Harlan Ellison – Blood and Porridge

May 28, 2024June 7, 2024

The writer on the edge of forever

I’ve just discovered that yesterday, May 27^th, would have been the 90^th birthday of writer Harlan Ellison. I don’t know if nowadays I’d describe Ellison as one of my all-time favourite writers, but he was certainly a massive influence on me when I was growing up and trying to write stuff myself. Here’s an updated version of something I wrote about him in 2018, just after he’d passed away at the age of 84.

Harlan Ellison was often categorised as a science-fiction writer, although he once memorably warned anyone who called him a science-fiction writer that he would come to their house and ‘nail’ their ‘pet’s head to a coffee table’. In his lifetime the Cleveland-born Ellison authored some 1800 stories, scripts, reviews, articles and opinion pieces, but it’s as a short story writer that he was best known. In fact, when he was in his prime, from the 1960s to 1980s, he was responsible for some of the boldest and most exhilarating short stories I’d yet come across. He seemed to push both his imagination and his writing energies to the very limit.

Describing his stories is difficult, but the nearest comparison I can think of is the fiction of Ray Bradbury. However, Ellison’s work also had counter-cultural and radical political tones that encompassed both the idealism of the 1960s’ civil rights movement and Summer of Love and the cynicism and despair that came with the Vietnam War and, in the 1970s, Watergate. His short stories frequently contained a palpable anger too. Yes, Ellison had a lot of anger in him. More on that in a minute.

By focusing on his short stories, I don’t wish to denigrate his occasional novels. Indeed, I’d rank 1961’s Spider Kiss alongside Iain Banks’ Espedair Street (1987) and John Niven’s Kill Your Friends (2008) as one of the best rock ‘n’ roll novels ever.

Ellison wasn’t a big name in the UK but in the 1970s – perfectly timed for my development as a teenager – Britain’s Pan Books brought out editions of several of his short story collections, like The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World (1969), Approaching Oblivion (1974) and Deathbird Stories (1975). All had gorgeously psychedelic covers by (I think) the artist Bob Layzell. It’s fair to say that my 14 or 15-year-old mind was blown by them.

© Pan Books

I also loved how Ellison prefaced each story with a short essay describing how it had come into being. These pieces gave insight not only into his combative personality but also into the rich life-experiences he’d had, or claimed to have had. Before establishing himself as a writer he’d been, among other things, a truck driver transporting nitro-glycerine, a hired gun and a tuna fisherman. This inspired me when I was a budding writer to try my hand at different jobs and build up my experiences, though the stuff I ended up doing – stacking shelves in Sainsbury’s, working in a shoe warehouse, serving as a warden at Aberdeen Youth Hostel – was rather less glamorous than the items on Ellison’s CV.

Some of his work also appeared on television, although TV was a medium he generally had a low opinion of. In a 2013 interview he accused it and other modern forms of entertainment and communication of having “reduced society to such a trivial, crippled form that it is beyond my notice.”

For instance, he scripted the 1967 Star Trek episode The City on the Edge of Forever, which has Captain Kirk, Mr Spock and Dr McCoy catapulted back in time to 1930s America and confronted with an agonising time-travel-related moral dilemma. Do they intervene in an accident and prevent the death of a woman called Edith Keeler who (despite being played by Joan Collins) is a noble political activist dedicated to peace, pacifism and public service and with whom, predictably, William Shatner’s horn-dog Captain Kirk has fallen in love; or do they let her die, which means her political movement won’t gain power in the USA, delay her country’s entry into World War II and allow the Nazis to become masters of humanity, which will happen otherwise?

Thanks to its inventive and thought-provoking spin on time travel, The City… is the best episode of the original series of Star Trek. In fact, as I don’t like any of the later TV incarnations of Star Trek, I’d say it’s the best Star Trek episode, full stop. Ellison, however, was unimpressed with how the show’s producer Gene Rodenberry and his writing staff rewrote his script and watered down some of its themes and was never slow to sound off about it afterwards. It may be significant that his later short story How’s the Night Life on Cissalda? (1977) features William Shatner attempting to make love to a revolting-looking alien creature. Shatner’s toupee falls off in the process.

© Desilu Productions

More time-travelling figures in the Ellison-penned episodes Demon with a Glass Hand and Soldier that he wrote for the TV anthology show The Outer Limits (1963-65). Years later, he was incensed at what he saw as plagiarism of elements of his Soldier script by James Cameron while he was making the first Terminator movie in 1984. Ellison threatened to sue and got a payment of 65-70,000 dollars from Cameron’s financiers and an acknowledgement on The Terminator’s credits. By 2014 Ellison had mellowed to the point where he could see the funny side of it. He played himself in an episode of The Simpsons in which he gets into an argument with Milhouse Van Houten. When Millhouse comments, “I wish someone would have come from the future and warned me not to talk to you,” Ellison grabs him by the throat and screams, “That’s my idea!”

In fact, Ellison was highly litigious. After discovering his writing, I found an interview with him in an American magazine called Future Life where he talked about suing Paramount Television for stealing an idea of his, about a robot policeman and a human one who are partnered together, and turning it into a TV show called Future Cop (1976-78). “We’re going to nail their asses to the barn door!” he declared in the interview. Later, when I was playing rugby for my school and while we were trying to psych ourselves up against our opponents, I inadvertently let slip with Ellison’s phrase: “We’re going to nail their asses to the barn door!” I exclaimed. That earned me some strange looks from my teammates. Nailing asses to barn doors was not part of the common vernacular on south-of-Scotland rugby pitches.

I can honestly say that for a period when I was a teenager, Harlan Ellison, with his mind-bending fiction, his braggadocio, his adventurous backstory and his take-no-shit-from-anyone attitude was the person I wanted to be. Of course, as I grew older and became less impressionable and more mature, and learned more about Ellison, that changed. I began to appreciate that Ellison’s persona involved a fair bit of self-mythologizing, egotism and unwarranted bloody-mindedness. When Stephen King observed that he knew one writer who was convinced that Ellison was the reincarnation of Jonathan Swift and another writer who referred to him as a ‘son-of-a-bitch’, I found myself in sympathy with both viewpoints.

And by the time I read a profile of him in a non-fiction book called Dream Makers (1980), written by Charles Platt, I was disappointed but somehow unsurprised to encounter a character rather too driven by vanity and rather too desperate to impress. Ellison and Platt later fell out badly, violently it’s said, though not as far as I know about the Dream Makers profile.

Also falling out with Ellison was the late English writer Christopher Priest, who took issue with Ellison’s editorship of the Dangerous Visions series of science fiction anthologies in the early 1970s. There was supposed to be a third volume in the series but for reasons known only to Ellison himself it never appeared, leaving a lot of commissioned stories in limbo and depriving a lot of authors of potential earnings. This seems hypocritical of Ellison, considering how famously touchy he was about payment for his own work – he’s said to have once mailed a wayward publisher ‘213 bricks’ and a ‘dead gopher’ as a protest. Priest even wrote a short, investigative book about Dangerous Visions 3’s non-appearance, inevitably entitled The Book on the Edge of Forever (1994). Priest’s website notes how an anonymous review of his book on Amazon, headlined Mean-Spirited Jealousy and giving it one star, “bears all the hallmarks of Mr Ellison’s own unmistakable style: florid overstatement and a fog of half-truths intended to cloud the issue. Well worth a visit to witness the great man in action, a rare sight!”

© Fantagraphics Books

And although Ellison was a vocal supporter of the USA’s Equal Rights Amendment, much of that good work was undone in 2006 when he groped the writer Connie Willis onstage at an awards ceremony. I’ve seen a clip of the incident and am inclined to think Ellison believed he was indulging in some harmless japery, but that’s not to say he wasn’t massively disrespectful towards Willis and didn’t make a colossal arse of himself. He also did himself no favours when, after he’d issued an apology – one commentator described it as something that “could only loosely be construed by a chimpanzee whacked on smack as an apology” – and after Willis hadn’t acknowledged it, he ranted abusively about her on his official message board.

Still, as I came to know the artist’s failings, and revised my opinion of him, I focused more on the quality of the art itself. And with Ellison, some of that art was amazing. Here’s a list of ten of his short stories that bowled me over when I read them.

Delusion for a Dragon Slayer (1966). An unremarkable little man suddenly finds his soul transplanted into the body of a Conan-the-Barbarian-type swordsman in a blood-and-thunder fantasy land. What follows is a merciless dissection of the inadequacies of the nerdy males who read sword-and-sorcery stories. I actually write sword-and-sorcery stories, so I’m allowed to make sweeping generalisations like that.

Pretty Maggie Money Eyes (1967). This sad, haunting story is about a woman’s spirit inhabiting a Las Vegas slot machine and the down-on-his-luck gambler whom she – possibly – takes pity on.

© LQ / Jaf Productions

A Boy and His Dog (1969). A post-apocalyptic satire that’s a spot-on blend of anarchy and irreverence, featuring as its main character a young hoodlum and an intelligent, telepathic and sarcastic canine. It was filmed in 1975 by L.Q. Jones, with a youthful Don Johnson in the lead (human) role. Though the movie version isn’t perfect, it still holds up better than a lot of other, more portentous sci-fi films made in the same decade.

Along the Scenic Route (1969). A biting analysis of the relationship between Americans and their cars, Scenic Route details how a couple out for a leisurely drive end up competing in a lethal demolition derby. It prefigures a lot of ‘dystopian-vehicle’ movies like Death Race 2000 (1975) and the Mad Max ones.

One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty (1970). Another of Ellison’s time-travel tales, this grippingly melancholic one is about a man going back in time and befriending his younger self while he’s a bullied, insecure child.

Bleeding Stones (1973). This is quite simply a story that made my jaw drop with its combination of brutality, blasphemy and surrealism.

© Pan Books

Hindsight: 480 Seconds (1973). End-of-the-world stories are a dime-a-dozen in science fiction, but the brilliantly simple yet elegiac concept behind this one has always stayed with me. It’s about a poet who volunteers to stay on an about-to-be-destroyed earth after the rest of humanity have been evacuated, so that he can provide a commentary on his planet’s dying minutes.

I’m Looking for Kadak (1974). This Kurt-Vonnegut-meets-Woody-Allen-type comedy is about the tribulations facing a group of blue, eleven-armed aliens on a far-flung planet who’ve converted to Judaism. The minyan – quorum – for communal Jewish worship is ten, and they want to sit shiva, i.e., conduct the rituals of mourning for a departed friend. The problem is that there’s now only nine of them on the planet. So the hero sets off on an epic quest to find a long-lost Jew, Kadak, in the hope he’ll serve as the tenth.

Shatterday (1975). In this unsettling tale, a man accidentally phones his own apartment one evening and finds himself talking to himself. In fact, this other self is a sinister doppelganger who’s appeared from nowhere and is planning to usurp him from his existence.

Count the Clock That Tells the Time (1979). Taking its title from a sonnet by William Shakespeare, this describes how a lethargic never-do-well gets trapped in a weird, ghostly netherworld. It’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of wasting time and frittering your life away – something you couldn’t accuse the famously prolific Ellison of doing.

So, thank you for the entertainment and the inspiration, Mr E. May you rest in un-cantankerous and non-litigious peace.

© Pan Books

October 24, 2021October 24, 2021

A guy called Gerald

© Valancourt Books

And here’s another re-posting ahead of, and appropriate for, Halloween…

Often, the fame and popularity won by writers during their lifetimes seem to evaporate with, or soon after, their deaths. Once they’re gone, they’re forgotten too. I’m thinking of writers from the 1920s, 30s and 40s like Edgar Wallace, Hervey Allen, Lloyd C. Douglas and James Hilton, who were massively popular in their day, but are practically forgotten in the 21^st century. Come to think of it, names that were ubiquitous on the bestseller racks in bookshops and newsagents when I was a kid, like Harold Robbins, Morris West, Leon Uris and Alistair MacLean, seem to have disappeared into the mists too. Everyone was reading their books in the 1970s but I can’t imagine anyone reading them now.

To this list of forgotten writers, we must add the British (later American) author Gerald Kersh, who was clearly prolific and popular. His Wikipedia entry credits him with 20 novels and 20 collections of short stories, plus ‘thousands of articles in different publications’, published between 1934 and his death in 1968, but he seemed to drop off the radar at the moment he died. A few years ago, I began to hear his name because a number of writers I admire, like Anthony Burgess, Angela Carter, Michael Moorcock, Ian Fleming and Harlan Ellison, thought highly of him. But all traces of his work seemed to have vanished. When I asked about him in bookshops, my inquiries would draw a blank. Even in bookshops run by clearly knowledgeable people, like Transreal Fiction in Edinburgh and Whitie’s in my hometown of Peebles, nobody had heard of him.

However, several of his works have now been republished by Valancourt Books, who’ve won praise from the Times Literary Supplement for their efforts to “resurrect some neglected works of literature… and make them available to a new readership”, and I was able to order copies of his 1958 novel Fowlers End and his 1968 collection Nightshade and Damnations while I was in the UK a while ago. I couldn’t find, though, a reasonably priced copy of his 1938 crime thriller Night and the City. This is the book that has probably come closest to ensuring a legacy for Kersh, because it was filmed in 1950 with Richard Widmark and again in 1992 with Robert De Niro.

I’ll leave aside Fowlers End just now, which Anthony Burgess rated as one of the great comic novels of the 20^th century – which doesn’t surprise me, because it’s the sort of sprawling, baggy, rumbustious and verbose book that Burgess himself loved to write. Let me talk instead about Nightshades and Damnations, a collection of eleven of Kersh’s short stories selected in 1968 – shortly before he died – by none other than celebrated American science fiction and fantasy writer Harlan Ellison. In the introduction to the collection, Ellison makes the sadly misplaced prediction that “He is leaving a legacy… that has influenced, and is still influencing, generations of younger writers.” Actually, last night, I watched Dreams with Sharp Teeth, the 2008 biographical documentary about Harlan Ellison, and I noticed that during the end-credits Kersh was in a list of people Ellison wished to ‘thank’, along with Ray Bradbury, Franz Kafka and Edgar Allan Poe.

Some of the stories in Nightshades and Damnations are rather brilliant. There are horror stories like Voices in the Dust of Annan and Men Without Bones that, with their science fictional overtones, are reminiscent of, and as good as, the work of H.P. Lovecraft. The Brighton Monster, a tale mostly set in the 18^th century and one that begins as an out-and-out horror story, also uses a science fictional twist. It takes a sudden and admirable turn into the present day – well, post-World War II – that makes it horribly relevant.

Bone for Debunkers is a tale of forgery that’s worthy of Roald Dahl, while The Ape and the Mystery and The King Who Collected Clocks are extravagant historical fantasies incorporating Leonardo Da Vinci and clockwork automata respectively. And The Queen of Pig Island is an elegant, surreal and ultimately tragic tale of what happens to some human circus-sideshow attractions when they survive a shipwreck and have to establish their own self-contained society on a desert island.

Best of all is Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo, in which the narrator is Kersh himself, travelling on a wartime transatlantic troop ship when he meets the titular Corporal Cuckoo, who claims to have been born in the 16^th century and to be immortal. The story suggests a grisly downside to being immortal, which is made grislier when the person is a bit stupid and unimaginative and hasn’t thought the implications of being immortal through properly. It’s a theme that was picked up by Robert Zemeckis’s 1992 movie Death Becomes Her.

While other writers have vanished from popular consciousness because, well, their writing wasn’t terribly good and wasn’t designed to stand the test of time, Kersh’s work has, refreshingly, not dated at all and still constitutes a good read. On the other hand, that work has suffered the misfortune of simply being out of print for a very long time. Let’s hope that Valancourt Books will help bring the achievements of Gerald Kersh back, deservedly, into the limelight.

From wikipedia.org

October 16, 2021

The tragic, magic man

© Coronet Books

Continuing with the October / Halloween theme, here is a piece I first posted at the beginning of 2020 about a collection of spooky stories by the late, great Charles Beaumont.

Last year, while I was back visiting my family in Scotland, I happened to be hoking around in some boxes of books that belonged to me but that’d ended up gathering dust in a corner of my father’s attic. Inside one of those boxes I discovered a very old paperback called The Magic Man, a collection of mostly fantasy, horror and science-fiction stories by the late American writer Charles Beaumont originally published in 1965. Dimly, I recalled buying this for 25p, though the cover-price was a pre-decimalization 3/6, in a second-hand bookshop in the Lincolnshire town of Louth. I worked in Louth for five months in 1983 as a volunteer classroom assistant and houseparent at a residential school for boys with severe behavioral issues – ‘maladjusted’ boys, as they were called in those unsympathetic and non-PC days.

I knew Beaumont’s name in 1983 because I’d seen it attached to several movies that’d had a big impact on me while I was growing up, such as The Seven Faces of Dr Lao and Masque of the Red Death (1964). But after buying the book, I never got around to opening it and it ended up stashed away and unread among the hundreds, eventually thousands of other books I owned.

Anyway, 37 years later – this sentence makes me feel absolutely ancient – I’ve finally read the stories in The Magic Man. The collection kicks off with an introduction by Beaumont’s friend and mentor Ray Bradbury, which while gracious in tone suggests that Bradbury was a hard taskmaster to have as your writing tutor. He recalls telling the young Beaumont to write and submit one story every week: “He worked, I remember, part time at United Parcel Service, back in the early fifties, so as to spend the rest of his hours finishing that special story that must be sent off in the mail every Saturday.” Intriguingly, Bradbury also mentions that Beaumont tried, “for years, to convince movie producers to make films out of the Ian Fleming books.” Obviously, and sadly for Beaumont’s bank balance, someone else managed to convince Cubby Broccoli and Albert Saltzman to make films out of them first.

With Bradbury as his guru, it’s no surprise that several stories in The Magic Man bear the imprint of Bradbury’s own fanciful, atmospheric and wistfully nostalgic writing. The title story, about a stage magician who travels a circuit of small American prairie towns doing magic shows and who doesn’t appreciate the importance that his ‘magic’ holds for the prairie townspeople while they go about their otherwise humdrum existences, has echoes of Bradbury’s 1962 novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. It also evokes Charles G. Finney’s novel The Circus of Dr Lao, which coincidentally Beaumont adapted for producer George Pal as the movie The Seven Faces of Dr Lao. Also with a flavour of Bradbury-esque small-town America is The Hunger, although Beaumont’s tale of a lonely, frustrated spinster who feels a strange affinity for an escaped, murderous lunatic pushes the envelope further than the genteel Bradbury would have done.

Bradbury’s introduction notes too that Beaumont had a penchant for driving and “burning up the dirt on the nearest racetrack” and a couple of the stories reflect his love for automobiles. A Classic Affair, about a worried woman asking a friend to follow her husband, whom she believes is in an adulterous relationship, takes a nice twist when the man discovers just what, as opposed to who, the husband is having an affair with, although the twist that follows on from that twist isn’t perhaps so surprising. Meanwhile, the final story, A Death in the Country, convincingly details the desperate life of an aging and failing dirt-track car racer and is one of the collection’s few non-genre stories.

If Perchance to Dream, the story of a man with a heart condition who’s troubled by a recurrent dream where he’s lured onto a literally heart-stopping rollercoaster, sounds familiar, it’s because Beaumont adapted it into an episode of the classic TV show The Twilight Zone (1959-64). This was one of 22 episodes of that series that he scripted or co-scripted. (Beaumont clearly had conflicted feelings about writing for cinema and television. According to the cult New Wave sci-fi / fantasy author Harlan Ellison, Beaumont once told him that: “Attaining success in Hollywood is like climbing a gigantic mountain of cow flop, in order to pick one perfect rose from the summit. And you find when you’ve made that hideous climb… you’ve lost the sense of smell.”)

Another story that ended up as the basis for a TV episode is The New People, which became an instalment in the British anthology series Journey to the Unknown (1968-69), made by horror specialists Hammer Films in conjunction with 20^th Century Fox. Beaumont’s story features an enclave of successful professionals and their families living in a well-to-do American neighbourhood who, like the characters in Richard Yates’ novel Revolution Road (1961), are beneath the surface bored out of their wits with their situation. But while Yates’ characters try to solve the problem of their ennui by contemplating a move to Paris, Beaumont’s characters decide to enliven things by participating in some dark activities indeed. In the Journey to the Unknown episode, this sinister community is moved to the affluent Home Counties of England. With a first-rate cast including Robert Reed, Adrienne Corri, Melissa Stribling, Milo O’Shea and a splendidly saturnine Patrick Allen, it’s fairly effective. But the episode leaves out an important plot element involving the main characters’ sex lives (or lack of them) that gives the original story a satisfying and, with hindsight, logical twist ending.

The Magic Man has a couple of weaker entries, which tend to be science fictional. The Last Caper suffers because it attempts to graft a Raymond Chandler / Philip Marlowe-type private-detective story onto a space-age setting, with characters speaking a futuristic version of Chandler’s famously hardboiled 1940s patois. (“Don’t push it, rocket-jockey…”). This sounds awfully dated now. Similarly, The Monster Show has its characters speaking like futuristic beatniks and doesn’t fare any better. (“It’s pictures that count. Flap?” “Nothing can go wrong. Nothing-o.”) It makes me wonder how dated the hip and cutting-edge, for the time, ‘cyberpunk’ sci-fi novels of the 1980s and 1990s will seem in a few decades’ time, if they don’t seem dated already.

That said, The Crooked Man, set in a future where homosexuality is the norm and heterosexuals are a persecuted minority, is a fine example of a science-fiction story that highlights a contemporary injustice by pitching its readers into a world where the tables have been turned. It was pretty bold of Playboy magazine to publish the story when it did, back in 1955.

A little too varied in quality, and with some stories that show their influences a little too much – the 1955 story The Murderers, though enjoyable, pinches the premise of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) and the 1929 play by John Hamilton on which it was based – The Magic Man isn’t wholly satisfying. But it contains a lot of interesting and entertaining fiction and makes one wonder what spectacular things Beaumont might have gone on to write if he hadn’t died at the wastefully young age of 38. Yes, Charles Beaumont was born, grew up, established himself as a writer and died in almost the same period of time that elapsed between my buying The Magic Man and my reading it.

The nature of his passing wasn’t pleasant. He succumbed to a mystery illness, which his agent Forest J. Ackerman theorized was a combination of Alzheimer’s and Pick’s disease, whereby he suffered from headaches, reduced concentration, slurred speech, erratic behavior, weight loss and premature aging. At the time of his death, one of Beaumont’s sons recalled, he “looked 95 and was, in fact, 95 by every calendar except the one on your watch.”

So, while the main character of the title story here styles himself as the Magic Man, I can’t help but think of the story’s author as the Tragic Man.

From twilightzone.fandom.com/wiki

October 9, 2021October 19, 2022

Short, sharp shocks

© New English Library

We’re into October now, a month that ends with the scary festival of Halloween. In keeping with the spirit of the season, I thought I would repost on this blog a few old entries that have a macabre, and hence Halloween-y, theme. I’ll start with this item, which I originally wrote in 2017. It’s about my favourite volumes of short horror stories: books that deliver a series of short, sharp shocks.

These are the ten collections of short horror stories that have had the biggest impact on me. To keep this exercise manageable, I’ve limited it to collections written by a single author. And the authors included are ones who are still alive or were alive when I started reading their work. Hence, no Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft or Arthur Machen.

Blood and Water and Other Tales (1988) by Patrick McGrath

Patrick McGrath has spent his career writing fiction that shows his love for the gothic and grotesque but, in a rare display of broad-mindedness, critics have avoided pigeonholing him as a ‘horror’ or ‘fantasy’ writer and treated him as a serious mainstream-literary figure instead. What a lucky man he is. Blood and Water… showcases McGrath’s short fiction and features, among other things, a diseased angel (The Angel), a hand that starts growing out of an unexpected place (The Black Hand of the Raj), a community of anaemic vampires (Blood Disease) and, most surreally, a girl who discovers a jungle explorer camped in the bushes at the bottom of her suburban garden (The Lost Explorer). Particularly vivid is The E(rot)ic Potato, a meditation on decay told by a fly. And an even less likely narrator relates the events of The Boot’s Tale, an account of a nuclear holocaust that manages to be both horrible and funny.

© Penguin

The Bloody Chamber (1979) by Angela Carter

Horror stories are often likened to dark fairy tales and Angela Carter’s short fiction commonly explores the overlap between the two. For me, The Bloody Chamber is her greatest collection. It provides adult, gothic reworkings of such fairy tales and myths as Beauty and the Beast (The Courtship of Mr Lyon), Snow White (The Snow Child) and Bluebeard (the title story). It also contains one of the most gorgeous vampire stories ever, The Lady of the House of Love. And werewolves get a look-in too thanks to the stories The Company of Wolves, The Werewolf and Wolf-Alice, which were incorporated into the classy 1984 movie The Company of Wolves, directed by Neil Jordan and scripted by Jordan and Carter.

Books of Blood, Volume 1 (1984) by Clive Barker

In the mid-1980s Clive Barker caused a sensation with the publication of his six Books of Blood, which are basically six volumes of short horror stories linked by a clever framing device. Such was their impact that Stephen King dubbed Barker the Beatles of horror writing – whilst likening himself to horror’s slightly old-fashioned Elvis Presley. To be honest, I found many stories in the later Books of Blood a tad pretentious; but Volume 1 is just about perfect in its blend of the funny, the profound and the hideously, graphically bloody. Humour comes courtesy of the demonic-haunting spoof The Yattering and Jack and the charming supernatural-theatre story Sex, Death and Starshine (no doubt drawing on Barker’s experiences running the Dog Company theatrical troupe in late 1970s and early 1980s). Profundity is supplied by In the Hills, the Cities, which takes place in the then-Yugoslavia and spookily prefigures the Balkans conflicts of the 1990s. And for sheer, gross horribleness you can’t beat The Midnight Meat Train or Pig Blood Blues, the latter being one of my candidates for the title of Scariest Story Ever.

© Sphere

Dark Companions (1982) by Ramsey Campbell

Ramsey Campbell has long been regarded as Britain’s greatest living horror writer and Dark Companions is an ideal starting-point for anyone new to the Campbell oeuvre. Both grim and believable, his short stories take place in a recognisably frayed and decayed modern Britain, populated by lonely and frightened people whose everyday fears gradually and nightmarishly take on tangible form. Highlights include the distinctly un-Christmassy Christmas story The Chimney; The Depths, a dismaying exploration of why someone would want to write a really nasty horror story; Mackintosh Willy, which combines childhood fears of the bogeyman with all-too-real themes of homelessness and child abuse; and The Companion, surely the best ‘haunted fairground’ story ever written.

Night Shift (1978) by Stephen King

I can’t not include Night Shift here. In my boyhood I’d go to scout summer-camps in the countryside near the Scottish town of Hawick. During one camp I spent three days stuck almost permanently inside a tent because the Scottish weather was doing its normal thing and pissing non-stop with rain. Luckily, in a Hawick bookshop beforehand, I’d bought a copy of Night Shift, a 1978 volume of Stephen King’s short stories, and to keep boredom at bay, I read that during the three days. It made a big impression. King has produced slicker collections of short stories since, but the unpleasant things inhabiting the tales in Night Shift have stayed with me for 40 years. A huge demonically-possessed laundry machine that rumbles into malevolent life (The Mangler)… Giant mutant rats lurking in the basement of a factory (The Graveyard Shift)… A man slowly transforming into a monstrous flesh-eating slug (Grey Matter)… A Mafia-type organisation that helps you give up smoking by threatening to torture and kill your family every time you puff a new cigarette (Quitters Inc)… No, Night Shift isn’t subtle, but it certainly scared the bejesus out of me when I was a thirteen-year-old boy scout.

© Panther

The October Country (1955) by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury is someone else I couldn’t not have on this list as, to me, the guy was basically God. He could turn his hand to writing anything – horror, science fiction, fantasy, magical realism and yes, our old friend ‘mainstream literature’ – but The October Country is probably his purest collection of macabre stories. It features such pieces as The Scythe, about a man who finds a mysterious scythe, starts using it and becomes the Grim Reaper, harvesting souls rather than wheat; The Jar, wherein a man buys the titular jar at a fair and becomes obsessed with the indescribable something that’s floating around inside it; and the splendidly-grisly Skeleton, about a paranoid man who becomes convinced that the bony figure embedded inside his own flesh is an imposter and takes action to evict it.

Shatterday (1980) by Harlan Ellison

Remarkably, the science fiction / fantasy writer Harlan Ellison managed to win fame by largely eschewing novels and writing masses of short stories instead. Well, fame in the USA at least. His name was little-known and his work hard to come by in Britain. Among many collections, Shatterday is possibly his best. Particularly memorable is the melancholy Jeffty is Five, about a little boy who refuses to grow up; The Man Who was Heavily into Revenge, about a schmuck who haplessly wrongs another person and then, inexplicably, finds the whole world venting its wrath upon him; Count the Clock That Tells the Time, a cautionary tale about the consequences of doing nothing meaningful with your life and frittering it away; and the unsettling title story, about a man who phones his own apartment one evening and finds himself talking to himself, or more precisely, to a sinister alter-ego who’s planning to usurp him from his own existence.

© Penguin

Swamp Foetus (1993) by Poppy Z. Brite

New Orleans writer Poppy Z. Brite’s collection Swamp Foetus was a revelation when I read it in the 1990s. It’s populated both with the archetypes of traditional gothic fiction – ghosts, zombies, freaks – and with the characters of another type of Gothicism, the modern-day sub-culture that arose when kids, inspired by punk, new romanticism and Edgar Allan Poe, started dressing in black, applying kohl eyeliner and listening to bands like the Sisters of Mercy and the Cure. Swamp Foetus thus has stories like His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood where decadent, black-clad, absinthe-swigging youths fall foul of ancient voodoo / vampire horrors. That said, no Goths are to be found in the best story here, which is Calcutta, Lord of Nerves. Calcutta takes a fresh angle on George A. Romero’s original trilogy of Living Dead movies. In the films, Romero’s zombie apocalypse is a very American one, with barely a mention of events in the rest of the world. As its title suggests, Brite imagines the same apocalypse happening in the capital city of West Bengal. What happens? Nobody seems to notice it that much.

Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch (1996) by Dorothy K. Haynes

Scottish writer Dorothy K. Haynes is much underrated. Her stories, often set in the dour, oppressive society of 1930s, 1940s and 1950s Scotland, when the Presbyterian Church still had undue influence, are impressively disturbing in their quiet way. Perhaps most disturbing is The Peculiar Case of Mrs Grimmond, about an old woman who takes pity on a strange, unidentified little animal that her cat drags into the house one day and, while she looks after and nurtures it, incurs the wrath of the community around her. Haynes also tackles myth and legend. Her very Scottish takes on such fabled creatures as banshees (The Bean-Nighe), fairies (Paying Guests) and changelings (The Changeling) are satisfyingly grim and creepy.

The Wine-Dark Sea (1988) by Robert Aickman

I’ve written about Robert Aickman before on this blog, so I will just say here that this, for me, is his finest collection of stories. There’s one stinker among its contents, the supposedly satirical Growing Boys, which is an unwelcome reminder that, first-rate writer though he was, Aickman was also a grumpy, reactionary, modernity-hating conservative. However, everything else is excellent, if frequently challenging and baffling. The Inner Room is a phantasmagorical story about a weird doll’s house. Never Visit Venice pokes fun at the modern phenomenon of mass tourism with its an account of an unwary visitor to the title city taking a ride on a gondola from hell. And Your Tiny Hand is Frozen, about an unsociable man becoming addicted to a telephone, through which he communicates with a strange woman who may or may not exist, shows Aickman’s unease about the loss of face-to-face interaction that new communications technology was causing – the story was written in 1953. Maybe it’s just as well Aickman passed away in 1982. He’d have really hated our era of smartphones and social media.

August 13, 2021August 19, 2021

Richard Matheson – he was legend

Something has got me thinking about Richard Matheson, the science-fiction and horror author and screenwriter who passed away in 2013 at the age of 87.

What thing? Well, the news that the anti-Covid-19-vaxxers in America, determined to plumb the depths of stupidity to find new reasons for not getting vaccinated, have found the stupidest reason yet. Speculation is rife that the vaccine could turn you in a zombie. You know, like one did in the 2007 sci-fi / horror movie I am Legend, with Will Smith, which was based on Matheson’s 1954 novel of the same name. This has prompted one of the movie’s scriptwriters, Akiva Goldsman, to step up and announce on social media: “Oh. My. God. It’s a movie. I made that up. It’s not real.” In fact, the source of the contagion in the movie wasn’t a vaccine but a virus, genetically reprogrammed by Dr Emma Thompson to combat cancer, going spectacularly rogue.

In Matheson’s novel I am Legend the monsters are vampires, not zombies. Also, what turns people into those vampires isn’t the movie’s lab-reprogrammed virus, but a mysterious pandemic. However, the book’s premise of the world being suddenly and nightmarishly turned upside down and a small number of uninfected humans finding themselves menaced by those who’ve been infected and turned into monsters, including their own loved ones, was one that a young George Romero appropriated for his seminal 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead. In doing so, Romero made it the blueprint for at least 80% of the zombie movies that have lurched across cinema and TV screens ever since.

In the novel, the number of uninfected humans is small indeed: just one, Richard Neville, who is alone in the world during the daytime and then under siege in his fortified house at night, by the vampires that everyone else has turned into. Gradually, Neville, researching the plague, stumbles on scientific explanations for the vampire-like symptoms of its victims, why they drink blood, why they can only be killed by stakes through the heart, and why they have an aversion to sunlight, garlic and crucifixes. I am Legend also ends with an unnerving psychological twist. Neville, who’s spent his days roaming the surrounding city and staking the slumbering vampires, realises that the vampires are now the normal ones and he’s become the monster of everyone’s nightmares, the deadly legend of the title.

It’s a pity that though I am Legend was filmed on several occasions, and though Matheson lived to a venerable age, he never got to see a satisfactory celluloid version of it. The novel received its first film treatment in Italy, where Rome unconvincingly stood in for Los Angeles, with the cheaply and incompetently made L’Ultimo Uomo della Terra (The Last Man on Earth). Neville was played by Vincent Price, whom Matheson admired as an actor but thought was miscast in the role. L’Ultimo Uomo della Terra was at least fairly faithful to the book, unlike the subsequent film versions, 1970’s The Omega Man, with Charlton Heston, and the 2007 one. In The Omega Man the vampires have become a group of demented albino mutants called, with an unsubtle reference to Charles Manson, the Family. In the Will Smith version of I am Legend they’re even less impressive, a bunch of bald, hyperactive zombies animated by some shoddy CGI.

Both the later movie versions lack the courage to portray Neville as being totally alone and eventually have him encounter other, as yet uninfected survivors. They also lack the courage to include Matheson’s game-changing ending. Instead, they close with Heston and Smith depicted as Christ-like figures who nobly sacrifice themselves for the good of what’s left of humanity. Neville was a more interesting character when he discovered he’d become a bogeyman. Still, disappointing though all three film versions are, there’s at least a good graphic-novel adaptation of I am Legend available.

The more I reminisce about Matheson, the more I realise what a wonderful and influential writer he was. His other big – though ‘big’ perhaps isn’t the most appropriate adjective – novel of the 1950s was The Shrinking Man (1956). Its hero, an archetypal middle-class American male called Scott Carey, is exposed to a radioactive cloud that causes his body to shrink at the rate of a seventh of an inch every day. Thereafter, Carey’s world turns nightmarishly upside down too, though at a more gradual rate than Richard Neville’s. First, he experiences psychological and sexual humiliation as he finds himself increasingly dwarfed by his normal-sized wife. Following an assault by the family cat, no longer a loveable moggie but a carnivorous monster, the now-tiny Carey loses all contact with humanity and finds himself trapped in his house’s basement where the dangers facing him become formidable indeed. A common spider, for instance, takes on elephantine proportions. And Carey’s shrinking doesn’t stop, let alone get reversed. At the book’s close, he muses, “If nature existed on endless planes, so also might intelligence.” Thereafter, he dwindles away into infinity.

A year after its publication, the novel was filmed as The Incredible Shrinking Man, directed by Jack Arnold and with Matheson providing the script. Matheson was unhappy with how Arnold structured the film. He told the story in linear fashion, whereas Matheson wanted it to begin with the shrunken Carey in the basement, reliving what had happened to him via a series of flashbacks. However, it’s still one of the best science fiction movies of the 1950s. It crucially retains the novel’s bleakly philosophical ending. I can remember seeing the film on TV as a kid and being genuinely upset when the ending defied my expectations that things would finish on an upbeat note. The Incredible Shrinking Man was, incidentally, one of the great J.G. Ballard’s top ten favourite sci-fi movies.

As well as novels, Matheson was a prolific writer of short stories, many of which were collected in four books called the Shock series. Shock 1-4 were published in Britain in the 1970s by Sphere Books, who decorated the covers with lurid and gory images – the antithesis of the unsensational, non-violent and thoughtful works inside. The stories I remember best include Long Distance Call, about a woman plagued by mysterious phone calls that, she discovers, emanate from a local cemetery into which the telephone wire has blown down; The Children of Noah, about a motorist who finds himself in Kafkaesque predicament when he breaks the 15-miles-per-hour speed limit of a tiny American town called Zachary; and the brilliant The Splendid Source, in which a man embarks on a quest to find out where dirty jokes really come from.

Long Distance Call was one of several Matheson stories that were turned into episodes of the celebrated TV anthology series The Twilight Zone (1959-64). The best of these, adapted by Matheson himself, was of course Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. In this, William Shatner essayed his second-most-famous role, that of a just-released psychiatric patient who’s on board a plane and, looking out of the window, sees a gremlin dismantling one of the engines on the wing. Whenever he tries to alert the crew and fellow passengers, the beastie inconveniently disappears from view. Particularly memorable is the moment when the traumatised Shatner dares to peek through the window again and discovers the gremlin pressing its face, which resembles that of a hare-lipped teddy bear, against the outside of the glass and staring in at him. The episode was remade as a segment of the movie version of The Twilight Zone in 1983, with John Lithgow in the Shatner role, and ten years later it received the ultimate accolade – it was spoofed in a Treehouse of Horror edition of The Simpsons, with Bart Simpson the only passenger on the school bus able to see a gremlin sabotaging its engine. This version was called Nightmare at 5½ Feet.

Other episodes that Matheson penned for The Twilight Zone were also influential. A World of Difference is about a businessman who makes the mind-blowing discovery that he’s a fictional character and his life is actually a movie. Furthermore, the movie has just had its production halted, meaning he’ll have to live in the ‘real’ world as the declining, drunken movie star who’s been playing him. This clearly informs Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show. Meanwhile, Little Girl Lost tells the tale of a child who, one night, falls from her bed and into another dimension, a mysterious, misty void from which she can hear her parents’ concerned voices but can’t escape. A young Steven Spielberg no doubt saw and remembered this one, because the same idea features in 1982’s Spielberg-produced Poltergeist, though this time the little girl is sucked into the other dimension through the household TV set. And yes, The Simpsons spoofed it too in Treehouse of Horror.

Steven Spielberg has much to thank Matheson for. Matheson’s short story Duel, based on an experience he had on November 22^nd, 1963 – of driving home depressed at the news of Kennedy’s assassination and being harassed by a large, tailgating truck – was filmed as a TV movie in 1971 by Spielberg and gave the young director his first big critical success. Again, Matheson wrote the script. Duel-the-movie has motorist Dennis Weaver and the psychopathic driver of a 1955 Peterbilt 281 truck get into a deadly game of cat and mouse around the roads and highways of rural California. We never see the truck driver himself, just his immense, bellowing, dinosaur-like vehicle. Duel is the archetypal man-versus-machine story and, again, has been influential. Stephen King basically rewrote it (but upped the ante by adding lots of malevolent vehicles) with his short story Trucks, which he later filmed as Maximum Overdrive (1986).

The made-for-television movies that filled American TV schedules in the 1970s kept Matheson busy. As well as Duel he scripted The Night Stalker (1972) about a reporter called Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) who investigates a series of killings in modern-day Los Angeles and discovers that the perpetrator is a vampire. The Night Stalker was successful enough to eventually spawn a TV show called Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974-75), also starring McGavin, in which Kolchak investigated other strange cases involving monsters and supernatural phenomena. Though short-lived, the show was a major inspiration for Chris Carter, whose massively popular The X-Files (1993-2018) had a similar theme. Carter acknowledged his debt to Kolchak by having Darren McGavin guest-star in two X-Files episodes.

Meanwhile, the TV anthology movie Trilogy of Terror, from 1975, was based on three of Matheson’s short stories. The first two segments are unmemorable, but the third one, which Matheson scripted from his story Prey, is great. It stars Karen Black as an insecure woman who tries to shore up her relationship with her boyfriend, a lecturer in social anthropology, by buying him an antique ‘Zuma fetish doll’ as a birthday present. The doll is a hideous-looking thing and sports a many-fanged grin resembling a Venus flytrap. Before she can give the doll to its intended recipient, it comes to violent, gibbering life and she spends the evening fighting it off in the confines of her apartment. Black’s plight is the inverse of the shrinking man’s. She’s normal-sized and the threat she faces is tiny, but terrifying. This also creates the template for Joe Dante’s movie Gremlins in 1984. In particular, the scene in Gremlins where Frances Lee McCain fights off a horde of the sneering, reptilian mini-monsters in her kitchen, employing a blender and a microwave oven as weapons, is very reminiscent of Trilogy of Terror.

When he wasn’t writing novels, short stories and television scripts, the ever-industrious Matheson was writing for the cinema. In the early 1960s, he scripted several of the movies based on works by Edgar Allen Poe that were made by American International Pictures and directed by Roger Corman: The House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962) and The Raven (1963). All told, Matheson did a good job of preserving the original stories’ gloomy, clammy spirit, whilst meeting the commercial demands of a studio and a director who were already famous for their exploitation movies, and keeping engaged a star – Vincent Price – whose performances tended to slip into the knowingly hammy when his material bored him. The movies aren’t the most faithful adaptations of Poe, but they’re surely the most fondly remembered ones.

Matheson also worked on British movies. For AIP’s trans-Atlantic rival, Hammer Films, he scripted The Devil Rides Out in 1968 and managed to turn Dennis Wheatley’s bloated, reactionary novel about upstanding Anglo-Saxon aristocrats fighting a bunch of ghastly Satan-worshipping foreigners into something rather good. And in 1973, he adapted his haunted-house novel Hell House for the screen. The result was The Legend of Hell House, directed by John Hough and starring Roddy McDowall, Clive Revill, Pamela Franklin and Gayle Hunicutt as psychic investigators trying to get to the bottom of terrifying supernatural manifestations in the titular mansion. The movie’s ending, which has the surviving investigators finding a hidden sanctum where the psychic forces are emanating from an embalmed body, played by a very un-embalmed-looking Michael Gough, is pretty stupid, which Matheson himself admitted. Still, John Hough directs the film’s scary set-pieces with vigour and there’s an unsettling electronic score by Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson.

Matheson was a modest soul and in interviews he usually seemed puzzled that so many people could be so inspired by his work. He might have ended up a very rich man if, like his famously litigious contemporary Harlan Ellison, he’d bothered to sue every filmmaker and writer who’d ripped off his ideas. Mind you, he’d probably have spent all his time in court, so I’m glad he just turned the other cheek and devoted that time instead to writing his marvellous stories.