The Dead of Night – The Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions

The Dead of Night: The Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions

Wordsworth – 2010

I originally planned to just read Widdershins, Oliver Onion’s most famous collection of ghost stories, but after finishing that collection (it’s available online), I decided to read the Wordsworth anthology of his collected ghost stories. This collection is almost 700 pages long, and it contains Widdershins (1911), Ghosts in Daylight (1924) and The Painted Face (1929), all three of the collections of ghost stories that Onions put out in his lifetime, along with a few other bits and pieces. I read Widdershins and wrote the following paragraphs almost a year ago, but I only read the remainder of Onion’s ghost stories over the last couple of months. I had mixed feelings.

I had seen collections of Oliver Onion’s ghost stories around for years, but it wasn’t until I came across his name being mentioned in T.E.D. Klein’s The Ceremonies that I decided to read him. I read Widdershins, probably his most famous collection of ghost stories first.

The first story in here, The Beckoning Fair One, seems to be Onion’s most famous work. It’s a story about a man who falls in love with a ghost and goes mad. It’s very good.

The other stories are all of a decent standard, but there was a couple that I felt like I had read before. There’s one where two guys visit a house and later find that that house has long been abandoned. I’m pretty sure Count Stenbock wrote one along the same lines. Also, there’s one where the protagonists find out that they themselves are the ghosts.

The writing here was surprisingly good. I had Onions pegged as a pulpy writer, but these are finely crafted stories that rely on terror and suspense rather than bumps in the night. I wasn’t sure if I was going to read any more of Onion’s stuff after this collection, but I think I’ll probably give the rest of his stuff a go in the future

The Painted Face collection (originally published in 1929) is made up of only 3 stories. The titular tale, a lengthy novella is pretty good, quite literary. I liked The Master of the House, a tale about a weird werewolf man. The other story in here, The Rosewood Door was pretty standard Onions. Overall, I liked these tales as much as anything in Widdershins, and unlike Widdershins, there are no duds here.

Ghosts in Daylight contains all of the stories I really disliked. I sometimes take notes into an excel spreadsheet when I am reading a short story collection, and I’ll share what I jotted down while reading the stories from this one:

Story	Comments
The Woman in the Way	boring story about a priest who meets a boy who met a ghost of a woman who was engaged to his brother in a field.
The Ascending Dream	3 men from different ages dream a dream that causes them to leave their sweethearts. BORING
The Honey in the Wall	a girl owns a big house but has no money. She fancies a guy, so she dresses up a ghost. Nobody cares.
Dear Dryad	very boring story about a tree that 3 generations of people do stuff in front of a tree.
The Real People	a “comic” story about an author whose characters come to life. BORING.

If you’ve ever watched that movie From Dusk till Dawn, you probably remember that scene in the strip club with Selma Hayek dancing with the snake. I love pretty much everything about that scene, including the music. The song playing is ‘After Dark’ by Tito and Tarantula, who actually appear as the band playing in the film. Tarantism, the album that song is from is great, but I haven’t listened to it for years. A few weeks ago, I was reading through this Oliver Onions collection, and I started reading a story called “The Smile of Karen”. It’s about a jealous husband who gets upset when he sees his wife smiling. As I was reading it, I remembered that there’s a song on Tarantism called ‘Smiling Karen‘. I went back and listened to it, and sure enough, it’s about a man who finds his wife has been cheating on him, so he kills her. I emailed Tito to see if this was just a coincidence, but he hasn’t responded yet. The story was good though, one of my faves.

The other stories in here are of varying quality. I quite liked The Rope in the Rafters, a story about a disfigured soldier visiting a haunted castle, and Resurrection in Bronze was an interesting look at creative mania, but the rest were fairly shit.

Oliver Onions wrote some excellent ghost stories. He wrote some fairly dull ones too. I do appreciate the comprehensive nature of this collection, but, in truth, a greatest hits anthology would be far more entertaining. I was going to read Onion’s novel, The Hand of Cornelius Voyt, but I probably won’t now.

A.N.L. Munby’s The Alabaster Hand

The Alabaster Hand – A.N.L. Munby

Four Square – 1963 (Originally published 1949)

The protagonist in T.E.D. Klein’s The Ceremonies mentions that this book is on his shelf. I promised myself I would read all of the horror fiction referenced in The Ceremonies, but after attempting to read the truly atrocious Ingoldsby Legends, I had to wait a while before going any further with Klein’s recommendations.

The Alabaster Hand is the only work of fiction by Alan Noel Latimer Munby that was ever published. It’s a collection of ghost stories that were written while the author was being detained in a prisoner of war camp in Nazi Germany. The collection is dedicated to M.R. James, and James’s influence can be felt in every one of these tales.

Munby was a serious book nerd. He was an antiquarian book dealer, a librarian at Cambridge and the President of the Bibliographical Society. His characters, like those of James, share his interests, and his passion for old books creeps into several of the stories here. There’s mysterious diaries, terrifying grimoires and an antiquarian bookshop run by a pervert. The book nerd in me couldn’t help but enjoy these tales. I spend a good deal of my free time researching quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore, but Munby took these pursuits to another level. I get the sense that Munby was romanticising the life of an antiquarian though. Michael Cox, in his 1995 introduction to this collection notes, “The stories in The Alabaster Hand are deliberately retrospective in their evocation of a world that, by 1949, had largely vanished.” It’s hard to imagine anyone other than a carefree Victorian Lord having the necessary time and money to pull off a life truly dedicated to the pursuit and study of antiquarian books.

There’s one story in here called ‘The Negro’s Head’ that is liable to cause offence to modern readers. It’s about a black lad who is murdered for being black. Although the narrator does not condone this murder, he does end the story with regrets for the “savage who was so grievously wronged at the hands of one of my own countrymen.” I know words were used differently back then, but describing a murder victim as a savage seems pretty silly by any standard. I’m quite sure Munby actually meant well here, but I’d still skip to the next story if I was reading this one on the bus.

My favourites in the collection were ‘Herodes Redivivus’, ‘The Book of Hours’, ‘Number Seventy Nine’ and ‘The Devil’s Autograph’. As fun as some of these stories were, none of them were remotely scary. I recall feeling a bit creeped out when I read some of James’ stories, but nothing in this book had that effect. They’re decently entertaining though, and if you like M.R. James, this may be the next best thing. It’s quite short too. You might as well read it.

Joe R. Lansdale’s Best Short Stories (High Cotton and Bumper Crop)

Joe R. Lansdale’s High Cotton and Bumper Crop

Golden Gryphon Press

I read a few Joe R. Lansdale books last year (Part 1, Part 2). Some were great, and I ended the year as a Lansdale fan. I gathered from social media and other blogs that his short stories are some of his best writing, and I decided to look at them next. His first story collection, By Bizarre Hands , is highly esteemed, but I opted instead for High Cotton and Bumper Crop. These are ‘best of’ collections that came out in 2000 and 2004 respectively. There has since been another greatest hits collection, but its contents are nearly all included in the collections I read, and what’s left, I can read some other time.

For the purposes of this review, I’m going to treat the two collections as one. I cannot imagine a person reading one and then not wanting to read the other. The original Golden Gryphon Press editions are hard to find now, but both collections have been reissued by Crossroads Press.

I had read one of Lansdale’s short stories in the first Splatterpunks Anthology a few years ago, and then I read the God of the Razor ones after finishing The Nightrunners. I didn’t bother to reread these ones.

I was actually working on some short fiction right before reading these collections (I’m debating whether to post it here), and I actually found these books quite inspiring. My biggest struggle with writing fiction is coming up with ideas, and it’s really cool to see an author taking what are often silly ideas and then going through with turning them into a story. ‘Fire Dog’ is a perfect example. It’s very silly, but also very entertaining.

Some of the stories are hilarious, but some are also extremely violent and deeply disturbing. ‘I Tell You It’s Love’ was my favourite. It’s the romantic tale of a couple of deranged sadomasochists. It’s quite nasty. I’m already looking forward to reading it again.

Joe R. Lansdale’s readers won’t need PhDs in literature to see that his writing is openly anti-racist, but these books contain the n-word an awful lot (well over 100 times in High Cotton). The usage of this word is to show the ignorance of the characters using it, and this is nearly always entirely obvious, but it definitely dates the writing. I can’t say for sure because I haven’t read any of his recent books, but I doubt Lansdale puts that word on paper as much as he did in the 80s. Again though, he was very clearly trying to use his writing to condemn prejudice.

Lansdale’s writing is exactly the kind of stuff I need when I’m coming down off some high falutin’ literary horror that I’ve had to push myself to get through. It’s not that his writing is dumbed down or anything like that; his stories are just a lot of fun to read. His prose is tight and he tells a mean story. I am, without doubt, going to read more of his short story collections in the future.

Thomas Ligotti’s Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe
Penguin Classics – 2015

Although most of Thomas Ligotti’s fiction has already appeared on this blog, I only recently read his two first, and probably most famous, short story collections. Songs of a Dead Dreamer was originally published in 1985, and Grimscribe: His Lives and Works came out in 1991, but they were first packaged together, along with some stuff from Noctuary and Teatro Grottesco, as The Nightmare Factory in 1996. It wasn’t until after True Detective made Ligotti a household name that Penguin decided to reissue his first two collections under their Penguin Classics series. I believe Ligotti is one of only 10 authors to live to see their books published as a Penguin Classic. This is definitely more high-brow than a lot of the crap I write about on here.

I’ve written about Ligotti so many times here that I don’t have too much to say about the writing here. I suppose I learned that Ligotti didn’t start propounding his pessimistic outlook on life at a late stage in his career. It was there from the beginning.

“the revelation that nothing ever known has ended in glory; that all which ends does so in exhaustion, in confusion and debris.”
Vastarien

Again, I was impressed with the nightmarish quality imbued in Ligotti’s prose The word nightmare is often used as a synonym for scary or unpleasant, but these stories actually possess a bizarre dream-like quality. Obvious details are omitted, and stuff that shouldn’t become weird becomes very weird. It’s unnerving and disorientating, and I love it.

“To see the world drown in oceans of agony is the only vision which now brings me any relief from my madness”
Masquerade of a Dead Sword

While I waited a week or so after finishing Songs of a Dead Dreamer to move on to Grimscribe, this felt like one long book to me. I can’t really think of way to distinguish the tone or quality of the two collections. I think I enjoyed the stories in Grimscribe more, but I’m almost certain that this was due to the fact that by the time I started on the Grimscribe tales, I had figured out that I had been reading the book wrong. Let me explain. I love Ligotti’s fiction, but I have to be in a fairly specific mood to really enjoy his writing. It’s dense and at times tedious, and reading some of these stories at night just made me want to fall asleep. As I started on Grimscribe, I worked out a system where I would read Ligotti on my lunch break at work and then read a trashy splatterpunk novel before bedtime. It was perfect.

I definitely prefered the more straight forward stories collected here. Vastarien, Dr. Locrian’s Asylum, The Last Feast of Harlequin, The Night School and The Coccoons were some of my favourites, but there were plenty of others that I really, really liked. Ligotti is one of the few authors whose books I have read more than once, and I’m sure the stories in this collection will stand multiple readings too. I feel like I might enjoy some of them even more a second time around. I’ll tell you what; in a few years, I’ll go back and read through both Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe more carefully and write more in depth posts about them then.

The last time I saw my friends before Covid hit, I was chatting to one of my buddies about Ligotti’s books and he told me that he had recently acquired “the one with Drake on the cover”. Given the likeness, I am surprised nobody has done this before:

Dystopia – Richard Christian Matheson

The first time I came across Richard Christian Matheson, I liked him. The second time, I did not like him. The guy is known as one of the splatterpunks, and last year, I did a megapost on his dad’s books, so I thought I’d better take a closer look at his output. RCM has written novels, but he is most famous for his stripped down short stories. His most popular collection of stories is 1987’s Scars and Other Distinguishing Marks. I was originally going to read this one, but I opted instead for a collection called Dystopia from 2000. This collection contains all the author’s fiction that had been published by that point, including everything in Scars.

Dystopia – Richard Christian Matheson
Crossroads Press – 2011 (Originally published 2000)

Honestly, choosing the longer collection was probably a mistake on my part. Matheson is a talented writer, and some of the stories in Dystopia are great. The problem is that some (maybe even lots) of the stories are not really great. The most notable factor of Matheson’s writing is his precision; many of these tales are told in less than 3 pages. This is really cool when it works, but there’s many, many stories (60ish) in this collection, and they’re not all masterpieces. I usually read a few in each sitting, and the brevity and quantity made even the good ones a bit forgettable. I appreciate complete collections of author’s works, but I would have been far better off with a shorter “Best of” collection of this author’s works. Dystopia is more than 400 pages. I reckon a slim 180 page greatest hits would have been far more impressive.

It has been pointed out to me that I often avoid discussing specific stories when reviewing short fiction anthologies. The nature of the stories in this collection makes it even less appealing to get into specifics. Fortunately, as is so often the case, Will Errickson over at Too Much Horror Fiction blog reviewed Matheson’s short fiction more articulately and in more detail than I ever could. Check out his review here.

Kinda crappy post this week… sorry. Life has been pretty hectic recently, and I haven’t had much time to blog. I had to go through my draft posts folder to find something to polish up for my Sunday deadline. I wrote the above a long, long time ago. I was actually planning to read RCM’s novel, Created By and including my thoughts on that in this post, but after putting it off for half a year, I have decided not to bother. Life is too short to read everything. I gave this dude a chance, and while he was clearly a capable writer, I currently have no desire to read more of his stuff. If anyone has read this novel and is convinced I would enjoy it, let me know and I’ll reconsider.

I have a few big posts coming up in the next few weeks, so check back soon.

J.B. Priestley: Grandfather of Dr. Frank-N-Furter

Here’s two books by an old English wanker:

The Other Place – J.B. Priestley
Valancourt Books – 2018 (Originally published 1953)

I quite enjoyed the first few stories in this collection. None of them are particularly scary, but they’re all quite strange. The only ghost story is about a haunted TV set, and it’s going for laughs rather than scares.

It took me several months to get through the first half of the book, but I rushed through the rest in an afternoon. I think I might have enjoyed this part more if I had continued at my original pace. Reading these tales in close succession highlighted how similar many of them are. It seems that most of them are about people having visions of the past or the future. They’re all competently written and enjoyable, but looking back now it’s tricky to distinguish some of them. This wasn’t the most jaw-dropping book I’ve ever read, but I liked it. After finishing, I was happy enough to give Priestley’s novel Benighted a try.

Benighted – J.B. Priestley
Valancourt Books – 2018 (Originally published 1927)

Benighted is quite good. Yesterday, I was out for a drive with my wife, and I was telling her about the book I was reading. When I explained the plot to her, she responded that it sounded awfully like The Rocky Horror Picture Show. She was dead right. This is the story of a couple who get caught in a storm and have to seek shelter in an old house full of weirdos. Unfortunately, there are no sweet transvestites in Benighted. I looked into this a bit, and it turns out that The Rocky Horror Show was directly influenced by The Old Dark House, the 1932 film version of Benighted. I was pretty embarrassed that I hadn’t noticed the similarities beforehand. I love that movie!

I’m a little surprised that Benighted isn’t better known. It starts off atmospheric and mysterious and ends quite exciting. Things get pretty heavy between the characters, and there might be a little bit too much philosophical insight for this to appeal as a straight forward horror novel. It’s creepy in parts, but that creepiness never seems to be the main point of the book. It’s hard to get too concerned about the tongueless ghoul lurking upstairs when you’re trying to figure out the single biggest obstacle to human happiness.

Still, it is fair to call Benighted a horror novel. If you look up “gothic tropes” on google, the first 3 listed are darkness, isolation and madness. Bingo! Those are the main ingredients here. This is also a novel about a labyrinthine mansion filled with a strange family’s shameful secrets. That’s pretty gothic bro. There’s no supernatural element though, so I guess this would be classed as psychological horror nowadays.

Truth be told, I had originally written a more laudatory review of these books. It was going to end with a claim that I would some day seek out the author’s other works. Then I read that he hated Irish people. Fuck you J.B. Priestley, you little jaffa prick. Glad you’re dead and if I ever come across any of your other books, I’ll stick them up my ass.

Richard Matheson’s Horror Classics – I Am Legend, Hell House, The Shrinking Man and a bunch of short stories

I’m ashamed of myself. I have been writing about horror fiction on this blog since 2015, but this is the first time I will feature the work of Richard Matheson. Silly me. I have written about these books in the order that I read them. This order does not reflect their date of publication or their merits.

I Am Legend
Gold Medal Books – 1954

I first read I Am Legend about 6 years ago. I remember absolutely loving it. I had seen the abominable Will Smith movie with the same title and had been terribly disappointed with that film’s optimistic ending. I could not say the same thing about the novel. I started this blog a year or so afterwards, and somehow never got around to reviewing the book. I read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House a few months back and decided immediately thereafter to read Matheson’s similarly titled Hell House. Just before doing so, I thought about revisiting I am Legend so that I could do a multi-book post on Matheson. I am extremely glad I did. I loved I am Legend the first time I read it, but I’m pretty sure I enjoyed it even more the second time around. I think it’s fair to say that this novel is one of my favourite books.

There was no sound now but that of his shoes and the now senseless singing of birds. Once I thought they sang because everything was right with the world, Robert Neville thought, I know now I was wrong. They sing because they’re feeble minded.

This is the violent, dark and crushingly bleak story of Robert Neville, the last man on a vampire ridden Earth. For a novel with so little hope, Matheson does an impressive job of pushing the disappointment. The dog! Oh Jesus, the dog! Come on Richard, why would you do that to your protagonist? Everything always gets worse. I don’t want to spoil how the book ends, but holy shit, that last paragraph, that last sentence, is phenomenal. This is what I want from a horror novel. It’s well written too, really enjoyable stuff. Both times I’ve read it, I’ve finished it in less than a day. Damn, this book is awesome. Seriously, if you’re into horror at all, you should really check this one out.

Hell House
Viking Press – 1971

I don’t know much about the writing of Hell House, but I believe that it’s a fact that Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House had a pretty big influence. The set up for both tales is almost identical – a scientist and two psychics are sent in to study a haunted house. While Jackson’s book relies on subtle, psychological terror, Matheson’s goes for an all-out onslaught of horror.

The title of this book is an apt one. This is a blasphemous, perverted, blood and guts, kinda haunted house. Matheson doesn’t shy away from getting gritty, but the pacing, characterisation and general decent standard of writing prevent this from feeling exploitative. The nastiness in here is effective too; this is quite a scary book.

Hell House is almost twice as long as I Am Legend, and I don’t think it packs quite as much of a punch, but its drawn out descent into Hell is effective in its own way. This is definitely worth reading if you like horror.

Offbeat
Valancourt Books – 2017 (Originally published 2002)

Offbeat is a collection of Matheson’s stories that had not been previously collected in an anthology. Matheson wrote a lot, and these stories’ failure to be included in other collections was not due to their quality. (One of these tales is actually featured in Penguin’s The Best of Richard Matheson.) Still though, I was a bit underwhelmed by a few of the stories in the collection. The twist endings of a couple of them seemed very predictable. My favourites were ‘And Now I’m Waiting’, ‘Maybe You Remember Him’ and ‘Phonecall from Across the Street’. I didn’t enjoy this book quite as much as the novels I had read beforehand, but I certainly don’t regret reading it. If you were already a fan of Matheson, I reckon you’ll enjoy this.

The Best of Richard Matheson
Penguin Classics – 2017

When I found out that Penguin had recently put out a “Best of Matheson” collection, I realised I had done things backwards. I should have read this first and Offbeat afterwards. That being said, it is a testament to the quality of the tales in Offbeat that I started reading another collection of Matheson’s stories directly after finishing that one. I didn’t know quite how prolific Matheson had been, and I didn’t know how well I already knew his work. He wrote a bunch of stories that turned into episodes of the Twilight Zone. I’ve never watched an episode of the The Twilight Zone, but I’m familiar with the plots of some of the episodes from the times the Simpsons parodied them. Also, this collection contains ‘Duel’. I remember watching the movie version of this with my dad when I was a kid. I had no idea it was based on a Matheson story.

Honestly, this collection is a much, much better place to start if you haven’t read any of Matheson’s short stories before. These stories are quality. There’s one near the end called ‘Mute’ that I particularly enjoyed. It’s not really a horror story, but it contains some pretty interesting insight on language. This Matheson was a smart guy.

The Shrinking Man
Bantam Books – 1969 (Originally published 1956)

I had no great desire to read this book, but it was discussed at length in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, so I thought I’d better read it and get it into this post. It’s the story of Scott, a man who gets hit by a radioactive wave that causes him to shrink exactly one seventh of an inch every day. I had this pegged as more of a science fiction novel than a horror novel, but, as Stephen King points out, there isn’t much science in here at all.

I actually want to talk about the science, or lack thereof, because it really annoyed me when I was reading this book. This chap doesn’t shrink a certain percentage of his body height every day. He shrinks the same amount every day. If you think about this, it’s pretty ridiculous. If a 6’4″ man shrinks 1 seventh of an inch in a day, he is losing approximately 0.2% of his overall height. If he keeps losing the same amount every day, after another 529 days, he will only be 2 sevenths of an inch tall. By the next day, he will have lost 50% of his height. By then he will be one seventh of an inch tall and will continue to lose 100% of his height in one day. This doesn’t make sense. I’m not a scientist, but I feel that I know enough about the basic laws of reality to state that this rate of shrinkage is a physical impossibility.

Ok, I am going to discuss the ending of the book, so skip to the next paragraph if you haven’t read it yet. The book ends with the protagonist entering a microscopic existence. It is a weird upbeat ending full of optimism. This doesn’t make sense. Ok, maybe it’s possible he was a teeny tiny little bit taller than 1 seventh of an inch and that it will take another day for him to completely shrink out of existence, but that isn’t what the book suggests. Matheson suggests that the protagonist will continue to shrink interminably. But he can’t keep shrinking at the same rate! This would only work if he had been shrinking a percentage of his height, not a fixed amount. Things can always get a little bit smaller, but they can not decrease their size by more then their size. The other option that Matheson had to end this novel was for Scott to find himself in some kind of opposites universe of anti-matter or something where he actually finds himself growing larger every day. Sure the science is ridiculous, but at least that would work mathematically (which is more than can be said for the ending as it stands).

Really, this is more of an adventure story than anything. While half of the novel describes the shrinking process and its unpleasant effects on Scott’s life, the other half details his struggles with a spider after getting locked in his cellar alone. The spider stuff is exciting, but the real horror lies in Scott trying to come to terms with his inevitable disappearance. My favourite part was when a pervert thinks the shrinker is a kid and tries to diddle him. It’s obviously a horrible, horrible thing to happen, but the dialogue was pretty funny.

Silence a moment. Then the man said. “Women. Who come into man’s life a breath from the sewer.” He belched. “A pox on the she.” He looked over at Scott. The car headed for a tree.

This book was fine, but it was definitely my least favourite of Matheson’s novels.

I Am Legend is absolutely crucial. You should definitely check out the Best of short story collection too. If you like those, check out the others listed above. Matheson has plenty of other books, but I reckon I’ll give it a while before I seek those out. (5 books by one author over the course of 3 months was a lot for me.) This guy had a huge effect on the horror genre, and it’s not surprising. These books are imaginative, well written and sometimes truly horrifying. Richard Matheson was a cool guy.

Thomas Ligotti’s Noctuary

noctuary - ligotti

Thomas Ligotti – Noctuary

Carroll and Graf – 1994

Noctuary was the first Thomas Ligotti book that I read, but by the time I got around to starting this blog a year later, I had forgotten the whole thing. I’ve reviewed quite a few of Ligotti’s books recently, and I wanted to go back to reread this one.

I have to say, I enjoyed this collection less after having read Ligotti’s other stuff. A few of the stories are so weird that they went over my head, and some of them are so abstract that I found them boring. What the hell is ‘The Medusa’ about? I read it, and I understand all of the words and sentences, but I still feel like I don’t get it. Weird? Yes. Scary? No.

I think the atmosphere of these texts is far more important than their plots, and while I do appreciate some good atmospheric horror, I felt like this was a bit much. I reread Noctuary over the course of a very stressful week last month, and that might well have affected my enjoyment of the book, but I seemed to remember Ligotti’s Teatro Grottesco collection being a little more to the point and quite a bit more satisfying.

There’s a compilation of very short works at the end of the book called “Notebook of the Night”. Some of these were fairly dull, but this section also contains my favourite piece in this collection, ‘The Premature Transfiguration’. This is a relatively simplistic tale about people turning into lobsters and then begging to be killed. LOL!

I’m being a bit negative here. I did actually like this book, but I seemed to remember enjoying it more the first time I read it. It took me less than 24 hours to finish it that time, but more than a week this time around. If you’re already a Ligotti fan, then check this out, but I don’t think it’s the best starting place if you haven’t read his stuff before.

Hugh Walpole’s All Souls’ Night

All Souls’ Night – Hugh Walpole
Valancourt Books – 2016 (Originally published 1933)

Hugh Walpole was a very popular author of fiction about 90 years ago, but he’s not very well remembered anymore. This book was published during the author’s lifetime, and unlike many of the short story collections by old dead guys that I write about, this is not a ‘best of’ or ‘collected supernatural works of’ collection. It’s just a bunch of stories that the author wrote at around the same time (assumedly between 1928, when his previous collection of stories was published, and 1933). All Souls’ Night was recently reissued by Valancourt books, so it is likely one of the author’s better works.

Valancourt market this as a collection of macabre tales, and while I suppose there are enough spooks in here to warrant doing so, quite a few of these stories have nothing of the macabre or supernatural in them. The non-creepy stories are well written, and I enjoyed a few of them, but in honesty, they left me with no desire to seek out more of Walpole’s work.

The creepy stories are quite good. There is a different collection of Walpole’s collected supernatural stories that was published posthumously, and I think I probably would have enjoyed that collection a little more than this one. However, the fact that All Souls’ Night was selected for republication over Walpole’s other short story collections suggests that it contains the author’s best ghost stories. These were well-written, enjoyable tales, but if they are the author’s best works, I don’t feel any great need to seek out his lesser stuff.

I feel a bit mean writing this review. This is an interesting collection. Walpole was gay, and while his work doesn’t describe explicitly homosexual acts, it is quite gay at times. (I mean that with total respect. Read the book and I’m sure you’ll agree.) This collection was published in the 30s too, so it’s likely very interesting to historians of queer fiction. (That’s not to say that it won’t be interesting/enjoyable for others too.) I wasn’t blown away by All Souls’ Night, but reading it wasn’t an unpleasant experience. It just wasn’t really my thing.

One of the reasons I decided to check this out was the author’s name. I assumed that he was some relation of Horace Walpole, the author of The Castle of Otranto, the first Gothic novel. Hugh’s wikipedia page confirmed that the two were related, but it didn’t give the precise details. After a bit of sleuthing, I figured out that Horace’s Great Grandfather was Hugh’s great great great great grandfather. I’m not sure if that makes Horace Hugh’s great great great uncle, second cousin thrice removed or something else.

The Splatterpunks Anthologies: Extreme Horror and Over the Edge

splatterpunks extreme horror over the edge sammon.jpg
Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror – Paul M. Sammon (Ed.)
Xanadu – 1990

The first Splatterpunks anthology was published in 1990. It’s a collection of extremely violent stories, most of which had previously been published elsewhere. Some of the stories are quite enjoyable and some are fairly shit. The most remarkable feature of this collection is the editor’s attempt to delineate Splatterpunk as a separate entity from regular horror fiction.

Every review I have read of this collection has commented on the fact that most of the authors included herein reject the splatterpunk label. Sammon himself acknowledges this fact several times throughout his introductory notes. Let’s face it. Splatterpunk was never a revolutionary literary movement; it was a label created by David Schow to describe a small group of his writer friends who were writing gory stories. The authors in this anthology repeatedly refuse the splatterpunk label because it’s too limiting, and they feel that it would only apply to a small portion of their output. If we’re calling writers Splatterpunks because they’ve written a couple of gross-out stories, surely Stephen King fits the bill too. His story Survivor Type is easily as extreme as most of the stuff in this anthology. (My point is not that King should be included here; it’s that the editor’s posturing is ridiculous. In the next anthology he goes on to claim that Bret Easton Ellis, a writer who is parodied in this collection, is actually a Splatterpunk too.)

The book includes a lengthy epilogue that I was unable to finish. Paul Sammon’s attempts to make Splatterpunk seem like a really important cultural phenomenon were genuinely embarrassing to read. I was going to include a quote from the introduction here, but after rereading the first few lines of it, I found myself cringing too hard to continue. He literally compares his authors to Burroughs, De Sade and Baudelaire in the second sentence of this book. Some stories in here were decent, but I had forgotten most of them only two weeks after finishing the collection.

Splatterpunks: Over the Edge – Paul M. Sammon (Ed.)
Tor – 1995

The second Splatterpunks collection came out 5 years later, and this book is far, far worse than its predecessor. Actually, I really liked some of the stories in here, but there’s way more in this one, and some of them are absolute shit.

The really dislikeable part of this one wasn’t the awful stories or even Paul Sammon’s embarrassing introductions; it was the non-fiction pieces. Aside from Sammon’s bullshit, the only non-fiction piece in the first collection was an essay on ultra violent films. I watched most of the movies it mentions when I was a teenager, so I actually quite enjoyed reading this piece. Although it was about movies, it didn’t feel hugely out of place in a collection of ultra-violent stories. There’s an article in Spatterpunks II by Martin Amis on the movies of Brian De Palma. Martin Amis is not a horror author, and while De Palma has done a few horror films, those aren’t the movies being discussed in the essay. Sure, some of De Palma’s movies are violent, but they don’t compare to the other stuff in these collections. There is absolutely no reason for this essay to be in this collection other than having a famous author’s name on its cover. Fuck off Martin Amis.

There’s also an interview in here with Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan. My favourite pastime is reading about Satanic occult orders, but I skipped this section after about 2 pages. It was excruciating. Not only does LaVey come across as an embarrassing dildo, but the interview is performed by Jim Goad. Jim Goad, for those of you who don’t know, is just about the edgiest edge-lord in town. He beats women and believes that white people are oppressed. He also published a magazine in the 90s that included pages of rape jokes. When it was first published in this same magazine, the LaVey interview was followed with an interview with David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Together, LaVey and Goad are unbearable. Again, this piece has absolutely nothing to do with horror, and can only have been included because Sammon saw it as edgy and in-your-face. (There’s also a particulary embarrassing “rant” from Goad’s wife. I actually felt sorry her after reading it. Total loser.)

And I think this edginess is the big problem with these collections. Times have changed in the last 30 years, and being edgy isn’t cool any more. Pushing the boundaries of taste isn’t a difficult task, and today’s teenagers throw about the phrase ‘edgelord’ with derision. These kids have grown up with the internet. By the time was I was finished school, I had seen video footage of executions, extreme S&M and tonnes of stuff that’s worse than the stories in this book. (Can you guys remember rotten.com?) I don’t think it’s possible to make literary gore as shocking as what kids see on their phones every day. Brutal violence is fine and dandy when it’s used for effect, but it’s rarely interesting when it’s presented as the main attraction.

A lot of this crap is boring and predictable. Think about it:

How can you make a murder more offensive? Hmmmm, make the victim more innocent and vulnerable. Who are the most innocent and vulnerable members of society? Well, women are certainly more vulnerable than men, and there’s plenty of women dying in these books, but children are more vulnerable than women! Oh wait, one of these stories is about a child dying in a car accident. Yeah, but babies are more innocent than children. Sammon’s got you covered fam; one of these stories features a baby being sexually abused. Ok, hang on! Fetuses! Fetuses are even more vulnerable than babies! They’re the most innocent and vulnerable of all! But no author would ever have the balls to write about somebody killing fetuses, would they? Actually, yeah. quite a few of these stories involve people killing fetuses. A lot of Splatterpunk seems to involve this kind of punching down, and as I am no longer 13 years old, I have no interest in this kind of crap. I far prefer gore, brutality and violence when it’s directed at somebody who deserves it.

Also, just to amp up the cringe factor, Paul Sammon filled the last few pages of this book with a list of bands that he likes. I did the same thing with my homework journal when I was 15.

All this being said, there were some great stories in the second collection. Gorman Bechard’s Pig was deadly, and I quite liked the weird ones by Petoud and Koja. There are a few duds in here for sure, but just as it was with the first collection, this book would be far more enjoyable if it was just a collection of stories with no bullshit in between. Give me gore and brutality, but don’t try to make it seem clever when it isn’t.