let's read some horra fiction eh

[sillydetectivepizza]

thomas ligotti

Ligotti’s one of those weird giant holes in my horror literature knowledge. I mostly know him from what other people have gushingly talked about, and his collaboration with current93 and other strange music luminaries, during that time in my life where my love for coil and nurse with wound and the assorted other bands pretty much ruled my life.

He’s spoken of in hushed reverence to the point where I, well, kind of tuned out the talk. But ligotti’s often talked about in a way like he’s a modern Lovecraft - just well without all that nasty baggage that Lovecraft brings to the table.

There’s something about the way people talk about his writing though, it gives me the feeling like I imagine a cat gets when being pet backwards. Ligotti’s often talked about for this kind of arcane nihilism by moody male writers in a way that raises a bunch of alarms. He’s not some edgelord shit, you know? He’s different! We swear!

I can see the potential appeal. I equate darkness and dark topics with trauma, and our ability to process and understand trauma. that’s why particularly violent and upsetting works of art have appealed to me in the past - it’s a method of growing and understanding all the emotions that shared pain brings. Real nihilism is an almost religious experience - you are giving yourself up to nothing, the great emptiness. Instead it’s often packaged with a knowing sneer and an expensive leather jacket. If Ligotti gives off the former and eschews the latter, he’s worth investing in. Coil, the band I was talking about earlier, has its share of pretty awful people who devote a lot of love to the band, and I can separate the band from its fans.  Can I do the same with Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe? Well, I’m gonna find out. And I’ll write the reviews here. No particular order or pressure. I’ll probably do the first one, “The Frolic”, tomorrow (spoiler alert - I eyerolled my way through it) and then the next sometime later.  Not going to try to stick to a daily schedule though, it made me hate reading last month.

[sillydetectivepizza]

5/21/20 - “Decorating with Luke” by Adam-Troy Castro

Here’s another story everyone can read:  http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/decorating-with-luke/

As I’m still ruminating on yesterday’s story - and probably will for a few days onwards, I hit upon another story dealing with the repercussions from emotional trauma.

This one I didn’t love, though Adam-Troy Castro is an excellent writer and handles the story well. Personal preferences and all, but the reveal at the end didn’t work for me. Though I have to say I feel storytellers can learn from the buildup, how the writer here offers just enough information and reveals the situation slowly while maintaining tension through the story. This is all very carefully done and from a structural standpoint is quite fascinating to pick apart. The writing here is spare to an absurd degree, and Castro very effectively uses that to keep everything on edge. There isn’t a lot of really pretty prose and the only time Castro lets loose with anything more descriptive than is necessary is towards the end of the story. That choice works because it keeps the story laser-focused.

also of note - like yesterday’s story dealt with present tense all while talking about something happening over a long period of time - this one takes a structural risk with perspective: first person speaking to second-person “you” - and using that to drip out what the story is really about. Like I said, I’m not sure the reveal is worth it to me - but that could purely be personal preference. There are lessons, to me, on how to keep the attention on the reader by concentrating on the many things this story does well, and by observing and thinking on the writer’s choices in how they relay the story.

[sillydetectivepizza]

5/20/20 “The Past You Have, The Future You Deserve” - K.H. Vaughan

Another day finished up with work unable to put two thoughts together in any coherent way.  Decided to go easy on myself - check a story by a mutual friend, which limits the, er, emotional baggage that comes with these stories. You know, put on the training wheels.

Nox Pareidolia is an anthology that came out sometime last year - and every once in a while I pick up a story and try it on for size. Roughly half of them I’ve liked a lot so far, and that’s saying something. Usually like one or two stories stand out.

I’ve tried “The Past You Have, the Future You Deserve” a few times and never got past the first few pages. It was def one of those Other Stories until now. Like you feel a bit of guilt in the back of your heart because you can’t get into it, that kind of thing. But today was tiring, life is tiring, I needed to be taken away somewhere for a while. I’d heard Vaughan read a bit a few weeks ago and it stuck with me, so I gave it another shot. I’m glad I did. The story’s present tense except when it isn’t, and Vaughan’s style is far from spare, but still very careful and deliberate. Muted. And that muted, distant style means the first part of the story - where the reader experiences the childhood of the protagonist - feel like we’re injecting the protagonist’s memories to experience them first hand. Time passes in the story - and it drifts into past tense and back again - a deliberate narrative choice that I can understand why but it still took me out of the story a bit - that turns the story from what could be a pretty typical Stephen King plot into something grand and melancholy.

The story - about the survivors of an unnamed event that’s killed a number of children, is, at its core, a story of how trauma reverberates for generations, never quite healing those struck by it. I loved this bit, at the beginning:

And it factors into that trauma the million little choices caused in part by that trauma and how it adds up and weighs the hearts of those who have  made it past the prime of their adulthood.

It should, really, be the kind of story I need to avoid - God knows I ruminate about this shit enough on my own, but that’s the odd healing part of tragedy, you know? It feels like a release sometimes, a release that couldn’t happen any other way. Your soul feels a bit more free having experienced that emotion.

I choked up, a bit, at the end. I kinda needed to feel that strongly about a story.

So yeah, I liked it.

[sillydetectivepizza]

5/18/20 - “Down Atsion Road” - Jeffrey Ford

Jeff Ford’s another one of those authors I feel like I should have read, but never have, mosty due to the negative goblins in my head. So I saw someone talking about one of his collections, Crackpot Palace: Stories, for a buck ninety-nine and gave it a spin. Thinking of it as one of those coffees I never get because of quarantine. I picked “Down Atsion Road” kindasorta at random, checking the publication credits in the back for something in a horra vein. Tells the tale of one weird legend in the Great Jersey Pine Barrens, told almost entirely in first-person exposition.

Wasn’t entirely a fan of the story, tbh. Despite being drawn from real legends in the area, it lacked some of the things that make urban legends so wonderful to retell, but yet retained some of the mundane trappings that real legends tend to have. Oh and the protagonist is a writer, which is always a mark off in my book, whether that’s fair or not, I can’t tell. 

but... will I read another story from this collection? I think probably. Ford’s got an easy style and there’s a good sense that if one story won’t work for me, another probably will. Consequences of picking stories practically at random, I suppose.

[sillydetectivepizza]

I spent the weekend trying to read my favorite Lovecraft story of all time, “The Shadow out of Time” - as a teenager reading through all of his stories, I thought it was far more sublime than many of his other horror stories (Though The Whisperer In the Darkness scared me more - it WAS set in Vermont and I was living there at the time, after all) Just couldn’t get through it. Not sure it’s a personal failing, the fact that my tastes have wildly changed, or what, but I spaced out after a few paragraphs every time I tried. I loved this: >  If the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing.

It’s very Lovecraft. But the “seething vortex of time” is a great image. the rest, of what I read, was pretty standard Lovecraft stuff.  Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee is from old New England stock (surprise surprise) with a family estate (shocker) - everything is overdescribed in typical Lovecraft fashion. What I liked of the parts I read was that it was a personal journey of obsession: The Great Race of Yith aren’t bad guys per se - though they do force mindswitches. But once they are there they aren’t actually malevolent, just.. alien. Since it’s one of the last ones he wrote, It feels like if Lovecraft survived to keep writing we might have more stories in this vein. Wish I had the brain to read it all the way through. Ah well. Onwards.

[sillydetectivepizza]

5/15/20 - “Love Letter” by George Saunders

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/06/love-letter

Yesterday was brutal to the soul. Today merely like a metal grate rubbing slowly against bruised skin. So I try to read, try to keep up. This isn’t a horror story, you say, but you’re going to give me credit anyways, after all, I read a fantasy story the other day just because it brightened my day a bit.

But I’m going to say something controversial: this isn’t supernatural horror, I’ll give you that. And it’s not horror either, even if I can and may yet go on in paragraphs about the Aickman-like qualities of Saunders’ prose and plotting. This isn’t a horror story because the horror genre is made up of cowards, mostly. This should be a horror story, but it’s definitely not, because I can’t imagine this showing up in any horror anthology or current magazine. Even extreme horror plays it safe. We stick to our genre and we keep our heads down.

“Love Letter” - a rather folksy letter written from a grandfather to his adult grandson, is a stylistic conceit wrapped around a story and I love them, really any story that changes the structure around the traditional short story. The terrifying bits are only hinted at. Like I said, I kept being reminded of Aickman here, or Shirley Jackson. But it’s not a horror story.

But the subtlety here - the horror elements, goes in what is unsaid, goes into the negative spaces around the words. The things we know must be like if the letter writer says what he is saying. Good horror can capitalize on that, it’s something we chase in stories, usually. But not when it’s overly political. But it also talks about things that need to be said - how we view our present and how we assimilate into a society slowly changing out from under us.

This story left me sick and depressed and in need of a strong drink. In that I think it’s a success.

[sillydetectivepizza]

5/13/20 “Blackwood’s Baby” by Laird Barron

There’s a certain class of writer that I despise for reasons that are absolutely not the fault of the writer in question. Laird Barron’s one of those people. These aren’t good emotions and I hesitate even to talk about them. Hard to admit that kind of weakness online, even in a semi-anonymous fashion. When I was getting published in the early 2000s I was on the top of the world. Every story was a learning opportunity, every connection seemed to build on the other. I felt good about my stuff. I had friends I admired who read my stories and liked them. I wanted to get better and thought I could. And I don’t know how much of the stories that I got published were as a result of me being a fiction editor of another magazine. How much of that time was a lie. When I quit gothic.net a bunch of doors closed. People I thought were friends stopped responding to me. Not everyone - but even here I made it worse, because I got paranoid about the writing community, assuming everyone I thought was a friend was just using me. I pushed good people away with the bad.

Years later, I slowly rediscovered my own ability to write. It wasn’t easy. And it came with no rewards. I resented the names of people who had popped up in the time of my absence. They took something I thought I had a chance of having myself. Seeing people I once counted as friends laughing with this new writer made my lip curl in disgust - self-disgust as well as outwardly-projecting. Like I said, these aren’t easy things to talk about or admit. But it’s the truth. So for years I’ve been consciously saying “I bet Laird Barron actually is a good writer and I just never gave him a chance.” I feel like that dude in that one Scrubs episode throwing rocks at couples to spread the old misery around. Yeah, super healthy stuff. Part of this short-story-a-day thing is a journey to unknot all these dark tangles that keep me from writing. You got to seize the day. Every day I look at that little list of authors I’m supposed to now like that I can’t get myself to like, and I try to resolve myself to give them another shot. Yesterday I had a difficult day and read a writer that consistently brings a smile to my face. Today maybe I’ll get to untangling one of those hard knots. The story I picked was from one of Barron’s recent collections, the wonderfully-titled The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, titled “Blackwood’s Baby” - it was originally in an anthology called  Ghosts by Gaslight: Stories of Steampunk and Supernatural Suspense which reviews say is pretty light on the steampunk, but hey, what can you do. But because of that anthology you can read it here: https://www.freesfonline.net/authors/Laird_Barron.html if you don’t trust my review of the story. And you shouldn’t, because, yeah, I still hated it. And I’m pretty sure I’m not even remotely giving it much of a chance. The story is set in some vague post-war-possibly-the-great-war frontier and involves an emotionally-damaged man named Luke Honey who has nightmares about his brother, and some companions we know we shouldn’t like them because they’re described that way. There is a big hunt, and some competition around a rifle. Bad things happen.

I won’t get into a lot of details why I didn’t like it, because the sad truth about such things are, if you go into any story looking for problems, you will find problems with the story. There are choices the artist makes that you would have made differently. There are stylistic grooves that a writer will have that will rub you like a cat petted the wrong way, and this is doubly-true if you are fixing to not like something. 

So I would talk more about what I thought didn’t work if I thought my own impressions were at all valid here. But I will say I really have to want to understand a protagonist to stick around to get to the good parts. And there are good parts. Despite my reservations, when the story gets really good, it’s fucking great. There’s a bit when the all-hell threating to come loose the whole story long finally goes and comes loose, it’s unreservedly glorious.

Maybe, ten days from now, I should read another of his stories. Give it another chance. Maybe that knot of my own resentment wasn’t fully untangled, but maybe it loosened a bit. Maybe.

[sillydetectivepizza]

5/12/20 - “Gordon, The Self-Made Cat” Peter S. Beagle

I had one of those exhausting work days that start with exhausting work nights and just bleed over. I had no head for horror. Or reading. Or really anything but staring at a wall and drooling. But I said I’d do a short story a day, so I’m gonna do my best.

The Line Between is one of Peter S. Beagle’s many short story collections, this one I got, signed, somewhere in the late oughts, and never really read it. Beagle’s one of those rarified, last of a breed fantasy authors, like Diana Wynn Jones, that measure out wit and charm, tell stories that are really tales at heart, and share almost no baggage with the lions of epic fantasy that the genre is more known for now. I adore him, even if he writes nothing like anything I would ever want to write. His art is precious.

Gordon, the Self-Made Cat is one of those stories that is utterly Beagle-like in every way, too. Most of his tales can’t really be explained in a way that gets across why they are so charming. They seem a measure too simple and absurd.  Gordon, you see, is a mouse. When he is told by his parents that mice are hunted by cats, he is vexed and offended by the revelation, and swears to become a cat instead. This is impossible, but he will not deviate from his mission. I talked earlier of world building and its importance in fantasy fiction. Beagle, like Jones, is deft at it and does it as if he is speaking off-hand about things he is sure you already know. Like:

All cats go to school, you know, whether you ever going or not. Dogs don’t, but cats always have and always will. There are a great many cat schools, so Gordon found one easily enough, and he walked bravely up the front steps and knocked at the door. He said that he wanted to speak to the Principal.

Well yes, of course cats have schools. Everyone knows that. And so he develops rival cats, meets a good-humored dog, and aces classes like Sleeping In An Undignified Position and Tailchasing.

The other thing I liked about the story is - Gordon loses. He does impossibly well at being a self-made cat, he is the hero after all, but it terrifies mouse society and ends up making the cats insecure.

Like the Waggoner story yesterday, this is not a story about someone going through some major internal change. It’s not about that and doesn’t have to be. This is a story about how a mouse tries the impossible to become a cat, and society rejects his strange ways. So what does he do? He picks himself up, dusts himself off, and decides he might have a go at being a dog. Doesn’t look so hard. Not his best tale. Still adorable.

[sillydetectivepizza]

5/11/20 - “Cleaning Up” by Tim Waggoner

braindead from a day’s worth of zoom meetings, so the thoughts on today’s story will be kinda short. Waggoner’s a writer who’s been around for a while - he’s got a lot of books under his belt, short stories, too, and teaches writing, so you can bet his craft is on top. In all those years he’s spent a good chunk finding new ways to adequately describe gore, and this story does not break from that habit. If stories w/ lots of gore isn’t your thing, you might want to stay away. It’s not really my thing either, but I still liked the story a lot. I want to talk a little about tension in stories and the expectations of a reader, but before that, if you’re interested, you should read it first so you can say, “Wow, Seth, wtf. That’s not what I got from that at all”.  It’s here: https://www.thehorrorzine.com/Fiction/March2020/TimWaggoner2.html I’m friends with some youtube horror movie reviewers & know a little from them about how movies in the modern days have to handle the expectations of the viewer. All people who watch a horror movie come in with at least two things: a) what they signed up for when they knew it would be a horror movie

b) the kind of things they are used to seeing right off the bat

For a fan, a) is a good thing. You come in almost with a contract w/ the artist: whether it’s “I’m gonna see some disturbing stuff” or “I’m going to experience vicariously the panic and fear of the main characters” - it’s the kind of unspoken contract that any work of art has, but has to be more explicit because it’s horror. We know the bad thing’s going to happen. We signed up for this.

 And the genre lives and dies off of b) because the extreme sensation horror fans are chasing can’t be repeated and have the same effect. Horror is like every other genre, only moreso. But back to the story. Tim tells us what the story is about right off the bat - it’s about cleaning up. That’s the title. It’s the first contract that the writer makes with the reader.

The story begins with an agreement about cleaning work - and lots of hints are dropped without anything explicitly being stated: Cheryl’s teeth. The agreement is about the cleaning of the house but several rooms are barred from entry. The mystery about the former cleaner. And finally, the scream.

We’re expecting this, as readers. We’re being led down a path we know is bad, because we signed up for the Winding Our Way Down Bad Paths tour.

But then the story shifts perspective - still focusing on the protagonist, but shifting in time to another scene entirely. We see an encounter with the protagonist’s son, and we learn a little bit more about the protagonist through that scene - little details that tell us who the protagonist is by filling out the negative spaces around the protagonist. But then the expectations switch:

This story is two stories with the same narrative. By merging those two stories together, Waggoner keeps us on our toes, letting us focus on what we expect from one of the stories as he delivers the other. That’s the thing I like about this story. On its own - both of the stories are nice, but neither really work. Together, they are like a one-two punch that keeps us dancing back as we read.

That brings me to the second thing I’m reacting to in this story. An often-told aphorism in storytelling is that all stories are essentially about change. The journey of the story is the journey of who they are - how they are challenged and now these characters we grow to love react to those challenges.

The protagonist here never changes, and I have to assume that’s intentional. I think it works - weaving often violently gorey parallel perspectives tells us who the protagonist is, what we have to like her and what we might find repulsive. We see parts of who she is by viewing one story with the information we know from the other.  That’s talented, and teaches me a little about the structure of short stories.

[bibliolokust]

jeffrey ford’s ‘the trentino kid.’

last night, i found myself pulling out my copy of ellen datlow’s anthology of contemporary ghost stories, ‘the dark,’ and rereading the first piece- ‘the trentino kid’ by jeffrey ford.

almost immediately i was struck by the elegant conversational tone that ford takes with the story, as if we’re seated with him at a booth in the dark end of a bar, or around a campfire, or other such places in which storytelling weaves memory, experience, and doubt together and it’s a perfect example of the sort of shaggy dog story that the best of ghost story (in the british/american sense) can achieve.  by telling us a story that echoes aspects of ford’s own life and working class upbringing, the line between story and storyteller blurs in such a way that the reader can only believe that this is something that clearly ‘happened’ even in as much as it clearly did not.

ostensibly a story about a working class college dropout who spends his day digging clams and his nights writing fiction, ford manages to weave the subtext of class anxiety feelings of failed promise into the narrative in a way that almost disavows the very notion of subtext, putting them on display in order to use the supernatural/speculative elements to create a small world in which such distinctions as ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ have no sway.  his narrator tells us the tale of, when he was younger, a hard life of physical labour out on a dangerous bay and we’re told of the sad fate of the trentino kid, swept out to drown while clamming, his body disappearing, as so many do, beneath the waves (and we’re treated to an incredibly striking scene- the kid’s father showing up to where the clammers tend to socialise and just… being there, heartbroken, and this scene displays a grasp on the paradoxically simple and complex tides of grief that can overwhelm someone.)

but it’s not that simple.

the narrator, during a quickly rising storm, sees a figure struggling in the water and another, more cynical clammer (who we’ve seen as a dishonest braggart, already) ignoring the figure and hightailing it back to shore.  upon investigating, he realises that it’s the trentino kid, dead as doornails but still very much animate.  and remembers the advice an elder clammer had given him- ‘you have to help anyone in trouble.’  so he does.  and the two embark on a harrowing journey back to shore in which the ghostly kid begins to disintegrate, to take on the appearance of a corpse that had been dead for some time, scavenged at the bottom of the bay.  all the while, the boat is thrown about on the waves, falling to bits.

ford’s description of this journey and his narrator’s attempts to come to grips with the horror (or perhaps miracle?) that is happening in front of him is nothing short of breathtaking, a novel’s worth of ideas on the meaning of death and, really, of life itself crammed beautifully into just a few pages of description and narrative, heavy with implication.  when the boat finally fails them and the narrator finds himself saved upon the shore, it’s no surprise.  we expected this much because that’s what this sort of story is and that’s why the narrator is there to tell us this.  as such, it’s also no surprised that downsy (the cowardly braggart who refused to help the ghostly trentino kid) was found dead on the wee island that he would often lie about bringing women to, after his boat failed to make it back, being destroyed in the storm.

but where ford breaks from this, perhaps the world’s oldest literary tradition, is in the after.  in that period of reflection between coming to, wet and bedraggled, and sitting in front of us.  what ford does, here, is an absolute betrayal of the rules of storytelling- after telling us, earlier in the story, that he had been saved once before by john hunter (the older fellow what gave him the advice about helping anyone in trouble) and telling us that he had told the story of his meeting with the trentino kid in the bar that the clammers frequented, what ford does then is extraordinary in how successful it is- he obliquely hints to us that hunter, himself, was a ghost, the implication being that the narrator had just told his tale of ‘saving’ one ghost to another ghost who had, previously, saved HIM.

the layers of murky obliqueness here work in such a way that we can’t ever be sure whether or not hunter was ‘truly’ alive or dead (or neither?) on any of the occasions that the narrator mentioned meeting him and we are left in a world where such notions of death, life, memory, and experience are, at the least, bound in grey haze (if not altogether absent of real boundary and meaning) and ford elevates the shaggy dog story into a work with deep philosophical resonance that is rendered beautifully through the working class elegance of his prose and knowledge of the life of the clammer (and of the lives and bodies of their boats) and we are left, as readers, with no answers.  and, really, no possibility of them.

[sillydetectivepizza]

5/10/20 - “The Willows” - Algernon Blackwood

All plans are half-thought-through, apparently. I never bothered to check “The Willows”, the seminal piece of weird fiction, written by Algernon Blackwood and published in 1907. It of course is not a short story. it’s a novella, and it reads like it’s written from the time. So, in my perennially-scattered mind, it’s not a day’s affair to read it and give some thoughts. I can be pretty dumb.

I tried to read it on Saturday and was not in a place to do so, though I made some good progress. Today, after a night’s game of Arkham Horror that my wife has been insisting we play since the start of the quarantine (and I am so fond of her that she has such insistences) I tackled it again, this time queuing up a playlist of “A Forest” by the Cure, the song and all its covers. Which helped, and I recommend one do so.

You can read the novella here: http://algernonblackwood.org/Z-files/Willows.pdf

or anywhere you get your Gutenberg files from. It is, as I suggested, quite long, so buckle down for a very patient journey. My favorite cover of “A Forest” is by Steven Wilson, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgGYRi-nx7A - but there are so many good ones one can and I did make a whole Spotify playlist from it.

I’ll start my thoughts with some math. And then I won’t explain it for a while, my brain being the weird thing that it is:

H.P. Lovecraft = Algernon Blackwood + wrath

And my brain is weird. Because this is not a modern story and is very much a product of early 20th century/late 19th century Britishisms, “The Willows” is a languorous journey of run-on sentences that run a mile just to get around the block. And I have a thing that’s always kept me from enjoying this kind of stuff, my brain just skips over swaths of text without me noticing, or something in the story inspires me to think and now I’m looking up locomotives or something or wrapping my thoughts around some half-mentioned idea in the text.

And then I realize my mistake, skip back, feel ashamed that there’s a page of text I just... didn’t read, and go back and reread the same paragraphs over and over, this time skipping over a completely different section.

I end up coming out of these things like someone staring at a painting through a sheet with some holes poked through it. “I think it’s a painting of an elephant! I think. Maybe a girl in a gray dress, come to think of it...”

By the way, I love the run-on sentences, too. Blackwood just takes his time getting around to describing something. Take a description of both the protagonist’s sense of unease and the elements here:

The wind was simply enjoying itself, for nothing rose out of the flat landscape to stop it, and I was conscious of sharing its great game with a kind of pleasurable excitement. Yet this novel emotion had nothing to do with the wind. Indeed, so vague was the sense of distress I experienced, that it was impossible to trace it to its source and deal with it accordingly, though I was aware somehow that it had to do with my realization of our utter insignificance before this unrestrained power of the elements about me.

For Blackwood, there are still so many things that man will never really be able to understand. And he has a sort of mystic’s joy along with the sickening fear that such a lack of understanding may lead to awful things. There is rapturous joy in realizing you are not the center of the universe, along with the quite rational terror in understanding you never really understood your place quite like you do now.  Another quote I saved from long ago:

Blackwood’s skill is in mixing these things. And he has a lot of skill. “The Willows” is one of H.P. Lovecraft’s favorite stories, and one can make a case he tried to top it his entire life, possibly only succeeding towards the end of his days with “The Shadow Out of Time”. In Lovecraft’s stories, his gaze, unlike Blackwood’s, does not linger over the terrain. Lovecraft never seems to have taken that deep breath somewhere out in the forest, so alone that if he screamed no human would hear him, realizing right there in that moment how utterly alive he was. Lovecraft realizes there are limits to his mind and imagination and he just hates it. He has that reputation of course for his virulent racism, his hatred of the other, his doggedly proto-facist views. And I’m talking about that too, but I’m also talking about that primal rage that bubbles out of some men the moment they feel a certain weakness. It’s there, all over Lovecraft’s writing. And at times he seems to use it to further the story. But it’s always there, something he seems urgent to rationalize away. Blackwood just doesn’t do that. Blackwood’s “others” here are barely described - the protagonist views them as these vague giant amber things, when he does at all, and they seem to be both there on the island and not there at the same time.  The protagonist’s companion - the guileless “Swede” (I love that) starts off being almost contemptuous of reflective thought. By the end the Swede is worrying away at the problem of what he sees and hears and what he does not, coming to wild conclusions, while captivated by his own terror. 

Speech relieved him. He had to get those words out lest they spin in faster circles in his thoughts until they drowned him. God, I love that. I think that’s the core of most weird fiction, too. What we do when we are knocked out of our self-oriented worldview and forced to come to terms with what we’ve taken for granted both in the other world and within our hearts. Blackwood, at the very start of weird fiction itself, gave us that, and good fiction can come from the answers to those questions.

[sillydetectivepizza]

5/8/20 - “The Undying Lands” by Michael R. Fletcher

Hey! Yesterday there was some lovely responses, and now I feel like I’m no longer tossing these in the metaphorical bin. that’s quite lovely, and makes it a wee bit easier to keep going. As I’ve been doing this for slightly over a week now, it seems more obvious why I’m doing this - I’m trying to recapture that love of writing and reading short fiction again. I had this idea that I’d read one story, and any story once a day, and I’d talk about that story however I felt. But that’s not what’s driving me now. I need to find that spark to see what makes me love writing, and I need to talk about that.  I’m switching - today, and maybe only today, I dunno yet - to some grimdark fantasy. Grimdark’s a subgenre of fantasy mildly inspired by Warhammer and Martin’s “Game of Thrones” - but it’s kind of grown from those rather limiting influences into its own thing. To outsiders I tend to describe it as “What if a bunch of epic fantasy nerds started reading Cormac McCarthy?”

The flagship of this little subgenre is the aptly-named Grimdark magazine, https://www.grimdarkmagazine.com/ - and the stories in the issues there give one a good overview of what the little genre entails. The story I’m reviewing comes from issue #21, a magazine released just before the pandemic arrived.

The grimdark subgenre is a kissing-cousin of horror, but because it is comes from decades of western fantasy, most of the writing still has the trappings that come along with it.

If you read, say, a Brian Keene story by itself, you’ll probably be entertained. But there’s a number of little shortcuts in his writing that he picked up from the authors that inspired him to write - and if you’ve read through your Piccirilli or Landsdale, you’ll find it an easier time. Pretty much every modern fantasy story you read has about double that kind of stuff.

Since most writers in grimdark are looking at that three-book series, long and complicated backgrounds and histories are just the way of things. That bleeds into the writing - with even short stories being full of the kind of exposition that more literary weird fiction would run shrieking their fool heads off to get away from. “The Undying Lands” is also like this. I’ll talk about what I like a bit later, and I do do like it, but what I don’t like about it I also things I find fault with the whole goddamn subgenre. “The Undying Lands” is a story about a woman who’s going to die a horrible death in an area, after committing the unpardonable sin of defending herself against a well-connected person who needed killing. That’s it, that’s the story, and it’s all the story needs. You got the tension right off the bat. Something has to change, whether the protagonist likes it or not, and in this case, if she does nothing, her head’s gonna come clean off. So of course, roughly a fifth of the way into the story, it’s gotta stop and let the reader know why the Undying Lands are called the Undying Lands and not like The Lands Where People Die Like Everywhere Else. This involves several paragraphs of a necromancer and undead armies marching around that have almost nothing to do with the story save it involves undead stuff and lots of violence. It drags the story to a halt for that, for nothing, really, and then the story struggles to pick up after that. I’m not saying this because Fletcher is a bad writer - quite the opposite. He’s a good writer, the story’s entertaining, and this is the kind of thing fantasy fans want. It drives me nuts, because I want my fantasy genre filled with genre things, but I want my mystery, too.  And I want that narrative to be as tight as the Iowa Writer’s Workshop magical fiction stories I reviewed earlier this week. I want every word to count, and I want to feel the tension rise as the story keeps going. So what do I like about the story, huh? The story’s a fuckin romp, for one. I want my fantasy version of a Sam Pekinpah western, and I want it to be blisteringly funny so it keeps my attention, and I want to feel the tension of relatable protagonists in impossible situations. And I want my monsters. This story delivers all that. It’s great.

I probably will get back to more grimdark fantasy as the month lingers on. Mixed with the weird and the horra, of course. I have 22 issues of the magazine in my patreon account just calling me, after all. For the weekend, since they’re depressing to me, I’ll probably not read current stuff. 

I’m thinking classic stories that made me love reading and writing.  Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows tomorrow (probably, I may change my mind) - and That One Stephen King Short Story I Actually Really Love on Sunday.  Depression permitting, of course.

[sillydetectivepizza]

5/7/20 - “There and Back Again” - Carmen Maria Machado

Gentle reader, you will have to manage my vast disappointment that I just read an excellent short story called “There And Back Again” and there was not one single Tolkein reference. 

Oh, right, this is in Nightmare Magazine again, and you can read it for free right here: http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/there-and-back-again/

Either there wasn’t one, or there was one and I am too much of a space cadet to spot it. I am disappoint.

“Yes,” you tell me impatiently, “Tolkein is important to you. But was it any good?”

And this brings me to the second thing you must manage today, which is my vast disappointment that it was a grand little story, and clocking in at 1500 words, and only needed to be 1500 words, and I am drowning in envy.  I have intended to write 1500 word stories and they clocked in at 7000 words or more. Practically novellas.

I digress, slightly. With 1500 words, there’s not a lot of room for nuance. Vexingly, there is nuance. I must bite my lip to contain my frustration.

If I have a weakness in prose, it’s for simple, clear, and direct writing that bursts out with evocative language when one least expects it.  Or sometimes the opposite. Take this, from the first 1/3rd of the story:

They were easy to eat when they were like that. Soft. Fermented, almost. And when I was done, she would collect me and take me upstairs, and we would sleep two heavy, parallel sleeps: her besotted with alcohol, me with blood and bone. The next morning, I’d always find her sitting at the table, rolling a silky glaze of absinthe around the inside of the martini glass and staring at the place where the sunlight struck the floorboards.It was that way for many years, the two of us.

And then she died and I was alone.

Machado’s fiction retains that clarity throughout the short piece. It darts out with something beautiful, then pulls the reader back in.

Great stuff. And again, there's a lot in this prose in the economy of what it says, and what it alludes to, that makes it so good. The structure is careful and lean.

[sillydetectivepizza]

Was having trouble passing through the malaise that is my brain to read a story to give a proper review. so, instead, here’s a short short short by Franz Kafka.

[sillydetectivepizza]

5/5/20 - “Through the Veil” by Jennifer Marie Brissett

five by five and I review a story that anyone can read for free right here on the internet:  https://uncannymagazine.com/article/through-the-veil/ It’s not ‘dark fiction’ by any stretch of the imagination, but as as science fiction story it has a lot of the same themes I really go for - determination, obsession, focus, abandonment. It’s a verbally dense story with no dialogue of any kind. My first read through I kind of hated it - I couldn’t pay attention at all and blamed the story. That verbal denseness to me felt like the writer was being deliberately obtuse. I got frustrated. I put the story down.  The thing is, I realized soon after I had no attention span for anything. I tried to read something I was already fond of and had read through several times in the past, and felt exactly the same way about that story. I’ve been sitting at my computer stressed out, trying to work and scanning twitter all day without any check on my own mental state. A few hours later, I was able to finish the story, though I’m still in that headspace. I do quite like it. One thing I struggle with in my writing is how to reveal the environment, how to use the space of the story to create a place that feels real yet has mystery to it. Brissett does this really well here: the place across the ‘dimensional divide’ feels both eerie and alien and at the same time a real place.  It’s a story of focus and sacrifice - I keep going back to the motif around the hair of the protagonist - the protagonist loses it as they struggle to get to the other side, then shaving it all off once they have returned, casting away the parts of themselves they were so worried about losing... it fit.

even though I struggled with the prose cos it just didn’t mesh with my current neurological state - I think for some readers out there it’s going to do the exact opposite, completely immersing them in the story briefly and then rising back to reality and gasping for air.  Maybe. I think so.

[sillydetectivepizza]

5/4/2020 - “Engines of the Ocean” by Christopher Slatsky

”Into my heart, an air that kills...” There’s a conversation an online but dear friend and I have once in a moon or so about the power and corruption of nostalgia - nostalgia for something you think you can return to becomes somehow selfish. Nostalgia tipped with melancholy avoids this - it is a remembrance of the dead. Memory, as a theme, dominates the fiction of a lot of writers of dark fiction, in a way that doesn’t seem true for other genre fiction. But perhaps I just don’t have enough experience with other fiction to make that assessment. Hmm. -- This act of reading once a day and commenting on it feels like a strange ritual and one I’m not sure I value yet. Without any response - not that I blame anyone for not having one - it feels a bit like taking a huge left turn out of my day every day to write a bunch of notes and then very carefully and neatly place them in the garbage can where they most likely belong. Nevertheless, my depression has allowed me to continue today. Or at least today. I’d always meant to crack open Shadows and Tall Trees vol. 7 - an undertow publication that is absolutely the kind of thing that someone like me should support, and I always felt a bit guilty that I got an electronic version and then couldn’t make it through a single story. Slatsky as well - one of those new writers I keep hearing I should read, then feeling a deep sense of shame that i never get around to actually reading them. So I was in a bad mood, and thinking of tossing this whole thing. I tried a friend’s story, posted a long time ago, and it did nothing for me. I poked around, feeling the same of yesterday’s absent story, and went, “ah fuck it” and tried Engines of the Ocean. -- And, my dear invisible and suspiciously-absent reader, I loved this thing.

it’s a story, like many horror and dark fiction stories - that’s primarily a relationship between the main character and their past. Missing or misunderstood parents feature in a lot of stories, and memories are a constant theme that wind their way through fiction of the dark and strange. “Engines of the Ocean” - a story about a main character coming to terms with her past relationship with her father Like previous stories, it’s got a lot of things I shouldn’t like. Literally the first half of the story is loaded down with the passive voice - almost aggressively so. There’s a lot of good reasons to use and not use passive voice when one can in stories. It has a distancing effect on the story, drawing the reader away and making them feel a little less real. It can slow down action. In general, one wants to avoid stuttering words over and over - and it can be very easy to overuse a simple word like was.

The 10-hour drive to Oak Field was uneventful. The town had been hard hit by the recession. All of the shops she drove past were empty. Black windows with the occasional FOR LEASE sign interrupted the monotony.

Was. Had been. were. After a while that stuff adds up. And usually my editor-bit would want to take a red marker and underline all the past-tense versions of ‘to be’ just to put it in stark contrast with the rest of the story. Since Slatsky is a published author with a number of short story publishing credits, I have to assume the heavy use of the passive voice at the beginning is intentional - a way to separate and isolate the main character; to give the reader the feeling the character’s not entirely in tune with her memories.

The writing as well is extremely prosiac all the way until it isn’t, and that as well feels like a conscious choice. Not one I would make and that interests me as a writing nerd. There’s a lot of ‘tell not show’ in the beginning where Slatsky flat out tells you something is distressing. And then, well... It gets grand at the end. And lyrical, too. And I can’t quite quote those parts without ruining it. They need the build-up. There’s a lot to ruminate about the preservation of memories - and of control, of stasis. The re-occurring theme of salt preserving something that should have rotted away, and yet salt coming from the brine of the ocean. You learn deceptively little about the main character, Cordelia, or the father of hers torn from everything but her memories. But a lot seems to be said in the negative spaces around the prose.

When I edited fiction at gothic dot net I used to hate all those short stories - many published - where the supernatural bits never were fully revealed. It always felt like cowardice to me, like the writer was terrified of letting the reader in on the story lest the reader feel disappointed. Stories like “Engines of the Ocean” remind me that when it’s done well it’s something magical, something transcendent.

[sillydetectivepizza]

no review yesterday

Yesterday depression hit so hard it felt like artillery. I just kind of walked around all day, feeling stunned by the intensity of it. Have you ever had that feeling before? Like your city is being bombarded all around you, but no one else seems to notice it but you? You just want to scream HOW CAN YOU DO ANYTHING AROUND THE CRUSHING NOISE OF REALITY but... they do, and you can’t. Such a weirdly intense type of panic attack, usually my depression or my anxiety are far more subdued. I read a story yesterday. I didn’t like it. I wrote about half the review, then thought about the author in question vanity searching their name and coming across some asshole on tumblr hating their story, and tossed it. I can tell I’m still depressed today, just have to work. The stories I keep picking for myself are stories that intentionally open up old emotional wounds around insecurity and jealousy. This is dire because the reason I’m doing this one-story-a-day thing is to combat it. I’m not ready to face that three days in.