Slay-Die's Night! Women of Darkness (ed. Kathryn Ptacek)

                                                                                

Happy Women in Horror Month! We're going to look at two collections by the great Kathy Ptacek this month--Women of Darkness, and Women of Darkness II. 

Ptacek explains in the introduction that, although there were a number of anthologies of classic female horror writers, there wasn't anything contemporary. So she set out to rectify that, beginning with this anthology.

We're still in high floor/high ceiling territory with this one. All the stories are of high quality, and there are several that are all-time greats.

Baby by Kit Reed

Synopsis: Beauty-obsessed Elva wants nothing to do with her sister Rilla's new baby. A party with the inducement of a handsome suitor gets Elva over her baby-phobia, but it turns out she was right to stay away. . .

Thoughts: This is a great start to the book. It reminds me a lot of Lisa Tuttle stories like "Replacements," with their grotesque literalization of metaphors about human relationships. The subtext for how mothers relate to children (and to motherhood in general) is obvious, but Reed extends the weirdness beyond simple allegory to make this a bizarre, off-key horror story.

For example, Elva is not a normal protagonist; she's difficult to sympathize with both in terms of attitude (she has something of the witch from Snow White about her), and the off-kilter, Aickmanesque way her thoughts are written. Let's take the first paragraph of the story:

"When her sister came home from the hospital with her new baby, Elva could not make herself visit. She shied away from disaster like a contemplative avoiding crowds, not because she couldn't handle it but because it got between her and that which she was trying to be."

This is, by the way, a great first paragraph: It sets up the initial conflict and our main character's motivations, but it also introduces us to the weird world of the story. The writing, like Elva herself, is oddly mannered and stilted in a way that, even if it's perfectly correct, still feels wrong (this is where the "Aickmanesque" comes in for me). 

A great start to the book and a joy to read. It manages to be completely creepy and disturbing throughout while also being consistently very funny.

Ransom Cowl Walks the Road by Nancy Varian Berberick

Synopsis: Years ago, Ransom Cowl murdered six women in the New Jersey town of Petersons Run. The day he fried in the electric chair, his mother spat curses into the dust. Decades later, the curses are jump-rope rhymes, and the four-man police force in Petersons Run has nothing to worry about. Right?

Thoughts: Speaking of joys to read, I was really looking forward to revisiting this one when I had to refresh my memory for the blog. And it still packs a wallop (even if the suspense isn't quite as high the second time around). 

This is a surprisingly nasty slasher movie of a story. What makes it stand out, beyond Berberick's deft hand with tension and gore, are the interpersonal dynamics. This plays out in two ways: First, by making the clues that something is very, very wrong not just tell-tale graveyard dirt and mysterious absences, but also shrugs and coldness and dismissive behavior. And, second, by ending the story not with a "killer is vanquished!" catharsis shot or a "oh wait, the killer is still here!" stinger, but with a long, agonized look at the emotional toll of the story. It's not a vague conception of "trauma"--it's a bloody gaping wound in your soul, and it reminds me of the best of Jack Ketchum's work. 

True Love by Patricia Russo

Synopsis: An alewife gets into a riddling contest with a stranger at her tavern, but there's a darker truth to the game. 

Thoughts:  I'd just seen the final Downton Abbey movie when I first started drafting this review, and so I couldn't help but imagine our protagonist as sounding like Mrs Patmore. We have what feels like a distaff Peter Tremayne story--a historical look at a bit of local color from the British Isles with a macabre focus. This is entertaining but up to much less than the opening one-two punch of "Baby" and "Ransom Cowl".

Still...every Christmas, everyone in my family gets a big orange in their stockings along with everything else. The orange isn't special--it's just an orange, one you can go buy and eat any time--and so it's not the most exciting part of the stocking. But there's nothing wrong with the orange, and it has pleasures all its own.

In the Shadows of My Fear by Joan Vander Putten

Synopsis: A madman sets out to retrieve the body of his true love from her watery grave. 

Thoughts: This reminds me of Poe, with its necrophilia adjacencies and monomaniacal narrator.  Not a lot happens in this story, but not a lot needs to happen: The images are striking and the tone is hysterical Gothic. And if it's good enough for "Masque of the Red Death" it's good enough for this. Another winner.

The Spirit Cabinet by Lisa Tuttle

Synopsis: Katy Mason's wonderful new London home is haunted...by her. Somehow, her presence is being projected backwards in time to a 19th century seance. So, Katy decides to make "contact."

Thoughts: Tuttle is a powerhouse, and this story is great. It's a fun mystery, and Katy and her husband are good characters. I will say that the whole time I thought the ending would be a little more horrific and perverse than it winds up being. On the other hand, I can picture the final panel of the EC comic this could've been from in my mind.

Hooked on Buzzer by Elizabeth Massie

Synopsis: Angel's childhood has led her to conflate sex, religion, and electricity into a single holy perversion. Bad news all around, but especially for the delivery boy who is thinking of robbing her. 

Thoughts:  One of the two stories Paul Sammon referenced in his fascinating and sometimes perplexing essay-cum-bibliography "Outlaws" in Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror, and which he subsequently reprinted in Splatterpunks II: Over the Edge (where I first read them, and which turned me onto this book). Not that I think of this story, let alone Women of Darkness as a whole as  "splatterpunk" but then it's my contention that Sammon's expansive definition of splatterpunk was grappling more with an overall trend towards more graphic and psychological content in horror fiction, a move that went beyond the literal profusion of sex and violence. I consider this "New Horror", based on probably a couple of half-remembered, misunderstood articles in back issues of magazines. Think of the stuff that the Dell Abyss line was purporting to do in terms of an edgy, experimental horror. I really think of Massie's stuff more along those lines, and this is an example.

Still, whether you want to call it splatterpunk or New Horror or whatever, it's here. We have all the late-80s/early-90s elements: Childhood trauma, religious extremism, a grimy impoverished environment, and sexual perversion. That's not meant to make this sound generic. No, it's unmistakably a Massie story, in that the upsetting and extreme content is fully justified and emotionally grounded, and it follows logically and tragically from a plausible setup. 

A weird, random thought I can't shake: For some reason, this story feels a lot like it could have been a vignette in Last Exit to Brooklyn (I believe that Hubert Selby, Jr. is secretly the most underrated American horror writer of all time, because nobody thinks about him as a horror writer). 

Little Maid Lost by Rivka Jacobs

Synopsis: A Miami motel owner's daughter finds herself caught up in a web of witchcraft with a mysterious stranger. 

Thoughts: This is a great story, but it does too much and goes on too long.  In some ways it reminds me, of all things, of Richard Laymon: I think that's because it has two of Laymon's particular strengths, which are commitment to telling an interesting story where anything can happen, and an oppressive villain. It's more that there's a novel's worth of incident in this story, and it's a novel I'd happily read, but it feels sprawling in a bad way (compared to, say, Tanith Lee's story here, which is about the same length, but is entirely focused).

Mother Calls But I Do Not Answer by Rachel Cosgrove Payes

Synopsis: Young Gina spends all her time in her room, fixating on scars and beauty and the strange beasts which surround her.

Thoughts: This is the sort of story it feels like I've read before (and will read again): An unreliable narrator, unhealthy obsessions, a final act of implicit familial violence. It's good and unsettling, but one of the slighter pieces in this book. The weirdness of the mirror world and the other, monstrous Gina does contain echoes of the all-time feminist horror touchstone "The Yellow Wallpaper," which is interesting. 

Nobody Lives There Now. Nothing Happens.  by Carol Orlock

Synopsis: The Marquette family moves to town and exerts a strange influence over the community, despite nobody ever seeing them.

Thoughts: Great title! This is an interesting story that has a real "Greystone Bay" vibe and some Shirley Jackson energy. It's not particularly horrific, just mysterious, and a bit sad. More of a dark fantasy than anything else, but a good one.

The Baku by Lucy Taylor

Synopsis: Work brought Sarah's husband to Japan, and now he's in Tokyo while she's drinking and fretting in the middle of nowhere. Someone gives her a baku, which is like a dreamcatcher, except where the dreamcatcher just catches bad dreams, the baku eats them.

Thoughts: The first two Lucy Taylor stories I remember reading were "Atrocities" and "Things Of Which We Do Not Speak," so I'm afraid I hold her to an unreasonably high standard with all of her other stories. And, this doesn't hit those heights (although very few stories hit the heights of those two stories). It's good enough--I'm not sure Taylor could write a bad story even if she tried--but I don't love it and it left me wanting to go re-read Ai Jiang's masterful "Red God Rising" again instead. 

The Devil's Rose by Tanith Lee

Synopsis: A Russian man delayed in a small town seduces a local girl.

Thoughts: So good--and cruel. Not the mean, misanthropic cruelty of Charles Birkin, or the naturalistic, drawn from life cruelty of Maurice Level, or the empathetic, oddly humane cruelty of Jack Ketchum. No, this is the sneering, aristocratic cruelty of Christopher Lee's Count Dracula. This is a shocking horror story, but the build-up to get there is a treat. Tanith Lee's historical horror is one of the crown jewels of this book. 

Midnight Madness by Wendy Webb

Synopsis: Bargain hunter Sandy Gault visits Discount City for a late night shopping spree, but discovers more than she bargained for. 

Thoughts: "Mom, can we have a Dennis Etchison story?"  "We have Etchison at home." A little harsh, maybe (although IMO any comparison to Dennis is a sort of praise), but this story doesn't go beyond what you'd expect. I like it, though. It's a vibes story, and they're vibes that I love--a sort of dreamy sinister hysterical Messiah of Evil thing going on--but in a collection of this quality, that's table stakes. I need more!

Monster McGill by Cary G. Osborne

Synopsis: Wrestler Monster McGill is a great heel, and he really riles up the crowd in his match with the Masked Avenger. Which turns out to be unfortunate for him.

Thoughts: Goofy. This is fine but not up to the standard of the rest of the book. And not everything has to "say something," but the problem is that some of the other stories are really loaded. Compared to the bizarro-satirical freakout of "Baby" or the lavish literariness of "The Devil's Rose,"  sometimes it's fine to just do whatever but if this is what you're doing then you have to be 'really saying something.' By the way, this is around the part where the book starts to slide in quality. It's relative, of course--but the ceiling gets a lot lower in the second half.

Aspen Graffiti by Melanie Tem

Synopsis: A woman discovers the dark secret behind the breakup of her marriage.

Thoughts: Steve Rasnic Tem and the late Melanie Tem have provided us with a nearly inexhaustible trove of literate, intelligent, challenging dark fantasies. I admit, this one didn't click the first time through. I thought the emotional realism and the interpersonal dynamics were perfect; I just didn't find the fantastic/horrific element that effective. This time around, I think it's better, although I'm still not sure it's necessary for the piece. 

What is necessary? The ending, which sports the most devastating and powerful line in the whole book, as the protagonist considers the heart she carved into a tree back when she and her husband were in love: "Now I wonder whether that tree died, or whether it was able to heal itself, grew its bark back over our initials and over the deadly fungus our love allowed inside."

Sister by Wennicke Eide Cox

Synopsis: Two sisters exact revenge on a childhood abuser. Except only one of the women is still alive. 

Thoughts: One of the few stories I didn't remember from the title alone when I went to do this review, but to be fair it's a generic title. The story is too, a little--it's an EC-style vengeance from the grave with rape-revenge elements--but it's good. When I first read this, I felt that I wanted the ending to be  more triumphant, and provide a full level of catharsis. However, on re-reading I think that's because the first time around I was struck by it fitting into the EC Comics mold, and those stories almost always have full catharsis. Here, though, the lack of triumph is more keeping with the emotional reality Cox is writing about. That's a theme that will pop up in Women of Darkness II, by the way--several of the stories there seem to be setting up the 'good for her' style of feminine revenge story, only to take that plot somewhere darker and more surprising. 

Samba Sentado by Karen Haber

Synopsis: An American in Rio gets the chance to revenge herself on her cheating husband with voodoo.

Thoughts: One of the stronger stories in the back half. I'm normally not a big fan of voodoo stories--a lot of the time it's a bunch of build-up for the same two or three outcomes (doll! zombie! Baron Samedi!).  But this one is good. Haber takes the voodoo revenge trope beyond where it usually ends to play out the creative and macabre consequences. 

When Thunder Walks by Conda V. Douglas

Synopsis: A dealer in Native American artifacts sets out to scavenge the resting place of her Navajo mentor and business partner. But Coyote has many tricks. . .

Thoughts: I think of the Jacobs, Haber, and Douglas stories all of being a piece (and I guess you could add the Taylor here too). They're all stories that take place against a particular folkloric tradition. This one is what I think of as a "glue" story. It's a middle of the pack, competent story that isn't particularly memorable, but fills out the book in a satisfying manner. It's interesting enough, the writing is fine, it's suitably horrific. 

Slide Number Seven by Sharon Epperson

Synopsis: A medical researcher turns herself into a Typhoid Mary after being doomed by an accidental infection. 

Thoughts: What a difference a year makes! I remember at the time thinking things like "gratuitously nasty" and "like an undercooked Michael Blumlein story." This time around, I had a lot more fun with it and its rancid vibe. The jaded, promiscuous yuppie researchers remind me of the unpleasant social circles in American Psycho, and Elaine's motivations make more sense. I think what makes it come together is less her horror at the unhygienic, gross world around her that she plans to cleanse, and more the moment where she reminisces about fishing with her father, and how she'll miss that. There's an inverse of survivor's guilt for Elaine--it's victim's bitterness. Why should she have to give up life when everyone around her is so undeserving? 

This is why you always re-read stories, kids. 

The Unloved by Melissa Mia Hall

Synopsis: Abused twins enter a disturbing menage a trois with their handyman.

Thoughts: This is a good one, which is why I'm surprised I couldn't remember a thing about it before I gave it a quick re-read for this blog. It might be that it covers similar ground to "Sisters," although this story is better and more disturbing. There's more Shirley Jackson here--this plays out like We Have Always Lived In The Castle, but brought up to present day and juiced up with the "New Horror's" exploration of more taboo and graphic subject matter. The ending is a punch in the face.  

Cannibal Cats Come Out Tonight by Nancy Holder

Synopsis: Dwight and Angelo are the Cannibal Cats, a pair of decadent rockstars who got into the business for chicks. Specifically, eating them. The boys are riding high until the beautiful Liss gets in the way.

Thoughts: We end strong. This is the other story  reprinted in Splatterpunks II (Massie's is the other), and is very much in the splatterpunk vein. It's also got an aggressively cocksure male POV, and that's important for what's brilliant here. 

Part of what I like about this story is the ending, and it is difficult to get into without giving stuff away, so if you haven't read this story, maybe just don't read the end of this blogpost and go find a copy of the book?

Okay, spoiler-ish time. What I like about the ending is that it's a double subversion. Our cannibal cats take Liss off to their shared retreat in the desert, and like the Beastie Boys in "She's Crafty," wake up to find the girl is gone and she's looted the house.

A nice way to end Women of Darkness and let the girls have their way at the expense of these splatterpunk types, right?

Except, that's not the ending. Dwight killed Liss and kept himself alive on her flesh while Angelo withered, letting him take out his rival and the ultimate prize in a two for one. I don't think this is a better or a worse ending than the 'pre-twist' ending, but I appreciate the subversion. The ladies don't win, the guy does, and he's going to keep doing it. If we're getting offended by any of this I think we're being silly--this is a fundamentally goofy story, and I don't think Holder is necessarily trying to make a point here. . . But I will say this is keeping with some of the other Holder stories I've read, which are also often subversive in this way--the great "Crash Cart" comes to mind. 

Come back next week for WOMEN OF DARKNESS II.