Oh Blue World, Don't Desert Me Now: Blue World by Robert R. McCammon

                                                                              

I've been looking forward to this. . .

Before a few years ago, with one notable exception (we'll cover it below), I hadn't read any Robert McCammon. I was aware of him, but I was too busy chasing down John Halkin novels about critter attacks and working through Richard Laymon's bibliography to make room for him. 

Then I finally picked up a copy of Blue World and I felt something I hadn't felt since I'd first dived into Stephen King years and years ago: Electrifying, joyful excitement! It was like a summer camp for the imagination, with clean, crisp writing, creative attention to detail, and a generally light-hearted, optimistic attitude (even when things go wrong, which they do a lot of the time). 

It's funny--I think some of the same reasons I like McCammon are reasons that other people don't click with him. That's fine, of course, but they're missing out. These aren't character pieces (mostly), they're stories--they are, as he writes in the excellent introduction, fast cars, mean and hot-rodded machines to get us somewhere quick. 

Yellowjacket Summer 

Synopsis: A traveling family stumbles into a backwoods Georgia town ruled by a boy and his army of yellowjackets.

Thoughts: Just because "It's a Good Life" is the definitive "evil kid with magic powers" story doesn't mean you can't have other good ones. Off the top of my head, I can think of King/Bachman's The Regulators, Thomas Disch's The M.D., and (less good but still worth a shout-out), Charlie Grant's "Secrets of the Heart." However, this is the best, and it comes closest to the horrors of Anthony Fremont.

Giving the kid other children to interact with is a good touch, and the scene in the cafe is legitimately tense, and stirs up the same sort of creepy dread I associate with "It's a Good Life." 

The very end stumbles a little bit--I think a clean happy ending, or even a clear downer ending, would be better than the bet-hedging we get. But a minor quibble. 

Makeup

Synopsis: A small-time hood steals a makeup case that belonged to horror icon Orlon Kronsteen. Seems the guy was a method actor. . .

Thoughts: McCammon is master of the high-concept, and part of that mastery is exploring all the things the audience wants to know. In this case, once it's established that one sort of makeup turns one into a vampire, we want to see what the rest do. McCammon obliges, giving us makeup-induced lycanthropy and a modern day Jack the Ripper. There's also. . .ah, but that would be telling. 

The horror star whose kit this was, by the way, is the same one whose castle becomes vampire headquarters in They Thirst. 

Doom City

Synopsis: A handful of people find themselves the only survivors after dark forces skeletonize the rest of the planet. 

Thoughts: This works WAY better here than it does in the staid confines of a Charles Grant anthology, which is where we last encountered it. The profusion of skeletons, the prioritization of action and spectacle over logic, the phoned-in, as it were, twist ending. . .these all remind me of Goosebumps 

(also a 'mist that makes everyone skeletons in the night' gives Welcome to Dead House vibes). But--in a good way.  It's just exuberant and wild and bursting with "let's tell a spooky story" energy and doing it on as big a scale as possible. This isn't an Aickman puzzle-box, and it doesn't have to be; it's a shot of imagination. 

Although, I would love to see an apocalyptic-scale Aickman story. . . 

Nightcrawlers

Synopsis: A Vietnam vet's dreams manifest in reality. Sounds nice, except his dreams are exclusively guilt-ridden nightmares where his dead comrades come to claim him.  

Thoughts: A celebrated short story, and one of the high points of the 1980s Twilight Zone revival, this one has one of the most elegant high concepts I've seen in speculative fiction. "Dreams become reality" and "those dreams are all PTSD guilt nightmares" has a perfect, horrible logic to it, and McCammon nails the set up and the pay off.  

This story has tremendous personal meaning for me, as well: It's the lead story in Dark Masques, the kludged-together omnibus of J.N. Williamson's first two Masques anthologies. I touched on this before, but this was one of the first collections of modern horror I read when I was moving beyond a Stephen King-only diet, and I've never been the same. I'm glad this story was one of the ones that ushered me all the way into the world of darkness, since it set a high standard.

As a side note, the X-Files would go on to brazenly steal most of the elements of this one for the season two episode "Sleepwalkers." That one is also a banger, and has the benefits of having Tony Todd, but it's nothing compared to this. 

Yellachile's Cage 

Synopsis: A mysterious old man and his bird bring hope to the inmates of a Southern prison. 

Thoughts: At heart, I'm a sentimentalist. I like people, I like hoping for magic and salvation and the best for everyone. My favorite writer of all time is Charles Dickens, for goodness' sake! So I get a kick out of tales like this. 

It's easy to see this story as an allegory for McCammon himself, perhaps: He--all of us--are 'prisoners' in a place that's scary and deadening (life/existence), and so he makes up stories based on what he's read and seen and can imagine and gives it to us, just as has been done for him by those who came before--and just as we need to do now for the next generation. 

I will say that the nature of Yellachile is a bit too implausible for me. I understand that the point of the story is that the old man isn't a voodoo priest--he's just a storyteller who understands the power of imagination and it's the old "the magic was inside you all along" bit. However, even allowing for the old man's taxidermy connections and his skill with watch repair, a steampunk bird is almost more implausible to me than voodoo, notwithstanding the former is technically more consistent with reality as we know it. I would have gone with a bit of magical realism here to underscore the theme. I understand that flies (heh) a little in the face of the message of the story, but you could surely massage that a bit with the notion that the magic of the stories keeps bringing generations of birds to the prison, like the end of Charlotte's Web. 

Pin 

Synopsis:  A man has only has two friends in this world. One of them is the rifle he's about to take down to the McDonald's, and the other one is Pin. Beautiful, wonderful, shiny Pin. 

Thoughts: No, not that Pin. This was a story I wasn't looking forward to revisiting, because I remembered it as just another New Horror-style vignette of intense psychological meltdown and edginess--the sort of thing you'd see in Deathrealm or early Cemetery Dance or one of those other great small-press mags from the era. 

I'm happy I was wrong! Although it is another one of those kinds of stories, it's a masterpiece of the form; McCammon draws the characterization well and swiftly, and the focus on Pin is excruciating. It's not exactly bloody, but the stream-of-consciousness brings the literary equivalent of a self-inflicted Zombi 2 eye-gouge to life. Ouch!

I Scream Man! by Robert R. McCammon

Synopsis: Family game night, and everything is perfect, except it's brutally hot, and those little bastards are rustling in the shadows. Luckily, the ice cream man will offer relief!

Thoughts: "Story that begins normal and then partway through it turns out it's the post-nuclear ruins and our protagonist has gone insane and pretends like everything's normal" is a micro-genre I enjoy. Bruce Jones and James Herbert have also written stories in this vein I liked. 

Like "Pin," this is the best of its micro-genre; McCammon begins things on an off-note and isn't concerned about hiding the ball from us very long; instead, he cranks the tension on how long it will be until our narrator can't keep the charade, and then pays us off well after the initial reveal. There's a line about "leaking" corpses that's one of the grossest things I've read recently.

That said, the McCammon optimism infects even his post-apocalypse: All things considered, the activities of the "I Scream Men" indicate a more functional society than you usually get in these stories. 

This would pair well with Gahan Wilson's "Mister Ice Cold" in the forthcoming Bourjaily Book of Horror Stories About Sinister Ice Cream Trucks That Use Over-Excited Punctuation To Convey A Particular Psychological State. Look for it everywhere non-existent horror chapbooks are sold!

He'll Come Knocking at Your Door 

Synopsis: A small Southern town and its residents experience incredible prosperity. There's a catch (isn't there always?): Every Halloween, each family must give the Devil his due, or suffer the consequences. 

Thoughts: Even better than I remembered it; this is a deceptively fast-paced story that, like so much of McCammon's work (and especially in this collection) breathes fresh life into time-honored tropes. Here, of course, it's the deal with the devil.

What makes this story the best possible version of itself are the grace notes and details--the fact that, for example, none of the things that Dan's received from the Devil (his new truck, or his new shotgun) will work on the Adversary. I also like that not everything the Devil wants from his beneficiaries is something overtly horrific; some of it is seemingly absurd, and some of it more psychologically petty: The model ship you've been working on all year and finally completed, for instance. 

The ending is a treat; a ridiculous bit of imbuing the post-war American pop landscape with menace in the best King tradition, and just enough mean-spiritedness to have a kick without too much to leave a bad taste. Maybe my favorite Halloween story. 

Chico 

Synopsis: An impoverished mother and her developmentally disabled son cope with her abusive boyfriend, but magic is at work behind the scenes. . .

Thoughts: Whereas I revised "Pin" upwards on re-reading, I have to revise "Chico" down. The idea is good, and so is the detail, but it gets a bit repetitive (and Mom's exultant religious fervor is grating). Maybe it's because I'm currently editing a story myself and trying to further chop what already seems like (but, in fact, isn't) a slim tale down to requisite fast car status, and so I'm feeling merciless about deadwood, but there's a lot of it here. 

I like the fundamental idea, which I like to view as a slight subversion of the "beatific special child with magical powers" trope: Chico does have a divine healing spark, but all he uses it for is to torment his tormentor with zombie roaches.  Although, having seen what happens to kids who're better able to capitalize on healing magic in The M.D. (hey, second reference!), maybe that's just as well for...the world, actually. 

Night Calls the Green Falcon 

Synopsis: A washed-up matinee star unearths his heroic persona to track down a serial killer. 

Thoughts: One of the many stories that makes David Schow's Silver Scream an essential horror anthology; this is gentler than many of the other stories in there but it's no lightweight. 

It's interesting to think of this coming out in the wake of 1986's one-two punch of superhero revisionism--Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore's Watchmen (there even is a "Watchman" character in here, a packrat with a photographic memory).  This is reminiscent of both of those in the way it mixes up old-fashioned matinee hero idealism, grubby punk energy, and sad noirish bitterness into an exciting adventure.

Like most of the stories here, it's unabashedly sentimental, but that's the point. Is it hokey when the Green Falcon wins over a hostile biker by shaking his hand and telling him to "walk tall and think tall," or when the Watchman remembers the Green Falcon's response to his fan mail, decades ago? Yes, but the world is desperate for things to believe in, so the response the Green Falcon gets from others makes sense. In that way, it's kind of like "Yellachile's Cage," where a single person's willingness to put on the mantle of hero or leader inspires those around him. 

The Red House

Synopsis: The arrival of a star worker and his all-red house provoke wonder and jealousy in a conformist, working-class neighborhood.

Thoughts: "The Red House" was always a much better fit for Greystone Bay than the pyrotechnics of "Doom City," but even so I think this story is better in the context of McCammon's other work than it is for the Grant anthology. I think part of it is that the story necessarily ends by looking outside of Greystone Bay--the point is that our protagonist's lesson from the experience is that he can go anywhere and be whatever he wants. And, that's a salutary moral, but it gets us further away from the "voodoo of location" that makes the Greystone Bay series so good. 

Something Passed By 

Synopsis: Something passed by, or we passed by something, but however it happened, Earth's physics and chemistry are out of whack. Now water is deadly, gravity howitzers bombard the planet, and time moves in whatever direction it wants. 

Thoughts: The story that sticks in my mind the most from Blue World, and the one I was most excited to revisit, especially after seeing Johnny Compton shout it out in "The Happy People". It has precedents in the topsy-turvy apocalypses of Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard, but this is its own thing. 

I will say this is another story that didn't quite live up to my recollections, although I think that's because there's nothing like reading this one for the first time, when you have no idea what to expect. 

There's easily several stories' worth of material here; you could almost split this up into two or three mini-stories like Charlie Grant did in "A Garden of Blackred Roses", and that would actually help the story a little structurally, because otherwise it feels slightly disjointed. So lean into it, maybe! In particular, while I see how the age reversal stuff at the end is in part supposed to pay off the material with the son earlier on, I don't think it does, and it undercuts the emotional effects of that earlier material, which is the strongest. 

It also slows down too much in the middle portion. I get the attempt at juxtaposing stereotypical suburban normalcy (poker night with the fellas) against the looming threat of apocalyptic destruction, and I can see this playing out well on film or in a comic book, but in print it drags, just a little. But these are all suggestions for how to make a great story a masterpiece; it's already very, very good. 

And, while the horror writer in-joke place names are mostly pointless, I got a good chuckle out of the "Spector Theatre and the Skipp Religious Bookstore."

Blue World 

Synopsis: Adult film star Debra Rocks has two devoted admirers. One is Father John Lancaster, a Catholic priest whose parish is right on the edge of San Francisco's red light district. The other is Travis the cowboy, a deranged gunslinger who's shooting and slashing his way through the cast of the porno flick Super Slick.

Thoughts: I put off reading this the first time since it's a short novel and a different sort of time commitment than what I look for in a short story collection. And, the description sounded more like a generic thriller than anything super-horrific. 

It is a generic thriller, ultimately, although the priest angle is a bit different. However, it's entertaining and readable and not the slog I feared it would be. Some of this is that it's difficult to make anything in the sex industry be truly boring.

There's an overblown comic book style to the whole thing that makes it work. Because, yes, a troubled young priest in his rectory apartment staring out the window at the giant red neon X from the red-light district a block away is an on the nose image. But, it's a cool on the nose image. Also up my alley--the Mile-High Club, a nightspot packed with damaged model airplanes and looping videos of air disasters. 

What's most important is the pacing--it's efficient and swift, moving things along while still layering in all the details that make it a worthwhile read--stuff like the Mile-High Club, or the details of the sleazy, Jim Wynorski-style science-fiction movie Debbie auditions for.

And, that's something I dig about all the stories in here--the great, fun, evocative details. These may be fast cars that McCammon is offering, but they've got fins and chrome and all the goodies.