A short overview of J.G. Ballard's "Concrete Era" of the 1970's.

 

During the 1970's, J.G. Ballard was creating an absolutely amazing body of work, some of the most important fiction being written in the 20th century. Cold surgical tales that mercifully examine our times and our place in these strange new times. A pornography of science fiction. A science fiction of pornography. Like Ballard says, pornography exposes our desperate need to use and exploit each other. And in the vast media dreamscape that has overtaken all of us, we are free to explore our most secret perversions and act on our most deep-seated hatreds. Ballard endeavors to look head-on at what over lit future we were about to find ourselves in.

Coming from a tradition of science fiction that was becoming increasingly safe and stale, Ballard took the field in a completely new direction. Science fiction was stagnant, still exploring space fantasies first innovated by Wells, Verne, and company, it had become a purely escapist literary genre. Ballard, in his focus on what he called inner space, on our society, and on the body and identity, changed the trajectory of the field. Ballard brought a new transgressive motive to the field, making work that was challenging, sometimes pornographic, sometimes abstract, and refused to fall into the science fiction tropes that only served to reassure the goodness of man and of humanity's great future destiny. Ballard saw the future as being cold and perverse. An erosion of emotion and an increase in the freedom to explore your own psychopathology. His work during the 1970's was transgressive and experimental, explorations of the future that was coming, or the future that we were secretly wishing for.

The Atrocity Exhibition (1972) is a collection of semi-related stories that examine the breakdown and ruin of both our culture and inner lives. Our dreams and our identities are corrupted and perverted by the victorious media landscape and the absolute takeover of technology that has enveloped all our lives. We can not escape the complete corruption of our lives by technology and media. The labyrinth is so deep and complex that we can no longer distinguish between what is reality and what is fantasy. And The Atrocity Exhibition is a surgical examination of our fractured lives and psyches. 

Crash (1973) shows us an apocalypse. Not one that is going to happen. Not one that has happened. But one that is ongoing every single day. An apocalypse we willingly engage in, enter into. Thousands die on the highways every year, a veritable mechanized genocide. In our media, we are bombarded with images of car crashes and car violence, and we are always demanding more. What may be the first truly pornographic science fiction novel. A true classic, shocking and alluring at the same time.

Concrete Island (1974) is a subtle tale of alienation. An abstract tale told as a stranded island tale. The main character, finding himself stranded in the middle of a maze of highways, literally trapped on a concrete island, the novel explores his secret desires that have been largely unknown to himself. Maybe the most understated work of this period. The concrete island of the title becomes the inner mind of the protagonist.

High-Rise (1975) is a sometimes interesting book, but Ballard’s provocative vision and innovative views on modern society aren’t as sharp in this one. He often times here falls back on overused symbolism, and his ideas are a bit too obvious and overstated. Class warfare literally played out over the different floors of the high-rise apartment building. A modern apartment building with all the amenities to make all its inhabitants feel comfortable and safe. Safety lulls the modern apartment dweller into wanting to break from the comforts of modern life and seek perversion and violence. Ballard is trying to write a kind of 120 Days of Sodom, full of perversion and classism, but sometimes it tends to come off as just cliché. It is a worthy book, but maybe the least of his works from this era. 

The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) is Ballard stepping away from the cold, sterile science fiction of his “concrete era” and into the world of dreams. This is Ballard fully embracing his interests in surrealism. Characters who may be alive or may be dead. The most inner desires and dreams made real. Ballard’s dark edges and perverse sexuality are still in full display here. But this is a more passionate book, full of dreams and fantasy. It comes from the same imaginative core as the “concrete era” books, just a change in texture, in expression. It signals a move for Ballard to move away from being cold and clinical and into a more active interest in exploring human relationships and emotional states in his future novels. 

Review: The Shrouds

David Cronenberg has always been far ahead of most of his peers. Crafting mind-bending films that question everything we innocently assume to be stable and real, Cronenberg has throughout his career been the great destabilizer. Exploring questions of identity, the physical body, and the oftentimes harsh and unsettling realities of our existence in this unstable and shadowy life we find ourselves born into. Having had such a long career directing, I feel like his films could be referred to in four eras. We find his two newest films to be a sort of revitalization of his artistic voice, Crimes of the Future and The Shrouds. I would say that the films of his first period, which looked and presented themselves as grindhouse shockers, subverted the audience by smuggling in quite radical and transgressive ideas, in films like Rabid and Shivers. Then he had his most lauded phase, his masterworks phase. He finally had budgets and attention from critics to allow him to make films with a more free hand. In this era, he created such films as Videodrome and Crash. Then in his third era, there is a kind of feeling of a director unsure where to go with his work. A sort of era of experiments in genres outside his previous work in the horror and science fiction fields. Here we find thrillers and character dramas. There was a feeling of loss of vision, a sense of uncertainty found its way into his films here. This period may be his least creatively satisfying. Films like Cosmopolis and Maps of the Stars are in this era. Then we had years of silence from Cronenberg. At least until, excitingly, we had the announcement of a new Cronenberg horror film, Crimes of the Future. In what was hopefully a return to form. Crimes of the Future, while delving into some interesting ideas, just lacked the bite and the sharpness of Cronenberg’s best work. A rather dull affair that never really challenged the audience. In this era, what we may call the fourth era of Cronenberg, we find ourselves with his new film, the semi-autobiographical abstract nightmare The Shrouds. 

After the minor letdown of Crimes of the Future, tempered expectations met the announcement of a new horror film from Cronenberg. But even with the disappointment of his previous film, a new Cronenberg film, no matter what, is a very exciting event, his reputation based on the absolute masterpieces that he has gifted us. The Shrouds is a film that is in part based on Cronenberg’s loss of his wife to cancer. A tragic loss that devastated him. She was not only his wife, she was a collaborator on his films, having served as an editor on a couple of his early films. The Shrouds is also a film that is an examination of the feeling of paranoia in our culture, a fog of online conspiracy theories, and a feeling that our lives have been derailed by technology. If technology gives us everything we feel we want, then why do we still feel empty, alienated from life? There are all these forces seeking control over our lives, through social media, manipulation of the news, manipulation of the stock markets and the economy, attempts to dictate and subvert our feelings on human rights and individual freedoms. All being conducted by shadowy forces that we can’t even be sure are real. An era of artificial intelligence and mass propaganda campaigns. 

The main character, Karsh, is some kind of vague technological mastermind behind a new innovation: cemeteries where one can monitor the decay of their loved ones while they lie in their tombs. This is a film of data breaches and breaches into our dreams. There is this insane haze of possible subversion of the cemeteries by what may be Chinese interests, using the graves and the dead bodies as a means of mass foreign surveillance. This paranoid idea is both crazy and perfectly relatable to anyone who has checked the news or logged on to social media in the past ten years. Cronenberg weaves all these feelings and concerns together, and has created this masterpiece of alienated grief and paranoia of unseen powers. He takes all these feelings of grief and loss and perverts them, twists them into something new and strange. There is this focus on the body, the body of his dead wife, the body of his lovers, the body rotting in the ground. What kind of person inhibits the body seems to be mutable. In our culture, are we but eager insects going after sensation and transgression? You can view the open body of your deceased lovers and relatives. Their bodies lay open to view. Is this a comment on the emptiness of our bodies, or ourselves?

But in form and in feeling, The Shrouds is a nightmare. It seems to have almost been dredged from the darkest and most murky parts of Cronenberg's subconscious. Both personal and abstract, The Shrouds is both a personal nightmare of loss and a paranoid vision of our culture. It is like Cronenberg put directly onto the screen the nightmares he had after the death of his wife. This is a very personal work, but don't make the mistake of thinking it’s completely autobiographical. This is private hurt perverted by nightmare logic. A haze of unreality hovers over the film. Paranoia and sexual desire are the main currents running through the narrative. Daytime logic is not needed for a nightmare to feel real. It all feels real in the way a nightmare makes total sense while you are trapped in it. Surgically deformed bodies, strange skeletal growths, technologically fueled perversions, The Shrouds is a fever dream of sick desire and alienated grief. 

Almost wonderfully unexpected, The Shrouds is a masterpiece from one of our most vital voices. In an era of sterility and Hollywood formalization infecting horror cinema, The Shrouds asks us to examine our ever increasingly fragile connections with our bodies and our interconnections with each other filtered through technology. Unsettling yet erotic, paranoid yet dreamy, The Shrouds brings Cronenberg to the modern era to help light the way through what most of us would consider to be confusing times. Where does The Shrouds stand inside Cronenberg’s oeuvre? I honestly feel it stands with his best work. The top tier of Cronenberg films, I would say, are Videodrome, Crash, Dead Ringers, and The Shrouds. Cronenberg combines personal nightmare and social commentary like no other filmmaker. And The Shrouds is a testament to how needed his vision is.

Interview: Ramsey Campbell

I recently had the pleasure of inviting horror fiction legend Ramsey Campbell to an interview for the Plutonian. Let me start by saying that anyone who enjoys horror should run out and read his work immediately. To call Campbell a legend is almost an understatement. In my opinion, any list trying to figure out the greatest writers of horror has to include Campbell to be respected. Ramsey Campbell stands with the greats, the classic writers like Poe, Lovecraft, and Jackson, and the modern greats like Etchison, Ligotti, and Kiernan. In this interview, I ask questions that follow my own obsessions and interests in his work. This is not meant to be an interview for people new to horror or new to Campbell’s work. This is me getting to pick the brains of one of my favorite writers. If you are new to Campbell let me give a short list of recommended works:

Demons by Daylight

Cold Print

The Height of the Scream

Scared Stiff

Dark Companions

        Ramsey Campbell, to me, is one of the great writers of unease. He also is, quietly, one of the great writers of transgression. His stories whisper, but in those whispers he explores taboos, diving deep into areas we as a society are not comfortable with. Perversion, obsession, the horrors of the body and its functions. The family as alien. Our secret desires for transformation and death. He writes masterfully in both subtle ghost stories and horrific tales of desire and breakdown. I hold Campbell's work dear to my heart, his work a dark beacon drawing us in, lovers of things macabre and perverse. 

Plutonian: As opposed to what would probably be the majority of horror fiction, I feel one of the major themes in your work are stories that feature a protagonist who is maybe a bit sleazy, someone who has an obsession that some may label as perverted or kinky. Instead of the good guy, the kind mother, victimized by monstrous forces from beyond. They, throughout the story, seem to be seeking their doom, and when they find their weird doom, there is a sense of completion to their journey. Like that is what they were, maybe unknown to themselves, seeking all along. Instead of a hero's quest more a pervert's quest. Like for instance, in your short story, Cold Print, or some of the tales in your collection Scared Stiff. Also among that line, there is maybe a Hitchcockian trope of placing blame on the viewer/reader for wanting the outcome, which seems to be implied by you in some of these works. Blaming the reader for desiring the dark ending that has been delivered to them. What interests you in the pervert as protagonist? And this seeking of both protagonist and the reader of horror fiction for perversion and doom, what are your thoughts on this?

Campbell: Are there so many? I’d have said a handful among hundreds unless I’m overlooking some. Perhaps they exemplify my interest in psychological extremes of various kinds. Sam Strutt in “Cold Print” conflates a couple of gym masters at my old grammar school with a colleague in the Civil Service office where I had my first job (he did indeed plague me for “exciting books” when he learned I imported Olympia Press books and such, then banned in Britain). Was I taking a sly literary revenge (unusual for me) on some or all of them? You’re right about the Hitchcock similarity, an element Robin Wood’s great monograph on the director had made me aware of. It’s certainly Strutt’s search for forbidden texts that does for him, but then I used to obtain banned books too. While his fate has a certain relevance to him, I don’t think the tale suggests it’s proportionate to his transgressions, such as they are. For me horror, to be horror, needs to be undeserved, but perhaps that means the reader seeking horror wishes just that for the character. We may also feel the horror reader relishes the transgressive, and in the years of home video witch-hunting, the forbidden.

As for the others—well, it’s the partner of the protagonist in “The Other Woman” who suffers, not him. In “The Limits of Fantasy” the central character does end up with the tables turned on him, but then many people of the persuasion like to switch sometimes. In “Again” her kink keeps the revenant vital, and the straight man is the butt of the dark joke. Danny Swain’s fate in Incarnate is terrible enough, but less so than that of some of the characters more innocent than him. Perhaps the comic tale “Safe Words” makes my sympathy for my kinksters clearest, or else my introduction to Nikki Flynn’s Dances with Werewolves. 

Plutonian: A lot of works in the horror field tend to try to convey a sort of voyeuristic sadism. A putting yourself in the position of the killer, enjoying the murderous body count, a sort of sick power fantasy. But in a lot of your works, I see an impulse to masochist submission to those dark outer forces. A wilful drowning into the dark and the obscure. In stories such as The Telephones or The Second Staircase, there seems to be a desire to be violated. Do you feel there is a masochistic tendency in some of your stories? Is there a sublimated desire for corruption and violation in your works?

Campbell: I certainly think it’s present in those tales, not even necessarily sublimated. Mind you, they were written in my late teens, which were really my extended adolescence. Like Fritz Leiber (make of that what you will), I was a late developer. My sense of sex, such as it was, derived very largely from reading (the same books I spoke earlier of importing) rather than from experience, and I suspect it was pretty inchoate. You mention placing the reader in the position of the killer. My fiction often has from The Face That Must Die onwards, but I think it generally presents such characters as fatally inadequate, committing their crimes in a bid (however unconscious) to impress themselves and their view of themselves on the world. That’s also true of my occultist figures, John Strong, Peter Grace (ironic names), and their kind.

 

Plutonian: Thomas Ligotti has talked about how H. P. Lovecraft dreamed the great dream of supernatural literature - to convey with the greatest possible intensity a vision of the universe as a kind of enchanting nightmare. After reading the best examples of horror fiction, the mystery is left unresolved, a lingering dread, or maybe a feeling of being unsettled, envelops the reader like a thick fog. But there is also a fascination, an enchanting allurement. Horror fiction, at its best, tries to imitate the ambiguous nature of nightmare. And of course the pleasures of nightmare. Evoking nightmare is no easy feat, if you go too fantastic you lose the realism necessary to truly unnerve the reader, yet if you are too ambiguous the work may lack the punch needed to affect the reader. It's not an easy path, bringing the reader through realism to nightmare. Of course a story, a work of fiction is too self-conscious to ever be pure nightmare. How does a horror writer try to convey this enchanting nightmare? Have you tried methods to remove yourself from your work and let more unconscious impulses reveal themselves, maybe to try to get the piece to be more akin to pure nightmare? And why are nightmares so pleasurable, so enchanting, for those of us so inclined to desire the experience? 

Campbell: I relish actual nightmares—free surrealist films, as I tend to think of them. Jenny knows not to wake me up even if I’m emitting uneasy sounds, because I believe nightmares have their own built-in release mechanism and will set you free if they become too terrifying. On the whole, they have. That said, I’ve recently had a couple of unnerving experiences. One recurring motif in my dreams over the past few years is that my phone goes wrong. Twice now I’ve dreamed it did and then realized this means I’m dreaming, only to fear that I won’t be able to escape the dream. Last time I started shrieking “I’m dreaming” to waken myself and eventually did, but when I told Jenny about it I realized I hadn’t wakened after all. Maybe I’m still trying to do so. 

Evoking them in fiction—I think the only way to do that is to follow my instincts. Conscious striving doesn’t work. The Grin of the Dark is one result of that approach—of liberating my imagination as much as I can and trusting it to lead—and recently “A Life in Nightmares” was another attempt. By far the closest I’ve ever come to having a pure nightmare straight onto the page was Needing Ghosts. A few days into writing the first draft I came to the scene at the bus terminal and was disconcerted by how much odder the destination names were than I’d planned. What to do? I elected to see what might develop, and until the story was completed I found myself hurrying to my desk each morning to discover what the day’s events might be and transcribing them, or so it seemed, direct from my subconscious and barely keeping up with their impetus. I may say that although I believe in rewriting as ruthlessly as possible, I changed that first draft hardly at all for publication. For once I didn’t see the need.

Plutonian: Writers like Lovecraft and Leiber are well-known influences on your fiction. But I would like to ask about maybe more subtle or less talked about influences. I would like to ask about the possible influence of the writers Alain Robbe-Grillet and J. G. Ballard on your work. Grillet pushed abstraction and eroticism into the mystery genre in works like The Erasers and The Voyeur and Ballard moved those into the science fiction genre in works like Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition, and I feel that one of your innovations was threading abstraction and a perverse eroticism into the horror genre. Most strongly in your collections The Height of the Scream and Scared Stiff for instance. I have read you briefly talk about both authors in interviews and I was wondering if you could speak on them a little bit more, were they direct influences and how do you see their work relating to yours? 

Campbell: Not so much Robbe-Grillet directly as through Resnais’ film Last Year at Marienbad, an enduring favourite of mine. This and his subsequent film Muriel encouraged me to elide transitions in the narrative, especially temporal, most radically in the final version of “Concussion”, where I had flashbacks occur in the middle of a sentence—an attempt to produce the same sense of dislocation the films did. Ballard could well be at the root of some of my stories where solitary protagonists wander urban landscapes that may embody their psychology or indeed subsume it. I think either writer might loom behind my tale “A Street was Chosen”, told entirely in the passive voice with characters identified only by symbols. I once thought of writing a story in the form of an index to a nonexistent book, but found that Ballard had. Incidentally, I think we’re now living in a world he might well have hoped only to imagine. 

Plutonian: Most critics and serious readers of horror fiction would point to your early collection Demons by Daylight to be a masterpiece and a turning point in the history of the literature of horror. I have read that the table of contents for that collection had been revised at least once if not a couple times before its release. I believe that The Cellars and also Before the Storm were both strongly considered to be included in Demons by Daylight? I was hoping you could talk on what stories were almost to be included in that landmark collection. And has there ever been any talk of releasing an expanded edition of Demons by Daylight including those works that almost were included?#

Campbell: Well, thank you very much! “The Cellars” might have gone in if Derleth hadn’t taken it for inclusion in his anthology Travellers by Night, but “Before the Storm” never would have, since I didn’t think it up to scratch. Indeed, when he asked me for a contribution to Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos I mentioned that I had one that wasn’t worth his attention, or words to that effect; that was the tale in question. (Instead, I sent “Cold Print”, not really expecting it to find favour, and was surprised it did.) The stories Demons would have included were “The Scar”, “Reply Guaranteed” and “Napier Court”. Just now we’re working on a limited edition that will indeed include them all, together with the first drafts of all the tales that were substantially rewritten.

Plutonian: I know you are a great fan and critic of horror cinema. I personally believe we are experiencing a new golden age of horror cinema. Films like Hadzihalilovic’s Evolution and Escalante’s The Untamed to me are new classics. Also, recent films that are blazing new trails are Robert Morgan’s film Stopmotion and Oz Perkins’s Longlegs. Themes that this new horror cinema seems to explore are a loss of a sense of reality among people, the taking over of simulated realities or dream realities more and more into our lives, the unease and distrust of one's own body, the physical self as alien to us, and an explosion of a corrupted sense of desire and sexuality. What are your thoughts on this new wave of horror cinema? How would you say horror cinema has evolved into its current form?  And what importance does horror cinema have in our world today? 

Campbell: I’m impressed by the range of unconventional, even groundbreaking, films the field has brought us of late. Besides the titles you cite I’d include Beau is Afraid (the best comedy of paranoia I’ve ever seen) and Christian Tafdrup’s ruthlessly devastating Speak No Evil. Many contemporary horror films seem willing to shine a strange but searching illumination on our world and aspects of it, though I’m resistant to those films that declare their metaphorical significance too openly. Certainly makers of horror films these days often seem more conscious of their themes than was the case in the past, which may be a mixed blessing, if it saps instinctive creativity—for me, the most fruitful kind.

Plutonian: From Lovecraft pastiches to abstract and ambiguous tales of unease to erotic body horror to nightmare comedy, your work has always been innovative and vital. What is next for your work? Is there any news on new works? What interests you to write after such a long and accomplished career? What can we look forward to? 

Campbell: Next up is a new novel, An Echo of Children, central to which is my belief that the attempted exorcism of children is a form of child abuse, dangerous and far too often fatal. All the same, you may find an uncanny element in the book. My notebooks are still swarming with ideas, and I’ll develop as many as I can while I’m capable. I hope I can still surprise us—me and the reader. One of my recent books might: Six Stooges and Counting, a personal appreciation of the Three Stooges. Did you know Kubrick’s film of The Shining was an extended tribute to them? Look within for the evidence, and more: the Stooges as the witches in Macbeth, the misleading trailer as an art form, the Stooges as a kind of gestalt whose identities constantly shift…

Review: Egger's Nosferatu

Since the beginning of cinema, a vampire has stalked its shadows. If there is any monster synonymous with cinema it is the vampire. There have been far more vampire films than any other kind of film. More adaptations of Dracula than any other book. Cinema is haunted by the dead. Actors long dead still parade across our screens. It is a kind of magic, those long dead still alive, still longing and fighting and loving and striving. The cinema is the home of the undead. Cinema's lust for young flesh and new blood is reflected by the vampire. Creating a vampire film is to delve into the primal forces that lay behind the cinema’s powers. 

Robert Egger’s retelling of Nosferatu has fallen upon us like a dark shadow. Like a black flower rising to bloom in the midnight hour. An ode to forbidden desire. For self-destruction and all-consuming lust. It is the horror film as poetry. A story that has been told many times. From vampiric folklore from all over the world, the bloodsucking undead is a figure born from the cultural unconscious of humanity. In literature we get Bram Stoker’s cementing the vampire myth into popular culture with his novel Dracula and Le Fanu's erotic female vampire in Camilla.. In film, we go from Murneau’s creeping vermin of a vampire to Browning’s seductive and classy reimagining of the character. 

I think it is clear at this point that Robert Egger is a passionate lover of horror. He brought one of the all-time classics of satanic cinema in The Witch. He then crafted a new classic for the strange midnight movie scene in the darkly ambiguous The Lighthouse. Now with Nosferatu, he gets to make a full-throttle gothic horror. And it is a just gorgeous and ambitious film, the horror film as art of the first rank. 

In Nosferatu Egger’s get to play with some of the classic themes of horror cinema. And also pay homage to the entire tradition of horror cinema. The swirling camera work that puts the viewer in the scene, confused and vaguely threatened, recalls Dreyer’s Vampyr. The camera moves on its own accord, anxiously looking for Nosferatu in the scene, acting with a strange almost telepathic link with the viewer. A tale that deals in both fantasy and eroticism, Nosferatu also is an ode to bestial sexuality. The entire film is held down under its sway. Through the long night, repressed passions rule the stage. At least until daylight and the bright light of the sun washes all passions away. A night of demonic lovers and sadomasochistic desires. Sex with corpses and the drinking of blood. Otherworldly desire, to the point of self-destruction. The erotic fairy tale is a tradition that has been heralded by such luminaries as Angela Carter to Clive Barker. From films like Daughters of Darkness to Hellraiser, combining infernal passions, sadomasochism, and transgressions against social norms, these films both titillate the audience and also explore themes that are never talked about in day-to-day life. The dark undercurrent of vise and perversion that lurk in the background, but are a huge force in our motivations and desires, whether we admit to them or not. 

The combination of horror and sex is a story as old as time. Maybe the original story that all other myths and fictions have been built from. The maiden and the skeleton. Persephone and Pluto. Beauty and the Beast. Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. Youth attracted to decay and corruption. The bringing together of two opposites Youth and Death. Innocence and Evil. The attraction they have for each other. In Nosferatu does Thanatos wear the mask of Eros, or does Eros wear the mask of Thanatos? In this tale of beauty and the demon lover, Nosferatu celebrates the perverse and all deeds hidden in darkness. A film worthy of the tradition.

Review: Crypt of the Moon Spider by Nathan Ballingrud.

There is a subgenre of horror that seems to be aimed almost exclusively at horror readers. A subgenre that delights in the dark and the macabre. That plays with the tropes and is a celebration of subversion and corruption. It takes the material of horror and pushes it towards the fantastic. It leans into the unreal aspects of horror, losing some of what makes horror disturbing, but making a midnight feast of the deformed and the abominable. 

I think this work first shows up in the early days of pulp horror. Clark Ashton Smith’s delirious tales of vampires on Saturn and evil wizards from the end of time were a precursor. As was Lovecraft’s The Hound, celebrating the French decadent tales of sick perversity and corruption and the gothic tales of curses from beyond the grave. Then you see it move on to the modern day. Karl Edward Wagner’s story Sticks is a grue-filled pulp tale of the undead and the doomed. Thomas Ligotti’s tales like Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech or The Last Feast of Harlequin, are gothic fantasies of puppets controlled by puppets controlled by puppets hidden in darkness. Mark Samuels’s stories like The Court of Midnight or In The Complex are tales of diseased protagonists lost in a lunar delirium. What all these works share is a love of the horror genre, and are meant as literary celebrations of the dark genre which horror fans are obsessed with. They are not meant as an attack on the reader, in the usual horror sense, but as graveyard fun, reveling in what makes us sick and what makes us diseased.  Using the techniques of pulp with actual literary intentions, this is a subgenre that has hidden in shadow, only enjoyed by the true initiates. 

Now we have what I hope will be a kind of formal entry, giving these works some attention from more mainstream horror outlets of criticism and promotion. Crypt of the Moon Spider. Nathan Ballingrud’s Crypt of the Moon Spider is a grotesquerie in the best way, a gothic pulp that shamelessly dives headfirst into sadistic doctors and lunar spider gods. A young woman, Veronica, is brought to a mental hospital on the Moon by her husband to try to cure her bleak melancholy. Set in the 1920’s, Crypt of the Moon Spider draws on classic pulp, literary noir, German expressionism, Lovecraftian cosmic horror, and deliriums inspired by Clark Ashton Smith, and mixes it into an intoxicating brew of horrific delights. Also, I am reminded of the transgressive fairy tales and explicit dark fantasy of Clive Barker, like Imajica and The Hellbound Heart. 

Crypt of the Moon Spider is a delight. Creeping sadistic scientists, young women who may be insane or may be victims of manipulation, strange alien bodies emerging from human bodies, it is truly a love letter to the horror genre. It is the first in a proposed trilogy. Seeing as that is the case, is it hard to give it a definite review since it is the first of a series.  I will say that I wish the pace was slowed down a little, it moves at an extremely fast clip. Which I take to also be a call back to the pulp stories found in the classic horror magazines at the turn of the twentieth century. I would have liked to just exist in the scenes just a little longer and live with the characters a little bit more. But is that such a bad thing to have been left wanting more? I can not wait to see what Nathan does with the rest of the series. A masterpiece and a must-read. Highly recommended. 

Review: Daddy's Head

 

    

    “Behind the scenes, there is something pernicious that makes a nightmare of our world.”

                                                             - Thomas Ligotti 

What strange forms can the human body take? What lurks hidden out in the darkness? These are questions that are the horror genre’s stock and trade. Horror deals in darkness and mystery. Horror relishes in the perversion of the human form and the subversion of the ideals that we cherish. And in horror cinema, the films we as horror devotes tend to love the most are the ones that evoke the darkness and mystery of existence and leave us in that darkness. 

A new film that has recently been released is Benjamin Barfoot’s wonderfully mysterious Daddy’s Head. A film that follows in the best tradition of horror cinema, a film that deals in nightmare. Daddy’s Head is also a film about mourning, of not accepting the darkness of life. Of wanting things to be different, and of the things that exploit the weakness and hurts of others. It centers on a boy who lost both his parents, previously his mother and having just lost his father. He lives in his father’s house with his father’s girlfriend, she got left his house and estate in the father's will. The girlfriend is trying to figure out what to do about his son, who never really grew a connection with each other, and now finds herself as the closest person to him. Both are deep in bereavement, their lives shattered with the trauma of death. 

And then… something… enters the boy's life, trying to lure him into its strange designs. A thing starts lurking, whispering to the boy in the dark. It crawls and slithers, wearing his father's face. I find a strange connection to the works of the master horror author Thomas Ligotti. The buzzing sound of the creature's voice is almost exactly what I imagine Dr. Thoss’s voice sounds to me when I read the Ligotti story, The Troubles of Dr. Thoss. This film certainly has what I would call a Ligottian vibe, a creeping menace, born out of our inner traumas and all too eager to participate in our breakdown. The paranoia of being trapped with some kind of alien thing, strange in form and unknown in intention, that can impersonate others reminds me of The Thing. But there is also this spidery, fairy tale aspect to the film, recalling The Babadook or Possum. And there is a genuine madness to the film that reminds one of Possession. Barfoot is obviously a devote of horror, and has studied the field deeply. But this is no homage film, no throwback film. Daddy’s Head stands on its own and is one of the most important horror films to have come out in years. 

    Daddy’s Head has one of the most what the fuck endings I have ever seen in a horror film. I had to rewind the film to watch it again to be sure what I just saw. And I was left thinking about the ending for days, coming up with new theories of what I had seen. Subtle and ambiguous, yet full of portent and meaning. Daddy’s Head leaves the viewer in darkness and mystery, whispering to us the secrets at the heart of the nightmare of existence on this dark earth.

Review: Red Pyramid by Vladimir Sorokin.

 

Red Pyramid is a corrupting book. Red Pyramid is also one of the all-time great collections. Containing stories ranging from sexual deliriums to satirical attacks on family and country, this is a book that purposely tries to assault the reader. But this is also a book of beautiful prose, poetic verse, and mind-blowing creativity. Vladimir Sorokin’s writing is like a black pearl, beautiful and contaminated, shining a black light in the depths of the human experience. His stories are dangerous in their freedom of expression and their flaunting of social taboos. 

Vladimir Sorokin is a writer who can shift from a standard short story narrative to prose poetry to abstraction all in the same work. Some of his stories will change mid-telling, changing setting, characters, and plot, leaving his readers lost in a labyrinth, trying to pierce together meaning and purpose in the dark. There is a delicious unpredictability in his work. What manner of surrealist set piece, decent into abstraction, or taboo-shattering perversity are we walking into when we start reading one of his works?

Sorokin seeks to corrupt his readers. He follows in the great tradition of de Sade, Lautreamon, and Genet. Writers who seek to dirty their readers. Who takes their faces and shoves them into the dirt and worms. He says, isn't the world dirty even in its innocence? Isn't the world hungering flesh and lies? Towers of concrete built on the bones of countless generations? Is this not the world we live in? Why do we lie and pretend? Sorokin implicates the reader. Why is it you want to read about family members destroying each other? About government officials shitting on their citizens? About all manner of vice and degradation? 

A quick look at some of my favorite pieces in the collection, works that pierced deep into my subconscious, stories that disturbed and delighted me in equal measure:

Obelisk - A savage attack on Russian ideals: family, the military, respecting the dead, and religion. What his homeland finds to be sacred all here comes under Sorokin’s pitch-black mockery. Exposing the falseness and hypocrisy of traditional values, this story is hilarious and bleak at the exact same time.

A Month in Dachau -If William Burroughs wrote a homage to the Marquis de Sade. A delirious mix of alternate history, science fiction, surrealism, and sadism. Avant-garde in its style and a wonderful homage to writers like Bataille and de Sade. What if Nazi Germany and Russia remained allies throughout World War 2 and found themselves victorious? How deep would their sadism and cruelty become?

The Black Horse with the White Eye - A subtle tale of strange creatures and childhood myths become a dark reality. Showing a delicate touch from Sorokin, this is a masterwork of suggested terrors and unease. A whisper of a horror story, worthy of Aickman. 

Hiroshima - A short prose poem that shatters the reader with its sharp imagery and mind-blowing premise. Somehow both subtle and explosive, this may be the greatest work in the collection. Minimalist and expressionistic horror are surgically combined into a strange chimera of a story. Hiroshiman ends the collection and makes sure you do not leave unscared. 

I think that also Sorokin can show a way forward for a stagnant American genre literature scene. American literature has become safe boring and increasingly irrelevant. Feel-good narratives, fake transgressive fiction that is sterile and non-threatening, and the almost complete absence of cutting-edge science fiction. Genre fiction after a very fruitful start at the beginning of the turn of the century has become mired down, too self-congratulating on its past accomplishments and with no feeling of attack or purpose. Good stories well told that are hollow and harmless. Horror fiction has almost completely abandoned its purpose as the genre that deals with taboos and exploring the secret thoughts of society and has become a circle jerk of banality. So reading Sorokin at this time just feels so refreshing. A reminder of what transgressive fiction can be. Sorokin explores the limits and then goes far beyond them, into the darkness of night. Like I said, I feel his work is a shining black pearl in a sea of darkness. Such beautiful corruptions await in Red Pyramid. Put this one on your shelf between Ligotti’s Teatro Grotessco and Bataille’s The Story of the Eye where it belongs.