Tag: Body horror

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First blood to Rampo

 

© Tuttle

 

And another Halloween-inspired post…

 

Japanese writer Hirai Taro, who lived from 1894 to 1965, was such a fan of Edgar Allan Poe, America’s doyen of macabre and mysterious fiction, that he used the penname ‘Edogawa Rampo’.  English-language names sound somewhat stretched and distorted when converted to the syllable-systems of Japanese – my own name is pronounced ‘Ee-an Sumisu’ – and Taro’s penname was basically a Japan-ised version of ‘Edgar Allan Poe’.  Say ‘Edogawa Rampo’ quickly a few times and you’ll find yourself reciting the name of Baltimore’s greatest man of letters.

 

Accordingly, during his literary career, Rampo wrote in similar genres to Poe.  He didn’t merely pen horror stories.  Poe’s name is now so synonymous in the West with tales of terror like The Tell-Tale Heart (1843), The Masque of the Red Death (1842), The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), The Pit and the Pendulum (1842), The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845) and so on that it’s often forgotten how innovative he was working in other genres.  In particular, he helped create the detective story with his trilogy of stories about crime investigator C. Auguste Dupin, The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), The Mystery of Maire Roget (1842) and The Purloined Letter (1844).  And it was largely in detective and crime fiction that Rampo made his name.  He even helped to found the Japanese Mystery Writers’ Club.

 

Rampo’s Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1956) is an English-language collection of nine of his best short stories.  Not only does it take its name from Tales of Mystery and Imagination, described by Wikipedia as ‘a popular title for posthumous compilations of writings by American author, essayist and poet Edgar Allan Poe’, but it combines stories from those two genres Poe helped to popularise in the early 19th century, the horror and the detective / mystery ones.  It has to be said the two styles mesh together nicely in this collection.  There’s a weirdness in Rampo’s detective fiction that ensures it doesn’t feel that different, tonally, from his morbid horror stories.

 

Among the crime stories, you get villains attempting to commit the perfect murder with schemes that involve living a double life as an invented character (The Cliff), impersonating someone who looks exactly like them (The Twins) and the fear of sleepwalkers that they might do something ghastly whilst moving in a trance-like state (Two Crippled Men).  All three have a last-minute twist wherein the main characters get their come-uppance from someone who’s even smarter than they are, or by a small but fatal act of negligence – the sort of minor blunder that would have Peter Falk’s Lieutenant Columbo swooping down like a hawk.  Talking of Falk’s beloved shabby-but-canny TV detective, The Psychological Test is a very Columbo-esque tale of how a pair of investigators use an ingenious method to get a suspect in a murder case to incriminate himself.

 

Meanwhile, The Red Chamber takes a trope popular in 19th and early 20th century English fiction, that of a comfortable, wooden-panelled gentlemen’s club where the tweedy members congregate after dark and, with the lights turned down, proceed to tell each other scary stories.  In Rampo’s gentlemen’s club, however, things get shaken up when the evening’s storyteller, a newcomer, boasts about being responsible for “the murder of nearly a hundred people, all as yet undetected’ and proceeds to explain how he did it and got away with it.  Several harrowing twists later, it’s no surprise that the story’s narrator, a long-term member of the club, concludes: “…we unanimously agreed to disband.”

 

The other four stories in Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination are macabre ones.  They possess the same oddness and intensity of his crime stories, but cranked up to higher levels.  The Hell of Mirrors is about a man who becomes obsessed with optics, with ‘anything capable of reflecting an image… magic lanterns, telescopes, magnifying glasses, kaleidoscopes, prisms and the like’ and with mirrors: ‘concave, convex, corrugated, prismatic.’  Typically with Rampo’s fiction, this obsession spills over into another obsession, a sexual one.  The protagonist is soon using telescopes to pry through the windows of his female neighbours and using periscopes to ‘get a full view of the rooms of his many young maidservants.’  The story reaches its climax when he devises a mirrored, optical device so depraved it ultimately induces madness.

 

The Traveller with the Pasted Rag Picture, on the other hand, is the one Rampo story in this collection that veers off into the supernatural.  It reminded me very slightly of the M.R. James story The Mezzotint, though the picture in that story was a spookily lifelike one that recorded a horrific event.  In Rampo’s story, a similarly lifelike picture serves as a testimony to a sad, doomed and one-sided romance.

 

That leaves two stories, The Human Chair and The Caterpillar, which I think are masterpieces.  The Human Chair concerns an ugly and reclusive craftsman who makes a living fashioning luxurious chairs, whilst getting a perverse kick out of imagining ‘the types of people who would eventually curl up’ in them.  Eventually, driven insane by his desire to get intimate with the folk who’ll acquire and use his chairs, he designs a bulky one containing a secret, human-sized cavity, inside which he hides himself.  The chair and its maker end up in a hotel lobby, where the latter gets his jollies from feeling the bodies of the guests rest on top of him.  No one “suspected even for a fleeting moment that the soft ‘cushion’ on which they were sitting was actually human flesh with blood circulating in its veins – confined in a strange world of darkness.”

 

The story is told in the form of a confession, sent as a letter to a famous lady novelist.  While she reads it, she begins to wonder about the suspiciously large and comfy chair she’s seated in, which has found its way to her study after being in a hotel.  There comes a final twist that nullifies what’s happened before – or perhaps doesn’t.

 

The Caterpillar, written in 1929, is an early, literary example of ‘body horror’.  The central character is an unfortunate young army officer so maimed and mutilated in battle that he comes home resembling the larval-form insect of the title.  This puts understandable strain on the officer’s wife, upon whom, totally helpless, he depends for care and attention.  In fact, The Caterpillar is more about the wife than the husband, with the hideous situation gradually pushing her into the realms of madness – of sadistic madness, because she starts taking her woes out on her husband, who can’t do anything to defend himself.  The story works both as a feminist tract, showing the plight of women whom society expects to be wholly devoted and subservient to their husbands, and as a horror story exploiting male fears of emasculation.  It’s a grim and powerful read, packing as much of a punch as it did when it first appeared, nearly a century ago.

 

I think the original Edgar Allan Poe would approve of Rampo’s tales.  They’re deliciously dark and twisted, and frequently ingenious, and sometimes funny too – a lot of the humour derives from how his villains, when telling their stories, like to revel in their own cleverness and degeneracy.  It’s just a pity that Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination is the only English-language collection by Rampo I’ve come across.  I’d really like to read more of his stuff.  Unlike a certain character played by Sylvester Stallone, I wouldn’t mind seeing a Rampo 2, Rampo 3, Rampo 4 and Rampo 5.

 

From wikipedia.org / © The Mainichi Graphic

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Jim Mountfield gets activated

 

© Cloaked Press, LLC

 

Back in September 2020, I had a story called The Nuclei included in an anthology called Xenobiology: Stranger Creatures.  All its stories, in the words of one of the editors, Michele Dutcher, shared a theme of “biology that has been artificially produced, or biological creatures that have been produced by genetic material being acted upon by outside sources to produce something new.”  Being about artificially-created biological creatures, The Nuclei was classifiable as science fiction, but it definitely lurked at the horror end of the sci-fi spectrum.  In fact, the creatures featured in The Nuclei were the result of me attempting to imagine the most revolting monsters possible.  For that reason, the story was credited to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I use for my macabre fiction.

 

The Nuclei was also a post-apocalyptic story, set in the ruins of Edinburgh – we definitely need more post-apocalyptic stories set in the capital of Scotland – after my revolting, artificially-created creatures had decimated humanity and brought human civilisation to an end.  The human characters, some ragged, malnourished survivors who belonged either to a loony religious cult or to an equally loony militia, referred to an event called ‘the Activation’ shortly before civilisation fell, when the artificially-created horrors were first unleashed on mankind.  That gave me the idea of writing a prequel to the story, detailing what happened at the Activation, i.e., on Day One of the nightmare.

 

I have now written that story, called The Activation, and have just had it published under the penname of Jim Mountfield too.  It features in Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024, the latest instalment in the annual Nightmare Fuel collections of scary fiction put out by Cloaked Press, LLC.  As its title indicates, the theme for this year’s collection was body horror, which Wikipedia defines as “a subgenre of horror fiction that intentionally showcases grotesque or psychologically disturbing violations of the human body or of another creature.”  Well, the modus operandi of the creatures in The Nuclei involved a lot of body horror, so this seemed a natural home for its prequel.

 

The setting and main character of The Activation were inspired by something that happened to me once and by somebody I used to know.  Firstly, the happening was a misadventure I had while travelling on the London Tube back in 2016, somewhere between King’s Cross and Liverpool Street Stations – I must have been on either the Circle, Metropolitan or Hammersmith and City lines.  A young woman had what is euphemistically described as an ‘episode’ and started screaming hysterically at her fellow passengers.  Unfortunately, among the things she screamed was the claim that she was carrying a bomb.  The train promptly stopped at the next station and remained there with its doors sealed for 20 or 25 minutes.  Nobody could get in or out.  Meanwhile, the woman kept shrieking gibberish at everyone.

 

At one point, a pair of British Transport Police officers walked down the train, but didn’t actually stop to deal with the unhinged woman when they reached her.  No, they just walked past her, to the train’s far end, and then walked back – again doing nothing when they passed her a second time.  Later, when I researched the protocol for occurrences like this, I found out that the Transport Police officers had done an ‘assessment of the incident scene’.  Satisfied that they knew where the problem was, and that it wasn’t a case of terrorism, and that there weren’t any other problems elsewhere, they then informed the local police and told them where to find the problem.  When those police arrived on the platform, the nearest set of doors were opened so that they could board the train and remove said problem.

 

Obviously, this took time.  And with those doors sealed until the local police came, it made me wonder what would have happened to the folk stuck on the train if there’d been a real terrorist present.  I guess we were considered ‘expendable’.

 

By the time the Transport Police did their assessment, it’d become clear to everybody that the young woman causing the trouble wasn’t a terrorist.  She was just some poor, mixed-up soul who’d probably forgotten to take her medication that day.  I realised this when, at one point during her ravings, she started listing ‘all the great prophets in history’.  These were Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed and… Zippy, the gimpy zip-mouthed puppet from the British kids’ TV show Rainbow (1972-92).

 

I had to put that detail into my story The Activation.  Although, because Nightmare Fuel: Body Horrors is an American publication, I changed Zippy from Rainbow to the better-known Cookie Monster from Sesame Street (1969-present).  Sorry about that, Zippy, but you just aren’t internationally famous enough.

 

© Teddington Studios / Thames Television

© Sesame Workshop / BBC / From X

 

Secondly, the main character in The Activation was inspired by a former colleague, a PE teacher, who was employed by an English private school I worked at in 2002.  He was an ex-soldier.  One evening, the two of us were having a pint in the neighbourhood pub when he told me – with a preliminary request not to say anything about it to the school’s headmistress – that when he went to the school to be interviewed for the PE-teacher position, he’d been homeless.  At the time he was sleeping inside some giant concrete pipes at the side of a road that were soon to be popped in the ground for a sewage or drainage project.  Homelessness among former members of the Armed Forces is something that’s tragically common.

 

Anyway, for The Activation, I thought the hero would be somebody with experiences similar to my old colleague – a former soldier, homeless, desperately trying to turn his life around.  And then he gets caught up in the hideous events of the story and is put through hell.  Yes, I know.  I’m a sadist.

 

Containing 14 tales of grisly, gruelling terror, Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024 can now be purchased on Kindle here and as a paperback here.

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More sinister sides of Singapore

 

© Epigram Books

 

A couple of months ago on this blog, I reviewed an anthology of horror stories set in modern-day Singapore called, appropriately, The New Singapore Horror Collection, written by local author S.J. Huang.  Now I’ve just finished reading a collection called Fright 1, containing 11 more scary stories set in the southeast Asian city-state, which my partner was kind enough to buy for me as a Christmas present.

 

Unlike The New Singapore Horror Collection, each story in Fright 1 is penned by a different person.  These 11 writers were the top-ranking entrants in a short-fiction competition held last year.  As the book’s introduction explains, Fright 1 “showcases the winners and finalists of the 2022 Storytel Epigram Horror Prize, and celebrates all subsets of the horror genre, told with a Singaporean twist.”

 

The first thing that struck me about Fright 1 was the preponderance of female writers – eight out of 11.  This might be a surprise to the many people who’ve traditionally associated the horror genre with male writers, although anyone familiar with the work of Angela Carter, Shirley Jackson, May Sinclair, Daphne du Maurier, Anne Rice, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the criminally underrated Dorothy K. Haynes, to say nothing of Mary Shelley, would argue otherwise.  Thus, the collection was doubly interesting for me.  Not only did its stories have a setting, Singapore, that I’m not very familiar with, but many of its themes were ones that impact on women – arranged marriages, pregnancy, sexting and, generally, being wronged by duplicitous men.  These being horror stories, such themes are refracted through a lens that sends them into the realm of the supernatural and macabre.

 

Fright 1 gets off to a solid start with Meihan Boey’s The General’s Wife, which is set in past times and is about an unremarkable young woman (‘with crooked shoulders and a pockmarked face’) whose family are desperate to get her married off to someone, anyone, so that they no longer have to be responsible for her.  When a mysterious, older, wealthy man known as the ‘General’, living on one of Singapore’s little satellite islands, requests her hand in marriage for no obvious reason, they don’t ask questions.  She’s hurriedly packed off to the island.  What follows is a tale of skulduggery involving deceit and sorcery, with suggestions of Bluebeard and even Jane Eyre (1847), impressively told and grippingly paced.  My only criticism is that I found the ending slightly rushed, although it contains a satisfying hint that the story’s narrator is no longer the shrinking violet she used to be.

 

Also set in historical Singapore is Dew M. Chaiyanara’s Under the Banana Tree, which is about a kampung – the Malaysian term for village – that’s terrorised by a pontianak when it takes up residence by the tree of the title and starts making “agonised wails that pierced the night and made all the villagers rush to slam their windows shut, bolt their doors and hold each other tight.”  According to Wikipedia, a pontianak is a supernatural creature found in Singaporean, Malaysian and Indonesian folklore that “usually takes the form of a pregnant woman who is unable to give birth to a child.  Alternatively, it is often described as a vampiric, vengeful female spirit.”  A woman in the village – evidently the only person there with a spine – resolves to go and tell the ponianak to, basically, shut up.  To her surprise, she finds herself developing a bond with the creature.  She also learns that they have more in common that she could ever have imagined.

 

Meanwhile, a non-folkloric and very modern supernatural being is devised for Kelly Leow’s story Breakwater.  This posits the idea that people subjected to extreme humiliation on social media, so that their lives are ruined, they end up living in shame and they vanish from their former social circles, actually, to a certain extent, ‘die’.  Not enough to leave behind a ghost, as many people believe happens when you physically die, but enough to create a semi-ghost, a ‘shade’.  Breakwater features a serial online-abuser being trailed, unbeknownst to him, by the shades of his former victims – one of which partly narrates the story.  I liked Breakwater a lot, not only because its central conceit feels genuinely new, but also because it’s set in Singapore’s East Coast Park.  The park is at the back of my residence and is an evocative place at night, one where, as Leow observes, “Cargo ships form a ghostly city out on the horizon, lights glittering in rows like the windows of apartments.”

 

Among the male writers represented, Teo Kai Xiang’s Untitled Train Story uses another well-known part of Singapore as its setting, the city’s MRT system.  Workers digging out a new MRT line discover a mysterious tunnel that seems to have existed a long time before trains began running underground.  It’s apparently man-made, its walls are covered in strange symbols, and it’s formed out of some ‘sleek and almost metallic black substance’.  I began the story wondering if it would turn into a Singaporean variant on H.P. Lovecraft’s seminal story Pickman’s Model (1927), which helped establish the trope, now common in the horror genre, of fleshing-eating, ghoul-like creatures living in secrecy under the streets of a modern-day city – see, for example, the movies Death Line (1973) and C.H.U.D. (1984).  Later, however, it becomes clear that Xiang’s story has more in common with a different strand of Lovecraft’s work – his tales of cosmic horror.  There’s something at the end of the tunnel that isn’t just deadly.  It also has the power to do disturbing things to the minds of those who encounter it and manage to survive.

 

For my money, however, the collection’s best tale is Dave Chua’s Hantu Hijau, which in Malay means ‘green ghost’.  It’s narrated by a young girl who becomes obsessed with a ghost, a female one, that’s said to haunt her Singaporean public housing estate: “Some doubted her existence; merely a hyper-localised myth to get children to return early and in bed before eleven, but I knew she had always been here, biding her time.”  The story is atmospheric and also manages the important trick of making the reader both frightened of its ghost and sympathetic towards it.  At the same time, Chua makes it believable by lacing the supernatural plot with descriptions of the block and its assorted inhabitants (“Despite the decrepit state of some of the storeys, the residents were full of kindness and humanity”) and with accounts of the girl’s mum – a hard-pressed single mother whose desperate attempts to make money and keep them afloat gradually become shady and even criminal.  With its blend of the ghostly, the grittily realistic and an urban myth that might not be so mythical, Hantu Hijau reminded me slightly of the Clive Barker story The Forbidden (1986), which later became the basis for the Candyman movies.

 

Not quite everything in the collection was to my tastes.  I felt a few stories had rather too much happening for them to be properly frightening.  Also, a couple of times, the social issues being explored were used for ‘body-horror’ moments that had me thinking of films like David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979) or Brian Yuzna’s Society (1989) – good, grotesquely-surreal fun, yes, but too far-fetched for the build-up that’d preceded them.  Maybe it’s just me.  I feel that to be truly scary, a story has to be at least partway believable.  But if it contains too many incidents, or too much over-the-top gloop, it becomes less believable and hence less scary.  Overall, though, I was impressed by Fright 1  and I strongly recommend it.

 

For the record, the 2022 Storytel Epigram Horror Prize judges ranked Dew M. Chaiyanara’s Under the Banana Tree as the third-best entry, Dave Chua’s Hantu Hijau as the runner-up, and Kelly Leow’s Breakwater as the winner.  The collection can be purchased here, as can an audiobook version of it.

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Jim Mountfield gets apocalyptic

 

© Rogue Planet Press 

 

A 7000-word story of mine called The Nuclei has just appeared in a new collection called Xenobiology: Stranger Creatures.  Its subtitle describes it as ‘an anthology of international sci-fi, steampunk and urban fantasy short stories.’

 

The contents of the anthology are explained in more detail in its introduction by one of its editors, Michele Dutcher: “Since Xenobiology is not a study of naturally occurring organisms, the stories in this anthology deal with biology that has been artificially produced, or biological creatures that have been produced by genetic material being acted upon by outside sources to produce something new.  Those new organisms can be intriguing when thrown into the mind of an imaginative author.”

 

The Nuclei is classifiable as science fiction but definitely lurks at the horror end of the sci-fi spectrum.  Therefore, in Xenobiology: Stranger Creatures, it’s credited to Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I use for my macabre fiction.  Basically, it’s a body-horror story set in Edinburgh after an apocalypse.  Now there’s a sentence you don’t get to write too often.

 

Writing a story with a post-apocalyptic setting was an opportunity for me to address some of the misconceptions people have about what would happen after civilisation collapsed, thanks to watching many Hollywood movies on the theme.

 

Firstly, and I say this with regret because I’m a big fan of George Miller’s Mad Max franchise, petrol would soon degrade and become unusable.  Thus, within a few years, no survivors would be able to drive around in motorised vehicles – not even in the giant armoured battle-trucks that featured in 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road.  So in The Nuclei I have the human protagonists riding about on horses or on bicycles.  The bicycles possess solid wheels made of micro closed-cell polymer resin that allow them to be rode over the debris-strewn, weed-sprouting streets of post-apocalyptic Edinburgh without the risk of incurring punctures.  Also, importantly, when the bicycles aren’t on the road, they’re ‘connected to motors and chargers and used to repower the batteries for essentials like the field radio.’

 

The story also makes references to a few things that seem too mundane to appear in the average post-apocalyptic movie but that would surely be a big thing for survivors of a real-life global meltdown.  For example, scurvy would manifest itself among those survivors if they were suddenly denied access to fruit and vegetables in their diets.  And the danger posed by cuts and infections would be immense after whatever supplies of antibiotics had survived the apocalypse ran out.

 

One crucial point that the story tries to make is that post-apocalypse the remaining humans wouldn’t immediately degenerate into bands of savages hellbent on killing each other.  This departs from the anarchic scenarios depicted in Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road and or in just about every zombie-holocaust movie ever made (the latter suggesting that, when it comes down to it, human beings are even worse than any zombies they’re trying to fight off).

 

Actually – as reports from the aftermath of any earthquake, tsunami or other natural disaster will testify – human beings are genetically programmed to cooperate and help one another out.  This is not for any uplifting moral reason but simply because cooperation increases their chances of survival.  Hence, in The Nuclei, you get the members of a loopy post-apocalyptic religious cult joining forces with a militia dedicated to the protection of medical science in order to defeat, or at least diminish, a common foe.

 

And what is that foe?  Well, it’s one of the ‘stranger creatures’ of the collection’s title, the result of genetic tampering.  It’s also the result of me sitting down and attempting to imagine the most revolting monster possible.

 

Xenobiology: Stranger Creatures is currently available from Amazon here.

 

© Rogue Planet Press