compete with The Grab by Richard Laymon. I'm not saying anymore about this one, except that it's ending will hit you like a bolt of lightning when it's done. You'll never go into a bar while travelling through ''hick'' states again.
So for newcomers, there's much to enjoy in this volume, but some real garbage as well. Still, everything is worth reading in here at least once. Particularly for the novelty of seeing the best variation on Matheson's Long Distance Call, as well as the absolute worst ''villain displays their handiwork in a sensationalistic fashion'' story you will ever read, as well as a tale of an arcade game that makes for a more convincing argument against video games than anything Jack Thompson and Hillary Clinton have ever shit out.
Ah what the hell, as you can see, I'll have to return to this one to review tidbits again and again..~
5) Wolf's Complete Book of Terror by (duh) Leonard Wolf.
This is a relatively recent acquisition of mine, and truth be told, it's kind of a thinking man's version of 100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories. It has a lot of the old stand-by stories from Poe, etc. But the cool thing about this volume is that Wolf has gone out of his way to try and squeeze in the essentials, what he thinks are the first of their kind, and while he's not exactly as successful as he'd hoped to be, it's sure great to get to see much-vaunted and influential but little-read gems like Varney the Vampire, George Langellan's The Fly and Ben Hecht's The Rival Dummy. It also doesn't shrug off more recent contributions(this one was published in '80) like Harlan Ellison's still brain-frying I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. He also manages to include some of the more obscure stories by luminaries such as Lovecraft, and that's a good idea, as there are lots of classics by Lovecraft that I love but am getting sick of. Why re-read The Call of Cthulhu for the 100th time when you already have it reprinted in 3 editions?
After being kicked out of my reading collection, he was unemployed and selling his body within days.
Wolf also knocked himself out to include other works, such as fables, poems, folktales, fairy tales, horriffic chapters and incidents from either non-genre books or from real life accounts(an account of the miserable conditions both of an old folks home and it's tenants is horrifying). He even works in, not kidding, an episode of the Marquis De Sade's Justine. This is such a bizzare grab-bag of the macabre and evil that you almost expect to find Hitler's love notes to Eva or Aleister Crowley's shopping lists!
The downside to all this esoterica is that it's hard to tell how much of it is authentic or unaltered unless you already have copies at hand, for example; Carmilla is included here, but has been re-written with several passages omitted and the climax sped up. It's also a mystery as to why, with all the esoterica collected here, he never found room for some Robert Bloch, Clark Ashton Smith, R. Chetwynd Haynes or Mary Shelley. Weird.
An appealing upside to the content, however, is that the book is decorated with some of the best pen and ink illustrations, tarot cards, engravings and woodcuts possible. It may be crude, but it's a feast for the eyes nevertheless. It may be innaporpriate to a story, it may only tangentially be horror, but these illustrations make this little curio a must-have. It may not boast as much material as 100, but it sure beats it in variety.
My favorite of the tarot images, and not because of the nudity. I just love the designs for the minion's tails.
Worth hunting down if you're a newcomer with loftier tastes than usual.~