Bloch Party: Monsters in Our Midst (ed. Robert Bloch)

                                                                                     

Yup, it's MORE early '90s TOR anthologies!

I'll switch it up at some point, but I've been meaning to read this for a bit. Bloch did two anthologies for TOR in this time period--this one and Psycho-Paths; both cashed in on his most famous creations, Psycho and Norman Bates, and focused on psychological horror and human evil. This is a good one. 

Snow Man by John Coyne

Synopsis: A Peace Corps teacher in Ethiopia finds himself at odds with his students.

Thoughts: This is a difficult story to evaluate because I think it's very well-written but also found it almost incoherent at the level of plot the first time I read it. But I also saw that Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling included it in a Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, and while I don't always agree with the picks for those volumes*, I trust them not to pick something that didn't "work." 

So I gave it another go, and I still don't "like" the story, but I think there is something there. In a way, it reminds me of some of Paul Bowles' stories, particularly the ones set in North Africa. Those, like this, are spare, unpleasant vignettes often about the cultural and political clashes between European outsiders and African locals.

However, those stories are usually clearer about what's going on than "Snow Man" is. Marc is a memorably unpleasant character--that part is all good. I suppose one reading is that he's missing his Midwestern home (hence the focus on the cold), and half-consciously decides to stir up trouble until he's sent home. There's one reference to him imagining his students are the rabbits he'd hunt back home, which suggests maybe he engineered the entire school strike and subsequent massacre. Which is interesting, but it doesn't quite cohere. Even if we just read this as a character study, there's just not quite enough glue binding the elements together. 

*For example--how the HELL does William F. Nolan's "My Name Is Dolly", perhaps the most definitionally 'mid' horror story I can think of, end up in the inaugural YBFH in the same company as George R.R. Martin's "The Pear-Shaped Man," Ursula K. Le Guin's "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight," and Doug Winter's "Splatter: A Cautionary Tale"?

A Gentle Breeze Blowing by Robert E. Vardeman

Synopsis: A gas station attendant and amateur chemical engineer is convinced he's found a fuel additive that will end smog. If only the corrupt bureaucrats and big business interests would listen!

Thoughts: Entertaining and, well, gentle. This feels like another one of those macabre stories in the intersection between crime and horror that make up so many of the "Alfred Hitchcock" anthologies and similar magazines. In fact, it feels pleasantly old-fashioned, despite the things which let you know this story was written in the early 90s (concerns about car emissions, references to eco-terrorists, worries that the Japanese are taking everything over). 

Fictional cranks are fun, and I like that we wind up small and end up at an apocalypse. There are just two problems. The first is that much of the middle section is the same joke over and over, just at a larger scale each time. The second is the twist Vardeman puts in the last lines--it took me by surprise the first time, so it worked, but it doesn't make much sense once you stop and wonder why Charley didn't immediately test out his additive on his own car first. I suspect Vardeman realized this as well, so he puts in a justification ("He had been so rushed, so hassled by the EPA bureaucrats") but I don't quite buy it. 

For You to Judge by Ramsey Campbell

Synopsis: A juror for the trial of a serial killer spends his Christmas haunted by the case.

Thoughts: Classic Campbell here; I talked about totality of effect last week and Campbell does that even better than Poe himself--every element in this story contributes to feelings of alienation and cruelty.

There's a lot that's nasty in this story, but I think the best touch is thematic: Poor Foulsham, the juror, is the only one at all interested in understanding Fishwick the murderer, and for his troubles the reactionary, prejudiced lot of his fellow jurors and society generally twist that humanistic gesture into complicity with evil. And, yes, surely one of Campbell's targets here is the way that society will grasp for every sordid detail of a crime but act like the person who wants to understand the criminal is the depraved one.

And yet, in this case, those people are right: Foulsham does seem to have opened himself up to possession. Unfortunately for, well, everyone.

The Child Killer by Steve Rasnic Tem

Synopsis: The Sackman has been killing children for forty years. His latest victim has plans of her own.

Thoughts: Yikes. The Sackman is on the one hand a mythic beast; the scale of his crimes over the decades outstrips even the most extravagant Henry Lee Lucas body count myths. At the same time, there's a horrible materiality to the story which places him in our world. He drives an ancient Buick, he has a house, he keeps trophies. But all of those elements which seem to ground our boogeyman then flip back into fairy tale land: The Buick serves almost as a magical hourglass for his time as the Sackman (it's been transporting kidnapped children for years, and when it finally chooses to fail, the Sackman supposes his "career" will be over), and the house a mansion carved into a mountainside. The trophies, too, are overwhelming, huge closets full of children's clothing, storage shelves of eyeglasses and toys, and even more upsetting artifacts. 

Even the nature of his crimes walks that reality/fantasy line: A moment in here which I will never forget describes how the Sackman once stayed on a sofa for three days (even eating and relieving himself there), all in the name of crushing a boy under the cushions, "the life squeezing out of his semi-conscious body an hour at a time." 

This is a ferocious story, unsparing and imaginative. Great stuff.

The Lick of Time by Jonathan Carroll

Synopsis: A woman begins self-therapy by talking to herself on her answering machine.

Thoughts: ChatGPT would have done a real number on poor Erin, huh?

Despite how uncommon the condition may be in real life, multiple personality disorder is a pop culture psychothriller favorite--and we largely have Robert Bloch to thank for that. Carroll's story takes a look at how the encounter with a real version of a split self--the answering machine--might lead one down this path.

However, Carroll being Carroll, he eschews the obvious Blochian route for this story for a bolt from the blue moment of emotional shock (I think I actually gasped when I read it).

I saw someone online say about this story that it has an optimistic ending, which I don't think it is at all. On the other hand, I think that Richard Matheson's "Person to Person", which is very similar, does (and I can imagine people disagreeing with that). Speaking of Mathesons, next up is...

The Edge by Richard Christian Matheson

Synopsis: A young man struggles with his inability to gain lasting pleasure from anything other than seeing or contemplating violence.

Thoughts: What does make this story stand out is that Matheson's protagonist is a sympathetic psychopath. He's bothered by the fact that the only thing which gives him pleasure is violence or suffering, and that he's on a trajectory of needing ever-increasing stimulation of the least socially-acceptable sort.

The ending isn't very surprising--there's never a wasted word in RCM's terse, efficient stories, so as soon as the setting's established we're at least partly primed for what happens--but it works. What makes it more effective than the expected twist is the exact phrasing, so let me throw up a spoiler barrier:

SPOILERS:

Our narrator's an airplane passenger, and at the end the plane's crashing. He alone is excited about the impending annihilation. As the rest scream, "Peter remained in his seat, peering out the window at the burning wing and onrushing community below." What makes this so good is that Peter's anticipation ("This was going to be good") seems less about witnessing his own and his fellow passengers' destruction (although I'm sure he's stoked for that too), but the fact that he'll participate as an agent of devastation on the town below (shades of the then-recent Lockerbie bombing).

How Would You Like It? by Lawrence Block

Synopsis: A man becomes a vigilante animal welfare advocate for the beasts of New York City

Thoughts: The funniest story about animal abuse you'll ever read! A low bar, I know, but this is funny.

What makes this story work is the structure. It's really just a series of vignettes. First, we have a pair of animal abusers getting their just desserts--and while the crimes of these two brutes wouldn't amount to capital offenses even with human victims, they're easily deserving of death within the comic book moral logic of a story like this. Then, Block backs off. The next two vignettes are examples of the protagonist politely intervening on behalf of animals and getting happier outcomes for the dogs and cats in question without any bloodshed.

At this point, our guy seems reasonable, and it's only halfway through the final vignette when we realize just how insane he is.

Extra points for having our hero buy the whip he uses on the Central Park coachman from a sex shop.

The Moment the Face Falls by Chet Williamson

Synopsis: A washed-up screenwriter of Westerns who peaked decades ago with an Oscar nomination gets another shot.

Thoughts: I've said it before and I've said it again, but one of the frustrations of this blog is that sometimes you find yourself writing much more about stories you didn't quite like (in an attempt to dissect just what went wrong) than about stories you love, because you don't want to spoil the surprise of a great story for others. 

So, I'm going to be a little vague--but what makes this story the cruelest and most horrific (in some ways) in the book is that, unlike most of the others here, it never crosses the threshold into murder--or even criminality. However, it hits harder than anything else in the book, and I think that's because once you remove death from the equation, it seems more believable.

And, because this is Williamson, there's an additional twist that cranks up the misery: Our "monster" this time around is arguably more pitiful than his victims, but this doesn't stir our compassion--only our horror and disgust. 

Judgment by Ed Gorman

Synopsis: A child pornographer gets his just desserts in a slum. His murderer is discreet, professional, experienced-- but no hitman.

Thoughts: A good idea done well. Gorman takes a situation that's been the subject of many thriller plots and gives it a murderous twist. He also does a good job of making the killer a basically sympathetic vigilante, but not making it a lopsided power fantasy.

Reality Function by J. N. Williamson

Synopsis: The obsessive, arrogant Matthew Miliken has clawed his way through life, and to the top of Salinger High School's English department, by getting rid of those in his way. He'll get his hands dirty if he has to, but his favorite method is driving a victim to suicide.

Thoughts: I'll be the first to sing Williamson's praises as an anthologist, but I usually find his fiction a bit iffy. So I'd be lying if I didn't admit I came to the prospect of 30+ pages of Williamson with trepidation, and that seeing the story open with a Colin Wilson quote about Jung made my heart sink.

But. . .it's actually pretty good. In fact, it's close to great, although I think that there's just too much going on and it dilutes the best moments. We have three  The way I would do it--I would hack this down to simple short story length, and focus on the meanest, Heathers-esque element, which is when Miliken manipulates a brainy but sexually-repressed teacher's pet into death by sexual misadventure. That shocking bit of nastiness gets watered down by everything else.

There is a pretty good final girl sequence here, too.

Sacrifice by Kathleen Buckley

Thoughts: A former mob boss tries to keep his son out of trouble, all while the Wire Killer terrorizes the city.

Synopsis: This is just bad. There's not a single sympathetic character, so all you're left with are the themes of "unpleasant mob guy" and "really unpleasant rich kid woman-killer." And that can work--those premises describe The Sopranos and American Psycho, after all. Here, though, there's no humor or deeper point about society, and there's not even the dubious leering pleasures of seeing the yucky stuff. At least then it might succeed on the level of the gross-out. 

There's a few parts in here where the vile father-son relationship almost clicks, and it reminds me a little of the horrible dad in Heathers (second Heathers reference in a row!). Otherwise, a misfire.

Name That Tune by Charles L. Grant

Synopsis: Everyman Stan likes to think about killing people from time to time. Who doesn't?

Thoughts: The first time, I felt like this was a weak story--a let-down from the usually reliable Grant. However, I think my bloodlust was just turned too high, and I was too busy waiting for the other shoe to drop to realize the point of this story. At first I thought it was a watered down version of Chet Williamson's "City Hunger" (Poe's Imp of the Perverse as brought on by the urban condition).

I do think it is a weaker story, but that's actually because, on a rereading, the other shoe does drop when it shouldn't. Most of this story is (and here's an oxymoronic concept for you) Charlie Grant's American Psycho: Stan's constantly entertaining homicidal ideations as an escape from the monotony of his life, but it's not clear whether he's ever actually acted on them. That idea is good, but then it does seem like he may actually be bumping people off, and that spoils it. 

Taking Care of Georgie by Lisa W. Cantrell

Synopsis: Georgie's getting married tomorrow. But tonight is his bachelor party, and anything goes. And his loving brother Roger has arranged everything with a pro. All Georgie needs to do is go to her apartment, and he can get out all the urges his beloved Susan won't accommodate...

Thoughts: The idea is great, and sleazy, and nasty. The execution, though, isn't. This story needs to be longer; as it is, it's a very good idea that's rushed through. I have some ideas for fixing it, but to do that we need to get into spoiler territory:

SPOILERS:

Roger sends Georgie off to his girlfriend's apartment, where he's told Georgie that he has a prostitute waiting and encourages him to 'get rough,' and where he's presumably told his girlfriend. . . nothing. Subsequently, Georgie attacks her, she defends herself, and Georgie ends up dead. 

It is shocking and callous, and Roger's subsequent comforting of Georgie's intended, on paper, is savage and chilling. But Cantrell puts the reveal of Georgie's killer (well, the woman who pulled the trigger--you might say Roger is the real killer) much too soon, and so we've already clocked that the highlight of the story in terms of twists and turns and nastiness has already come, and check out of the story. Why not leave it until the end, instead?

Or, if we want to get REALLY nasty--have Georgie either a) call Roger begging for help, because something went wrong and now the woman is dead, or b) show up as normal at the wedding the next day, pull Roger aside, and gloat about what a good time he had last night, which itself could be calibrated for anything from sex farce (turns out, Roger's girlfriend enjoyed stepping out on him with Georgie) to very upsetting and unpleasant implications. And I know that Cantrell can make it nasty--she wrote the insanely underrated "Cruising", one of my favorite stories from the whole Hot Blood series. But this isn't it. 

Fish Are Jumpin', and the Cotton Is High by S. P. Somtow

Synopsis: Jody reminisces on his childhood fishing trips with his father. The sort of fishing trips that attract the attention of law enforcement, and I don't mean the game warden.

Thoughts: Great story, although it is hard to square Bloch's handwringing in the foreword over slasher movies and their litany of 'femicide' with this (which leads me to wonder whether Bloch ever actually watched any of the movies he condemned, or if he was too busy writing stuff like the necrophiliac "boy meets corpse" story "Nocturne," which is fundamentally the same as Buio Omega, honestly). We're practically in Edward Lee territory here, with the zany, funny backwoods sex-murderers and their portable corpse of a grandma.

This is a good example of bad taste. That's maybe the most subjective sort of entertainment of all--what hits me as good, unwholesome fun may strike another person as try-hard edgelord material, and might strike a third as genuinely obscene and offensive on a moral level. But I loved it; I loved every gross second of it. It shouldn't work--it's just hitting every obvious splatter provocation, but it works.

It Takes One to Know One by Robert Bloch

Synopsis: Kevin Ames is the last member of the Skull Club--a group of writers who started out writing SF and horror in the pulps--and the only one who never made it big. He has, however, won the Skull Club's tontine and the bottle of wine that was the prize. Time for a celebratory drink while he reminisces on the past. . .

Thoughts: Great stuff, and knowing this was coming down the pike made me feel better about teeing off on Bloch in the Somtow review above.  Conceptually similar to Williamson's masterpiece in here (washed-up midcentury genre writers, bitterness, and roads not taken), but this town is big enough for the two of them.

The fact that there's a tontine involved immediately puts us on our guard--whatever their virtues in real life (and in fact tontines used to be used as the equivalent of municipal bonds, which is crazy to me), when we're in the realm of crime fiction, the tontine and the life insurance policy are the great flashing red 'MOTIVE' signs.

But, that's just the first place where Bloch twists things a bit, because it turns out that the tontine is just the tail, not the dog. What follows is a romp through a half-century of the history of genre fiction, full of switchbacks and betrayals and dark humor and, I'm sure, more than a little bit of autobiography (although I hope the beloved and prolific Bloch didn't see too much of himself in the bitter Ames).

I wanna take this and Chet's story, then grab Harlan Ellison's "Tired Old Man" and David Schow's "Pulpmeister" and put out another mini-anthology: The Bourjaily Book of Genre Writing About Genre Writing By Genre Writers.

The Lesson by Billie Sue Mosiman

Synopsis: During the Great Depression, a kindly old farm couple take in a traveling orphan boy. Unfortunately.

Thoughts: A good, nasty period piece let down only by the ending, which feels somewhat anti-climactic. Although maybe that's just me wanting to see this little twerp get his neck wrung. This story, sandwiched between two masterpieces, isn't much more than a breath mint. But--how good is a breath mint when you need one?

Fee Fie Foe Fum by Ray Bradbury

Synopsis: Grandma has long suspected her son-in-law Tom of wanting to get rid of her. The arrival of the Garburator trash disposal unit to the house sparks a new stage in their war.

Thoughts: Oh, but this is just such great fun! Bradbury writes with the same boyish enthusiasm as ever. Grandma is a worthy addition to Bradbury's long line of spunky, determined old ladies (off the top of my head, I can think of examples from "There Was an Old Woman," "I Sing the Body Electric," and "Memento Mori," but there are surely others), and Bradbury walks the line as to whether or not she's paranoid or justified in her fears of Tom (or, the most fun combination--paranoid AND justified). The Garburator is fun too, a character even if it's just a machine--it's a big shiny mechanical throwback to the marvelous household gadgets of the 1950s, and to the automated houses and robots and coffins of vintage Bradbury.