Stephen King - Cujo

She […] understood how afraid a person could be, how fear was a monster with yellow teeth, set afoot by an angry God to eat the unwary and the unfit. (p. 45)

Cujo is a novel from Stephen King's relatively early days, written in a period of such heavy drinking that, according to his On Writing (and Wikipedia), he doesn't remember much of writing it. Moving beyond its pedigree, equal parts promising (early King!) and dubious (so forgettable the man himself can't recall it!), Cujo, the slim physical book, bears little resemblance to its gigantic, two hundred pound titular canine. Nonetheless, this one packs in quite a bit of hefty ideas and tension.

Though occasional vignettes illuminate many of Castle Rock's other inhabitants, we focus primarily on two families, the Trentons and the Cambers. Donna Trenton's having an affair. Her husband Vic's just learned that devastating truth when he and his partner are called away to New York in a last attempt to save their struggling advertising business. Joe Camber, meanwhile, is a backwoods mechanic, and his son, Brett, needless to say, looks up to his dad quite a bit. But that worries Charity Cambers. She's worried that her bright son is going to throw away his future for this poor and rural life. Before Brett makes his decision, Charity wants him to see a different kind of life, and she manages to convince Joe to let her and the boy take a trip to see Charity's sister and her sister's husband, a rich lawyer.

As might be expected of him, King does an excellent job building up the characters and dynamics of each family. Much of the tension in these homes comes from the mothers, both of which are housewives, trying to fit into the world in a way that doesn't just leave them as, as Charity puts it, little more than a kitchen drudge that kept the clubhouse neat. (p. 47) We get scenes from each of the players, and so we develop a broad understanding of each home, even if the reader is still likely to, especially when it comes to the Cambers, take sides. Vic's advertising company, too, is illuminated, complete with the humorous rundown of their recent advertising campaign and the catastrophe that follows.

But I haven't said a word about Cujo yet, have I? The first thing to know about Cujo is that he's a good dog. Big, yeah, but friendly as can be. He played with Brett and was beloved by all. But, when chasing a rabbit, Cujo has the misfortune of finding a cave filled with bats. When one scratches him, the awful virus that they carried enters his blood. As Brett and Charity leave for their visit, Cujo goes rabid. He kills Joe's best and only friend down the road. And then he kills Joe Camber.

While Vic's gone, Donna's car starts to break down. She and her young son Tad nurse the Pinto over to the Cambers' place well past the edge of town. It breaks down in the driveway. That's when they notice Cujo, who throws himself repeatedly at the car, growling and straining to savage them. The doors and windows hold him back for now, but they can't get out. Before long, they realize that they are under siege by dog (p. 218).

This confrontation, the mad beast against a mother and her son, is the heart of Cujo. The greenhouse effect soon makes the temperature in the car unbearable. Far from the nearest house, they realize that no one is coming. Every one of their needs become a matter of incredible danger. As Donna realizes: In this curiously scaled-down situation – this life or death situation – even having to go to the bathroom became a skirmish. (pp. 208-9)

In comparison to the horrible danger that she is in now, the rest of Donna's life begins to seem irrelevant. Every other perspective that we have undergoes the same shift; Vic's commercial struggles and even Charity's cultural ones seem laughable in comparison to the simple life or death truths that underlie them. As soon as Vic learns of his wife and son's mortal peril, he gets a good look behind his life and then realizes it is all stage scenery and false fronts. (p. 248) Cujo is a novel about the brutality under civilization. King's usual habits of branding underscores this. It is not just a pane of glass between them and death, but rather a pain of Saf-T Glass, and, in the context, the brand name becomes to seem a hideous joke.

Cujo is about a life and death struggle, but it is not an uplifting tale of good and evil. It is, of course, tempting to slot the dog into the part of the script marked Villain, but that misses the point. As King takes care to remind us at the end, [Cujo] had always been a good dog. […] He had been struck by something, possibly destiny, or fate, or only a degenerative nerve disease called rabies. Free will was not a factor. (p. 309)

In the absence of malice, King leaves us with a brutality that is harder to come to terms with. It might simply be chance, the cruel and indifferent way of the world, a playing out of undetermined events that makes a mockery of Donna's naïve belief at the start of the novel that there were some things that God never allowed. (p. 169) Or, maybe worse, it all might be fate after all, might be, as Donna begins to believe in the heart of her hell, a punishment meted out by a wrathful God for her sins. If that is the truth, King is careful to make the misery, the pain, and the regret far too visceral to ever be called reasonable. If this is a punishment, it is one that far exceeds any crime, and yet it is the world that Cujo shows.

Despite its brutally successful main plot and thematic thrust, Cujo is not without its flaws, the main one of which stems directly from its success. Cujo is not, obviously, a supernatural and supernaturally deadly menace like the ones King employs so often. He is something far more ordinary than that, despite a few nonstarter hints that he might be something more. As a result, in order to position Cujo as a deadly threat, King has to manipulate a whole truckload of pieces. It's this series of coincidences that allows Donna to read it as fate, and it does work in that regard. But when yet another avenue of escape is closed off, and we are told that Donna Trenton might have called it another stroke of that same Fate she saw reflected in Cujo's muddy, homicidal eyes (p. 269), the reader can't help but recall that it's not fate at work but rather King's pen, and that all of the coincidences were planned out in advance to twist all the pieces into the one configuration into which they could be properly dangerous.

That's a small enough complaint, though, and a rather inevitable one in a work like this besides. I don't think Cujo is a masterpiece like The Shining or even 'Salem's Lot, but it is still a lean, mean and horrific beast of a novel.

Poppy Z. Brite - Drawing Blood

So many beautifully drawn dead bodies. (p. 162)

Drawing Blood is Poppy Z. Brite's second novel and my first experience with her full length work, though I had previously read and enjoyed Swamp Foetus/Wormwood and the collaborative Wrong Things. Centered on two young men shaped and horribly wounded by their parents and struggling to come to terms with life and love, Drawing Blood is an exemplary work of character driven Horror.

Brite's approach to Horror is almost the exact opposite of Stephen King. In novels like 'Salem's Lot, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, and so many others King places ordinary people into the most extraordinary of situations. Brite, on the other hand, takes the oddest characters and lets them live their lives. Though the novel's events can certainly be arranged into a convincing synopsis that promises thrills and action, Drawing Blood is one of the least plot-driven novels I have ever encountered. 

The two protagonists don't so much have pressing plots as they do backstories. When Trevor was five, his father, a famous artist, slaughtered Trevor's mother and brother and hung himself. Zach, meanwhile, lived a lucrative life as a hacker in New Orleans after leaving home at sixteen to escape his violent father and cruel mother. The ramifications of these pasts are not skin deep, and Brite does not shy away from her characters' darkness. Zach and Trevor have both been hurt awfully in the past, and that pain has twisted each of them in a myriad of ways. They can be jagged to get to know, and their lives can at first seem nothing but a tapestry of scars. But Brite imbues every word of her narration with the contents of their souls. The reader comes to know and understand them, to grasp their strange tastes and habits, and to feel their needs. Scant chapters into the book, Zach and Trevor feel like dear friends or, beyond even that, like alternate lives that we ourselves might have led.

Needless to say, Zach and Trevor meet, though they don't do so as quickly as one might think. On the twentieth anniversary of his father's murders, Trevor returns to his family home in Missing Mile to try and understand why he was spared. Zach, warned by a fellow hacker that the Secret Service is closing in on him, flees his home and city. For him, Missing Mile is just a stop on the road, but stop there he does, and it's then that he meets Trevor.

From that point on, the book's progress is wholly formed by the characters' interactions with one another. Missing Mile is the setting of much of Brite's work, including Lost Souls and one of the pieces in Wrong Things. Filled with all those accumulated stories, the town's roads and sections are vividly described with all the insider familiarity and lived-in distinction of any town you might find on the map. Far more importantly, it is filled with warmly human characters. Townsmen Terry and Kinsey have full and believable lives of their own outside of and beyond the confines of these here three hundred and seventy-three pages, and the depths of their lives and manner is evident from the briefest conversation we see them hold. Seeing two of Brite's characters interact is like watching your fiancé meet your mother; you know every person in the room as well as you could possibly know someone, but they don't know each other, and they are far too real and far too complex to be predictable. Though they will always stay true to their character, you don't know how the conversation will go until it plays out before your eyes.

Zach and Trevor fall in love, and the source of the novel's greatest light is also that of its deepest darkness. Both of them have well learned by this point that love brings pain, that it ends with cutting words and tears, pain and blame and regret, maybe even blood, that all of those things are almost guaranteed (p. 157). They know that safety is best found in emotional solitude. Zach isn't willing to risk the injury to himself that will come if he trusts and loves another. And Trevor isn't willing to take anyone with him (p. 174). When he first fucks Zach, he realizes that sex and violence have the same power, but that isn't the only connection, for death and love dance together as closely in his mind as cause and effect. If you loved someone, he wonders time and time again, really loved them, wouldn't you want to take them with you when you died? (p. 102)

As Trevor explores the house his father lived in and the deaths his father caused, he slips towards becoming his father. And as he falls in love with Zach, he risks killing the boy that he loves in the fulfillment of that love. The danger here is all internal. Drawing Blood boasts no villain, has no ticking bomb at the center of its plot. Its story is Trevor and Zach coming together with who they are and with their pasts and each other, and its dangers are no less real for that. When Trevor does cross the edge, the reader feels it twice over, feels the pain of his blows and also the violation of someone we know so well do something so cruel.

The overall feeling of Drawing Blood can likely best be summed up and felt in a description of Trevor's father's comic, a description that could pass just as well as one for the novel itself. To allow the characters I'm describing to wield the pen for a moment, Trevor describes the comic and the novel as made of: stark, slick, slightly hallucinatory drawings, the distorted reflections in puddles and the dark windows of bars, the constant low-key threat of violence, the feeling that everything in the strip was a little larger than life, and a little louder, and, a little weirder (pp. 100-1). All of this is brought out by Brite's fantastic prose. Brite is capable of bringing characters to life and of standing back while they need quick sentence to act and interact. He is also capable of stunning lines and images that crystallize her world, be they melancholically beautiful (Most of the Hummingbirds [family]were poetic souls tethered to alcoholic bodies. (p. 25)) or brutal in their extremity and futility (The skull always grinned because it knew it would emerge triumphant, that it would comprise the sole identity of the face long after vain baubles like lips and skin and eyes were gone. (p. 225)).

Despite its frequently grotesque imagery, its bouts of extreme violence, and its general no holds barred approach, calling Drawing Blood a Horror novel feels almost wrong. Horror is, certainly, a part of it, but it's not the only or even necessarily the dominant part. This is as much a love story as it is a horror one. In his description of it on his site, Brite says that this is a "very druggy book" and also one with "lots and lots and lots of hot, exhaustively detailed sex." Both are certainly true, and the novel seems about as much about those, and about its characters, and about Missing Mile, and all sorts of other things, as it does about its Horror. Truthfully, some sort of archaic label like Decadent or a modern one like, despite its often pejorative sense, Goth seems to fit the entirety of the novel better than Horror.

Whatever its classification, Drawing Blood is a powerful read. The book is messy in terms of its genre, its plot, and its characters, but that very messiness is part of why it feels like such a richly human book. The pages of Drawing Blood are stuffed with living, breathing people, and it's a pleasure to get to know them.

[Note: all page numbers from the limited James Cahill hardcover edition]

Scott Smith - The Ruins

Like, I suspect, many a reader, my interest in The Ruins was first sparked by the Stephen King quote on the cover. The best horror novel of the new century, King says. High praise indeed. Smith does, in fact, lay a superb foundation for an excellent horror novel. Unfortunately, he never gets past the foundations.

Enjoying a vacation in the Mexican sun, two American couples lounge on the beach and party with their fellow tourists. Though none of them speak Greek, they befriend three Greeks. And they befriend a German man named Mathias. Mathias says he has a brother, but they haven't seen him. When they grow to know Mathias better, he tells them that that brother went to an archaeological dig and hasn't been back since. The group, looking to help and looking for a great day amidst the ruins, agree to head out to the site to see what happened. The journey's ominous. Eleven miles down a jungle road, and the driver warns them off the whole time. When they reach the hill the dig's atop, they find the armed denizens of the nearby Mayan village at its base. When they dare to put a foot on the vine covered hill, the Mayans refuse to let them down. Before long, they find the decomposed corpses along the hill's bottom, shot through with arrows as they tried to flee. The tourists are trapped, and, needless to say, things only get worse from there.

The vine, they come to realize, is at the center of it all. It's not just omnipresent, not just absurdly fast growing. It doesn't only feast on dead flesh. The vine is malevolent. Worse, it moves. It thinks. The vine is trying to destroy them. It lays traps. It stretches out to devour any blood they spill. It crawls into their wounds. It makes the sound of laughter. It begins to speak, imitating their voices to drive them apart. One of the tourists, Eric, is even sure that it's inside him, growing in the cavity in his chest, shoving his organs aside as it strengthens.

Quarantined by jailors they can't hope to plead with, trapped with an impossible menace that seeks their death, the characters and the reader discover that the hot Yucatan sun is no barrier to claustrophobia.  Early on, Eric begins to ask: Who are they? (p. 28) He doesn't just mean the Mayans outside. He doesn't just mean the Greek and the German that they're with. He doesn't even just mean his friends. No, even Eric himself is now a mystery to the question's asker. Here, pushed to and past the brink of sanity, the characters discover things about themselves and each other that they wouldn't have thought possible. Quickly, they diverge into two groups. One, led by and sometimes only consisting of Jeff, is always planning, always ready to take any measures aimed at survival, no matter how grotesque or futile. The rest don't have his nerve. Or, alternatively, don't have his inhumanity.

Agency seems the chief question. Early on, before the troubles reach their peak, one character thinks back to how a relative of theirs cautioned them against simply reacting until, one day, they realized they had let life pass them by. It's necessary to plan, that relative cautions them. Planning, always planning – because that was what it meant to be alive (p. 422), one character eventually concludes. But such planning is rendered impotent by the constricting vines. Destiny is not in the characters' hands. At best, Jeff can struggle to stay alive for just a few days longer. Escape, the ultimate questions of life and death, are not in their hands.

Amidst all this, Smith's prose is not flashy but is often quite good, especially when it comes to the creation of specific and horrific images, the best of which is, I believe, the following: He believed that if he were to cut himself at this spot, just the smallest of incisions, the plant would tumble outward into the light, smeared with his blood, like some horrific newborn, writhing and twisting its flowers opening and closing, a dozen tiny mouths begging to be fed. (p. 300) The characters begin hard to tell apart, and the women could have used more differentiation, but Jeff and Eric both come off extremely well, the former characterized by his utter determination and the latter by his perpetual and ultimately mad wordgames, making increasingly frightened word chains that begin with a certain letter, such as: Dreaming, delirium, dying… (p. 300) Mathias, too, has a quiet strength about him, one that promises powerful things to come.

All of this potential – the set up, the claustrophobia, the questions of planning and identity, the characters – isn't so much squandered as let sit. Having laid the groundwork, Smith proceeds to capitalize on none of it, and it was in the last few pages of the novel that I realized my worst fears were going to come true – none of it was going anywhere. The Ruins is at once far too long and far too short. At 500 pages, it is a fair bit longer than the average horror novel. By switching among perspectives, Smith is able to keep the tension up for most of that length, but, at some point, the reader stops and wonders what's happened and where it's all going. And while The Ruins had five hundred pages worth of buildup, it has none at all of answers, climax, or development.

The chief problem with it all is the abrupt ending, coming from nowhere to slay the whole cast without any dignity or, save in one fantastic case, any climax. The buildup of interpersonal tension, of questions of what survival is worth morally, of different plans – all of that goes nowhere. After the fairly early revelation that it is not only malevolent but sentient, the vine goes nowhere. Its origins remain an utter mystery. It has some grand evil plan for the characters' demise, we are told, but things never come to that point, and it comes to nothing. All of the rising tension and promises Smith makes add up to nothing. The climax could have been slotted in at page two hundred without significant alteration.

Perhaps because of his quote on the cover, The Ruins invites comparisons to Stephen King. Specifically, in my mind, to some of the stories in Skeleton Crew. One gets the sense that Smith is attempting to be the collection's highpoint, "The Mist": an epic in terms of impact and emotion, even if confined to a single area, a statement about man's purpose and abilities in the face of inevitability and the world beyond him. He doesn't quite make it. In addition, The Ruins seems to be striving to be "Survivor Type," the horrific tale of a man who will do absolutely anything to survive. But the characters in The Ruins are never pushed to that point; though disaster is perpetually looming, and though Jeff makes grim statements, they are never actually made to face the consequences of their hard decisions.

Ultimately, the King story that most resembles The  Ruins is "The Raft". In both, young Americans (joined in the novel by nicely exotic foreigners) enter a seemingly innocuous area for relaxation and are relentlessly pursued, hemmed in, and then slaughtered by an utterly inexplicable force. In my review of Skeleton Crew, I said that The Raft was "extremely enjoyable," and it was. It was darkly claustrophobic, filled with inevitability and doom, and it didn't overstay its welcome. The first two certainly apply to The Ruins. The last one, not so much. It's not that the formula doesn't work for Smith. It does. Most of The Ruins is suspenseful and well done. It's just that he doesn't hit a single note that King doesn't, and he takes more than ten times as long to hit those notes. Without anything (anything at all) else thrown in, the story can't sustain itself over that kind of expansion. It's not so much weak as it is empty, desperately needing either an additional hundred pages to fulfill every promise and leave the reader stunned by its power or a pruning of two or three hundred pages to function as a lean and mean blow to the gut.

As is, The Ruins isn't bad at all, and you'll certainly be entertained while reading it. But it doesn't break any new ground, and, no matter how important an ancient mine shaft may be to the story, it doesn't go deeply enough at all into its own well trodden soil to justify itself.  An acceptable horror novel? Sure, I'll give it that. Best of the new century? Not even close.

Stephen King - Skeleton Crew

I've often heard that Stephen King's as good a writer of short stories as he is of novels, or – from some – that he's even better in that form, but my one experience with the man's short fiction, Everything's Eventual, did anything but confirm that opinion. Still, Everything's Eventual collected stories written relatively late in the man's career, and, as I've now said many times on this blog, all of the man's later works have failed to live up to his earlier, in my opinion. So we come to Skeleton Crew, the second collection from the man that many consider the greatest of all horror writers, and the man that – if the bibliography in this very volume's to be believed – is not only the bestselling horror author but the best selling author of all time. Does the collection live up to the man's reputation? Yes and no, really. Almost everything here's at least enjoyable, but there are two or three or more limpers for every homerun. But, of course, those homeruns sure can fly.

One of the things that I found most interesting in the collection is that many – though certainly not all – of the stories here are of a very different kind of horror from what King generally writes.  For a while now I've divided horror into two general groups: stories where the horror comes from the characters/humanity, such as the majority of King's work (The Shining, Pet Semetary, etc), and then stories where the horror comes from the unknowable world around the characters, Weird Fiction ala Lovecraft. Many stories here fall into that latter category, The Mist foremost among them. The Mist is, of course, the highest profile story here, initially released in the horror superstar anthology Dark Forces and, more recently, made into a movie and, as a result, released as a brief standalone volume (though why that would improve on the collection I've no idea). The reasons for the story's success and prevalence are damn easy to see: put simply, The Mist is one of King's best tales.

As always, King proves himself an incredible writer of people. Our narrator, David, and his wife and son are forced to huddle away from a ferocious summer storm. As they do, King humanizes each of them with quirks of diction and action, as well as the touching and believable ways that they interact with one another. Later, King extends that to the story's secondary characters, often establishing entire personalities with only a line or two, like when the narrator explains that he didn't care for Bud Brown, who seemed to fancy himself the Charles de Gaulle of the supermarket world (p. 51) or one of the descriptions of Mrs. Carmody: The easiest [person] to pick out was Mrs. Carmody in her blazing-yellow pantsuit. She looked like an advertisement for yellow fever. (p. 54)

The story proper gets started as a mist begins to approach from a nonsensical direction, a mist so dense that nothing can be glimpsed from within. As it comes, David and his son are, along with much of the town's population, in the only nearby supermarket, and it's there that they're trapped, for strange and horrible creatures walk the mist, monstrosities made up of tentacles and monolithic size that have turned the mist-drowned world into an alien hell unimaginable. The mist is change inescapable and catastrophic, and the heart of the story is the way that the ensemble cast reacts. Some collapse in despair, others refuse to believe what they be, blind themselves with regulations and routine, or try and escape their situation by fixating on an increasingly malevolent god.

Amidst all this, though, King refuses to give in to defeatism. His writing is dark, often and in this case punishingly so, but he still will not let go of the worth he sees in humanity. Carrying the fire was a very big deal for him, the narrator writes of his son. It helped him forget about being afraid. (p. 28) And it does more than that; by the end, the characters are, for all that they know, alone, and it's only their will that keeps them and all going. But King's optimism is not a blind one, and his triumphs are never easy or certain. I know that I've very often criticized the man's endings, but the ambiguous final scene of The Mist is absolutely perfect, filled at once with hope and horror in equal measures.

If The Mist challenges King's optimism, Survivor Type does its best to hack it off with a buzz saw. This  is a story of human determination, and, while reading, it's almost impossible to not think that, sometimes, it goes too far. But, as the narrator says, the only mortal sin is giving up. (p. 423) As we begin, the narrator's trapped on an island, alone and with no food. His fate seems sealed, but he disagrees and will always disagree. The center of the story soon becomes this question: How much shock-trauma can the patient stand? (p. 407) And the answer: How badly does the patient want to live? (p. 407) Well, our narrator wants to live very badly indeed, and, as the tale progresses, is forced to cut off and eat his own limbs to survive. This is a sickening story, that I won't deny, but it's written so compellingly, and with an undercurrent of the most perverted idealism, that it's impossible to ever look away. I won't be forgetting this one for a while, and I dare say you won't be either.

Beachworld, The Raft, and The Monkey are also tales of man facing an inevitable fate in an uncaring world. The first two are both extremely enjoyable, but The Monkey proves more perplexing. Essentially, the ending destroys the metaphor the story's built on. We begin as the main character sees his sons playing with a windup monkey toy that he had in his childhood. His reaction, one of abject terror, confuses them. The monkey, as we found out, dominated his youth as it clanged its cymbals together to signal each death around him. Now it's returned, and he sees it as tragedy returning to savage his idyllic life. Now, it must be stressed that the monkey itself does not kill its victims; it's not some cheap monster movie villain. No, the monkey merely clangs as they die from seemingly unrelated means. The monkey, it seems, is death, its shadow over each and every tragedy in the narrator's life. And yet, at the story's end, the protagonist succeeds in throwing the monkey into a lake, and the monkey – which has, for the entire story, been built up as a personification of death itself – is gone for good this time. […] The monkey would not be back to draw a shadow over Dennis's life or Petey's. (p. 195) So the narrator just killed death? Huh?

Of the other types of tales present, the most forgettable are generally the shortest and most violent. Here There Be Tygers is a quick story whose only event of note is the teacher being slaughtered by a tiger, but Cain Rose Up takes the cake in this category, a brief but bloody piece in which a student massacres his classmates. These certainly contain horror, but they don't make us care, and, without that, the horror's just spectacle. Most, however, are better than that, even if a fair few are competent horror like Word Processor of the Gods that show up, have a decent time, and then fade away without leaving much of an impression.

A few of the stories here distinguish themselves more in the manner of their telling than in the events told, primarily Mrs. Todd's Shortcut, The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands, and The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet. By far the most successful is the last of those just listed. The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet is a conversation between an editor, an agent, a writer, and the writer's wife, and it focuses on a story of insanity that the editor received. Of course, the editor – and King behind him – admits that the one thing the American reading public doesn't need foisted upon them is another story about Going Mad Stylishly in America […] But this story was funny. I mean, it was really hilarious. (p. 500) And so it is. The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet is absurd, simply told, and damn fun to read.

Alas, the other two frame-focused don't work nearly as well. The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands is a genteel story too proper in its telling to allow much humor beyond a polite nod and too vague and insubstantial to be particularly affecting. Mrs. Todd's Shortcut, on the other hand, is an interesting but far from exceptional tale about driving off the map and the addictions and dangers therein. In both cases, the cumbersome nature of their back and forth telling delays what satisfaction there is long past the point of sustainability, drowning their already meager cores with verbiage that's adequately written but does little or nothing to excite.

But I'm just getting lost in the details and the negatives. Those stories I've just pointed out and criticized? There are flaws in all of 'em, flaws – a tendency to excess, sentimentalism, and/or what have you – but you know what else? They're (almost) all still involving tales, and you can bet that goes double for those I didn't critique and triple for those I praised. King can make you care with a line, can pen a character like almost no one else, can draw you in with irrelevancies and keep you there with quirks and mannerisms and realities like nobody else. It's great when King generates dread thick enough for you to drown in, when he makes you laugh, and when he pens the human race's condition and downfall in a hundred page novella. But all of that's superfluous to his real charm, and, even in his weakest tales, even as King's pacing and construction and themes fall down and fall away, it's still damn hard to look away from the page and from the character's that he's so excellently birthed from nothing at all.

Skeleton Crew is like Stephen King's career in miniature. It's got a huge amount of work, all of which makes you care, almost all of which is decent,, with the occasional burst of brilliance so radiant it justifies every unnecessary word in the pieces that surround it. This is, without a doubt, worth purchasing for The Mist, and I can promise that you'll have a good time with just about all the rest, even if damn few of them will still be kicking around in your skull two weeks later at the least expected moments.

Standouts: The Mist, Survivor Type, The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet

Best Reads of 2010

I read 134 books in 2010. The following are my twelve favorites. For variety's sake, each author is limited to a single work, and books that made the previous Best Released list will not be considered here.  I’ll post my complete reading list for the year in a few days, so you know what I’m drawing from here.

In alphabetical order, we’ve got:

Review here.

Andreyev’s characters try and often fail to find meaning, their lives so well portrayed that the century’s gap between the tales’ writing and reading does not dim their impact in the slightest. This collection is often startlingly dark, with stories like The Red Laugh painting our whole world with their hellish brush, and other tales like The Abyss showing compassion and innocence defiled, destroyed, and left by the roadside. Andreyev is a master of pace, capable of making a man’s final night seem like years and of making the longest waits and isolations heavy with their inevitable ending. Though the exclusion of one of Andreyev’s best stories, Lazarus, is disappointing, Visions is still an incredible work.

Bakker’s debut is a work of powerful, vivid prose and thought provoking ideas, offering genuine insight while also succeeding at the standards by which mainline Epic Fantasy is judged. Though there are pacing issues, their detrimental effect was diminished on reread (this was my second time through), and those problems are ultimately inconsequential in the face of what’s presented. Bakker's characterization is deep, if miserable, and sympathetic, if deplorable. The various societies of Bakker’s world walk a fine line between recreating history and pure imagination, falling to one side or the other as their prominence dictates, and the magic here is innovative and excellently depicted. Highly recommended for any fans of fantasy.

The Master and Margarita crackles with vitriolic wit. Bulgakov’s writing is impassioned, outlandish, and brilliant. He can make you care for his characters. He can make you laugh at his characters. He can make you hate his characters. The Master and Margarita uses excellently realized fantasy to criticize and examine the oppressive world around it. This is a classic of genre and literature.

Malazan is a bizarre mix of larger than life fantasy and Erikson’s philosophical and social musings. The series is far from flawless, but Erikson’s large cast and powerful prose make each of the volumes satisfying and often exemplary. When it comes to balancing visceral entertainment and more cerebral pleasures, the early volumes often fell too far to the shallow-but-fun side of the spectrum, while Toll the Hounds almost wholly sacrificed plot for the sake of writing and theme. House of Chains is one of the few volumes in the series that manages to flawlessly blend the two elements. The volume features the introduction of Karsa Orlong, beginning with his extended viewpoint, and then takes us through the height of the Seven Cities rebellion. The new ground level perspectives introduced with the Malazan army that comes into play here are well done, and the battles are mixed with the atmosphere of other, imaginative scenes that take place in the farthest reaches of Erikson’s creation.

Up until last night, American Gods was on this list. Then I read Sandman. This is a graphic novel of startling scope and imagination, with a grace of writing and presence of atmosphere that make it remarkable in any category. The sheer depravity of 24 Hours and the power of The Sound of Her Wings together managed to make Preludes & Nocturnes one of my favorite reads of 2010, and I’ll even say that Gaiman edged out Moore for my favorite Graphic Novel writer. And I hear that the first volume is the weakest of the series. Is that even possible?

Review here.

Gilman’s prose in Gears of the City is among the finest that I’ve read this year. His characters are theatrical masterpieces, cackling and monolithic in their flaws and triumphs, and his world is oppressive and immersive. I could try and rationally argue for its spot here, but I think I’d rather let Gilman do that for me and just give you another excerpt of the novel’s writing:

Later, as Arjun and Brace-Bel hid in the darkness of their bolt-hole, Brace-Bel would breathlessly recount his adventures in the Museum. He explained that he had always, in his strange life, been the villain, or worse, the laughingstock; but he’d ventured into the enemy’s lair in search of his true beloved like a hero of the highest and most chivalrous romance. His purpose had been pure as the purest knight’s, because he expected nothing from [her], nothing at all. He became what he was always meant to be. It was laughable, humiliating, but also superb… (p. 233)

Review here.

Joe Hill’s debut collection is a brilliant piece of horror, which also happens to examine just what horror is and how it works. Hill is capable of visceral darkness, as he proves again and again in tales like Abraham’s Boys and In the Rundown, but he’s also adept at moments of heartwarming melancholy that leave your world feeling drained of color in comparison afterwards, as he shows in Pop Art and the title story. There’s the occasional weaker story, but they don’t succeed in bringing down the power of the collection. Hill proves himself right out of the gate and doesn’t let up; 20^th Century Ghosts is masterful and self conscious horror.

When I reread The Shining in March, I said that it was the best novel by the greatest modern horror author. Now, having discovered Ligotti, the latter part of that statement is almost painfully off (especially when one considers King’s lamentable later work), but that does nothing to dilute the power of The Shining. This is pretty much a textbook example of how modern horror should be written. The characters are complex and sympathetic, their relationships organic in their development, and the horror comes from the characters and their relationship to the world. It’s true that the ending is a disappointment, but what precedes those last pages is so powerful that the ending’s weakness fails to damage the work. This is a must read for horror fans.

Thomas Ligotti’s work is hypnotically powerful and devastatingly depressing. The man’s prose is crystalline, flawless and ornate. His grasp of atmosphere is equal to Lovecraft’s, and those are not words I say lightly. Choosing whether to include Songs of a Dead Dreamer or Teatro Grottesco here was very difficult. I ended up going with the latter. It’s less outright horror, operating even more on a cerebral level than Songs… did. The stories here are crushing, but they’re so well written that they are, somehow, beautiful at the same time. Review coming.

McCarthy’s work is brutally, horrifically violent. Most action stories, whether prose or film, manage to make violence glorious and exciting. Blood Meridian does the opposite. This is a story devoid of sympathetic characters and understandable motivations. It is a story with no goal in sight. It is, simply, violence, brutal and uncompromising, unending and representing the entirety of the world. And the reader, mesmerized by McCarthy’s masterful prose, has no choice but to keep reading.

Moore’s work is dark, powerful, and multifaceted; his inclusion in this year’s Best Of was assured. But that still leaves the question of which of his works to show. V for Vendetta (review forthcoming) was very powerful and generally devoid of some of the flaws of Watchmen (the ending-from-nowhere, for instance). Still, I had to go for the later work. Watchmen was generally deeper, and the character of Rorschach and his ultimate decision is still present in my mind despite having been read months earlier. If what you think when you hear super heroes isn't a nuanced examination of the nature of power, you need to read this.

After Dark is the story of a few almost unconnected characters in the early morning hours of Tokyo. There’s little to no overarching plot. Going in, I didn’t think that I would love this book, but Murakami’s prose made me an easy convert. This novel is beautiful, and I mean that in the fullest sense of the word. Tokyo is vibrant, alive, and bizarre, and the different characters came to feel as real as anyone I’ve ever met. Review’s on the way.

(THE DUBIOUS HONOR OF) WORST NOVEL

Review here.

This was no contest. Sheepfarmer’s Daughter was boring, and that's just about the worst thing that can be said of entertainment. The characters are uninteresting, the plot is uninvolving, the themes are occasionally offensive but generally unremarkable, and prose is wholly devoid of style. When reading is a chore best handled in fifteen minute increments, you know that something’s gone wrong.

THE WORKS UNCONSIDERED

When compiling this list, I left Shakespeare and Dostoevsky out of consideration for a variety of reasons. First, both are classic authors. You don’t need me to tell you that. More importantly, with Shakespeare, there’s the fact that I find it difficult to view his work in the same way that I do another author’s, and I’m not talking about quality here. Shakespeare is on such a pedestal, and his work has so seeped into popular culture, that one’s expectations going in are monolithic, and rare is (at least from what I’ve seen) the reader who, going into Hamlet (to pick a play at random) does not know the majority of the plot. If I had included Dostoevsky and Shakespeare, they would have both made the list (King Lear beating out Hamlet, for me), but that’s not to say that they would have been my favorite books on it.

Up and Coming (and Essential?) in November

Everyone has, of course, heard of The Wheel of Time and its penultimate volume, Towers of Midnight. Whether you’re a long term fan or you first heard about the series with the recent embargo shitstorm (in which case you’ve probably never heard of Lord of the Rings either, but nevermind) you’re probably well aware of the back story: the deaths, the splits, the outlines, the Brandon Sandersons, etc. All very exciting stuff, a massive hype storm that every once in a while turns malevolent, all with a book at the center. And early opinions of the book are generally quite positive, as Aidan nicely sums up with his review round up.


Half of me wants to grab this book right now and tear through it. I can still vividly remember the time when King was my favorite author. I’ve still probably read more books by King than anyone else, though he no longer occupies that favorite spot. And the reason why is why the other half of me is begging that overexcited bit to calm the hell down and look the other way. As followers of this blog now, my reactions to later King have not been positive. In fact, I went so far as to, in the comments of my The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon review, say that I wasn’t buying any new King. Will I be able to stick with that in the face of a new collection? Not sure…

Anyway, for those of you who aren't quite as conflicted, Full Dark no Stars is a collection of four novellas, ala Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight, and comes out on the ninth.


R. Scott Bakker’s second thriller’s due in a little bit if you live in the US, some time ago if you’re elsewhere. Neuropath was a mixture of brilliant and disappointing, but Bakker’s other books and blog posts (generally) fall within the first category, so I have high hopes yet. Early word on Disciple is generally good, with perhaps the most in-depth review that I’ve come across being here, though the same blogger’s list of quotes from the opening pages of the novel is probably more promotional in nature and less likely to color your expectations for those still undecided (leaving the juicy review for when you’re trying to sort out your own interpretations).


I’m a Malazan fan. A rather large (and moderately obsessive) one, actually. Ever since I finished Dust of Dreams, I’ve been going through a bit of withdrawal, and that was only a few months back. And yet, I’ve had my problems with Esslemont. I’m looking forward to Stonewielder, yeah, but, an unfortunate little part of me is more hoping that Esslemont doesn’t ruin any of Erikson’s nicely established characters than that Esslemont does a good job, having already given up on the latter. Unfair? Hell yes. That’s why I’m trying to hit that part with a shovel. In the meantime, you can check out Pat’s glowing review.

Terror, A List of Those Few Special Scenes

I don’t think that horror is defined by fear. Atmosphere, yes, certainly, but there’s a difference between atmosphere and fear. For me, atmosphere is the creeping sensation that the story’s real, that it’s inescapable, that it’s all around you. It’s what makes you believe in everything the author says and swallow every loathsome idea whole and unexamined.

Pure terror, though, is something rarer. Anyone who loves to read is obviously changed to a greater or lesser degree by what they’re reading at the moment, but to have that change become the dominant portion of your existence, for words on a page to push the fight or flight reflex to such extremes that you’re ready to beg for your life, well, that takes talent. So no, I don’t think that terror is the point of horror, but I definitely do think that it’s evidence that the author’s doing something right.

This is a Halloween list of those few books that have managed to terrify me, that made me forgot all about it just being a book, that had me on the edge of my seat with one hand gripping a the armrest so hard that my knuckles were turning white, frantically wondering how I could flee the room before It got there. Most of these scenes are not the climaxes of their respective books. Sometimes, they’re almost a throwaway. Yet, without exception, they all scared the shit out of me. So let’s take a look.

Before do, though, a warning: the following has spoilers for all books discussed.


To some degree, I think we all fear being helpless, and I’m damn positive that Evenson was thinking of that when he wrote one of the opening scenes in the second novella of Last Days. Kline is grievously wounded and under guard at a hospital. It starts: “Mr. Kline,” said the voice. “We’re coming for you.” And then the line went dead. (p. 113) There is nowhere for Kline to go, no way for him to get there.

He wakes up as his guard is killed, and then the assassin is standing over his bed. What follows is a game of wits, with one player feigning sleep the entire time, the whole struggle between them one of stealth, with near certain death hanging over every action. Unpredictability is the name of the game, and careful plans are devised, enacted, and abandoned, all without the other party ever knowing about their conception:

Inverting the syringe, she tapped the air out.

Now, he thought, tensing slightly, she will bring the needle close so as to inject it into my arm. When she does, I’ll plunge the mirror’s stylus into her eye and will kill her did.

Only it didn’t work quite the way he imagined. Instead of coming close and injecting it into his arm, she simply injected it into his IV bag. (p. 116)

Gripping, original, and paralyzing in its strength; this is how you write a horror scene, as far as I’m concerned.


In my review I said that the hypnosis scenes were horrifying, but it’s hard to really understand just how much of a betrayal it is to watch your own vicariously inhabited and completely trusted body go insane, to watch it betray everything it holds dear:

Stop her, said the only voice left in the world, and as she lunged past him, Judge saw himself catch her hair in one first and snap her head back. She was wretched off her feet. Judge pivoted and threw her down. The furniture jumped when she hit the floor. A stack of CDs on an end table slid off and crashed ot the floor without a sound. Jude’s foot found her stomach, a good hard kick, and she jerked herself into a fetal position. The moment after he’d done it, he didn’t know why he’d done it.

There you go, said the dead man. (p. 114)

Powerful and painful, Hill’s writing leaves you feeling complicit in an act that never happened.

I first read 'Salem's Lot quite a few years ago, on a Sierra Club hiking trip with my family. We’d just gotten back from some six mile uphill monstrosity, and I sat down in the lodge to read. I opened my book, and the two boys within decided they were going to walk through the woods to get to their friends house. As they walked, the woods creaked secretively around them (p. 115), and I started to get a little on edge. A branch snapped somewhere behind them, almost stealthily. (p. 115) Alright, more than a litte. Another branch snapped off to their left. (p. 115) A lot more than a little. Another branch snapped. Well, wait, calm down, Nat, they’re just kids. Nothing bad’s going to happen to the kids, right? Not quite right, as it turns out:

“In just a minute we’ll see the streetlights and feel stupid but it will be good to feel stupid so cunt steps. One…two…three…”

Ralphie shrieked.

“I see it! I see the ghost! I SEE IT!” (p. 116)

I skipped the next day’s hike, in case you were wondering.

But why was the scene so scary? I’m not sure. On reread a few weeks ago, it was still powerful, but nowhere near as horrifying. I think that the excellence was in large part derived from my situation – being a kid of roughly comparable age to the protagonists, in the woods – but the scene is still perfectly developed. The reader, of course, knows that there’s evil afoot well before it takes place and sympathies far more with Ralphie’s whining than his older brother’s rationalism, but the way the atmosphere gradually builds as branches snap, the way that (even at the end) the older boy is convinced they’re at least being hunted by a human foe, the way the scene climaxes in disorientation and uncertainty, it’s all great writing and Stephen King at his chilling best.


This is the first book that I read that scared me, actually. I’d read Cell before hand, and Needful Things, but both were more entertaining than upsetting. This one, on the other hand, dripped atmosphere. We’re a third of the way through, here, and Danny’s investigating Room 217. He goes into the bathroom, and sees the expected corpse in the tub. Well, duh. It’s a horror novel, after all. The woman was sitting up. (p. 326) Oh shit, that wasn’t supposed to happen. Danny runs, reaches the door, but The door would not open, would not, would not, would not. (p. 328) Shit. Double shit. But it’s okay, because Danny figures out how to get clear, so it’s all gonna be fine:

His eyelids snapped down. His hands curled into balls. His shoulders hunched with the effort of his concentration:

(Nothing there nothing there not there at all NOTHING THERE THERE IS NOTHING!)

Time passed. And he was just beginning to relax, just beginning to realize that the door must be unlocked and he could go, when the years-damp, bloated, fish-smelling hands closed softly around his throat and he was turned implacably around to stare into that dead and purple face. (p. 328)

No. God damn it, no! That wasn’t supposed to happen. These things just aren’t supposed to. The kid doesn’t get taken by the monster. He was okay, god damn it, O fucking kay! For about thirty seconds, I was determined to never read another word of The Shining. Then I decided that, if I did that, I would never know what had happened, and that would be far, far worse. So I finished and loved the book. But that scene scared me a hair’s breadth short of badly enough to make me give up on horror, and it did much the same thing on reread.

I think the reasons it’s so effective are fairly obvious, here. The investigation of the disturbance is something that we all know, and we play along with King for a bit when he first shows us the monster. Nice description, cool special effects, etc. Then it sits up, and the stakes raise a bit, but it’s okay, because Danny’s running to the door.

This is where the scene goes from entertaining to brilliant. See, here, horror comes from hope. Danny’s going to be okay, if he can just get to that door, except that it won’t open. Alright, fine, we expect the first attempt to fail, but there is a way out, there certainly is because Danny’s found it. And then King snatches that hope away, and it’s far more painful to have your chances dashed before your eyes than it is to have never had a chance.


The Ash Tree builds up its story of witchcraft and vengeance in an engaging but not revolutionary manner. Your average horror reader will no doubt be able to guess that when the rest of the party wishes Sir Richard a better night, his odds aren’t too great. Things happen exactly as you’d expect. What you probably won’t expect, though, is the friendly, inviting way in which the tragedy is told, the amiability of the words multiplying their effect tenfold:

And now we are in his bedroom, with the light out and the Squire in bed. The room is over the kitchen, and the night outside still and warm, so the window stands open.

There is very little light about the bedstead, but there is a strange movement there; it seems as if Sir Richard were moving his head rapidly to and fro with only the slightest possible sound. And now you would guess, so deceptive is the half-darkness, that he had several heads, round and brownish, which move back and forward, even as low as his chest. It is a horrible illusion. Is it nothing more? There! something drops off the bed with a soft plump, like a kitten, and is out the window in a flash; another – four – and after that there is quiet again.

“Thou shalt seek me in the morning, and I shall not be.”

As with Sir Mathew, so with Sir Richard – dead and black in his bed! (p. 48)

The simple, unadorned language, the easy candor of the words, all of it lures you in to the easy confessions of a friend. Instead, you’re treated to the writhing monstrosities that cover a sleeping, a dying, man’s form.

Lovecraft is unmatched when it comes to atmosphere. A Shadow Over Innsmouth builds up a rich tapestry of history and weaves a palpable feeling of unease. Still, Lovecraft stories are more cerebral than visceral, the ultimate horror more philosophical than emotional. Or, at least, that’s true of every story besides A Shadow Over Innsmouth. Because, see, while I was getting drawn further and further in by the view from the window, something was coming up the stairs:

I was irresolutely speculating on when I had better attack the northward door, and on how I could least audibly manage it, when I noticed that the vague noises underfoot had given place to a fresh and heavier creaking of the stairs. A wavering flicker of light shewed through my transom, and the boards of the corridor began to groan with a ponderous load. Muffled sounds of possible vocal origin approached, and at length a firm knock came on my door. (p. 842)

That knock broke all the rules. Lovecraft stories were about approaching elder gods, about learning horrible truths, about realizing that some cosmic force was about to crush your world without ever really knowing it was there. A Shadow Over Innsmouth, though, climaxes with a chase scene. All of a sudden, the cosmic force was right fucking behind you, and you were running for your life. The descriptive language that drew you so far into the story is suffocating, trapping the character in a world of sludgy details.

I read this story in a sitting at an airport, and I didn’t look up once until I was done. If I’d gotten there a few minutes later, I would’ve missed my plane without noticing until I’d turned the last page. As it was, I was practically shaking when I took my seat.


Sandkings is the story of a horrible thing happening to a horrible person. No big deal, right? Sucks for him, we laugh, move on, etc. Well, not quite. Because this bad thing is an army of sandkings all over every inch of his house. And those things are freaking terrifying, no matter who they’re directed at. It’s impossible to appreciate how much of a crescendo this tale builds to without reading it. The sandkings are everywhere and unstoppable, and the specialists called in to defeat them are slaughtered. The main character runs and…well, the twist in the final sentences is just yet another break breakingly awful thing about this story. Unfortunately, no quotes here, as I’ve been meaning to reread Sandkings for a while now, and I don’t want to dilute the effect by rustling through it a few days beforehand.


Banquet for the Damned’s opening is filled with little dream sequences. To crib my own review:

Throughout the first quarter of the narrative, we find ourselves inside character after character’s heads. They are not in their beds. They do not know how they got where they are. They have been suffering increasingly disturbing nightmares for days on end. Within a few pages, they will be dead. The inevitability of these sections is horrifying, and I found myself reading as fast as I could, sometimes having to force myself to not skip whole paragraphs, because growing acquainted with these pre-damned characters, understanding their thoughts and what makes them tick, was simply too painful. And, since this is horror, I mean that in the best possible way.

Horror can come from hope and from hopelessness, and this was definitely the latter. Disorientation begins the scenes and death ends them, the same every time, and you’re left watching as yet another sleepwalker is ripped to shreds. It’s a night empty of cloud and as still as space (p. 1), and the reader’s all too aware that it will end with death.


So, readers, what're your special scenes?