“Fruiting Bodies” (1988)

Brian Lumley’s effectively unpleasant story is first one up in a Year’s Best anthology edited by Karl Edward Wagner. The steady and patient way the story unfolds reminds me in many ways of Wagner’s own stories (such as the rightly famous “Sticks”)—and even more of work by H.P. Lovecraft, using a version of his dense language to ratchet tensions slowly and deliberately. I also see a connection to Guy de Maupassant’s “Le Horla,” with ships bringing in the horror somehow from overseas (in this case, of course, Haiti, source of all that is terrifying in the European imagination). Lumley has some fanciful ideas about dry rot, which I don’t think have much to do with reality. But that’s OK. The story is mainly set atop the cliffs of an English seaside town that is crumbling away. The cliffs have been giving way slowly for decades to the steady pounding of the ocean, losing ground at the rate of six or seven feet per year on average. The town is almost entirely gone now, with only a few decrepit shacks remaining, along with a lonely and strange old man still living there. The kind of decay described, along with Lumley’s take on dry rot, contribute to a mood of grinding despair, ultimately making it a nice piece in the world-building self-consciously “weird” vein. A churchyard cemetery is being taken by the ocean after the church itself. The garrulous old man is a widower with his own obsession about dry rot. His wife died as part of the town’s own death. The “fruiting bodies,” which we get to in due time, are part of the process of decay. It’s suitably repulsive when finally encountered. This dry rot “thing,” which appears to grow like a cross between mushrooms and brambles, is classified here as fungus, an element of nature with lots of weird biological properties when you look into it. (William Hope Hodgson, another likely influence, also wrote a good story about fungus, “The Voice in the Night.”) The old guy explains some of the situation. But he’s not exactly reliable either. This strange character might be the most obvious element lifted from Lovecraft in a tale that moves slowly but comes to life with a slow-burn vengeance. “Fruiting Bodies” first appeared in a late-‘80s incarnation of the venerated Weird Tales magazine. It has the Weird Tales world views locked in. Lumley is a worthy inheritor of the Lovecraft style, and this story might be as good a place as any to start with him.

The Year's Best Horror Stories XVII, ed. Karl Edward Wagner (out of print)
Listen to story online.