Last Exit to Forever: Borderlands (ed. Thomas F. Monteleone)

                                                                                  

Elephant in the room: There's a lot you can say about Tom Monteleone, and a lot of it isn't great. I acknowledge that. So why showcase Borderlands? Because I don't think the smoke from the bridges he's burned should blot out the frequently incredible accomplishments of the writers who made the Borderlands anthology series one of the most exciting and vital I've ever read. And it was good from the get-go in 1990: Some of the stories here are award-winning classics; others are oddball pieces that deserve more attention than they've gotten. 

The Calling by David B. Silva

Synopsis: A man cares for his dying, cancer-ridden mother. 

Thoughts: Incredibly strong start, and indeed this won a Stoker in 1990. Stephen King's "The Woman in the Room" is a laugh riot compared to this. However, despite the presence of a fantastic element at the end, I'm sort of split as to whether it's a horror story. It's heartbreaking and horrific, absolutely, but I don't think that it's stronger for the final horrible reveal. The story's strength, in my opinion, is entirely the intimate and sensitive look at what cancer (and, more generally, aging and death) does to a person, and how it strips away dignity and beauty and vitality. The dark fantastic bit at the end is in the good tradition of a literalized metaphor, but the thing is Silva was such a great writer that he didn't need the metaphor; he made it work just straight-up without the inducement of horror.

Perhaps Silva and/or Monteleone felt that the story needed an overt "horror" element to justify its inclusion here--but wouldn't the really subversive thing be to play it straight and give you a "this is true horror" moment? The problem there would be doing that would make the rest of the book seem petty and undermine the whole idea that you're buying this book for entertainment. So maybe the fact that the supernatural element here handicaps the rest of the story isn't a bug, it's a feature. 

Scartaris, June 28th by Harlan Ellison

Synopsis: A forgotten god travels the world, making small but important interventions in random lives along the way.

Thoughts: Prime grade-A Harlan Ellison. In some ways it feels like a throwback to Deathbird Stories (and in fact was included in some later reprints of that collection) with its interest in what happens to gods who have lost their power. It sort of picks up where "O Ye of Little Faith" leaves off.

In other ways, it seems to look forward to "The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore," maybe one of Ellison's last great triumphs, with its picaresque space-and-time traveling protagonist who capriciously intervenes in points big and small in reality.

It's funny, it's disturbing, it's thought-provoking, it contains words you've never read before and have to look up and then fall in love with, it's loaded with well-observed intricate detail but moves along at a quick pace as a proper story. . . It's Harlan Fuckin' Ellison, man. 

Glass Eyes by Nancy Holder

Synopsis: Learning you're going blind and have to have your eyes removed would be horrible news for any of us. But Dot, being a painter, has it hit especially hard. She's distracted enough that she wanders into the bad part of town, but then. . .

Thoughts: New Horror stream of consciousness leading us to a fractured fairy tale--are you sure this isn't "I Hear the Mermaids Singing?" It isn't, and unfortunately it's not as good as that triumph, either. The first half of the story is incredible--one of the best streams of consciousness I've read in a while, a tour-de-force of spiraling hysteria and schizoid wordplay, all dancing around an unspeakable horror. 

And then things get weird, but it's bad weird, not good weird. We'll get to the Jeffrey Osier story soon, but I think it's worth comparing that one to this. In both stories, we're clicking along with a perfectly good weird genre plot and then a fantasy world shoves its way into this one and things get nuts. The reason Osier's story works much more for me is because in his story, the fantasy world that comes up is his own. Sure, the elements are familiar if you've even glanced at an issue of Weird Tales, but Osier's writing the rules and coming up with what he wants to do on the fly. Holder is cribbing from another fantasy world (I won't say which, but there's a clue in the synopsis). No problem there; I've enjoyed several riffs on that particular world. However, it's jarring to be bopping along with one set of 'rules' the writer is using and then having a semi-pre-fab set of concepts come barging in out of nowhere. 

It's sort of a miss, but the great thing about Borderlands as a series is that the misses are 1) infrequent, 2) usually fascinating and downright brilliant in some parts, and 3) the few times that they're bad, they're bad enough to be memorably wretched (there are two or three stories from later in the series I still remember because of how much I hated them, which says something, doesn't it)?

The Grass of Remembrance by John DeChancie

Synopsis: A man's battle with his lawn drives him over the edge.

Thoughts: We have a pollution/eco-horror subplot, which I always enjoy, and which pays off in a big way. Surprisingly, it isn't really related to the lawn problems (although there's a throwaway bit about that at the end). There's also a "going postal" scene. It's striking that (per ISFDB) this was originally written in 1984 since it somewhat prefigures the more socially relevant 'New Horror' (which incorporated stuff like industrial pollution and random acts of mass violence). 

It's weird, but it doesn't cohere. The visions of Nazis are odd and confusing. I'm guessing the implication, given the Polish labeling on the grass seed that the story hinges on, is that this carries the curse of some Nazi atrocity committed on the land (basically, a deeply distasteful version of the 'haunted object from the Amityville house' so many Amityville Horror cash-ins went with). The result is that we have three different stories (a normal 'descent into madness' plot, a supernatural 'horrors of the past' plot, and some sort of eco-horror plot) all swirling around, and nothing really sticks. It's cool when they come together in the end--I enjoyed the big setpiece--but this is on the weaker end of the stories here. 

I have to say, at first I thought the protagonist's wife was slightly overreacting when she left him, but on further reflections, I'd say she dodged a bullet. Perhaps literally.

On the Nightmare Express by Francis J. Matozzo

Synopsis: A man finds himself haunted--not by the heinous crime his friend Joe committed in front of him, but by drawings in the victim's notebook which match his own nightmare visions. 

Thoughts: A reason why I have to have a cooling-off period between reading and reviewing is that in my notes right after I finished this one I wrote "garbage." That's not true. It's a decently written story, and even if the ideas are underbaked, the visions of the titular Nightmare Express are harrowing.  That's a lot more than many of the other innumerable stories about vampires and/or sex killers from this time period had to offer. 

What put me off my feed here wasn't that it starts out with a violent sexual murder, but that the narrator just tags along as his friend commits the crime, and then acts more or less like nothing happened. I don't necessarily have a problem living in the headspace of characters who are doing really bad things (although you do need to justify it for me), but somehow having our narrator be friends with someone who does took me out of it.

The twist, of course, is that "Joe" and our narrator are one and the same (itself, another staple of these kinds of stories).  I think this would have been more interesting cutting the split personality angle. Just have our narrator clearly be the sex maniac from the outset, cut some of the bloat, and give things a darker edge. The better version of this story is either much tamer (lean into the dream art, cut the sick stuff) or much nastier (cut out Joe and give us a close look at the guy's sick mind)--but this sort of falls short overall. 

The Pounding Room by Bentley Little

Synopsis: A man accepts a job with a computer manufacturer and finds himself in the bizarre Pounding Room.

Thoughts: This is kind of a Thomas Ligotti story by way of Bentley Little's half-grounded, half-bizarro approach. Like "The Town Manager" (I think my favorite Ligotti story) or any number of other tales, we have a Kafkaesque situation where a protagonist is within the framework of 'correct' and 'rational' society (bureaucracy and the business corporation), but is faced with nonsensical, perverse, or just plain counterproductive tasks and demands. 

What makes it particularly Ligotti-esque--and also, I think, dooms it--is the insistence on the nonsense and irrationality of the goings-on. The reason I say this dooms it is because Little (or, at least, his narrator) taunts us and refuses to provide any explanation for the oddball details and scenarios which make up the story (the narrator explicitly says that if the incident took place in a fictional story, he could try interpreting it, but because it happened in reality, he can't). At the same time, the narrator continues to think of the incident as incongruous with the rest of the world (and speculates on what possible motives the company could have for the Room). This is admitting that there is a reason, but not giving it to us, which feels kind of like a middle finger after the great setup. 

By contrast, Ligotti and his narrators actually do think reality is an unending stream of horrific nonsense, and elements of it are only distinguishable by kind. Think of Ligotti's "The Clown Puppet," in which the narrator clearly says that his whole life has been different sorts of nonsense, all of it connected by its absurdity and stupidity. In Ligotti's irrational world, nothing needs an explanation other than to point to the sign that says "everything is stupid and sucks" (which would have been a great title for The Conspiracy Against the Human Race). Little doesn't seem prepared to go that far, and so the story suffers. 

Peeling It Off by Darrell Schweitzer

Synopsis: A man who's learned how to peel away souls commits the act against his ex-wife, but the consequences are beyond what he could have imagined. 

Thoughts: The "rules" of how this all works aren't entirely clear, but the images and ideas are striking. The literalized metaphor for how when you miss someone  (or maybe when you don't miss someone), everything reminds you of them is great. But, given that this is a story where the supernatural "mechanisms" are important, I think a little more explanation would have been warranted. Compare to the similar "Bitter Skin" by Kaaron Warren, which in fact did go through revisions to clarify the "magic system."  

I almost wonder whether Schweitzer didn't come up with the excellent idea of someone finding their way back into your life through surrogates and then also came up with the great face-peeling images, and then worked to combine them. That might explain why there's (to me) a slight disconnect. 

Still, neat story. 

The Raw and the Cooked by Michael Green

Synopsis: A fast-food behemoth relies on child sacrifice to keep the burgers coming.

Thoughts: Michael Green is perhaps best known to horror conisseurs for his hard-to-find, bizarre novels The Jim-Jams and Dry Skull Blues. However, he also wrote a small number of short stories. If you've read The Jim-Jams, this is as weird and distasteful (complimentary) as that book, although a bit more pointless.

Yes, literally, there is a point: Fast food is bad, especially for our children, and we're all willing to participate in it because we suck, or marketing, or something. It feels like when you go to an art gallery and get to the contemporary section and there's oh, I don't know, a Coca-Cola bottle with the president's face feeding children into an oven for Moloch, and then you go to look at the caption, and it's called something like "#WhoseLivesMatter?"

Maybe "the fast food place with a clown mascot is actually evil" was edgier in 1990, but it feels trite. It also, weirdly, seems to pull its biggest punch. All the stuff with the poor little girl makes one queasy as it is, but there's a point where our 'hero' gets out some sandpaper and it seems like he's about to do something really dreadful but no, he's just sprucing up Mr. Wally's statue.  

His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood by Poppy Z. Brite

Synopsis: Two bored libertines turn to grave robbing for kicks. 

Thoughts: The epitome of the Poppy Z. Brite story? This one has it all: Lush libertine queer men in New Orleans, absinthe, graverobbing, goth clubs. . . it's a vibe. This oozes decadence and sex and class and decay; fitting for a splatterpunk update of HP Lovecraft's "The Hound."

Fun fact--I'd never actually read "The Hound" before this story, so I was marveling over how fresh and decadent everything seemed, and how Poe-like it was. Lovecraft was further from my mind, although I'd heard this was technically a Cthulhu Mythos story so I was wondering if a shoggoth would pop up. It doesn't, but this is as I've said maybe the exemplar of everything I think of when I think of Brite. Incredible work; pair it with some WH Pugmire and go on a bender of weird queer ecstatic horror.

Oh What a Swell Guy Am I by Jeffrey Osier

Synopsis: An unpleasant workaholic is afflicted with a grotesque intermittent disease that causes him to swell up.

Thoughts: This reminds me a lot of A.T. Greenblatt's "The Wanting", which also detailed an emotionally-triggered disease which causes swelling and general monstrousness among its victims.

This is one of the tales here that most fits the Borderlands ethos at its best: There are no guardrails, no restraints. Everything is possible in terms of content and creativity. There's more control here, and more realism. Everything keeps going harder and faster and stronger. No limits, pure intensity. An absolute triumph. 

Delia and the Dinner Party by John Shirley

Synopsis: A young girl, with the help of a fantastical companion, sees what's really going on at her parents' dinner party.

Thoughts: One of the couple of stories in here I'd encountered before (in Shirley's great collection Black Butterflies); this is a weird one, which is par for the course with Shirley. At times, I wonder if it's a little too weird: Usually, Shirley's weirdness is straight-forward, albeit bizarre, but this one has some oddness around the edges.

The core idea is great: There was an old MAD Magazine bit which showed people holding up masks saying one thing while saying what they really meant to the reader. Shirley does this at a yuppie dinner party, except it's a John Shirley story, so the "real meaning" is expressed by grotesque and obscene splatterpunk monster visions. Great, great stuff. However, the "Telling Boy" (who I imagine as looking like the notorious "Coily" ) is weird. The closest I can come to figuring out is that he's a ghost and he wants a friend but the only way that'll work is for both of them to be stunted in early childhood forever, but even that isn't totally satisfactory.

But--without him, we wouldn't get the biggest laugh line of the book: "They are both pretending they know about stock options," the Telling Boy said. "But they don't know anything about them. They are bragging to one another by pretending to know about the stock market."

Suicide Note by Lee Moler

Synopsis: A married man's love affair plunges him into a depraved cauldron of soul-scorching sex.

Thoughts: The last time we encountered Moler, it was in the intriguing but terminally overwritten "Wellspring". This time, things are still overwrought, but I'll allow it, since it's in the service of a thundering salvo of erotic depravity. I'm also not going to write any of the best(worst) lines out for you because, my goodness, they're filthy!

But, in the context of someone so rabid with lust that it entirely consumes him, it does work. The end of all of this is, I think, just a backstory for the dime-a-dozen psychosexual pervert of so much post-Psycho horror fiction (and that now, with the splatter floodgates opening, was about to be grosser than ever), but the overkill works. It makes it frightening and imbues it with power, even if any given line could inspire chortling. Sometimes a story just works for you, ya know? 

Stillborn by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

Synopsis: An abused boy befriends his stillborn sibling.

Thoughts: In the early '90s, Hoffman wrote some searing short stories which mined the vein of domestic horror: "Zits" and especially the uncompromising (dareisay courageous?) "Imprint" stand alongside Lucy Taylor's "Atrocities" and "Things of Which We Do Not Speak" in the Bourjaily Book of New Horror by Women That's Going To Make You Have a Real Bad Time (see also: Beth Massie). This story is very similar to PD Cacek's "The Grave," which I've touched on before in passing: An unhappy person with a monstrous mother finds weird solace in a dead infant (weird is maybe redundant--what sort of 'normal' solace is there to find in a dead infant in such a situation?). Both stories are squirm-inducing, but where Cacek's tends towards the Shirley Jackson side of things, Hoffman leans into some horrid, visceral possibilities. Although, in the great tradition of graphic horror, you only think you see the worst parts (it's actually playing out in your imagination).

Ladder by T. E. D. Klein

Synopsis: An aging Scotsman struggles to understand what God's plan for him was.

Thoughts: Subtle cosmic horror from Klein. Whereas cosmic horror usually flat-out denies that there's any sort of greater plan or meaning to human life, Klein's story has a more Ligotti-esque approach: There very clearly is a meaning to your life--God is indeed watching over you and shaping your life through divine providence. Only, the meaning behind that meaning is as arbitrary and meaningless as no meaning at all. Like the best cosmic horror, it removes the consolations of religion from the equation while retaining the presence of all-powerful supernatural entities. However, whereas cosmic horror often posits that humanity only intersects with these gods to the extent that we factor into their plans, Klein goes even further: The ends to which God uses us aren't meaningful, even to God. Pleasant dreams. . .

Muscae Volitantes by Chet Williamson

Synopsis: A man kills his lover in a moment of panic, but he can't escape the guilt.

Thoughts: "Killer haunted by a ghost that only he can see" isn't new. Off the top of my head there's Macbeth, but it has to be older than that (were the Erinyes visible to third parties? I don't remember). Certainly, Williamson's approach to it is, with the titular "eye floaters" dogging Randy, is a good one, although the fact that I very recently read a scarier story about ghosts in the eyes may have taken off a little shine. 

A larger problem is that the Alan-Randy conflict is the most interesting part of the story. Alan's a good character: He's manipulative and sympathetic and villainous and a victim, all at once. I like the simple notion that knowledge of his imminent death hasn't ennobled or depressed him, but rather made him selfish. Getting rid of him is necessary for the rest of the story, but it turns out to be the dramatic high point. 

One other interesting point in this story, and something that might make it more subtly boundary-expanding, is the matter-of-fact treatment of Roger and Alan's relationship. The story would work just as well with a straight relationship as with a gay one--absolutely nothing hinges on whether it's a homosexual versus heterosexual affair--and I think that's Williamson's point. The only time it really comes up, in fact, is when Williamson further pushes the point that there's nothing exotic or tragic or distinctively different about Alan just because he's gay: Alan reveals that he's dying, which immediately makes Randy afraid of AIDS. Alan retorts, "It may be reassuring to know that gay men can die from other things than AIDS. I have lung cancer, Randy." It's a great grace note in a story that needed more of them. 

The Man in the Long Black Sedan by Ed Gorman

Synopsis: A father confronts the monster that's come for his son.

Thoughts: Solid. Another story that I wouldn't say is taking us over the border. The themes aren't new, and the structure of the plot (an attempt to thwart destiny that winds up satisfying it) is probably as old as human concepts of fate and the gods.

I've written before that one of the risks of these Dangerous Visions-style "Let's expand the genre" anthologies that crop up with some regularity (see also: John Pelan's Darkside series, Dennis Etchison's Cutting Edge and MetaHorror) is that simple high-quality executions of more standard material don't "pop" the same way the mind-blowers do. That happens both with Williamson's story and Gorman's here (although I think I like Gorman's slightly more, because more actually happens).

On its own merits--this is a good story. The motel room showdown is good, and Gorman does a great job in the first page or so of establishing character, place, and tone. It's quick, it's economical, and it's as fine an example of the short story as a form as any. It's just hard to hear Gorman and Williamson's acoustic guitar solos while Ellison and Osier's fireworks are still ringing in your ears.

His Frozen Heart by Jack Hunter Daves, Jr.

Synopsis: A former minister is haunted after accidentally killing a boy.

Thoughts: Very much from the Edgar Allan Poe "Unity of effect" school. At times it's a little over-written -- just around the edges. But these are matters of taste. Daves works magic here; in just a few pages, he creates a fully-inhabited world and populates it with misery and death. Then, he makes it worse, while still denying even the grimmest sort of catharsis. As far as I can see, Daves only wrote two stories before going into a musical career, which was surely music's gain but definitely literature's loss. There's a lot of talent on display here. 

Evelyn Grace by Thomas Tessier

Synopsis: After an old high school classmate dies in sordid circumstances, a man insinuates himself into her family.

Thoughts: Dear Evelyn Hansen! Endlessly perverse; Tessier teases necrophilia but that's just the beginning to this uneasy, uncomfortable tale that begins with a mystery and ends with a precision strike of laser-guided obscenity. Besides the dire Dear Evan Hansen (the only movie I've ever actually walked out of), this story reminded me of one of Michael Garrett's underrated mean-spirited contributions to the Hot Blood series, "Sympathy Call." The two stories are somewhat different in approach, but they both revolve around the delicate situation of meeting grieving loved ones (and not just any loved ones--parents), the sort of circumstances where even the well-meaning may find themselves worried that the smallest wrong word or action could ruin everything, and then inducing erratic or cruel behavior. 

On a sadder note, RIP to Mr. Tessier, who recently passed away this year. 

By the Light of the Silvery Moon by Les Daniels

Synopsis: As the full moon rises, a wolf becomes a man and scavenges for food in an alien world.

Thoughts: The inversion has been done a bunch (my favorite example probably being the great  "Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster" from The X-Files), but this gets 90s with it, leaning into the "natural wolf versus technological man" conflict that '90s New-Horror adjacent Werewolf: The Apocalypse made a whole game out of (fun fact--White Wolf, the publisher of that game, had a publishing arm in the '90s that carried a number of interesting titles, including the Borderlands series!). It's a loopy story (Daniels is usually good for some goofy fun), but the descriptions of roads being like dried river beds under a stream of poison gas, and the wolf's horror at cooked food, play it straight and give the story legs once the initial humor of the inversion wears off. 

A Younger Woman by John Maclay

Synopsis: An aging attorney flees his unhappy marriage for a cross-country journey with a sexy young secretary. She is young, right?

Thoughts: Another slight story--you could have gotten away with a toned down version of this in an EC comic book four decades prior--but a good one.

On the one hand--it is sort of a sexist story, right? The main character is a shithead with a midlife crisis, and as he travels west with his lover (who is, at BEST, two-dimensional), she begins to age and become less sexually desirable. Oh, the horror! Of course, our "hero" doesn't care as much about what this means for her health or sanity (to be fair, she seems blissfully unaware anything is wrong) as much as his fate in being trapped with a girl other men won't lust after. On the other hand, that's basically the point: Maclay is punishing the protagonist and sending up the fantasy of the younger woman on its own terms. 

But You'll Never Follow Me by Karl Edward Wagner

Synopsis: A hard-drinking Vietnam vet returns home to take care of his aging parents.

Thoughts: Boom. Not all of Wagner's stuff clicks for me the way it seems to for everyone else in the horror genre, but he's certainly never less than an excellent writer, and this is a strong piece. And, just as I was thinking "we already had one 'The Woman in the Room'-style story here, and this is far less tasteful or horrific", Wagner brings out the big guns. What ensues for the final page of this already short story is even more tasteless than Silva's tale--but it's at least as horrific. 

Stephen by Elizabeth Massie

Synopsis: At an institute for the disabled, a therapist becomes obsessed with a patient who is nothing more than a head and chest.

Thoughts: Probably Massie's most celebrated story, and one which I'd somehow never read before. I will say that it doesn't quite crack my Beth Massie Top Five Stories (those would be, in no particular order, "Pit Boy," "Abed," "What Happened When Mosby Paulson Had Her Painting Reproduced on the Cover of the Phone Book," "I Am Not My Smell," and "Los Penitentes") but it's a top six or seven easily (and when you look at Beth's back catalog, that's still saying something).

But it's worth discussing at length. Massie threads the needle here in terms of the prurient instinct to gawk at the disabled and the handicapped, and the compassion they engender in us. Massie's solution here is that Michael and Stephen are not horrific because of their disabilities; it is instead the condition of being disabled or handicapped that is horrific. And this is not because it prevents their bodies or minds from matching some semi-arbitrary standard of "normal" or "healthy" or "beautiful," but because they frustrate the human inside from expressing themselves or flourishing (I should acknowledge there are some members of at least some communities of people with disabilities who would contest this view; however, I don't think that necessarily invalidates it).  Stephen is the obvious case, but I actually found his roommate Michael more compelling in this regard. Some of this is Massie's memorable, description of his condition, and the rest is Michael's bitterness (he kind of reminds me of Jan Hartog from The Brood). His life and his potential have been stunted; he complains of still being a student at 31, and even those 'studies' are unlikely to bear fruit (especially given that this story probably predates the ADA by a little). 

This is a bleak story, it's a hopeful story, it's a beautiful story. And is it horrific? Well, let me leave you with this thought: There's nothing in the story inconsistent with the reading that Anne is actually hallucinating her conversations with Stephen, and is using him as a blank canvas to work out her own traumas. I don't think that's the story Massie wrote, but think about it.  

Alexandra by Charles L. Grant

Synopsis: A doctor tells a patient about his relationship with the beautiful, enigmatic Alexandra.

Thoughts: More unity of effect here (it's what you'd expect from Grant), with a particularly Poe-like touch in the monologue the doctor tells his patient. The writing is delicate and beautiful and dripping with atmosphere. But what exactly is going on?

Given how death follows Alexandra and the doctor around Oxrun Station, it seems clear that at least one of them is a witting or unwitting angel of death. See also: The reference to the doctor's flowers wilting when he gives them to Alexandra, and the dream image of Alexandra petting a dog that ages and withers under her touch. Notice as well that, once he's begun his relationship with Alexandra, he notices a streak of grey in his hair and he's out of breath.

Okay. But, the doctor here seems pretty smug about everything, and nonchalant when it comes to the withering away of his patients (both literally and in terms of his market share). So either i) he's made a deal with Alexandra to provide her spirit with nourishment, ii) "he" isn't him anymore but he's possessed by Alexandra (or by whatever was possessing her), or iii) Alexandra had the power of death but was an innocent, but he usurped her power, possibly for some sort of immortality (there's a hint or two of this in the end).

It's tricky; like a jigsaw puzzle with a few too many pieces missing to be satisfying. But--the picture formed by the jigsaw puzzle is so cool that even seeing most of it is good enough. 

The Good Book by G. Wayne Miller

Synopsis: Weird: Being a gas-station owner in Western Mass and finding a man impaled on your flagpole. Weirder: Having your religious wife refuse to take it down for reasons of her own. 

Thoughts: WESTERN MASS MENTIONED! I went to college in the Pioneer Valley, and spent a lot of time even further west than that, so I get giddy whenever the Berkshires come up. And, I can say that I can totally see the events of this story happening in Hancock. . .

This one didn't quite work for me on the first reading, but I had more fun the second time around. The secret was simply this realization: There's scant indication that Phyliss's "Good Book" is the Holy Bible, other than that's what it usually means. Same with the references to "He" and "Resurrection" and "the Good Lord"--we assume those are indicators to Christianity, but they don't have to be (or could be syncretic). Heck, even her one mention of the devil is somewhat ambiguous. What other books might one be able to find in the dark corners of New England? 

Speaking of heterodox religious practices, it's time to close things out with . . . 

By Bizarre Hands by Joe R. Lansdale

Synopsis: An itinerant preacher decides to have some Halloween fun with a mentally disabled girl. Yup, Lansdale's going there. Yeah.

Thoughts: Night of the Hunter by way of John Waters. In other words, we are in bad taste territory, but Lansdale is a master of the right use of bad taste (he's a master of the right use of good taste, too, but that's not where we're headed to right now). Lansdale classics like "The Night They Missed The Horror Show," "Tight Little Stitches In A Dead Man's Back," and "The Job" all use bad taste to achieve their deadly serious aims.

Other classics, like "On The Far Side Of The Cadillac Desert With Dead Folks" and The Drive-In books use bad taste to get goofy, and this story fits into the latter category. It's really more like a slapstick cartoon than anything else--maybe a Sylvester/Tweety/Granny sort of triangle where A is trying to get its hands on the oblivious B, while C is running interference. It's funny, it's squirm-inducing, and I feel like I should be shot just for reading it. 

A strong ending to a strong book, but this is just the beginning. . .