Prince of Darkness: 13 Ghastly Tales by B.D. Prince

 

The Rack series is the gift that keeps on giving! After I wrote about B.D. Prince's pleasant E.C.-Comics style tale "Head Hunter" in The Rack II, he reached out and offered me an ARC of his recent collection to review. I was more than happy to, and this is a fun one: Lots of inspirations from classic anthologies, comics, and TV shows. Let's get to it!

Obligatory disclosure/disclaimer: As mentioned, Prince gave me the ARC, but that's it, quid pro quo wise.

 

The Last Drive-in Movie

Synopsis: An aging couple facing down death go to the drive-in to relive their first date.

Thoughts: Opening strong! We have an old couple here who are sympathetic and loving. It feels genuine, and the whole time you're reminding that this is "13 Ghastly Tales," not "13 Sad But Ultimately Life-Affirming Tales," so you're waiting for the other shoe to drop. And I found myself turning each page with dread wondering actly would go wrong. And then it finally does. And it's glorious.

The gore is great. It's not even especially graphic, it's just described well and it punches above its weight. And...if you read the afterword, there's even a metaphor and subtext here! And, being a literal-minded sap, I totally missed it!

Rattle And Sway

Synopsis: A young man dreams of circus stardom. But, be careful what you wish for...

Thoughts: Something I began noticing with this story is that Prince is good at quickly establishing time and place without too much clunky expository dialogue. This isn't always the case--we have a bit later on with a "Dr. Reichstag" in his pointedly "post-WWII Mercedes" that's a little on the nose for me.

I felt the first half was vivid and then it fell a little flat. The ending is obvious--this is a love letter to Freaks--but Prince's approach to the tone makes it different than similar stories I've read. There's more of an ambivalence to the tone vs. pure horror. I like it conceptually, but in practice I think it undercuts the power the story had built up.

Mighty Bear

Synopsis: A young boy is chosen as the successor to the tribe's chief, but he's going to have to start growing up fast.

Thoughts: This is another slight story, but I enjoyed it. It's essentially Hamlet with Native Americans, except whereas Hamlet just manages to bitch and moan his way into a Friday the 13th-level body count, this story has shapeshifter magic.

It's a nice, straightforward story: It's the sort of thing you could imagine a counselor reading to kids at summer camp. It is precisely the sort of thing that would have fit well into Bruce Coville's fantasy and horror anthologies of the 1990s, which were full of stories written by and presumably for adult audiences, but which were thoroughly appropriate fare for kids.

 

Into the Shadows

Synopsis: Max and Paulie's new house has something lurking in the shadows.

Thoughts: This is very similar to Let's Get Invisible! which is one of the stronger early-ish Goosebumps books. It's a cool, under-the-radar piece that wrong-foots the reader (who, to be fair, was usually 10 years old) and has fun mirror-dimension shenanigans (yes, I'm spoiling a Goosebumps book. If you haven't read it already, the ship has sailed my friend).

It's also actually tense and scary. It uses one of my favorite kinds of misdirection, the sort of dramatic irony you get in supernatural fiction when something SPOOKY happens and the character assumes (because, why wouldn't they) that the unexplainable noise they just heard has a rational explanation. I like this one. Lots of fun. A highlight of the first half of the book.

Jaadu

Synopsis: An infertile couple visits the carnival, where Jaadu, the two-headed cow, is said to grant fertility to supplicants.

Thoughts: Prince says in his afterword that it's really modeled again after old-school carnival horror, and that the last reveal would be one that would have a great final panel from a horror comic. He's right--I can practically see the "Good Lord!" and "Choke!" from two characters in the background. My problem here is that while the outcome isn't what anyone would want, I'm not convinced it's entirely horrific. Sure, it's a Monkey's Paw thing, but this might have more of a silver lining than you'd expect. Compare this with Charlie Grant's masterful "Temperature Days on Hawthorne Street," which has a similar scenario but really drives it home.

Still, I did feel Emma's pain, and found myself anxious and hoping that she'd take a chance and accept Jaadu's blessing--even though I knew she'd regret it. And that is the power of the Monkey's Paw derivative story--that even though you know what you're doing is the wrong thing, in a way you have no choice because of the emotional power of it all. It's nice to see the Penguin Boy is living his best life, by the way.

Will Work 4 Food

Synopsis: A bitter miser picks up a day laborer.

Thoughts: There's too much going on here. This falls victim to a flaw of the EC formula, which is their tendency to have the bad guy not just be a bad guy, but a murderer (even if it's not probable). Now, much of the time that's because we want to set up a rotting corpse exacting revenge, and that's great. We don't have that here, but we do have a lot of stuff, not all of which makes sense. Worst of all is the whole cuckoldry/ex-wife subplot, which just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Maybe my least favorite story in the book, which is too bad, because it starts with a strong setup. It just sort of goes all over the place in my opinion.

Outcast

Synopsis: Three kids investigate the mystery of what their foul-smelling oafish classmate has in his lunch bag.

Thoughts: Disturbing, but could use tightening. The premise is horrifying, and the mystery is solid, but we take much too long to get there, I think. For as much time as we spend with the three main characters, I never got a sense of as much depth as I'd need to justify all that spilt ink.

The core of the story is grotesque and good; I think there's just a little too much fluff to crunch. Still, the ending makes up for a lot. Kinda Laymon-ish.

 

Chanel No. 1

Synopsis: A man is on an obsessive search to find the *perfect* perfume for his special someone.

Thoughts: Feels like a Robert Bloch story. As we saw theother week, that's not an unequivocally good thing, but it is in this case.  It doesn't take very much to figure out the contours of the ending--I suspected it around the end of the first page, but then I read a lot of this stuff. Still, this story doesn't rely on the (telegraphed) twist, but on the increasingly unhinged behavior at the perfume counter to drive us along until we get to the end.

I like the idea that this guy is a puzzle designer, by the way. It tells you a lot about him: That he's  intelligent, that he's probably a loner, and that he sees the world in a way that follows some logic but not the way society works. 

Clever title, by the way (Prince explains it in his afterword).

"Feetus" 

Synopsis: A girl's trip to the carnival finds her with a new sort of pet. Which is bad news for any and all current pets and family members.

Thoughts: Hell yes. Our friend the Clown Quality Hypothesis is back. There are four circus/carnival themed stories in this collection (I'm counting "Hot Box" as one since there's so much circus content), and the two with the most clown content in them (this one and "Hot Box") are the better half the third story in the collection set at the carnival, and it's the best. The idea that balloons are clown eggs is the same energy as the excellent clown lore of "The Only Good Clown"--it's a sick, creative notion. I love it.

Then it gets really nasty at the end. This is the story I've been waiting all book for--something that takes Prince's interests and style, but does something new and takes it to the next level.

Witness

Synopsis: The cops finally catch a break in the Butcher case: His latest victim's been found alive. Unfortunately, she's in no condition to identify the culprit.

Thoughts: A quick and nasty story with a clear foundation in Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I suspect the same story that inspired Stephen King's "Autopsy Room Four" was an influence here. This feels like one of the short-short stories you run into in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine that straddles the line between crime and horror. It's a clever idea, although (like many stories of its type) it feels more like a 'twist delivery mechanism' than a story that rewards rereading and revisiting. That doesn't make it bad, but it is an inherent downside to this sort of thing.

Hot Box

Synopsis: A circus train is stalled on the tracks. Bad luck for them there's an out-of-control troop transport on the way. . .

Thoughts: It's an interesting story, and of a sort that I feel like I've encountered in the past: It's there in stories like Winston Churchill (alas, apparently not that one)'s "Man Overboard!," or some of Jack London's survival stories, or Fay Woolf's notorious "Slowly". It's partly adventure writing, and partly a conte cruel; it's not really horror at all but it is horrific. It feels old-fashioned, but in a good way.

I normally don't find adventure stories that exciting, but this one has i) good use of detail, ii) a sense of tragedy, and iii) a terrific payoff.

 

I Am The One

Synopsis: A bored kid visiting grandmamma learns they should have left well enough alone.

Thoughts: Another slight story, but here, that's the point. Prince notes that his inspiration was the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series,  and he nails it: The point of those stories was to be a way to carry on the oldest and most important function of mankind's storytelling tradition: Scaring the shit out of little kids. This is absolutely a story to read aloud, and Prince peppered it with the sorts of touches that make for effective spooky storytelling: The heavy use of sound effects (lots of "Thump Thump Thumps") and repeated, rhyming slogans ("I am the one who dwells in the well. . .I'm warning you now you'd better not tell", which then becomes "I'm warning you twice you'd better not tell"). It's times like this that I wish the phrase "understood the assignment" hadn't been driven into the ground because it's exactly what's happened here. Prince clearly gets how and why the stories he's imitating work, and does it in a way that's familiar but not derivative.

 

Wiggle Room

Synopsis: An awkward mama's boy of a farmer challenges the local blowhard for the attentions of a cute waitress.

Thoughts: LOVE THIS. This one feels a lot like a story from Bruce Jones' great Twisted Tales comics from the '80s. This is another one where you see the whole thing playing out in mental comic-book panels, or even as some sort of scuzzy 1970s regional horror movie. Like Deranged: Confessions of a Necrophile or Three on a Meathook or Scream Bloody Murder. However, for all that, it doesn't feel overly derivative or like an over-the-top pastiche. The characters might be exploitation stock, but Prince makes them come alive. Like, well, like electrified nightcrawlers.

Conclusions: I enjoyed this book. Like many short fiction collections, it can be uneven--there's a stretch of stories around the middle that sags a bit, but the last set brings it all home.

The second half of stories, which are presumably more recent, are generally stronger--throughout the course you get the sense of a writer starting out by emulating his influences, and progressing from competent reproduction of the same into a guy coming into his own and putting a distinctive spin on the classics. Fun stuff, in the best horrifically entertaining tradition, and I'll keep an eye out for what he does next!

Check it out here.