Demons and More Demons--Paul Genesse's THE CRIMSON PACT, Vols. 1-4

  Paul Genesse, ed. The Crimson Pact. Vols. 1-4.Alliteration Ink. March 2011, October 2011, May 2012, July 2012

Several months after the publication of Paul Genesse’s short-fiction anthology, The Crimson Pact, Volume 1, in March 2011, I posted a review at Collings Notes  (http://michaelrcollings.blogspot.com/2011/10/of-demons-there-be-no-end-paul-genesses.html) containing the following comments:

It’s a standard PR/Marketing ploy for an announcer to declaim in a stentorian voice that a certain product offers “SOMETHING FOR EVERYTHING!”

Well, in the case of Paul Genesse’s anthology of short stories and flash fiction, The Crimson Pact, Volume 1, the claim would be true ... as long as the ‘everyone’ involved has an unquenchable interest in things demonic. Please note, however, that in this case, the demons are (probably) not your typical straight-from-Hell, pitchfork-tailed monstrosities, or (perhaps) even in any realistic sense of the term ‘native’ to Earth. No, the demons you will encounter in The Crimson Pact are rather more like H. P. Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones—unknowable creatures from beyond the Void, waiting only their opportunity to invade helpless earths and rule them with devastation and despair.

Yes, Earths.

The introductory tale clarifies the essential situation. In an attempt at destroying demonic invaders, great armies are gathered and a cataclysmic battle is fought, with victory—albeit at a horrendous price—finally going to the human forces.

Or so they think.

Because, as in all things moral and just, evil often has the power to subvert and overcome, even at the moment of triumph. In “The Failed Crusade,” by editor Paul Genesse and Patrick M. Tracy, we discover that precisely this has occurred—that ostensible victory is in fact crushing defeat, as the hordes of demons abruptly withdraw and, siphoning the vast power of death and suffering and pain concomitant with the battle, break through the barriers that separate worlds, systems, dimensions, and universes.

And all at once, the entire multi-verse comes under attack.

More than that, however, the human forces realize what has happened and understand the enormity of their vulnerability in the face of the new conditions. A few elect to return to their long-abandoned families and live out whatever years of peace they may find; others—and more specifically, many of those who will become characters in the stories to follow—determine to carry the battle beyond the Void to the strongholds of the enemy, even though to do so requires their own deaths.

Thus the stage was set for the original fifteen short stories and eleven flash fiction stories in volume one and the scores of tales in the three (soon to be four) volumes that followed … tales that incorporated the atmospheric, the psychological, the technological, the theological; tales whose central characters chose to confront evil as well as characters upon whom the choice was forced, even—as in volumes three and four—characters who have turned against their own kind; tales that explored landscapes as varied as Chicago, New York, and London, landscapes as unassuming as nameless hamlets and isolated farms, landscapes both mythologically rich and technologically overpowering … and extending the sense of strangeness and danger inherent in each into uncharted worlds beyond.  

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the series, above and beyond the consistently high quality of stories told and the unending diversity of themes and approaches, is the feeling I enjoyed while reading that I was to a degree sitting in a movie theater. As a child, I was young enough to have looked forward to the pre-feature-film episodic serials that were then almost a required part of the experience. Ten or fifteen minutes of a breath-taking action-adventure plot that invariably ended with the hero trapped in an inextricable situation that could only end in death and destruction … and the inevitable words flashed on the screen, “Continued next week.”

A few years later, and I relived those episodes on afternoon television, two serials in half-hour slots on one of the two television channels we received in 1950s Billings, Montana. Again the exciting moments of action followed by the admonition to “Tune in next week for the further adventures of….”

In reading the four volumes of The Crimson Pact, I re-lived those moments of heart-pounding thrill. A fair percentage of every volume consists of direct or indirect sequels from preceding volumes. Well-known characters either find themselves in new conflicts or intricate plots continue to unfold in new places and, occasionally, new times. There is the instant of recognition—ah, yes! I remember this fellow—followed by anticipation of what new horrors he or she will confront.

For devotees of rough-and-tumble adventures, every volume of The Crimson Pact offers battle after battle, from battle-royals extending over page after page to surgically precise one-on-one combats. And in every case, intrepid demon-hunters much confront demons of the most ferocious sorts.

And, as with the movie serials, there is the additional treat—the anticipation—of a special full-length feature, most particularly the novella that opens volume four. Patrick M. Tracy’s “Darkness of the Sun” gives us a true-to-the-genre Western complete with Territorial Marshall, saloon gal with a heart of gold, an intrepid deputy marshal and the woman who loves him beyond all hope, and villains nasty enough to support gunfight after gunfight. Blood flows freely … and not all of it is human. From a demon-possessed bull named Otis to an incomparably seductive demoness, Marshal Calico Black and his handful of cohorts confront the unknown each time they ride out to bring peace and justice to the Old West. Sort of. All in all, it is a remarkable piece.

This is not intended to denigrate the shorter pieces. The episodic Tombs and Santos stories by Larry Correia and Steven Diamond (who flies solo in the final segment) combine non-stop action with careful character development. Usman T. Malik’s “A Demon in the Mughal Court” brings a welcome note of the exotic to the demonologies employed, building as it does on Pakistani myth and storytelling. Donald Darling’s Ronin stories fascinate through their willingness to reverse and convolute, until the demon sent to destroy earth and humans ultimately embraces a new identity and a new purpose, while demonstrating the single fact that reverberates through all four volumes: Demons cannot be trusted!

The volumes are beautifully packaged and readable, whether in ebook format (in which I read the first two) or gorgeous trade paperback (my texts for the final two). Paul Genesse has done a fine job in defining the overriding theme for the books, in selecting new and repeating authors to give each volume simultaneously a sense of freshness and a sense of familiarity.

And he is not done yet. Volume Five is scheduled to be released in 2013. It will be interesting to see which stories continue and while resolve … and how.

Highly recommended.

  

 

Transforming Terrible

Some years ago I wrote a terrible story.

At the time I finished it, of course, it didn’t seem terrible. Hot off the typewriter, it seemed like a small, highly polished gem. It was one of the first pieces of short fiction I had written, so perhaps I can be forgiven for over-appraising its worth at the time. But as the years passed and I began writing more stories, something about that one never seemed quite right. And yet, given frequent opportunities to burnish it a bit, I didn’t try to make it any better.

When the time came to assemble my first collection of short stories, Wer Means Man, and other Tales of Wonder and Terror (2010), it didn’t even make the initial cut-off. By then, I had long since acknowledged the awful truth.

It was a terrible story.

Then, several months ago, I was offered the opportunity to submit a story to an anthology of Lovecraft-inspired novelettes and novellas to be titled Space Eldritch. Lovecraft in Space! It was a chance I couldn’t pass up, so I began writing.

It wasn’t long before the idea I was struggling with juttered to a halt. It just wasn’t working.

That’s when I remembered the terrible story.

I went back to it, thought long and hard about it…and decided that it in fact contained the essence of what I wanted to say. Why not re-work it? A simple revision wouldn’t be sufficient because of the initial structural problems, but it still held promise. What it needed was a wholesale re-vamping.

 

Before proceeding any further, perhaps I should define what I think constitutes a story and how one can easily become terrible.

Stories have several foundational elements.

* They have Characters. Occasionally a story succeeds with a single character, but in almost every case, that character must struggle against something—environment, inner demons, the natural world in the form of storm or cold or other threats. More commonly, there are two (or more) fully defined individuals, one of whom is the focus of interest and empathy for readers, and the other, who acts as a counterpoint, an antagonist, a villain. The focal character—the protagonist—wants or needs something crucial that is obstructed by the villain or is in serious jeopardy because of the villain’s actions. Both characters need to be believable, vigorous (again, with a few exceptions), and multi-faceted.

In a terrible story, none of this happens. There may be performers, flat constructs who follow the writer’s playbook, but they fail to come alive. The sense of threat may not be sufficient or may not even exist; and when it is sufficient, the pseudo-characters do not respond to it credibly.   

* They have a Plot. That is, something significant occurs.  There is a legitimate conflict between two forces, the outcome of which is legitimately in doubt and, if achieved, will legitimately justify one and condemn the other. In the most extreme cases, the outcome may be life for one character, death for the other. The plot is sufficiently complex to generate interest but not too complex for the confines of the story; short stories are particularly vulnerable to overly skimpy, straight-line plots or bizarre, tortuous plots that extend well beyond the limits of the page count. A successful short story marries sufficient action to engaging characters, with the result that, at the end, readers feel a sense of completion, of satisfaction that just enough has been told … no more, no less.

In a terrible story, there may be either no plot at all, or too much. Sometimes characters—who may in and of themselves spark some interest—simply talk at each other. Rarely to each other. They recite stock ideas as if the ideas themselves could replace action. They spend most of the time telling backstory or force-feeding readers apparently pertinent information and not enough doing anything. Or they are in constant motion, fidgeting through  strongly telegraphed, predetermined  events that build no suspense, create no tension, and ultimately signify … nothing.

* They have a Setting. Stories do not take place in a vacuum … and if they do, then the vacuum itself needs to be so clearly defined as to become virtually a character, as, for example, the emptiness of the moors does in Wuthering Heights. That story could not have taken place anywhere else; the same should hold true for any successful story. This does not mean that the writer has to describe every picture on every wall in every room of a house, but it does mean that readers should have enough of a sense of place to understand how it will become part of the conflict, how it will influence the characters. Far from being an ornamental excrescence or an exercise in willful description, setting should resonate with every other component of the story.

In a terrible story, setting is usually ignored. It is not uncommon, for example, to have a commonplace action-adventure plot arbitrarily set on one of Jupiter’s moons and, without any serious adaptation for place, hailed as science fiction. Or—moving in the opposite direction—it may be that a tight, psychologically intriguing horror story is simply plopped into a stereotypic haunted house, on the assumption that the story will enliven the setting. Either way, the parts of the story do not meld. 

* They are carefully written. In a novel of 150,000 words, a single poorly handled sentence, a misturned phrase, or an infelicitous word-choice will probably be forgiven, if even noticed. In a story of 1500 words, that same sentence, phrase, or word might destroy verisimilitude, create distrust in a character, turn an intense action into momentary parody, or in any number of other ways disrupt the story’s flow. And thus kill the story. Successful stories allow readers to come to the end without even noticing the level of writing. Every word is such as to support character, plot, and setting. Change a key word or phrase, and the illusion of life might dissipate.

In a terrible story, writing is peripheral at best; sloppy, inaccurate, inadequate, or distracting at the worst. Without getting into such proofreading issues as spelling, grammar, and punctuation (although they are critical), the care—or carelessness—with which a story is told can undercut excellences in any of the other elements.

* They are entertaining. After all, why else would readers work their way through page after page? Successful stories—no matter whether they simultaneously communicate important ideas or suggest crucial themes or reflect out world either optimistically or pessimistically—successful stories entertain.

Terrible stories simply don't. Enough said.

 

All right, so why was my original story so terrible?

As I re-read it, I realized that—although it actually contained in embryo the possibility of a Lovecraftian Great Old One, something I wasn’t consciously considering when I first wrote it—it was woefully undeveloped in almost every element of storytelling.

It was pretentious from the first words. The original title, “‘Fortitude to Highest Victory’” reflected my Ph.D. work with John Milton’s Paradise Lost and, as I now saw, really had nothing to do with my story. It was just an opportunity for me to boast about having read the poem. As if that weren’t enough, on the final page, one of the characters actually quoted Milton … even though she/it was an alien on a planet light years from earth, millennia separated from earth. She also spoke Greek. Quite the knowledgeable creature.

It had no true characters. The story had actually begun accidentally. As I was looking up something else in the dictionary, I stumbled upon the Welsh word cwrth (pronounced like cooth), ‘an archaic stringed musical instrument, bearing a clear resemblance to the classical lyre, with the addition of a bow.’ For some reason the word caught my imagination. It looked alien, and the definition triggered an image of pregnancy, of swelling, so, logically enough, I started with a pregnant alien.  And that was as far as I went in characterization for her/it. The antagonist, I decided, would be somehow bug-like—you know, a “bug-eyed alien” also made literal. And he would be male. Other than that, and the stated fact that he represented an intergalactic Empire, I had no idea where he came from or what he was doing there. In the short space of the story, neither character had an opportunity to change in any substantive way. By the end, they were precisely what they had been at the beginning; there was, in fact, no story about them. Just authorial assertions.

It had no conflict. Almost everything that actually happened occurred outside of the heptagonal chamber and was reported second hand. The Cwrth—my protagonist—began by asserting a belief and never wavered. In the end, of course, she was proven right; but up until the final phrase, there was no warrant for her adamance.

There was an intrusion of something potentially interesting on the last page. A cloud appears on the distant (but undefined) horizon. It draws nearer:

Before Torcius could move, it had resolved itself into a fog, a mist, thick and impenetrable, but definitely inorganic—although there seemed to be a central core of darkness into which Torcius could not see.

Reading this now, perhaps twenty-five years later, I have no idea what I was trying to say. The passage seems to function as little more than an introduction to the quotation from Paradise Lost containing the phrase “Dark with excessive bright” (III, 375-381). But when I approached “‘Fortitude’” with the idea of salvaging what I could and transforming terrible into something better, it struck me that this might be how a Great Old One would appear if It were to sweep down upon a world. In the original, however, nothing happens that illuminates, as it were, the darkness.

Ultimately, the tale had no plot. It was a single episode, not a story, two characters without backgrounds or clear motivations talking to each other until the final paragraphs, when something finally happened. In addition, the story was stilted. Nearly every sentence was wordy, overburdened with information, some necessary, much tangential.

The story had no landscape, no setting, other than the seven-sided room in which the two meet. I think the “heptagonal chamber” was chosen as much for theological resonance as for anything, as if either alien would automatically respond to Earth-norm theology and symbology.

It was, perhaps worst of all, boring.

Actually, when I think about the story, I’m oddly impressed. It missed on every count. Pretentious. Overwritten. No plot. No characters. No setting. No conflict. Wow! am I good, or what?

Yet out of the wreckage that was “‘Fortitude to Highest Victory’” came “Space Opera,” a story I am proud to have appear along with fiction by D.J. Butler, Robert J Defendi, Carter Reid and Brad Torgerson, Nathan Shumate, Howard Tayler, and David J. West.

What happened? What made the difference?

 

First, a new title. The call for stories had specified an anthology incorporating space opera and H. P. Lovecraft’s mythic structure of Great Old Ones. The new title actually came before any key re-writing: “Space Opera.” I’m a great believer in italics; in this case, they indicate that the title mean something more than the standard phrase. The story was going to be about a violent clash between cultures, both obsessed by religion and utterly convinced of the rightness of their respective—and antithetical—causes. Opera suggests a certain level of drama, if not actual melodrama; it hints at ecclesiastical echoes through its root in ancient (human) languages; and it fits the characters’ mindsets.

The next thing to go was the obvious and gratuitous in-text reference to Milton. Allusions can be powerful; they invite into a story entire levels of additional storytelling. They remind readers of other characters and plots and settings that thematically or imagistically amplify the story being told, lend it greater depth and fullness. They do, however, need to be germane to the story. They need to point to something in the larger universe of storytelling that will make this tale better. If not, they are at best wasted words, at worst misdirection and pomposity. In a Lovecraft-based universe, Milton has no place.

For a story, one needs authentic Characters. “Space Opera” still focused on Torc and the Cwrth, but now they needed to be expanded. What were their motivations? How did their actions reflect their personalities? Which of the two seemed stronger? Which actually was?

Since both were aliens, a fair amount of anthropomorphism entered in. Both are functionally bipedal. Both are bilaterally symmetrical. Both recognize the visible symbols of pregnancy. Both can access spoken language (although I must admit to having some fun with the traditional space-opera convention of a translation-computer).

At the same time, however, they must also be alien, that is, other. How do they differ from us? How can those differences be incorporated into the plot? Which ones are crucial? Which incidental? To what extent do they simultaneously understand and misunderstand each other?

The next stage was to remember the basis of storytelling: Plot. A story might be defined as characters in conflict; taken as a whole, these two points constitute the action of the tale, its plot. “‘Fortitude’” had no action, so probably the most crucial step in transforming it was to establish that both characters wanted something critical and that their desires were mutually exclusive. One must win, the other must lose … in this case, die. 

That required knowing much more about Torc (as he is now called). Who is he/it? What is this nebulous Empire he represents? He must react in certain ways to the pregnant, female Cwrth; why would he do so? How would his presuppositions and assumptions make inevitable the clash between them?

Similarly, what would be the assumptions of a culture represented by an obviously pregnant female? In which, in fact, there are no significant males present? How would such a culture respond to the intrusion of the alien, the unexpected?

Answering these questions required both society-building and planet-building … which turned out to be much the most enjoyable part of writing “Space Opera.”

Then there was the issue of Setting. One was no longer sufficient. In order for readers to understand each alien as representative of a species, a culture, a civilization, without huge blocks of assertion and interruptive back-information, it seemed best to show each in its own matrix. Torc is a space voyager; he appears in the opening paragraphs on the bridge of his ship. The Cwrth is a planet-dweller; she confronts the alien intruder, Torc, in the confines of a room sacred to her people … and critical to the Lovecraftian theme.

As to writing and entertainment value … well, trust me on this one—given where “‘Fortitude to Highest Victory’” ranked on either chart, the only way “Space Opera” could go was up.

 

“Space Opera” is a fundamentally different story from “‘Fortitude to Highest Victory.’” For one thing, at 10,000+ words it is three times longer. It took substantially more time, effort, and ingenuity to deal with than did the original; a huge part of the labor, in fact, related to deciding what and how much of the original was even worth salvaging, beyond Torc and the Cwrth. The process, though long, was  satisfying.  I came to know both Torc and the Cwrth more fully than before; I understood more fully what each had to lose or to gain; and I wrote from the beginning with the Lovecraftian theme in mind, even though it doesn’t appear until late in the story. But when it does … wow!

Is it still a ‘terrible’ story? Not to me, at any rate.

Is it a ‘better’ story? Yes.

Is it a ‘great’ story? I don’t know.

But please do give it a try—along with six other sterling pieces. Join the “Book Bomb” and get an eBook of Space Eldritch on Monday, October 29.

You won’t be disappointed.

An Opportunity Missed

William Shakespeare, H.P. Lovecraft, and D.R. O’Brien. Shakespeare v Lovecraft: A Horror Comedy Mash-up featuring Shakespeare’s Characters and Lovecraft’s Creatures. Obiedan Publications, 29 August 2012. Large paperback, $5.99. Ebook, $2.99

 

There are several reasons why a novel connecting William Shakespeare and H.P. Lovecraft—a pastiche in the manner of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, George Washington: Werewolf, and Snow White and the Seven Dead Dwarves—should work.

Both Shakespeare and Lovecraft wrote about monsters. Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy is a ghost story; his other plays incorporate witches, aberrant states of mind, spirits and monsters, and humans in the grips of unbreakable obsessions. Lovecraft’s fascination with monsters—particularly the Great Old Ones and members of various cults, Cthulhu and otherwise—lies at the core of virtually every story he wrote. In certain areas of the grotesque and the macabre, he is master of many and servant to none.

Shakespeare and Lovecraft meet in the eighteenth century. The “Cult of Shakespeare” that declared him the finest poet/playwright of all times began in the mid-1700s and continued unabated through Lovecraft’s time. In many ways, the “Saint” Shakespeare we know today was invented during that time; many of the legends about the man and the final (to that point, at least) state of many of his plays derive from them. In other ways, Lovecraft seems just as tightly connected to that time. His writing, so problematical for many modern readers, shares characteristics with the masterworks of 18^th-century prose. His love of words and his extensive “wordhoard” pay tribute to that earlier time.

Shakespeare and Lovecraft are among the few writers who have become adjectival. When someone mentions “Shakespearean tragedy,” there is at least a general consensus as to what that means. When someone refers to “Lovecraftian horror” there is an equal consensus. Few writers are so definitive as to who they are and so consistent in the characteristics of their writing as to allow that kind of short-hand reference.

Shakespeare and Lovecraft were both independents in a time of relative conformity. Shakespeare was, as I noted years ago, “the Stephen King of his day,” willing to create terror, fear, or downright horror to captivate his audiences, regardless of the conventional theories of play-making. Lovecraft followed his imagination wherever it led, resulting in some of the most extraordinary prose tales of his century.

For all of these reasons, a book titled Shakespeare v Lovecraft, as this one is, should have worked.

This one does not.

It is not terrible. It is simply not engaging, not interesting on either the Shakespearean or the Lovecraftian levels. And perhaps its greatest failing, it does not blend the two into a seamless entity as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies does, or Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

To a large degree, the disjunctures in the book occur in the bridges between a passage from Shakespeare and one from Lovecraft. O’Brien’s writing simply does not live up to the power of his ‘co-authors’ and the story suffers for that. To give an example: on the first page of the story, we find,

A chaotic whirl of waters crashed against the rugged cliff face as ghoulish black clouds of grotesque contour rested and brooded like unwholesome vultures. Sheet after sheet of tropical rain lashed against the meagre [sic] threadbare cloak, soaking him through to the skin, yet the focus of his attentions remained unaltered and his frame remained resolute.

What are the problems here? For one, too many adjectives, several of which would actually strengthen the sentence if they were deleted. Something like—“Chaotic waters crashed against the rugged cliffs as grotesque black clouds brooded like unwholesome vultures”—might be more to the point, and even then rugged seems implicit (in this sentence at least) in cliffs and vultures are generally assumed by their natures to be unwholesome. Sheet after sheet could become sheets (which carries the suggestion of continuous); meagre  would have been more in keeping with the rest of the book if spelled in the American manner, meager; a threadbare cloak is by definition meager; and soaked to the skin is a cliché. In an attempt to sound Lovecraftian, the sentences become bloated, cumbersome, awkward.

The next paragraph contains the following:

Could the opportunity for revenge really have presented itself so easily, dare he believe it to be true: that his villainous brother would solely by happenstance to have simply come across his island prison in the current storm?

Since the two clauses are separated by a colon, that becomes unnecessary and the phrase should be something like “true: His villainous brother had come solely by happenstance….” The phrase “would solely by happenstance to have simply come” is garbled and cries for revision.

Such stumbles in writing continue. Prospero (the single character thus far) sees someone coming: “In an instant it was upon him, attempting to wrestle the Necronomicon [sic] from outwith his steely fanatical grasp.” I’m not certain why outwith appears, because it makes no sense.

A few paragraphs later creatures from the ocean’s depth begin to crawl “up the ship’s bough [sic]” as the “hideous waves rolled in frightfully, lashing away cargo and men with ghastly monotony and deliberation.” The words, as used, don’t seem connected to traditional definitions. Lashing away generally means ‘tying securely.’

Further in (p. 20), Henry V’s flagship, the Grace Dieu, is described has having on its deck “His renowned canons, ‘London’, ‘Messenger’, ‘and ‘the King’s daughter’.” While there might have been canons aboard the ship, certainly none of them would have been the King’s daughter.

In addition, there are anachronisms. Henry V (1387-1422) is troubled by the contents of pamphlets found at crime scenes throughout London. Since pamphlets, in the modern sense of the word, only appeared when printing presses had been popularized and literacy had become more widely spread than during the 14^th  and 15^th centuries—some of the earliest surviving chapbooks date from the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries—they would not have been scattered around London two centuries earlier.

Perhaps more to the point, the three perspectives in Shakespeare v Lovecraft do not mesh. It is one thing to use quotations from either author and place them in new contexts. For me, a sentence such as:

“Clearly, there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy,” the English King [still Henry V] whispered to himself in terrified amazement as he studied the being from another world.

While I can understand the intent behind the quotation, wrenched as it is from its place and time to be used as a response to a Lovecraftian Old One, the line so powerfully says Hamlet that I cannot accept it as an organic part of this story. For the duration of the line, I am elsewhere in my imagination and memory, to the point that the reference to the English King shocks and startles. Elsewhere famous and near-famous quotations from the plays—more Hamlet, and some Macbeth, for example—create the same disjointedness.

My final concern with Shakespeare v Lovecraft is that the story itself seems flat. It is neither particularly horrifying nor recognizably comedic. It is difficult to read…and the fact that I was tripped up by the wobbles referred to above signifies to me that the story was not strong enough to keep my attention focused; the mistakes became more interesting than the characters, the setting, or the plot.

Not recommended.

* * * * * * * *

Michael R. Collings is the Senior Publications Editor for JournalStone Publishing; an Emeritus professor of English from Pepperdine University; author of the best-selling horror novels The Slab and The House Beyond the Hill, as well as other novels and collections of short fiction, poetry, and literary essays; and an inveterate fan of all things grammatical and syntactical. His writing are available here, at starshineandshadows.com, at journalstone.com, and at hellnotes.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

With the Fading of the Light....

 

Tim Marquitz, ed. Fading light: An Anthology of the Monstrous. Angelic Knight Press, 31 August 2012, 396 pp., $18.95. Trade paperback.  ISBN-10: 1479213489; ISBN-13: 978-1479213481. Kindle edition, 538 kb., $5.99, ASIN: B0094IC60G.

 

In my last post, I reviewed After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia, edited by the more-than-capable Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. It presented nineteen visions of what it might be like to live beyond the End of the World, beyond the cataclysm or catastrophe, and the kinds of worlds remnants of humanity might have to contend with. As indicated in my comments, the editors and the individual authors did a noteworthy job on all accounts, creating enclaves of survivors with whom readers could empathize and about whom readers would care.

But what if there were no survivors?

What if the end were truly the End?

Tim Marquitz tackles this intriguing possibility in Fading Light: An Anthology of the Monstrous. Physically as impressive as After, particularly thanks to evocative cover art by Jesse Lucero, Marquitz’s anthology incorporates thirty tales of the end … the bitter end, in nearly every possible definition of bitter. The tales are linked, however, by a common image, indicated by the title, Fading Light.

There are no nuclear catastrophes here to wipe out civilization in collective fireballs, or implosion of a black hole, or zombie-engendering plagues. Instead, the end comes quietly and, in several stories, without warning.

One morning, the sun does not rise. Or, at least, appears not to rise.

There are many ways for the light to fade.

It might be as simple and direct, as common, as a volcanic eruption that spreads a cloud of ash and dust across Britain. After all, such a thing has already happened. Except that in Adam Millard’s Parasitic Embrace, the volcano expels much more than the usual lava and air-borne detritus. There is something else in the cloud, something living, from the depths of the planet…and neither it nor the cloud is going away. The End.

Or it might be that curious humans delve too deeply beneath the oceans, drilling or exploring or …well, simply being where they have never been before. And in doing so, they antagonize hideous creatures, as in Georgina Kamsika’s “Altus”; or perhaps worse, they stir up the very darkness itself, and it rises slowly, inexorably in a “Dark Tide,” the title of Mark Lawrence’s frightening piece.

Or perhaps there are just … clouds, sudden, impervious, seemingly permanent, that cut off sunlight and gradually kill off all life. There might be a possibility of hope, as in Stacey Turner’s “Born of Darkness,” with its vision of a long struggle against evil; or a moment of discovery that there is no hope at all, as in Wayne Ligon’s “Dust.”

Or possibly, just possibly, the sun itself has lost something so essential to its being that it has already begun to dim when the story opens. Malon Edward’s story “Blessed Be the Shadowchildren” considers that possibility in a tale of tortured love, celestial kidnapping, and blackest revenge.

Or … well, there are always monsters: as tiny and insignificant as leeches that rise from dank, dark sewers to wreak retribution; or as vast as creatures without names that journey in their own cloud through the distances of space until they find a waiting, nourishing planet. It may be a shadow, a doppelgänger that no one else can see. And anything in between.

Such suggestions only touch the surface of possibilities in Fading Light, which takes readers from the historical past—the age of the Vikings, the defeat of Napoleon—to unforeseeable and entirely unwelcome futures. Each tale encapsulates an instance—sometimes an instant—in which the light fades and death … or unalterable change … becomes inevitable. Character might have been taken unawares by the initial circumstance, but within the context of the stories each must realize that there is an end. If not this moment, then soon.

The tales are linked by theme—Fading Light—but that does not mean that they are overly dependent on an outside inspiration. Within that theme, the various writers approach their content independently and with great imagination. Several stories touch upon the mythological, almost suggesting without actually pinpointing influences from the great Myths—Classical and Norse. Others are more anthropological, sociological, or historical. A few are directly theological.    

For the most part, the writers do justice to the challenge. There occasional wobbles of word choice in a story or two, but little of import occurs to draw interest away from the stories. The fact that I read the 396 pages in less than two days let me know—as if I needed it—that the stories included are engaging, imaginative, well-handled, and as a whole present a convincing, if diverse, nightmarish vision of … The End.

Recommended.

* * * * * * * * *

Michael R. Collings is the Senior Publications Editor for JournalStone Publishing; an Emeritus professor of English from Pepperdine University; author of the best-selling horror novels The Slab and The House Beyond the Hill, as well as other novels and collections of short fiction, poetry, and literary essays; and an inveterate fan of all things grammatical and syntactical. His writing are available here, at starshineandshadows.com, at journalstone.com, and at hellnotes.com.

 

 

 

Writing Horror--What Do I Get Out of It?

[I am just enough of a Renassance numerologist to want to make the hundredth post to Collings Notes something a bit different. So, instead of writing about writing or reviewing someone else’s book, I am going to indulge in some mild soul-searching and thinking-on-the-screen.]

 A few days ago, I received the proof copy for my newest book, a collection of essays on writing, emphasizing horror: Writing Darkness.

Most of the essays included were stimulated by my work with JournalStone Publications. Since affiliating with them, I’ve judged a novel competition, read short fiction, read novels for possible publication, written an introduction to a fine novel by a powerful new writer, edited novels and short stories, and—perhaps most important—written a series of short articles about writing for the JournalStone website.

In the process of doing all of these things, a number of things happened.

First, I wrote enough articles to provide the core for Writing Darkness…in fact, the impetus for the book came from those articles.

Second, I had the opportunity to look at horror from multiple directions: as a writer, as a reader, as a critic/reviewer, as an editor. I could see rough-cut stories and stories after their final polish. And more importantly, I could see what kept otherwise good stories from reaching their full potential and what could be done to help them along.

Third, I had multiple opportunities to think about horror—what it is, how it works, why it is popular, how it has evolved.

Fourth, I had the chance to merge those considerations with more practical ones: why does this sentence structure enhance a sense of horror while that one does not? How does punctuation, word order, word choice, sentence length impact horror?

And fifth, I was able to sit down and consider a hitherto unasked question: What do I get out of writing it? That is, other than the frequent strange looks that come my way when I admit to doing so.

Here are several answers:

I make a little money:

I am fortunate in that my life does not depend upon my writing. It never has. For thirty years my primary vocation was teaching, with writing an adjunct. University-level teaching requires publication, even when the publications are not always appreciated by colleagues. So I published. But not for a university audience. Most of my books on King, Card, and others had as their target audiences late high-school and early college readers, young folks who might be excited to realize that literary criticism could justly be applied to science fiction, fantasy, and horror; and who might be equally excited to see their favorite genres treated with the same respect as is characteristic of ‘mainstream’ scholars.

In large measure, I think I succeeded. I had a number of students contact me at school to request interviews, ask questions about comments made in one of my books or articles, even ask permission to use me as a source in a researched paper. Each time, I felt a certain level of gratification.

What I did not see, however—and did not expect to see—was a tidal wave of money heading my way. One of the early King studies, Starmont’s original Stephen King as Richard Bachman, did earn around $5,000 the first year; but that was a stark exception, unmatched until last year when my horror novel, The Slab, spent six months or so as a Wildside bestseller.

Since my own novels have appeared, I’ve seen an uptick in the number of people actually buying my books. Still nothing to shout about but enough to meet our increasing needs in my retirement.

So to that extent, horror has been good to me.

I meet fascinating people:

I am inherently an intensely—perhaps pathologically—shy person…have been for as long as I can remember. I don’t make friends easily, feel intimidated by everyone around me when I’m in groups, can’t imagine why anyone might be interested in getting to know me. These feelings have intensified over the past twenty years, since my triple-threat—deafness, tinnitus, and clinical depression—has to some degree taken over my life.

My single outlet, since I don’t attend social functions and haven’t understood a word at church for the past couple of years (I’m the organist, so I come; play the prelude; play the hymns as my wife conducts them and give me signals about volume, tone, etc.; play the postlude; then leave, often without speaking to anyone), is the several conferences I attend each year. One is explicitly an SF/F symposium, another is a bit more open to horror…and twice now I’ve been invited as a Guest to World Horror Con.

That hasn’t made me any less shy, but by sitting on panels (thanks to all who have so graciously interpreted audience questions and comments that I couldn’t hear), I am ‘forced’ to meet new people. And that has been a life-saver, both figuratively and literally.

I’m not a techie, so my contacts with SF are perhaps the least strong; my interest in fantasy is primarily academic, Tolkien and Lewis specifically, so I often don’t have a great deal in common with Fantasy writers.

But horror….

Now, that is something I can empathize with. I can talk blood and gore, pain and suffering, monsters and the monstrous along with the best of them (I hope) and enter into conversations I would never otherwise have had. Many of the points made in Writing Darkness stem from panels and presentations over the years; and many of the examples quoted and analyzed are from works by writers I would never have imagined getting to know. Through their books, whether I read for pleasure, to review, or to discuss; through their presence online and in emails; through their responses and encouragement, I feel more part of a community than I ever did while teaching.

And for that I am grateful.

 I write what I want—what interests me:

During the past year and a half, I have published:

·         Writing Darkness, a book on writing horror, primarily drawn from Collings Notes;
·         three novels—Static! without speaking to anyone tone, etc.ller , Shadow Valley, and Serpent’s Tooth;
·         three short stories—“Space Opera,” due out in Space Eldritch this month; “In the Haunting Darkness”; and “Accommodation”;
·         A Verse to Horror: An Abecedary of Monsters and the Monstrous, a book of horror-limericks;
·         HAI-(And Assorted Other)-KU, a book of primarily non-horror haiku, although there is a section of “HorrorKu”;
·         a 2-volume bibliography of my works;
·         Lines from Collings Hill, an edition of my grandmother’s poetry;
·         Deep Music, a collection of LDS-oriented musical readings;
·         Perspectives, an edition of some 350 reviews;
·         The Filamental Emblems, a book of poem-and-crocheted-pattern combinations that try to communicate the same feeling or thought;
·         BlueRose, a collection of half a dozen previously published chapbooks;
·         The Gummi Bear Omnibus, a tongue-in-cheek annotated ‘scholarly’ edition of poems by my son and daughter detailing the rise and fall of the intergalactic Gummi Bear Empires.

Now, what do these have in common?

Just one thing. Me.

Not all are horror—two of the novels are cozy mysteries—but there is a sense of darkness in each book I’ve written/compiled. They reflect my imagination. Horror, in that sense, is not restrictive. It is not a matter of technological advance, or of the plausible improbable, but of emotion. Anything can carry a touch of the horrific; in one of my darker moments, I once wrote a Christmas Pageant that my wife refuses to let me show to anyone, let alone propose for use in church. It’s about Christmas and all of that, but it is also about death and loss and suffering, which are implied in Christmas, perhaps but should probably remain as implications.

Be that as it may, horror for me is often less a generic specification than an approach. I can have characters in one of the mysteries, Devil’s Plague, walk along a forest trail in the middle of the night. They are simply going to the scene of a crime. There is no suggestion of anything supernatural about the death or the location. It is dark, yes, but they have strong flashlights, and two of the three have hiked the trail many times before.

The situation reminded me of a midnight hike when I worked at a Scout Camp over 40 years ago, and that similarity then urged me to emphasize the spookiness, the aloneness, and impending sense of possible fear that I recall from that hurried hike. We had had a medical emergency at a distant lake, and one of the scouts needed to be taken back to the base camp. It wasn’t life-threatening, but having just hiked to the lake that afternoon, not having eaten anything since breakfast (that is another story), being roused from almost-sleep, then force-marching down-mountain to the accompaniment of a moaning boy and constantly shifting shadows…well, I simply had to make one of my characters feel the same creepiness, eeriness, uncertainty.

And there it was, a moment of horror in a straight-forward mystery novel.

Or another, shorter moment: sitting outside on a bright spring afternoon, writing haiku about the tulips, then noticing that at the core of each—no matter the colors of the petals, red, pink, yellow, white—there was a hidden darkness, a deep blue-black spot in the center. And thinking, “what if?”

Another moment of horror…and several HorrorKu.

For me, horror is infinitely malleable. It can become obsessive and direct the movement of an entire novel; it can be momentary and bring little more than a tint of darkness to a story or poem.

 

As curious as it might sound, I owe horror a great deal. Beginning with my first essays on Stephen King’s writings thirty years ago, it has been a recurring leitmotif in my life, making the internal more understandable and the external more bearable.

Many thanks.

How to Write Post-apocalyptic Fiction

Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, eds. After. Hyperion,  October 9, 2012, $16.99 (Hardcover)

In any anthology, there are usually one or two stories—occasionally more—that just do not speak to me. I read the first few pages, then…thump…my interest flags and I find myself flipping through the pages to find the end.  And hoping that the next story will revive my excitement. This is not to suggest that the stories are not good or that the editor failed to select well; it merely means that some stories do not appeal to my particular (and sometimes peculiar) taste.

When I opened the package that was delivered two evenings ago, I had great expectations for Datlow and Windling’s After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia. The cover art was spectacular. I know that cover art is in some senses irrelevant to content, but in this case, the jacket design seemed perfectly apt for what I hoped to find between the covers. And beyond that, the cover simply felt perfect—slightly nubbly, almost as if it were beginning to decay after whatever cataclysm had destroyed the city and left the single man as witness.

Then I began reading. And read. And read.

And never slowed or stopped. Not one story in After was other than what I had hoped for… engaging, thought-provoking, imaginative. The authors—and the editors—did everything right.

The Apocalypse:

The wrong way:
For aficionados of the late, great 1950s SF/Horror films, the wrong way to begin a post-apocalyptic tale will sound familiar. A voice—deep, resonant, rather like the voice of God—speaks while the screen shows planet Earth. The voice says something like: “In the year 2050 the nations of Earth finally came close to annihilating themselves and destroyed all but our plucky band of survivors living in a tiny valley, protected from the fallout and the atomic mutants.” In other words, the setting is explained before the story actually begins. The disaster is described, its consequences enumerated, and then—finally—we meet our characters.

The right way:

At the core of each story in After is a cataclysm, a disaster, an apocalypse. The word goes back to a Greek root meaning ‘to uncover, to reveal.’ That is precisely what the nineteen authors—including some of the finest in contemporary horror—have done. Rather than taking the easy way (easy for writers and for readers) of setting the stage by describing in great detail what has just happened, they allow readers to ‘discover’ the nature of the catastrophes that have overtaken their characters and their characters’ worlds. In several instances, we never find out exactly what did happen, but the after-effects are so horrific that the causes begin to seem irrelevant. Whether by accident or design, something was unleashed or released, and all humanity, represented by the characters, have suffered and will suffer from it.

In one story, in fact—Matthew Kressel’s “The Great Game at the End of the World”—there is no reason given at all. Told in flashback during the world’s last baseball game, the story simply shows the main character in school…when something happens and the walls collapse and several of his friends are lying there dead and only he, apparently, has survived. He eventually finds his sister, a few others, and a number of Creepies, alien creatures that have for some reason attended the event. This story actually comes closest to the fundamental, theological definition of the word; the revelation of God. Sort of.

The Survivors:

The wrong way:

In weakly thought-through apocalyptic fiction, at some point one character looks into another’s eyes and says something like, “Oh, don’t you wish things were like they used to be, before that rogue asteroid the scientists named Montieth-Cummings AG22141 veered for some unknown reason from its path past the earth, shattered the dark side of the moon, and caused that mysterious dust to fall over everything so that now everyone who has ever died has risen as either a zombie or a vampire. Oh, for the good old days.”

This is the least effective way to identify what has happened and its consequences for the characters, if for no other reason that humans—particularly humans under stress—don’t generally talk this way. They use short-cuts for long phrases, clipped forms for longer, unfamiliar words…and seldom rehearse the details of a cataclysm to someone else who already knows them, at least not in this blunt a format. The result is stilted, it is unconvincing, and—most deadening of all—it stops the action until the indigestible lump of exposition is finished. By then, of course, it is entirely possible that the reader has gone elsewhere for a stronger story.

The right way:

In After, the writers and their characters rarely discuss the catastrophes in any but terms of effects. One of the few that describes it directly is Gregory Maguire’s challenging “How Th’Irth Wint Rong by Hapless Joey@ homeskool.guv.” Most of the story is told—hand-written on paper—by an uneducated survivor struggling to put his memories into words…and to spell them correctly. There are a few interruptions by his tutor, whose literary expertise barely exceeds his. But Maguire reserves the key bit of data (“the SuperCollider collapsed”) for a character outside the limits of the story, punctuating the irony of Joey’s attempts to express something he will never understand. In another, “Rust with Wings” by Stephen Gould, there is no effort at all to explain how it came about that metallic-colored metal-devouring insects have destroyed great swaths of the Southwest. It is sufficient to know that they have…and that the characters know no more about their genesis that the readers do.

In effect, readers are encouraged to discover the ramifications of the disaster along with characters. In a world in which everyone fifteen and older transforms into a ravaging, flesh-eating beast—as in Nalo Hopkinson’s “The Easthound”—the key is not why? But rather what happens when characters realize that they are approaching that age and how the recognition alters their views of relationships, of kindred, of self.

The Aliens (if any):

The wrong way:
Once more I’m drawn to images from 50s SF movies when considering the wrong way to deal with aliens. Again and again, at some point in those great old films, the creature from beyond steps into the camera frame…with ludicrous results. A disembodied puppet-head glowering menacingly from inside a clear sphere. Something resembling a giant carrot shuffling down the corridors of an arctic outpost. And—perhaps my favorite—gigantic eyeballs pulling themselves along with ridiculously frail tentacles. In each case, the intention was (presumably) to horrify, yet by giving too much detail, by showing the mechanical horrors too clearly, too crisply, the films achieved the opposite result (and I’m old enough to remember not being frightened by them when they first appeared).

The right way:

The aliens (in the several stories that depend upon them) are not shown landing and taking over the earth; that is not the point of the anthology. In several instances, as in Garth Nix’s “You Won’t Feel a Thing,” the invaders—in Nix’s story simply the “Overlords”—are not shown at all. Instead, the stories emphasize the effects of their presence on the survivors.  

Lines between alien and human may blur as the consequences of apocalyptic change emerge. Genetics and genetic manipulation may transform humans into chimeras. Aliens may accompany the disruption of the earth, may comment on events, may even participate in the last baseball game on the planet—but the stories remain bound to the humans involved. Their sufferings, their discoveries, their lives and deaths give After its extraordinary power.

 The Language:

The wrong way:
The easiest way to suggest a post-apocalyptic world is to fiddle with the language. Unless the writer is as brilliant as Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange—in which he provides details about the overthrow of England by the Russians only through neologisms and portmanteau words—most attempts to do so come across as strained dialogue or narration filled with agglomerations of unpronounceable consonants that, for weaker writers, represent alien intelligences.

The right way:

Instead, in After, language is used almost as a character; the distance between today’s speech and the characters’ languages reflects the impact of the disaster. What has disappeared leaves behind few words to linger over despondently; instead, new words are generated to define new realities, or old words take on new meanings…and readers must intuit those meanings as part of the discovery. Hairies, counters, the Rosamund, the Rehabilitated, THE EVENT, THE BEFORE, THE AFTER, the sprouteds… these and many other words/phrases take on significance far beyond their usual meanings as they become opportunities for discovery.   

 The Message:

The wrong way:
Many stories have an underlying message—a theme—that the writer wishes to illuminate. In the hands of someone unsure of the story’s ability to exist first as a story and secondarily as a message, there are occasional moments when the author emerges through the texture of the tale to state the moral outright. In the 19^th century, it was acceptable to find sentences such as, “And thus, Dear Reader, we find that little children should always respect and obey their elders lest they, too, be eaten by the Great Golliwog hiding beneath the stairs!” In the 21^st, even though such overtness is generally frowned upon, it nonetheless persists.

The right way:

Again, in After, only rarely does theme rise directly to the surface. Perhaps closest to an allegory, in which characters represent particular personality traits and hence become flat figures manipulated by a moral, is Sarah Rees Brennan’s tale of Fair Rosamond, the objectified prize to be handed over to the single survivor of the Trial…as a way of eliminating a generation of young men who might otherwise cause civil unrest. Set in the future, it carefully builds on fairy-tale/Arthurian motifs, even including characters’ names: Rosamond, Yvain, and the Order Knights.  It does not, however, point to a specific moral until the final line, when Rosamond’s desires and the storyline merge in a single, statement that is at once both culmination and declaration. With her final words, we understand—without being told over and again—that the story has been about freeing women from shackles of male domination and expectation. It is carefully, effectively, and beautifully handled throughout.

Others stories touch upon theme. Some virtually challenge readers to sit back and think about how the story relates to Before, that is, to their own word. Through concerns about runaway technology, aggressiveness and mindless warfare, class struggles, unhampered belief systems (both theological and scientific), and Earth’s place in the universe itself, After offers imaginative, explorative, speculative visions of possibilities and consequences, without descending into indoctrination or propaganda. The stories are, and remain, essentially excellent  stories.

 The Package:

The wrong way:
Assembling a collection/anthology is frustrating at best. Placement of stories is crucial. Which should come first? Which last? How can the middle stories be protected from medial slump—that sense that less powerful pieces have been sandwiched between more powerful initial and terminal ones.

There are several mechanical ways that sometimes work. Chronology of stories by authors’ birth dates provided a useful structure for Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (see “Where Horror Is(n’t)—http://michaelrcollings.blogspot.com/2012/09/where-horror-isnt.html), since the anthology spanned roughly a century and a half. But for a collection of contemporary horror, that arrangement would be less than useless.

Or stories might be arranged chronologically by publication date. Again, that would prove valid if they ranged over a number of years and if all were reprints. For a volume containing original fiction…useless.

Sometimes anthologies go alphabetically by authors’ last names. This seems the most mechanical of all and essentially suggests that the stories could be arranged in any order and they would be just as effective. Nearly useless.

What often results in from mechanical arranging is an anthology that may have an overriding theme but that seems basically a random collection of stories.

The right way:

After is a coherent, unified whole. Each story is in the right place to play off the one before and to resonate with the one following. The pacing allows for lighter moments to interrupt more somber ones. Jane Yolen’s short poem, “Gray,” for example, picks up on the final tone of Hopkinson’s “The Easthound” in its opening line, “How many ways to describe gray….” The horror of the final revelations in the story prepare readers for the melancholic undertones of the poem’s first stanza. Then, toward the end, Yolen introduces “red” and notes that eventually, gray will be little more than a memory…and leads seamlessly into Carolyn Dunn’s “Before,” which begins in horror and ends in hope.

The stories in After are not arranged programmatically to create anything like a novelistic effect, of course. Each is independent. Each has its own strengths. Yet the transition from one to the next never jars. There is only a strong sense of completion…and anticipation.


In all respects, After is a well-conceived, well-executed exercise in dark fiction. Highly recommended.