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.

Review: Longlegs

 

I went to go see Longlegs with low expectations. Expecting maybe a low-budget serial killer film. Hopefully with an interesting twist. Within the first five minutes, my expectations were utterly demolished and the film just kept drawing me in further and further, insane plot twist after plot twist, surreal set pieces, and an understated menacing score, by the time the movie ended I was disorientated and in a state of shock at just having witnessed a modern masterpiece. Seeing Longlegs reminds me of my first viewing of The Shining or Rosemary’s Baby. And it deserves to be spoken of in the same category as those films. It's a slow burn, a hallucinogenic fugue, the likes that you don't really see in theaters anymore.

Longlegs centers on the strange killings… of entire families. And the FBI agent who tries to solve what is going on and who is behind the murders. But that is just the framework the film uses, the actual film is a descent into pure nightmare. The film starts on a strange note, and the nightmarish feelings just get deeper and deeper as the film goes on. From satanic possessions to doppelganger puppets, the film transforms and metamorphoses what it is as we watch. There is the expected ending explanation of the plot, which against all odds somehow makes the film even more surreal and nightmarish. The main character walks through the film like a sleepwalker. In fact, there is a sleepy haze throughout the entire film. The only character who seems fully awake and aware is the head detective, who stands out as a bizarre figure in this film of somnambulists. And of course, the one character awake and alive in this film is punished for that. The score is sparse, with no dramatic bursts, and no jump scares. The film just kind of quietly worms its way into your brain. Everything is off-kilter. 

Longlegs is a film that compares favorably to such hypogenic films as Kurosawa’s Cure, Polanski’s The Tenant, and The Exorcist 3. This is a film that seeks to unsettle. To linger with the audience long after they have left the theater. A malignant influence, the experience of watching the film does not stop when the end credits roll. It festers in the dreams and the quiet thoughts, like low-grade acid. The film does not even feel real, after the film, you wonder if you had just hallucinated the whole thing. 

Nicolas Cage is both subdued and menacing in the title role. Wonderful low-key makeup. He looks fake, like a deranged mannequin come to life. He has little actual screen time, but his presence is felt throughout the entire film. The film is all about outer influences penetrating into our lives. Puppets and sleepwalkers a central motif of the film. The film kind of follows a spiraling trajectory, circling in on itself, becoming stranger and stranger. 

On a side note: This film seems to cement 2024 as the year of Ligottian puppet horror. Alongside Robert Morgan’s Stopmotion, this is a film that deals in the subversion of reality, the exploration of nightmare, and the use of puppets as metaphor. Thomas Ligotti is one of the all-time greats of horror fiction, and it was only a matter of time before his influence was felt in horror cinema. Much like Lovecraft never got really any good direct adaptations of his work, but was represented by such films as Ridley Scott’s Alien and John Carpenter’s The Thing. Ligotti’s influence is being felt in Stopmotion and Longlegs. 

But what is Longlegs? What is the meaning of this strange film? Let me offer some speculation: The main protagonist laments his wearing of long legs early in the film. Like the body is some kind of stumbling vehicle for him. Awkward like stilts. Also, Longlegs can refer to a kind of spider. Quiet and predatory, laying traps for its unsuspecting victims. The film never really states what the true danger is, beyond some rather bizarre plot twists and dreamlike set pieces. Is Mr. Downstairs really the devil, Satan himself? Or is that how the burnt-out acid casualty is interpreting it? What is it that has to be smuggled in the heads of puppets to be able to infect and corrupt the families? What is it that Mr. Downstairs actually wants? There is a sense of Mr. Downstairs mocking the families, purposely ruining the lives of happy families. The strange silent puppets containing plague, the making of the families to turn violently on each other. Mr. Downstairs seems to be a kind of degrading presence, a disease to be spread. A malignant tumor in the heart of our conceptions of family and community. Is Longlegs some kind of infecting vermin? A sentient disease? A subterranean creature that designs to corrupt the family unit? The answers are not forthcoming, and the nightmare lives on.

Ramsey Campbell: Master of Personal Nightmare.

One of the pillars of the horror genre is the fiction of Ramsey Campbell. The importance and influence of his work can not be overstated. His protagonists are perverts, obsessives, loners, and losers. Often they end up lost in some kind of dark erotic delirium or ambigious nightmare straight out of their own subconscious regrets and fears. Mystery is all-important in his work, leaving the reader lost in the narrative long after they have put the book down. There is a dream logic that flows through his tales like a haze or a fog. Things almost make sense, but it feels like one piece, a piece necessary to understand what is going on is missing. The ominous endings leave you in darkness and confusion.

There is a strong element of Ramsey exploring the darkest recesses of his mind. His fears, his desires, and his obsessions, freely and unashamedly examined and played with in his tales. There is also very clearly his deep love for the horror genre. His playing with tropes and twisting them into his own unique point of view. You can tell Ramsey puts the crafting of an incredible horror tale first, even if it exposes an uncomfortable amount of his inner life. His love of the horror genre shines through his work. He explores the field and what you can do with it, pushing the limits of what can be talked about and dealt with in the genre. What the limits are and how to push beyond them. Ramsey Campbell may be the most important horror author since H.P. Lovecraft. 

Campbell’s tales offer no easy explanation. Often ending in darkness and mystery, the reader is left confused, not sure what just happened. His tales linger in the reader's mind. What was that in the darkness? What was that voice in the night? You will never know. You can’t come to terms with what you don’t understand. Which is a vital key to Campbell’s work. There is no winning. You don’t even know what happened. What you are facing. How can you fight the darkness? And what if the darkness is coming from within you? In a way, the darkness and the unknown emerge from the protagonists. Their innermost shameful desires and secret regrets come out, lurking, twisted, and inhuman. There is an almost self-destructive element to his plots, the protagonists rarely are chased by the horrors, rather they go seeking them, and come to meet them, in whatever strange form they have taken. Another way Campbell reveals himself in his work. From absent parents, broken homes, lonely men, sexually frustrated loners, and stressed want to be authors. Inadequate lovers, and troubled couples, there is a realism to Campbell’s work, facing real-world troubles and failures, that balance the abstract deliriums that haunt his work. 

Do his characters desire the strange dooms awaiting them? Are they seeking transformations and the corruptions that await the end for them? The violation and transformation of the human body is a central concern of Campbell. Sometimes perverts, horror authors, or neurotics find themselves physically mutilated or metamorphosed into something else, their flesh twisted into new forms and meant for new purpose. Regular people who in the end find themselves to be actually something quite unhuman. Or shown to never have been human to begin with. Sometimes his characters come to realize a hidden truth and find to their horror that life is not what they thought it was, that there is a corruption at the core of existence. His stories are populated by whispering figures in the night, fungal horrors lurking underground, and unearthly doppelgangers who have taken over your friends and family. Chimerical and strange beings lurk at the corner store or your familes dining room table. For all the dooms that come down on his characters, his stories never come across as moralistic. That may be because there are no “good” characters in his work. No good family man overcoming the evil horrors. In fact, he seems to be saying that we all are corrupt. We all in our own ways are perverts and obsessives. A lot of times the horrors are reflections of the protagonist. Nothing can be overcome because life itself is a nightmare. 

Clear predecessors to Ramsey’s work are Lovecraft, M.R. James, Robert Aickman, and Fritz Leiber. Also, a strong dose of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Vladimir Nabokov can be seen in his prose style and use of wordplay. He certainly also paid close attention to the maturing of the horror film in the 1960’s and 1970’s and drew inspiration from the best of that new wave of horror film. At the same time, the European art house film around the 1950’s and 1960’s were providing new ways to disquiet and challenge the audience. A quick list of films that you can clearly see an influence on Ramsey Campbell’s work include: Vertigo, Don’t Look Now, Last Year in Marienbad, Belle de Jour, Eraserhead, The Eclipse, Repulsion, and The Innocents. 

His early collections, the era of his work that I prefer, are masterworks of the genre. Demons by Daylights was one of those works that changed the shape of horror forever. A seminal work that stands with Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, showing a completely new path for horror to take. For me, his most essential books are his incredible run of works between 1973 and 1987. Campbell’s Demons by Daylight (1973) was oblique in its storytelling and sexually explicit, it used a kind of urban realism, the horrors of run-down apartment complexes and dark streets of empty houses that may hide any kind of horror. He then followed that up with the ambiguous tales of obsession and desire in his The Height of the Scream (1976). In this collection, he perfects the combination of abstract surreal atmosphere with emotionally ruined characters. His next collection, a masterwork of tales of creeping dread, Dark Companions (1982) shows Campbell absolutely at the height of his craft. His prose has never been better than here, and many of his all-time greatest works are contained within. Later on, he released Scared Stiff (1987) a collection that put the sex to the forefront but retained Campbell’s signature hallucinogenic style. Highly recommended also is his collection of Lovecraftian fiction, Cold Print (1985), an updating of classic cosmic horror tropes, bringing sexual deviancy and emotionally complex characters to the normally coldly inhuman style of Lovecraft.

You can see Campbell's influence spreading all over the horror genre, whether indirectly in the late 1990’s early 2000’s J-Horror films like Kairo and Cure or directly in the degraded pessimistic fantasies of Thomas Ligotti. His signature tropes of creeping dread and vertigo-inducing endings have spread their tentacles all over the horror genre. He has undeniably changed the tradition of horror literature forever. He helped make horror more personal, more about personal nightmares and deep dives into the darkest parts of one psyche. The diseased mental landscapes of the average man. Blighted urban landscapes that you can see right out your window. Ramsey Campbell shows us how dark the inner lives of people, by revealing the darkness inside himself, can really be. There has never been a better champion for the importance of horror as literature, or a greater practitioner. 

Review: Stone Gods by Adam Golaski.

Adam Golaski may be the most underappreciated writer working in the horror genre. His first horror collection, Worse Than Myself, kind of flew under the radar when it was first released. But since then it has been slowly getting revived by writers and critics who now realize what an absolute masterpiece Worse Than Myself was. A true cult phenomenon, Worse Than Myself was the collection that other horror writers would name as one of the greats. Now I feel that it is commonly recognized as deserving to stand with such works as Campbell’s Dark Companions and Ligotti’s Grimscribe as a modern-day classic. 

Now, with much anticipation, Golaski has come with a new horror collection. Stone Gods. Does it live up to his first collection? And after having read it I would answer with a definite yes. Golaski is a writer who is hard to pin down. He goes from surrealist horror to abstract pieces to takes on classic horror tropes. He resists classification and follows his own obsessions. A lot of his work has a kind of labyrinthine logic, scenes straight out of a dream, and plots dovetailing in on themselves. 

I would like to focus here on my favorite stories from Stone Gods, and one of my favorite stories of all time. “Hushed Will Be All Murmurs”. In this tale, two men are seemingly trying to get to the sea and avoid some kind of calamity. A strange fog envelops everything, and hints are made that it has spread everywhere. Then the tale goes to the memories of a man who failed a girl who tried to seduce him. A personal trauma of regret. Then the man finds what he thinks is a stone, covered in seaweed on the beach shore. He gets closer and realizes it is a decapitated head. The head of the girl who he failed to get in fact. It beckons him closer. Has him touch her lips. Then the story freefalls into delirium and circles back around to the beginning of the tale.

Hushed Will Be All Murmurs combines personal trauma, subconscious imagery, hints of apocalypse, the haunting sublime of seashores, and a fog that hides all clear meanings. This story is a personal favorite. I have long been a fan of Golaski’s work, and this is a shining example of why I love his work. And this is just a taste of what delights await in Stone Gods. Don’t wait on this one. Golaski is a master of the horror tale. A real cult author in horror circles, talking about his work is almost like revealing a secret. Pick up Worse Than Myself and Stone Gods and find out what we all have been talking about. 

Review: Invaginies by Joe Koch

    Let me start this review by saying this: Joe Koch’s work is a revelation. Let me also say: Joe Koch is one of the most vital voices working in the horror field today. I have read his new collection, Invaginies, and it blew me away. Joe Koch has quietly been creating a body of work that deserves a wider audience. Let me lend my voice to getting his name out there.

    Invagines showcases Joe Koch’s style, a blend of abstract surrealism and transgressive body horror. In all honesty, most work that falls on the more “experimental” and abstract usually misses me. A lot of work in this mode seems to me to be badly written, using the “experimental” label to excuse lazy writing and a lack of any real ideas. But after having heard his name talked about with excitement in horror literature circles, I knew I had to give his work a chance. Then I read his story “Paranoid Cancers of a Demented Eros” in Sam Richard’s J.G. Ballard tribute anthology Feral Architecture: Ballardian Horrors. And his story just seeped into my body and my psyche like some parasitic vermin or some corrupting video signal. It stayed with me and kept me thinking about it. Unlike most “experimental” work, this was written with precision. Full of interesting ideas, arresting images, and just amazingly lush poetic writing. I knew then that this was a writer to watch. 

    Now having read his collection Invaginies, I  feel Joe Koch is a master of the horror tale. These works fulfill the promise of his previous work I had read. In a field of horror literature that is becoming increasingly bland, safe, and stale, Joe Koch’s work is seductive and dangerous. Whispering secrets that may not be safe to say in the daylight. Contained in Invaginies are tales that delight in the failures of the body, stories that show that sometimes Eros may look like Thanatos and sometimes Thanatos looks like Eros, stories that show disease in full bloom, and how poetry may be made from infection and corruption. 

    In terms of works that Invaginies may have a kinship with, I can see a relation to M. Gira’s The Consumer, William Burroughs's Naked Lunch, some of the more outlandish tales of Clark Ashton Smith, a heavy splash of Kathy Acker and Kathe Koja, and Micheal Blumlein’s The Brains of Rats. I feel now with Invaginies, Joe Koch can be said to be a major figure in horror literature. Now having tasted his deliciously poisonous concoctions, I need more… more…