“In the Hills, the Cities” (1984)

[spoilers?] Full disclosure, I remain dubious about the Clive Barker project at large, but Stephen King’s clarion blurb, “I have seen the future of horror,” still resonates enough for a fulsome career by Barker, the painter, theatrical impresario, baker, chef, chief bottle washer, and short story writer. Or, at least, short story writer is how he started when he made it to horror lit, specifically with the six-volume Books of Blood collection, before going on to write a bunch of novels, series, screenplays, etc. The slightly cringy Books of Blood credo goes, “Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.” The general sense I struggle with is that I’m not sure Barker is a good short-story writer and I still believe short stories are the soul of horror literature. With some exceptions Barker’s stories tend to be uniformly long, minimum page count 30 and ranging up to near 100. No problem there—H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Aickman frequently went long too. But Barker’s stories are also just a little saggy. There’s a lot going on, including extreme violence (dubbed “splatterpunk”), but it tends to run monotonous for me. On the other hand, the things Barker dreams up are uniformly weird, unexpected, crazy, startling, and original. He’s not borrowing from old traditions, though he harks to them, sometime quite explicitly, but rather he is more shooting to create his own. This much-anthologized oddball from the first volume of the Books of Blood set is as good a place as any to start. It is set in the Soviet-era Yugoslavia—Serbia and Kosovo, I believe—and the two main characters, the “English gentlemen,” Mick and Judd, are a gay couple on a honeymoon type of road trip through central Europe. Barker is normalizing gays in this story, not sensationalizing them, or using them to add some element of horror, which is refreshing. They just are what they are—a couple who bickers passive-aggressively the way couples do on travels and then later enjoys makeup sex.

Eventually we arrive at the story’s main conceit, which is kind of hard to explain, let alone believe. Is it a spoiler to reveal the ideas? For centuries, two neighboring cities of “tens of thousands” have perfected a way of fighting in which they strap themselves together—men, women, and children, Barker emphasizes—into lumbering humanoid forms that do battle with each other in hand-to-hand (so to speak) combat, rock ‘em sock ‘em style. Useful illustrations can be found on the internet. Barker has someone explain: “Ropes to tie them all together, flawlessly. Sinews ... ligaments ... There was food in its belly ... there were pipes from the loins, to take away the waste. The best-sighted sat in the eye-sockets, the best-voiced in the mouth and throat. You wouldn’t believe the engineering.” He has that right. I don’t believe it. Yes, there are certain faint echoes of the movie The Wicker Man and of Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery.” But in general it seems beyond ridiculous to me and it’s just getting started. I was constantly distracted by the impossibility of it. The soles of the feet, consider, are made up of the biggest, heaviest men, who are smashed to pulp dead. Lots of people die even on the victorious side. Apparently it is considered an honor. Mick and Judd wander into this strange battle and find the remains of the defeated city with literally thousands of corpses. Barker is enthusiastic and gets carried away with the concept, piling on with detail (babies replicate teeth inside the mouth, stuff like that). But for me he is plainly overdrawing on his suspension of disbelief account. Good start, good middle, protracted from there—it’s no way to write a story (but what do you do anyway with ideas like this?). But you better not take my word for it. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer give “In the Hills, the Cities” their stamp of approval by including it in their estimable and valuable anthology The Weird. Barker himself picked it for Masters of Darkness, an anthology where that’s the concept, writers picking their own stories and explaining why. "In the Hills, the Cities" is all over the place. The implication is that it’s a masterpiece. My strained credulity could well be a minority view.

Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vols. 1-6 (Vol. 1 kindle)
Masters of Darkness, ed. Dennis Etchison
The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
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6. Primal Scream, Screamadelica (1991)

[2022 review here]

Hey, I am on vacation! (figuratively speaking)! But I wrote the long piece linked above just two years ago and it has approximately all I have to say about the classic, delectable psychedelic album by Primal Scream. See you next time for the start of the top 5! Yowza wowza, so on so forth.

“It Will Be Here Soon” (1979)

[spoilers] I’m still not sure what to make of Dennis Etchison. I can’t say I like all his stories a lot, but I can’t say I don’t like them either. I like the sense I get of a very careful writer, but he may be just too restrained, or subtle, for me. After what the movies did to horror in the ‘70s and ‘80s—including shifting the emphasis from short stories to novels, and never spare the gore—I certainly understand the impulse and maybe even the necessity for keeping the work quiet, emphasizing suggestion over excruciating detail. I like the title of this story, the sweeping blank affect of passive voice a certain trademark of Etchison’s. Compare “We Have All Been Here Before” and “You Can Go Now.” According to ISFDB, this story is part of a Jack Martin series—the first, in fact, so not many worries here about continuity issues. Jack is a grown man, in his 20s or 30s, visiting his quasi-estranged father. Jack feels guilty about neglecting him. It’s a familiar situation between parents and grown children. His father has developed an interest (and/or obsession) with listening closely to blank recording tape, thinking he finds strange voices and messages there. For Jack it’s something he didn’t know about his father, but in many ways it only makes him think the old man is a bit of deluded fool. On that point Jack seems likely to be right. The story seems to be mostly about the alienation between parents and children. In the end Jack is seen recording whispered nonsense syllables for his father to find—an act of kindness, on one level, perhaps, but obviously on another level belittling, manipulative, a cruel deception. The best-case scenario is that his father will think he has found something to support his strange ideas. He will be happy but he will be conned. I don’t see it very much as an act of kindness. His father and stepmother—really, the whole situation—reminded me some of the documentary 51 Birch Street, which is also about parents and grown children and even has a stepmother too, though a much happier person than the one here. That might be more about Jack’s attitude. I didn’t think this was one of Etchison’s better stories, but I’m also not sure I’m the person to judge.

Dennis Etchison, Talking in the Dark
Story not available online.

I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

I Saw the TV Glow works in a slow and dreamy David Lynch key, heavy on the soundtrack and with music videos shoved in all part of the package. There are sinister horror undercurrents aplenty in this story of two fans of a ‘90s TV show called The Pink Opaque. We see scenes and hear plot points about the show, which is a little bit X-Files and a little bit Pete and Pete, with jolts of aimless meaninglessness for effect. The setup seems to be two girls on psychic adventures with monsters. In 1996, two youngsters, 7th-grader Owen (Ian Foreman and then Justice Smith) and 9th-grader Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) bond over the show, which runs on a USA Network-like cable channel on Saturday nights at 10:30 p.m. Owen has a home situation that makes it hard for him to look at it—there is a sad arc to his family over the years but we never get very much information, especially about his strict stepfather. Owen sneaks over to Maddy’s when he can to look at the show with Maddy and Maddy’s friend Amanda. Later Maddy makes videotapes of the show for Owen. It’s their favorite TV show ever. When both are in high school, Maddy wants to run away and she wants Owen to come with her, but he hangs back. Then Maddy disappears—police investigation, presumed dead. We don’t get much information about this either, but it sounds serious. When Maddy shows up eight years later Owen can’t believe it and begs her to tell him what happened, where she has been. She appears reluctant to say but finally admits it has something to do with the show. She has been living inside it or something. It seems unlikely but ever more unhinged plot developments suggest otherwise. It’s also possible she’s insane. I’m not sure it all adds up but I’m not sure that matters. I was interested in the first place because I’d found an earlier movie intriguing by director and writer Jane Schoenbrun, 2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. It’s fully steeped in the self-proclaimed dark corners of the internet such as “analog horror,” the topic of numerous youtube channels, and plays to them well. I Saw the TV Glow is attempting something similar with ‘90s cable entertainment shows and VHS swap-abouts, but with much more ambition than mere parody or mimicry. I’m not sure it’s such a fruitful direction, but I found at least this one to be engaging, mysterious, even cosmic and awe-inspiring in a way that is only slightly ironic.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

This long novel by W. Somerset Maugham is generally considered his masterpiece and it is indeed very good—as good as I remembered from first reading it over 40 years ago. It’s autobiographical but not really autobiography. Most people, including me, remember it as the story of the tragic, absurd relationship between first-person narrator Philip Carey and a waitress in a teashop named Mildred. The 1934 movie version, for example, stars Bette Davis and focuses exactly on that (Davis is perfect and the picture is worth seeing). I noticed, however, that Mildred does not show up until page 268 of a 607-page edition. It’s easy to see why she is so memorable—she is as terrible a person as you would ever care to meet. The first 267 pages are devoted to Philip’s life from the age of 9, when his mother dies and he is orphaned (his father died years earlier). This is true to Maugham’s life, as is being sent to live with his clergyman uncle and aunt. Philip has a clubfoot that makes him a target of ridicule for other kids growing up and even into adulthood. Maugham had a stutter that produced similar experiences. Philip tries first to become an accountant. Then he wants to be an artist and moves to Paris for two years to study. Ultimately he decides he doesn’t have the talent and gives it up. His uncle never approved of the artist plan and by the time Philip is 21 he is fed up with Philip’s inability to commit to a career. He wanted Philip to work in the church but by this point Philip has given up all faith in God and is an atheist. The magic here is Maugham’s ability to make it all so interesting. It is a strangely compulsively readable novel and pure pleasure all the way. There is somehow pleasure even in the agonies of Mildred. Most of us, men and women too, have likely had relationships like it, though perhaps not as abysmally intense. You may like to know now that he gets shut of Mildred and finds his way to a happy and satisfying end. Maugham actually was a doctor like Philip becomes, but he was also a prolific writer with a shelf-full or so of novels, plays, stories, and essays to his credit, which I understand are often nearly as enjoyable. I’m still not ready to take on The Razor’s Edge due to the terrible Bill Murray movie adaptation, though word of mouth claims the novel is actually good. I’ve got my eye on The Magician, which is about Aleister Crowley, or The Summing Up, which is about writing. But Of Human Bondage is the natural place to start with Maugham. It’s fair to call it a masterpiece. If anything, I liked it even more the second time.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

“The Werewolf” (1979)

[spoilers] In the Angela Carter collection The Bloody Chamber, this very short story is the first of three meditations on Little Red Riding Hood to finish the book. It might be the best—short and keeping the details blunt. The “good child” has no name, no red garments. The fairy tale comes to mind only because it involves a girl, a wolf, and the girl’s grandmother. The grandmother has been feeling under the weather and the girl is dispatched to bring her oatcakes and honey. On the way there she is attacked by a wolf, which she fends off with a knife like a badass. “Here, take your father’s hunting knife, you know how to use it.” That’s a voice in her head, no doubt her mother’s. She faces the wolf head-on, drops her things, squares up, and takes the knife. “[S]he made a great swipe at it ... and slashed off its right forepaw.” The wolf goes “lolloping off disconsolately.... The child wiped the blade of her knife clean on her apron, wrapped up the wolf’s paw in the cloth in which her mother had packed the oatcakes and went on toward her grandmother’s house.” The spoiler alert goes right here because the ending surprised me, although you may have already guessed it. The grandmother seems to be sicker than ever. She is burning with fever. The girl takes the cloth with the wolf’s paw to make a cold compress for Grandmother’s forehead. But the paw is now a human hand. And soon the girl discovers that Grandmother is now missing a hand. Grandmother is the werewolf! The girl calls for help, the neighbors show, recognize her for a witch, and “drove the old woman, in her shift as she was, out into the snow with sticks, beating her old carcass as far as the edge of the forest, and pelted her with stones until she fell down dead.” And that’s the end of the story, except for one last paragraph: “Now the child lived in her grandmother’s house; she prospered.” Amazingly savage, amazingly straightforward about it, and all matter-of-fact. I just didn’t see any of these plot developments coming and it took my breath away.

Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats
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“Hills Like White Elephants” (1927)

Just because the 1927 Ernest Hemingway collection is called Men Without Women doesn’t mean we’re going to get any stories without women, and here we are. The story is good, or not bad, but the values it puts out are terrible, repugnant. It’s another very short story—four printed pages—and involves a conversation between a man and a woman who are traveling together and waiting at a station for a train. They are having drinks. There is something between them—it’s likely she is pregnant and they are talking about an abortion, but the story is never explicit on the point, which is annoying. I mean, I’m pretty sure what’s going on here, but the third-person narrator is never clear enough for me. It feels stupidly coy. But it’s clear enough. He wants her to get an abortion and she doesn’t want to. She would prefer to marry but it doesn’t seem to be an option for him. All speculation on my part. This is one story where the whole “iceberg” thing goes awry. The wrong things are revealed. Too much is not disclosed. The narrator has an unexplained hostile attitude toward the woman. She is referred to as a girl and she seems to be behaving petulantly and immaturely. What the story doesn’t seem to understand at all, or at least not very well, is that this man is a jerk. The way I read it, he wants her to get an abortion and he doesn’t want her to bear his child. He obviously doesn’t care what she thinks, how she feels, or what she wants. He doesn’t want to talk about it at all. It’s infuriating to me and completely explains her behavior. Of course I have some sympathy for the guy’s position. Who among us has not wanted to eat their cake and have it too? But he is at least as petulant and immature as her. I’m not sure the story, or the narrator—or Hemingway—is aware of it. In terms of the mechanics of the story, yes, I have to admit it’s pretty good. The setting and the moment are well conceived and the story is carried by majority dialogue. It could be a one-act play. It’s poignant in its way, at least insofar as it subscribes to old school values that have arguably had their day. But it’s impossible to untangle the virtues of this story from the toxic attitudes. Somehow unfortunately this seems to happen with some frequency with Hemingway.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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7. Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation (1988)

[2007 review here]

I agree Daydream Nation only makes it by the skin of its teeth into a countdown of psychedelic albums. No one, not even Jim DeRogatis, seems to see Sonic Youth that way. Wikipedia as usual flails with the shotgun approach: noise rock, alternative rock, avant-rock, indie rock, art punk, postpunk (each term with an article defining it). Fair enough! I’ll opt for postpunk for the sake of convention, but don’t miss the extreme, mind-bending counterpoints of this album. That’s what makes it psychedelic for me. The music is churning and raw—may take some getting used to—but the cover, the painting Candle (Kerze) by the German painter Gerhard Richter, is suitable for propping up against the wall for meditation sessions when you’re out of candles. It’s one of the most peaceful album covers I’ve ever seen and it is what drew me to it in the first place (after giving up on the band circa 1985). The title offers another arching spectrum, suggesting on the one hand the qualities of the strange tunings, the electric guitar acoustics studies, and the distanced furies in “Daydream,” but even more importantly suggesting, in “Nation,” the oceanic currents in which this band willfully loses itself. But this is an odd kind of postpunk ocean, perhaps more like a vast and unexpected inland sea. Daydream Nation works best for me—works extremely well—in limited, regular doses. The double-LP vinyl release was how I knew it and I generally took it one side at a time. I wouldn’t want to call them suites. This is not Tales From Topographic Oceans by Yes, which never worked for me let alone as oceanic. Yet in a way that is how Daydream Nation operates. These little sets and blasts of electric guitars to the brain alternate vocalists / lyricists among Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, and Lee Ranaldo (who sounds so much like Moore in a slightly different register that I didn’t notice for years, sort of like Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins). I took the album one side at a time. Or on the headphones for walking, picking it up and putting it down most days. The CD generally proved too long for me to go all at one gulp, even with shuffle—it tends to fight too much with other albums, for one thing. Lately I have listened to it on repeat, 30 to 50 minutes at a time, picking up where I left off, and that works well too. Like the candle on the cover that burns with steady flame, there is something very still at the center of Daydream Nation—within the lengthier tracks themselves (“Teen Age Riot,” 6:57; “’Cross the Breeze,” 7:00; “Total Trash,” 7:33) or in the album taken as a whole with some of its shorter pieces. Though I loved all the sides it was side 3 that called to me most often and still does, with nothing longer than 5:00. The two Ranaldo songs (all music on all tracks credited to the band collectively), “Hey Joni” and “Rain King,” are showcases for the way the band itself can feel like it has turned into a lurching monster rearing up across a cityscape, destroying buildings. Thurston Moore’s “Candle” bids to be the soul of the album. The 2:41 “Providence” is a montage of random low-fi piano tinkling, an amplifier humming, and answering machine messages from Mike Watt, which altogether suggest, among other things, that drugs were involved with the making of this album. Really, the whole thing, you know I have to say it: PLAY LOUD.

Masculine Feminine (1966)

Masculin féminin, France / Sweden, 103 minutes

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Writers: Jean-Luc Godard, Guy de Maupassant

Photography: Willy Kurant

Music: Jean-Jacques Debout

Editors: Agnes Guillemot, Marguerite Renoir

Cast: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Chantal Goya, Marlene Jobert, Catherine-Isabelle Duport, Michel Debord, Elsa Leroy, Evabritt Strandberg, Brigitte Bardot, Francoise Hardy

Guy de Maupassant gets a cowriting credit on Masculine Feminine because the rights to two of his stories, “The Signal” and “Paul’s Mistress,” were acquired for the production. But director Jean-Luc Godard barely used them in the picture, which instead is more typical of his shattered approach to filmmaking in the 1960s, with quick setups and improvisation (see also Alphaville, Band of Outsiders, Breathless, The Little Soldier, Pierrot le fou, Vivre Sa Vie, Weekend, etc., etc.). Ostensibly broken up into “15 concise parts,” the picture mixes up cryptic textual statements on title cards (“The mole has no consciousness, yet it burrows in a specific direction”) with scenes of the lovely principals bantering and living their Pepsi-Cola Generation lives (or, more accurately, as it were, their ANTI-Pepsi-Cola Generation lives).

Masculine Feminine is only murky about the revolution. It’s a little late for Communism and a little early for Women’s Liberation, which hit harder in the next decade, although Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had been published by then and birth control pills were more and more widely available. That’s about the depth of the sexual politics, which are otherwise more libertine. Jean-Pierre Leaud plays Paul, a 21-year-old political activist and revolutionary, who acquires his own little maybe only emotional harem, with the polyamory playing out as it will, kind of more on the sidelines if anything, off-camera. There’s ye-ye singer Chantal Goya as Madeleine, an aspiring singer. Goya’s songs fill the soundtrack. And there are her two roommates Elisabeth (Marlene Jobert) and Catherine-Isabelle (Catherine-Isabelle Duport). As much as anything it’s a movie about the Sexual Revolution—no one under 18 was permitted to see it in France—but more than anything it is a freewheeling half-improvised and half-baked intellectualized Godard exercise. I’m hard put for a synopsis. That’s about as good as I can do. Random observations follow.

“The Harbor-Master” (1899)

I’m still not sure at all about Robert W. Chambers as a writer of horror (and/or fantasy and/or science fiction). He didn’t do much of it, more inclined to writing bestselling romances that are all but forgotten nowadays. But his speculative stories have an ardent and enduring fan base, which includes Nic Pizzolatto, co-creator of the True Detective franchise. The Chambers gold is found in the first half of his 1895 collection of stories, The King in Yellow, specifically in the first handful or so of stories. The rest are romances, and cheesy. I’m even meh on the ones with all the reputation, such as “The Repairer of Reputations,” and not at all interested in the romances, which I thought took up the rest of his career. And mostly they did, but it turns out he returned to the weird now and then, as with this one. It also exists as the first five chapters of his 1904 novel In Search of the Unknown, the story of a cryptozoologist pursuing monsters and romance. Gutenberg has the novel online and the story is also featured in a 2021 Hippocampus collection of Chambers stories edited by S.T. Joshi, The Harbor-Master: Best Weird Stories of Robert W. Chambers. It makes sense to give this story the honors of the collection title because it’s the best story I’ve read by Chambers yet. It seems likely that H.P. Lovecraft was influenced by it for his so-called “Deep Ones” (off the coast, in the water) in the “Innsmouth” story. It seems likely the creators of the 1954 movie The Creature From the Black Lagoon knew this story too. Lovecraft’s amphibians interbreed with humans, but this “harbor-master,” the nickname the villagers have for it, is more of a brute animal with perhaps a taste for human flesh. He’s certainly a danger. I must say it impressed me, nicely paced, always interesting. The harbor-master is intriguing and scary too—the image of him seen from a distance is powerful. The story is also somewhat oddly funny in places. The cryptozoologist narrator is visiting the remote area at the invitation of a man who claims to have a pair of extinct birds, great auks ... and something more, if there is any interest. Our guy works for the Bronx Zoo, a detail I love. It makes sense given Chambers’s origins in New York City. Halyard, with the auks, is an invalid in a wheelchair who has a “pretty nurse” working for him. Our guy and the pretty nurse take up with one another, described comically as on all fours on the floor looking for a thimble the pretty nurse has dropped. The romance(s?) begin (in the novel)! I count this story as a good one from Chambers. Maybe I’m ready to give him another chance. He is a tough nut!

The Harbor-Master: Best Weird Stories of Robert W. Chambers, ed. S.T. Joshi

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