Let's take advantage of the Halloween month to delve a little into horror. I've been reading through a decent chunk of Ramsey Campbell (several collections of shorts, several novels from the 80s through recently) and I've developed some thoughts about his work.
Ramsey Campbell wrote that his first novel,
The Doll Who Ate His Mother, derived in part from an effort to make a new monster, distinct from vampires and werewolves and so on. Not having read the novel, I can't comment on it specifically, but there is a monster all his own, if perhaps not purely original. Its slimy spoor can be traced through his works from the 70s to the modern day. The best way to describe it is as fat. Not obesity, fat. Lard, cooled grease, a soft, slimy, off-white putrescence that can only approach and mock the shapes of the everyday.
While Lovecraft's works often emphasized similar visceral sensations for his horrors, there is still a grandeur even in Cthulhu's flabby claws and gelid body. Stephen King's horrors generally manage to have some respectable manifestation outside of filth and decay. But this monster is all decay and all filth, with scarce a sign of respectability to be found.
More specifically, even without this flabby oozing beast, Campbell finds fear in softness, in the loss of solidity. Oh, yes, there's a definite use of social anxieties throughout his work, but this is generally around a core of finding that the banister is sagging when you touch it, and the stairs are melting into a slurry.
But ascendant from the core, we find a definite working-class sensibility even when the characters are in relatively privileged positions. This reaches its apex with
The Overnight, a book where the flabby beasts are practically a relief compared to the horror of American-style retail work, but even in works like
Ancient Images and
The Grin of the Dark, with relatively well-off people in creative work, we still have a definite sense of being the underdog against the overweening forces of society.
The most interesting trend in his work is a move away from obvious explanations- earlier work tends to explain everything over the course of the novel, his 90s work left some things undefined, and more recent materials have left the pieces for the reader to put together (
The Overnight) or left things entirely ambiguous (
The Grin of the Dark). While this is largely due to the different demands of the narratives, it's certainly a refreshing trend in horror.
Moving on from Campbell, let us turn to John Farris's
All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By (1977), a near-potboiler with an excellent title that tells almost nothing about the actual contents. The basic story is simple- two young men with traumatic pasts, a mysterious woman, the 1940s, and somewhat-better-than-pop vodou, with a carefully spun-out narrative that allows you to guess the basic thread about halfway through but comes to a nastily effective ending. The story is uncomfortable on racial grounds- the villain is the illegitimate mixed-race son of a Southern planter, plotting to receive his inheritance and taking revenge against his racist, pedophiliac half-brother, and, frankly, he's far too sympathetic for the narrative to work well in 2013. Also, way too much dialect. The vodou is somewhere between "voodoo dolls" and Disney's
The Princess and the Frog, and the research appears to largely be taken from books I recognized. The overall setup is somewhat similar in general terms to Tim Powers'
The Stress of Her Regard, and so I couldn't help thinking about his much-better vodou in
On Stranger Tides.
Next, we have Colson Whitehead's
Zone One: A Novel, which is basically what happens when George Romero's
Dead trilogy is carefully distilled and the social commentary taken to the ultimate conclusion. The book exists in a sweetly sardonic atmosphere (looting is sponsored in the reclamation of Manhattan), and then the final third turns into unrelenting horror as the remnants of modern society are destroyed one after the other in a concerted attack, and the main character decides to join the dead. It's good to see a novel willing to have the same basic, ghoulish message as Val Lewton gave to his films.
Shirley Jackson's
The Haunting of Hill House is a masterpiece of horror literature, one of the few works unambiguously both, and already something you can see a lot of excellent reviews of. So I won't say much in general, except to present my own interpretation of the book- namely, that this is the story of Eleanor Vance, a young woman with a number of psychological issues, who went to Hill House and was presented with a choice. There was Theo, who was already in a relationship, and very obviously exterior to Eleanor, (and a woman, but this does not matter within the novel), and there was Hill House, single, practically interior to Eleanor, and, unfortunately, abusive and manipulative. Eleanor made her choice, but whatever walked in Hill House still walked alone.
Anne Rivers Siddons
The House Next Door is another version of the haunted house, and is practically a fixup novel split between three novellas with a frame story. This haunted house, like all good haunted houses, works on the insecurities of the people nearby. From a mere heart attack and scandal to a multiple murder, the house concludes its corruption by self-destructively driving the narrators to murder and arson to stop the house. Alas, we still have the "O Henry twist down the mineshaft", to quote Stephen King, and this one is an especially haunting one. On the other hand, the viewpoint character is named Colquitt, which may be a deal breaker for some people.
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Meanwhile, I've also read three different books about Walt Disney World, one mainstream, one fantasy, and one sci-fi. The sci-fi one shoots for satirizing fandom, but avoids the mark by a fair few meters. The fantasy one is a pure slobberfest to the Disney ideology. The mainstream one is probably the most honest, depicting Disney World as a place that attracts a wide variety of fucked-up people, but leaves it open as to what effect the park itself has on them. The only things left over are YA and Cory Doctorow, so I think I've basically exhausted the sum total of literature related to Disney World, which now that I think about it is a particularly sad subgenre, and unfortunately I have the desire to contribute to it.
