Review: All the Fabulous Beasts by Priya Sharma.

I wish I had read this collection sooner. It came out in 2018 and has been on my to-read list for far too long. I finally took the plunge and let me tell you, Priya Sharma’s All the Fabulous Beasts is an absolute masterpiece of strange eroticism and dark fantasy. On the outskirts of horror, comes this book of gentle nightmares, of loving tortures, and of bone-deep longings. Beings lost in a world of disappointment, desperately seeking some kind of sense of self, a feeling of belonging, some kind of transcendence. The works in this collection are inspired by myth, fairy tale, and urban legend. Shapeshifers, bizarre combinations of human and animal, people with hidden identities, all roam these pages, but, they are no different than you or me. What defines who we are? Are other people not as strange to us as a mermaid or a snake woman would be? And when we look in the mirror, do we not see some unknown chimera staring back at us? These tales of fantasy are presented with a strict realism, an attention to the nuances of characterization, these are real living and breathing people, not one-dimensional fantasy tropes. The themes of transformation and rebirth run throughout her fiction here, but her stories are not the usual horror trappings about ordinary people suffering hideous transformations. Her stories are about beings trapped in lives they know they were never meant to have, and finally escaping their traps or at least longing to. Sometimes what traps us are things like family, love, or career. And sometimes we are trapped by what we thought we were, by what we were told we are. Yes, they may change in horrific ways, change into something alien to them and us, but at least it’s change, at least they are free to be who they really are. There is this recurring love of the outsider, and a fear of settling down, of compromising. These stories are hymns to loneliness, to secret desires, to those who chose to walk down the shadowy path far away from the sun. All written in this quietly poetic, understated yet powerful prose.

There is a lot of great work here. Some stories I would like to single out are:

The Crow Palace: A woman is forced to return to her old family home after her father's death, emotionally detached from years of being away and secretly haunted by deeply buried shame. She finds a landscape of skies filled with black crows and a shocking secret long hidden away. 

The Anatomist’s Mnemonic: A wonderfully many-layered exploration of fetishism and loneliness. It balances a tightrope between erotic thrills and a surgical coldness that only a master storyteller could accomplish. 

The Sunflower Seed Man: Maybe the most “horror” centered tale in the collection. It’s one of those stories where you are reading it, wondering if the author is really going to go there. And when she actually does go there, it’s just wonderfully macabre and amazing. 

A Son of the Sea: A tale of a man who feels this longing for something he can not define. A tale of loneliness and the mysterious depths of both the ocean and the human heart. And when he does what he has been seeking, it is one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful and surreal endings in all of horror fiction. 

The Nature of Bees: A true chimera of a tale, where most would find horror in a strange tale about a woman, alone and longing for physical pleasures, and the strange cult-like group of beekeepers she encounters, here we find unbridled eroticism and an escape from social mores.

I could go on talking about all the stories I love in this, it is such a breathtakingly beautiful collection. It shares some of the quiet tenebrous subtlety of the films of Val Lewton. And those who love the work of Angela Carter and Caitlin Kiernan will love the heady mixing of eroticism, myth, and cynicism in her work. Through the use of fantasy and horror, Priya Sharma shows us we are all strange unique beasts, and all the more fabulous for it. Highly recommended! 

Review: In Fabric

Peter Strickland, director of Berberian Sound Studio, a meta-fictional romp about a sound designer working on an Italian horror film slowly going unhinged or is it the film that is going unhinged, and The Duke of Burgundy, a poetic study of masochism and power dynamics, is a director who exemplifies the notion of the director as artist, the auteur. His films are so deeply personal, so explicitly obsessive, they are at once almost completely unassessable and completely alluring in their fetishism and necessity. He clearly needs to create these films, and we are the better for them. He is one of the few modern masters of cinema, and his newest film, In Fabric, may just be his greatest creation yet.

One of the hardest things to do when you review a film is to attempt to pick apart the film, to understand it so you can explain it to the people reading the review. But, as a film lover, you don’t really want to know a film inside and out. You want to live inside it, to submit to its strange rhythms and textures. In Fabric is a film that almost defies one's ability to review. It is this phantasmic collage of different horror tropes, all perfectly assembled without the slightest stitchers seam to see how he put it together. 

Inside this strangely disorientating clothing store, sinister whisperings can be heard. A cabal of seemingly witchlike retail workers enchant customers into buying their wares. Their sales pitches are almost spell-like, absurd poems of sinister salespeak. This beautiful score, something that sounds like it came from the heyday of the European horror film, envelops everything in its sensual embrace. One of the customers, going out on a date with a man she met on a dating site, buys a dress, something to help her hopefully catch a new man. But, this is no ordinary dress. It is this creeping, dread-inducing thing, a haunted, or maybe cursed, thing that lurks, silently floating in the dark. Meanwhile, this strange clothing store, sends out these television commercials, maybe diabolic transmissions would be a better name, a cancerous technology, dangerous to view, infecting the late-night stations. 

In Fabric is this weird mix of the old school ghost story like The Innocents, shades of elegant Euro-horror films like Suspiria and Daughters of Darkness, the Cronenbergian techno-panic of Videodrome, a strong dose of the schizo drug-induced humor of Adult Swim programming, and the experiments in terror of the 90’s Japanese horror film like Ringu and Kairo. And it plays as this aggressively surrealist satire. Meant more to disturb than make light, but without losing sight of the humor of its disturbing subject matter. Like Eraserhead, you could watch it one day and laugh your ass off, then watch it again the next day in anxious silence. And somehow this all works, and it works perfectly. I was amazed at how this film is all of this and absolutely uniquely its own thing. It just may be the greatest horror film of the 2010s. Its only competition being Hadzihalilovic’s Evolution and Eggers’s The Witch.  I have the feeling that I will be watching this one over and over and over again, a contagious film fetish captured on celluloid. 

Review: The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt.

Sometimes the greatest of reading experiences kind of come out of nowhere. After reading all the books your friends recommend and just feeling cold to them, all the masterpieces that you could not get past ten pages into, sometimes you just pick up a book that you had maybe heard one or two reviews, maybe mentioned once on social media, you pick it up, take it home, and within a couple pages, you know you are in the hands of a master, after a couple stories, you know you are reading a new all-time favorite. I just had that experience reading The Dark Dark, a collection of short work from Samantha Hunt. I knew next to nothing about this book and was completely unfamiliar with the author. Now, as it stands, The Dark Dark is one of my favorite books. 

I think one of my favorite things that art can do, whatever film, literature, etc, is, as David Lynch puts it, “ leave you room to dream “. Samantha Hunt creates these seductive mysteries of narrative, these little shards of dreamlike delirium, always grounded in reality, grounded in people you know and maybe, just maybe, are just like you, and with just the slightest touch, a seeping unreality slowly creeps in, coloring everything with an impenetrable haze. You think you are reading one kind of story only to end up someplace strange and unexpected. I think to give an idea of what her work is like, you would take the extreme ambiguity of Aickman, then take the willfully corrupted narratives of Evenson, and add a pinch of the playful meta-narratives of Calvino. Which is to say, Samantha Hunt’s work here is challenging and thought-provoking to say the least. These stories are kind of like some strange creature, recombined from familiar animals into something strange and compelling, like a chimera or a manticore. You think you know what you are seeing, then the landscape of skin and flesh changes, and you wind up in the dark, entangled in strange limbs and just falling into darkness.

To give an example of the stories in The Dark Dark, one of the tales, All Hands, concerns a coast guard officer inspecting a cargo ship in the Gulf of Mexico. One night while on duty, he falls overboard into the black ocean, almost getting trapped under the ship. All around him, deep in the water, are thousands of abandoned holes, former oil wells. He is later visited by his lover, a teacher at a grade school. She just got done with a meeting with some students and the principal of the school. Apparently, there has been an unexplained outbreak of teenage pregnancies. At the school, there are over a dozen girls pregnant, all seemingly impregnated at the same time. It’s also hinted at, that there may be a widespread epidemic of unexplained pregnancy, reaching maybe into the thousands. But all of this comes in underplayed plot points and hints. The story focuses on the inner life of the two main characters, their frustrations and worries, their desires and longings, you could almost miss the underlying themes. And what is this story about? What links these two themes, the abandoned holes in the ocean floor and the inexplicable pregnancies? There seems to be some subterranean meaning buried in the narrative, and you can’t help but keep going back, thinking about this story. Pretty much every story in this collection had me thinking about what I just read, hours later, days later, trying to figure out the mystery, trying to see through the fog and the obscuring gloom of the stories to discover just how deep they go, what meaning I can take from them. These aren’t just random exercises in surrealism, to be clear. These are heart-rending, subtle, powerful examinations of the human condition, at turns melancholy, despairing, cynical, or painfully hopeful. These are characters lost in the darkness of an unknowable world, but there is someplace even worse they find, the dark dark inside themselves.  

The Top Ten Horror Films of the 2010s.

The horror film scene of the 2010s were this mix of post-Anti-Christ art-house horror, post-Ringu/Kairo creeping dread, post-Existenz/Crash Cronenbergian body horror, and post-Adult Swim bizzaro acid humor. Adult swim and streaming services like Netflix have acted like this decades midnight movie experience, bringing all the subversive pleasures of cult cinema to your television. And I think that horror cinema is actually in a great place right now. In a way that no one seemed to notice, while everyone seemed to be talking about remakes and franchises, we may have had the most vital decade for the horror film since the 1970s. While the 1970’s horror film subverted reality by exploring strange dream states and nightmares made reality, the 2010’s horror film dealt with a reality that has disappeared, a world of simulation and unrealities made normal. Central themes of this new era of horror filmmaking seem to be trying to find some semblance of the real or the human inside the labyrinth of unreality that we are trapped in, and the having to deal with an actual political and environmental nightmare unfolding every day on social media and the nightly news. And can we comment on what an amazing job independent film company A24 is doing? Almost half the films on this list were produced by them. All in all a very interesting period for the horror film. Here is my pick for the ten best horror films of the 2010s.

1. In Fabric ( Strickland, 2019 )

2. Evolution ( Hadzihalilovic, 2015 )

3. The Witch ( Eggers, 2015 )

4. Under the Skin ( Glazer, 2013 )

5. The Neon Demon ( Refn, 2016 )

6. The Lighthouse ( Eggers, 2019 )

7. Hereditary ( Aster, 2018 )

8. Enemy ( Villeneuve, 2013 )

9. 10 Cloverfield Lane ( Trachtenberg, 2016 )

10. The Human Centipede 2 ( Six, 2011 )

Best Horror Films and Books of 2019!

2019 was a fantastic year for horror in film and literature. The trend of small film studios producing sophisticated horror films for the art-house theater crowd is still going full force. The weird horror boom in the small presses also continues to pick up steam. And these are trends that we need to support and to advocate, in a time of the death of the indie movie theater and the destruction of the local book store, the fact that there is actually an increasing amount of great works being produced outside the major companies is actually astonishing. Streaming services and cheaper film equipment certainly helps the independent filmmaker and the ease of use of print-on-demand services and the ability to create your own websites to host your publishing business helps create a viable alternative to big business models. So in review, I was blown away by the works that came out this year. Just some absolute masterpieces came out in 2019. I would say a theme of 2019 was the foundation of a new canon of horror filmmakers. We have a new group of Romeros, Cronenbergs, Carpenters. Some new or first-time directors really cemented themselves as masters of the form, and some already established writers took their work to new levels of greatness. So let’s get down to the best of 2019 lists!

Best Horror Films of 2019

1. In Fabric - Directed by Peter Strickland 

Going into 2019 my most anticipated film was Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse. I was left absolutely stunned and awed by his first film The Witch, a film I consider to be one of my all-time favorite films. I absolutely loved his follow up film The Lighthouse, which I will be talking about more in a bit. Then in late November, I caught a screening of Peter Strickland’s new film In Fabric. And within 10 minutes I knew I was witnessing greatness.  In Fabric blew me away, destroyed me for all time, reassembled me, and sent me on my way. I was a huge fan of Strickland’s previous films, the wonderfully weird Berberian Sound Studio and charmingly perverse The Duke of Burgundy, which I thought were both great films, but I was not prepared for how masterful and original In Fabric is. A blend of mind-breaking surreal corporate satire, creeping ghost film, an exploration of toxic media, and an elegant gothic horror, this film came almost out of nowhere to capture my vote for best horror film of 2019. 

  

2. The Lighthouse - Directed by Robert Eggers

As I said above, I think my most anticipated film going into 2019 was Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse, a tale of madness and protean things from the depths of the ocean. His followup to his diabolic masterpiece The Witch, I could not be more hyped for a film, I was worried that my expectations may actually be too high. Well, The Lighthouse actually managed to exceed my expectations. What Eggers delivered was an honest to goodness Midnight Movie, a film that drew inspiration from ancient myths and the silent horror film, but filtered through a lens made from classic horror tales written by the likes of Blackwood, Machen, and Hodgson. Reminiscent of the classic late-night drug-fueled insanity of cult classic films like Eraserhead, Begotten, and Tetsuo: The Iron Man and the way they infused German Expressionism and a more current fractured sense of reality and meaning. The Lighthouse is soaked in tension, malignity surreal, and bizarrely humorous, I really can’t believe Eggers got the funding to produce this film. If In Fabric took the top slot in this year’s best of, it is only by the smallest of margins. 

2. Wounds - Directed by Babak Anvari

Wounds, adapted by the great short story by Nathan Ballingrud and directed by Babak Anvari, had a small release, mainly viewable on the streaming service Hulu. Which is a shame since I would love to see this one in a theater. A more traditional horror film than the others on this list, this one builds on using traditional tropes to create a tension-filled experience, before blowing all the hinges off for a mind-shattering end that I actually had to rewind and watch a couple times because I could not believe what I was seeing. Wounds is a bit of a fusion between the creeping dread of 1990’s era Japanese horror films and the more postmodern era of fractured narratives. This one just gets right down to it, it wants to get under your skin and actually creep you out. It is perfect viewing for a late-night scare. 

Best Horror Books of 2019

1. Song for the Unraveling of the World - Written by Brian Evenson

Brian Evenson has been writing horror for many years now and is an established master. But I really feel that he has entered this new phase in his work and is creating the best work of his career. His previous collection, A Collapse of Horses, literally broke me, it has this just virulent creepiness, this sense of his work not being safe to read. A Collapse of Horses stands up there with the best of Poe, Lovecraft, Aickman, Oates, and Ligotti. Then a new collection was announced. Song for the Unraveling of the World. I can’t describe how hyped I was for this book. I was worried that I was just setting myself for a letdown. Turns out, I had nothing to worry about. This collection kind of serves as a follow-up or a sequel to his A Collapse of Horses. Some of the pieces kind of work with or advance some of the themes of his previous collection, and some use different genre tropes such as the outer space story or the body-snatching alien to take different approaches to the material. I think the 1-2 combination of A Collapse of Horses and Song for the Unraveling of the World may be the supreme accomplishment of the horror genre for this decade, 2010 - 2019. 

2. The New Flesh: A Literary Tribute David Cronenberg - Edited by Sam Richard and Brendan Vidito   

The New Flesh is an anthology that pays homage to the weird body horror of David Cronenberg. It is just filled to the brim with squirm-inducing medical procedures, bizarrely erotic transformations of the flesh, and mind-blowing breakings of reality. There were some really stand out stories in this from writers like Brian Evenson, Sara Century, Mona Swan LeSueur, Fiona Maeve Geist, and Gwendolyn Kiste. The New Flesh serves as this view back on one of the founding figures of the current horror field and a look forward at where weird horror is and where it is going. Essential. 

3. Wounds - Written by Nathan Ballingrud

Despite hearing the name for years, I am a bit of a latecomer to Nathan Ballingrud’s work. With the upcoming film adaptation of one of his stories and from just having heard his name so much, I decided it was far past time for me to take a deep plunge into his work. And I must say, his collection Wounds was amazingly good. He somehow mixes the heartbreaking with the diabolical, the surreal with the commonplace. His work in Wounds reminds me a bit of Clive Barker, but with a lot more emotional heft. This collection is a bit of a blend, some of the works are more of the malignantly surreal postmodern horror tale and some are more of a take on dark fantasy with a bit of a Satanic flavor. And let me say, it is quite brilliant how Nathan updates and personalizes the figure of Satan for a new generation of horror readers. From his shockingly surreal The Visible Filth to the heart-rending sadness and desperate love of The Maw, Nathan finds the depths of human love and longings in the darkest and bleakest regions of the horror field.

Review: The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature by Christopher Slatsky

The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature is horror writer Christopher Slatsky’s new collection, due out at the end of January 2020. It is his eagerly awaited followup to his cult favorite first collection Alectryomancer and Other Weird Tales. Alectryomancer was an astonishing debut, featuring a new distinct voice and some incredible work. His story from that collection, A Plague of Naked Movie Stars, still unsettles me every time I think about it. What an incredibly bizarre work. Upon news of this next book, the question was, can Slatsky deliver on the promise of his first book? Will it show an author maturing and refining their work? I can confidently say that the answer is yes, this new collection takes what was so amazing about his first book and furthers the themes and sharpens his prose. 

The stories in The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature are mainly these extremely interior explorations of tragedy and ruin, and of the beauty that can be found within the horrific. Slatsky’s universe is one where a loved one, a sibling, a parent, can be lost, suddenly, into something that is unexplainable, some hole in reality or perception. But also, everyday life can be just as bad, or in some cases, even more horrible, then the darkest imaginings of a horror writer, which is a theme that is just as strong in his work. Many stories actually combine the two themes, the nightmarish and the everyday tragic, to horrifying effect. In our lives, there are mysterious forces at work that devour our loved ones, and take them into some outer darkness, some of these forces you can name monster, and some are named illness or accident. Is there really that much of a difference between some otherworldly horror and cancer? In Slatsky’s work, he takes these moments of breakdown, and perverts them, makes them into this kind of strange walking poetry, a misbegotten thing, a hymn to what destroys us. What his characters have lost are transformed, horrifically changed in ways that stager understanding, and brought back to bring a strange revelation or a final devastation. His narrators come to realize, their eyes now open, to the fact that the entire universe has been changed into the image of a horrific transformation, a horrible loss. The universe has become a monstrous mirror to the narrator's most private hurts. The world, a reflection of the most inner wounds. They come to realize there is no “outside” there is only inside, and everything inside is corrupt. His stories like Engines of the Ocean, The Figurine, or The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature, are these mood poems, views into the darkest parts of the authors being, the rotten and corrupt thoughts made real. 

In the best of Slatsky’s work, his stories delve deep into very personal fears and anxieties. The loss of children is a huge theme for him. At the center of a lot of his stories are these surreal and troubling images, these images born out of some deep sunless part of Slatsky’s mind. These images are chimeras of both his fears and this paradoxical nightmarish beauty and are genuinely disturbing and beautifully malignant, like poisoned candy or diseased sex. After reading stories like Phantom Airfields or The Carcass of the Lion, which to me are some of the best horror fiction currently being written, you have to put the book down, kind of let what you just experienced soak in, come to terms with what you just read and try to understand the strange feelings you just had overwhelm you. But be warned, when one of Slatsky’s walking terrors enters your psyche, it burrows so deep that it will be with you for the rest of your days.

Slatsky has two modes of writing, the confidant intellectual writer exploring some newfound interest, and the artist lost in his own obsessions, trying desperately to record down in prose his more taboo and disturbing thoughts. Slatsky is one of the only true surrealists working today in the horror field. He takes two disparate ideas, say the love for a young child, and the cold terrors of outer space, and combines them into a unique new form. Slatsky also may be the greatest visual stylist that horror fiction has ever known. He creates these perfect paragraphs, these incredible tableaus, of just mind-shattering power. He reminds me, in turns, of Magritte, of Witkin, of Lynch. His prose is akin to the new wave 1970’s science fiction writers, and then out of nowhere, it’s like Slatsky channels say, Lautreamont or Francis Bacon, and just attacks with some scene or image that shakes you, that challenges you, that unnerves you. 

In terms of criticism, there are a couple. I do think the collection suffers from the current trend of publishers kind of just putting every story a writer has recently written into the book to make the biggest collection possible. I think the book would have benefitted from maybe 3 or 4 of the weaker stories being trimmed. Also, there is one nonfiction essay, and one kind of metafiction/nonfiction essay, I feel if you are gonna have a blend of fiction and nonfiction in a collection, then there should be at least a couple nonfiction works in it. Just having one feels a bit off to this reader. I think maybe to the already established fan of Slatsky’s work, this criticism is not so much of a big deal, the more the merrier. But to the new reader of his work, a more focused, more tight collection would come off better, allowing the author to showcase his best works. But all in all, these are slight problems. The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature is sure to be one of the most important horror collections of 2020. Christopher Slatsky is one of the most important names in contemporary horror and I am truly excited to see what he does next.