Still Brooding After All These Strange Aeons: Lovecraft's Brood Part II (ed. Ellen Datlow)
We're back with Part II, and even more meaty stories to sink our teeth and tentacles into. I'm going to throw a blanket spoiler warning over all of these. Even when I spoil things, I try not to give away every little secret these tales have to offer, but discussing what's good (and sometimes not so good) about these stories requires getting under the hood.
"The Note" by Paul Tremblay
Synopsis: A writer's life is shattered after his wife stops to read a note on the door of an abandoned house.
Thoughts: SPOILERS FOR JACK KETCHUM'S "THE BOX" WHICH IDEALLY YOU'D HAVE ALREADY READ BY NOW, THERE'S A REASON IT WON A STOKER! PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK.
On paper (of course it's on paper! it's a story!) this is a lot like Jack Ketchum's masterpiece "The Box." In both cases, a middle-class father details the disintegration of his family following an ill-fated bit of curiosity (curiosity which the tale in fact refuses to satisfy), and attempts to find meaning in the meaningless. However, the stories are doing different things. Ketchum's tale is simpler. Like so much of his work, it is an invitation to enter into solidarity with humanity by sharing some of the pain and experiencing some of the meaninglessness. It is an act of bearing witness. When the father sets out at the end to try to find the man with the box, we feel that he is as much seeking to join his family in death as he is looking for an answer.
Tremblay's story, on the other hand, is more intellectual, which is not to say it's more or less sophisticated than Ketchum's. Faced with horror and nonsense, our narrator (a writer, and one presumably based on Tremblay himself) attempts to solve the mystery. However, that attempt gets him nowhere; indeed, it may have doomed him. "I am afraid that my insipid writer's brain. . .took a concatenation of real-life events that didn't make any sense and puzzled the jagged pieces together into a narrative that I could better explicate, if not understand." But the narrator's fears go far beyond getting high on his own supply of pomo metafictions: "[W]hat I am deathly, pants-shittingly afraid of, is that the events of my life (and yours) and the people I love have been rearranged, have been molded into narrative not by me but by the universal mind."
It's not a million miles away from the "language-as-virus" theory-fictions of William S. Burroughs or Pontypool, but it's even more interesting. One of the most underrated horror films of the 21st century, Benson and Moorhead's Resolution, does something similar, suggesting that narrative logic and the narrative arc is itself an elder god which desires setting up and fulfilling dramatic and genre conventions.
I love it, love it, love it, and yet. . .it's a tonal shift that doesn't work for me. The bulk of the narrative is straightforward and lacks either the sense of play or the neurotic suspicion around the edges throughout needed to justify the narrator's fears. Perhaps the idea is that it's only now, in a moment of clarity and/or insanity, that the narrator realizes what he's been doing all along and that he's been a thrall to Narrative. . . but this comes dangerously close to an "it was all a dream ending." Compare to Stephen Graham Jones' "The Door of Sleep" which makes even more audacious metafictional maneuvers while seeding the 'main' story with the hints that get us there.
Maybe Tremblay doesn't completely stick the landing as a non-traditional horror story, but at the level of traditional horror story, he does. The single most pants-shittingly scary, to use our narrator's phrase, part of Lovecraft's Brood for me is the uncanny encounter with a grocery store employee--a staticky, sinister figure reminiscent of John Keel's "Indrid Cold."
The very last line is creepy, too.
"A strange form of life" by Laird Barron
Synopsis: A prisoner and a guard have a tryst against a backdrop of apocalyptic tension.
Thoughts: "Man, I read about a radioactive cloud movin' underground form Hanford toward the Columbia. One teaspoon of that shit will light up the river and kill a half million whitebread assholes in the 'burbs." That line's been lurking in the back of mind for a couple weeks now. . .
The mounting dread gives this story power. The entire story takes place in an isolated prison and society of an indeterminate time, place, and state of disorder, but the story itself is quiet and almost comforting. Not that this is cozy horror; it's a comfort that's made poignant by the fact that it can only be fleeting. It's like the extra ten minutes in bed you negotiate from your mom when she wakes you up for school; it's the stop for a cup of coffee at a service plaza before getting back on the road to drive several more hours. The relationship between prisoner and guard matches this, both temporally (their assignation is just a short break, and we're coming in towards the end of this session before we go back to the grim realities of this isolated prison), and in the more abstract sense that the dynamics between prisoner and guard aren't conducive to a healthy long-term relationship. And this would be the case even without the horror part. . .
To be sure--Barron's also effective at delivering the "action" part of the horror.
As an aside, I think part of the reason mushroom horror has been having a moment is it's part of the next frontier of body horror, and visceral horror in general. Amputations and eviscerations and other subtractions from the unified body are all fun, but there's only so much you can remove. In contrast, mycological horror offers all sorts of new and exciting grotesqueries (for example, see Clay McLeod Chapman's "Fairy Ring"). In general, I think additions, not subtractions, are a more interesting area of body horror because, beyond the horror, there's the possibility of beauty and progress as well.
"Call of the Void—L’appel du Vide" by Carol Gyzander
Synopsis: Ellen, a troubled photographer, finds herself drawn to the "Medusa" rock formation at Zion National Park.
Thoughts: SPOILERS FOR MORT CASTLE'S "IF YOU TAKE MY HAND, MY SON" WHICH IS ONE OF THE GREATEST HORROR STORIES EVER WRITTEN OR TO BE WRITTEN, SO MAYBE READ THAT BEFORE READING THIS (ALTHOUGH EVEN IF YOU KNOW WHAT'S HAPPENING WHEN YOU READ THE CASTLE STORY IT DOESN'T MATTER IT STILL HITS HARD).
This is ultimately a conte cruel disguised as a cosmic horror story, and which uses a cosmic horror payoff for the 'cruel' part of the equation. It's a supernatural conte cruel, in other words, which seems like a contradiction in terms. Isn't the whole cruel tale style about realism, naturalism, and reality? There's a strong Naturalist strain in cruel tales in particular--I've always thought of Emile Zola's L'Assomoir as horror-adjacent the same way Requiem for a Dream is--and you can trace a through-line from French Naturalism to the Grand Guignol and from there into bloodstream of popular horror culture.
But is Lovecraft Naturalistic? So I went and dipped my toes into the pool of Lovecraft scholarship and saw that there are some people who see an overlap between HPL and Naturalism (particularly the American Naturalism of Jack London and Ambrose Bierce). This is a fascinating rabbit hole I'd love to explore some day, but for now, let's make the following statement (cribbing again from the sources I've linked, although I've only read the synopses): If we simply take the monsters and gods and supernatural phenomena of the cosmic horror universe as is--that is, assume the 'truth' of Lovecraft etc.'s "scientific mythology," then the resulting literature is Naturalistic to the extent it shows the 'normal' functioning of this cosmos (just as London shows the normal functioning of nature, or Zola of urban society).
Back to Gyzander: Elements of the story (specifically: the ill-fated belief in a "step into the light" supernatural reconciliation with loved ones) remind me a lot of Mort Castle's "If You Take My Hand, My Son," which is one of the meanest and saddest horror stories I've ever read. In both cases, the protagonists make a decision based on a mistaken belief related to the supernatural. However, the difference between the two stories is telling: In Castle's story, the main character has been deceived, and his fate is unfair and unjust. In Gyzander's story, there's no apparent deception, other than self-deception, and this is where we get the cosmic Naturalism:
"Medusa. . .radiated light that connected and danced with the stars, and she realized that the moving tendrils, the beckoning tentacles of stone, were not reaching for her. They were reaching for the sky as Medusa was one with the universe beyond her--and did not care about her any more than the hawk cared about the jackrabbit."
Ellen's mistake was to read metaphysical significance into what's either an organism that lured her in (something is "bleeding the life force from her") or (and this is the reading I prefer) or the byproduct of a phenomenon that, unknowingly, dooms creatures it does not and perhaps could not care about. Think of bugs frying themselves on your porch light--they relate to it in a "mistaken" manner, while the lightbulb just is, a silent incandescent god, controlled in turn by beings beyond the possible comprehension of bug or bulb.
Think about THAT next time you're relaxing on the deck!
"Hypnopompia" by L. Marie Wood
Synopsis: A woman gets an unwelcome early morning wakeup call.
Thoughts: An effective blast of fear; this has the pleasant edginess of something from one of John Pelan's Darkside anthologies, or maybe a Matthew Bartlett bit. It particularly reminds me of the Ligottian antics of Mark Samuels's "Vanishing Point." This is over too soon to hit the highs of the Samuels piece, but it never falls into the lows. It's an assault on the senses with, I think, a hint of political/environmental conscience.
"It's 90 degrees Fahrenheit in Calgary, but we're working on that," the demonic weatherman says (perhaps the even more evil cousin of the weatherman in Donald Burleson's "Snow Cancellations", presumably with glee. And, it's true. . .we're all working on it, unfortunately.
It's just the right element of social consciousness to give the piece that much more heft beyond being a high-impact slug of horror imagery, but not so much as to turn it into a message piece with a "correct" political interpretation (I like political horror the most when it's not even completely aware that it's being political).
"Volcano" by Livia Llewellyn
Synopsis: A self-destructive student in a state of arrested development gets a campus job upholstering furniture.
Thoughts: Like a Hold Steady song written by Kathe Koja. Callie, our protagonist, is a fascinating bundle of anomie and self-loathing, and I think I could read a whole straight non-genre story about her. In fact, that's what we have, if you strip away a couple of details that make it clear something supernatural is happening. At first, I thought the story would be better this way--I think Callie's anti-natalist angst is more convincing when it isn't undercut by the confirmation of supernatural reality. Isn't knowing that there's something out there, even if it's malign, more comforting than cosmic nihilism?
Well, maybe, but we haven't actually established there's anything there in the dark. At story's end, Callie writes that she "pretends" the darkness inside her "is whispering to me in a patchwork god's sotto voce," which seems like an acknowledgement both that the cellar phenomenon doesn't necessarily have a "what" behind it (or a "who," but facts in evidence do not suggest anything we'd want to honor with a humanizing "who"), and that Callie finds the fiction that there might be comforting. If we assume that in fact the thing in the cellar simply is, the same way everything else is, then what we actually have here may be some more cosmic Naturalism.
Between this and "One of These Nights," I really need to pick up a Llewellyn collection in my next horror shopping binge.
"Halogen Sky" by Wendy N. Wagner
Synopsis: A couple stops at an uncanny, all-but-deserted hotel in the middle of nowhere.
Thoughts: In theory, I love this story: I worship Dennis Etchison's spare, cryptic slices of dismay from the in-betweens of modern life. So updating that into the liminal space of those places that, as Wagner's characters note, just pop up along the sides of the road to serve travelers makes sense.
There's a personal reason, too--when I was a kid, my family would make the two-day drive from Iowa to Washington DC to visit my grandparents. I remember staying at countless Hampton Inns (Hamptons Inn?), jumping back and forth on the hotel beds, going to the ice and soda machines (like one of the characters in this story, but less traumatic), playing in a pool. I loved those trips, and those memories (it's why I'm also very fond of Lawrence C. Connolly's "Circle of Lias" from the great Borderlands 4, which takes in exactly that '90s budget hotel feel). Even today, I find something reassuring in the small, just-good-enough offerings of these sorts of hotels. Call it liminal comfort?
As for this story: Everything is aggressively, capital-W Weird, almost from the jump. And when the uncanny is that front and center, without something more, I find it hard to get too creeped out. Going back to Etchison's work for a moment--much of the time, the liminal space he describes isn't the source of the threat, but a stage where it plays out (there are exceptions, like "It Only Comes Out At Night" and "The Late Shift"). It also helps that Etchison usually uses a pretty-close third person narrator, so there's enough subjectivity that we're not sure that what we're seeing is right. The same is true with many of Ligotti's more intense stories: I think "The Clown Puppet" is one of the scariest things around, but I don't know that story would be as effective without being inside the fevered brain of its narrator. Here, the third person narration isn't particularly close, so we feel that we are seeing everything 'accurately' and bright as day, and that isn't as scary. This is too bad, because the characters are realistic and likable, but their reactions to the environment aren't.
There's also no explanation for this--no thesis statement. It doesn't have to be one that would be convincing--for example, "The Clown Puppet" explains the phenomenon by saying "my entire life has been a horrible series of different sorts of nonsense, including this giant clown puppet", and that works for the story. There's an interesting hint that, as in "Sideways," government experimentation caused this: The story takes place on the far side of the old Hanford Site nuclear facility in Washington, where, as the narrator's dad says, "the US military stuck a pry bar in reality and tore a hole for all their secrets." The fact that Dad lives in a doomsday bunker, apparently, seems like another detail worth expanding on. Later, during a barrage of images, we see a man in green fatigues digging to the center of the Earth. But, unless I've entirely missed the point, there's nothing else relating them.
Heck, there's a weird sort of satire you could do with this, imagining that the American government somehow tapped into the spirit of America, which manifests itself as a cancerous, ever-sprawling set of fast food joints and gas stations, but overall this story feels like a missed opportunity.
"Wind Come Down the Mountain" by A. C. Wise
Synopsis: Carter, a guilt-stricken producer of a wilderness survival show, heads into the mountains to search for his star: A survival expert who disappeared after weeks in the wild.
Thoughts: Speaking of cosmic horror and Naturalism, we have this story, which is in keeping with the Naturalism of Jack London. Well, sort-of keeping with Naturalism, since there's an explicit supernatural element.
This is the second story in a row that doesn't do very much for me as a whole; it feels very similar to any number of contemporary horror stories on the more literary end of the spectrum that take place in nature and conjure an atmosphere of menace that dissipates into vague cosmic horror. Some of it is a subjective x-factor; I'll intellectualize all day about why I think I like or don't like something, but sometimes it just isn't for me. In this case, Wise describes some beautiful and terrifying images, but I didn't feel it. I'll chalk that up to the fact that a summer day near the Boston Harbor may not be conducive to appreciating this.
What makes the story more than worthwhile, though, are some of the discursive asides Wise gives us. For example: "Chillicoate Mountain, Carter suspected, was just as haunted as anywhere else. Which either meant extremely, or not at all. People went missing all the time in the wilderness. Unmarked graves might choke the spaces between the trees. There was nothing worse here than anything else, but it felt different. More personal."
I also like the main character here; he's well-realized and has a moral center. The sleazy reality TV producer has quickly become a 21st century stock character (I fear in real life as well as fiction), but Carter not only runs a professional operation, he takes personal responsibility for Lane Harper's disappearance, and puts his money and safety on the line in his search for his star. Carter's guilt is understandable, maybe even admirable, but Harper knew what he was getting into, and Carter tries to do his best by the outdoorsman.
I don't think that's what Carter's really guilty about, though. I think it's this. Carter says that "[n]etwork executives. . .wanted the illusion of death, its specter, so audience could sit comfortably on their couches, never having known a moment of true hunger, and watch an individual walk right up to the edge of their mortality, but ultimately walk away again, whole."
In other words: Carter's been selling a lie about the nature of things. . . and now the things of nature have come to collect.
"Infantum" by Ian Rogers
Synopsis: After a host of women around the world came down with inexplicable pregnancies, an intergovernmental consortium carted them off to secure medical facilities. Over five years later, they're still pregnant, but that's not the weirdest thing. . .
Thoughts: Let's get it out of the way--yes, this is The Midwich Cuckoos/Village of the Damned/Children of the Damned; Rogers' characters mention the similarities. But there's no reason John Wyndham should have all the fun! The story plays out like my favorite sort of X-Files episode--the ones where we start off with an anomaly that's "super weird, but table stakes for the paranormal," and then folds in on itself, getting increasingly, impossibly weird. Rogers gives us that, and although he doesn't explain all the anomalies to our satisfaction, he doesn't really have to: In the X-Files, the explanations are quite rational, as long as you spot a couple pieces of medical or scientific impossibility. In cosmic horror and the Weird, things simply are, and existence precedes explanation.
What is in need of better explanation, perhaps, is just how our heroine smuggled a handgun into a place with the security profile of Area 51. It gives us the wonderful gag of her grabbing her Walther out of a hollowed-out copy of What To Expect When You're Expecting, and I realize one overestimates the competence of any institution at one's peril, but still.
A bigger problem: The character work doesn't resonate for me. About halfway through, we learn critical backstory for our protagonist's motivations, and it's interesting, but it never seems to inform how her character behaves either before or afterwards. Maybe the very ending, but even that beat doesn't feel wholly earned.
About that ending--Rogers doesn't give us an unambiguous explanation, but he identifies the, err, fathers in a way that's still satisfying and offers a few different interpretations. One of them is an obvious candidate for the phenomenon, while another makes a horrible amount of sense when you remember it's a Lovecraft anthology.
And there's a third one which I personally choose, mainly because it suggests an ultimate outcome that's less grim and more kind of goofy.
(Satyrs. It's satyrs.)
"Diving Deep" by Gary McMahon
Synopsis: A brooding professional diver investigates an artificial structure deep under the Antarctic ice.
Thoughts: "Artificial structures where there can't be any" is always a good set-up; it's an sf version of a locked-room mystery, and the premise for Sphere, which is easily my favorite Michael Crichton novel. There's a deep wrongness to it. Even when the works don't stick the landing (for example, the movie The Deep House, or the X-Files episode "Firewalker", the latter of which isn't quite about artificial structures but comes close), they leave me with the lingering creeps.
What's neat and scary in this story, weirdly, is also the inverse of what I just said. Once you're in Antarctica (which, to be sure, is a very big "once"), the boundary between the relative safety and normalcy of the base camp and the terrors of the deep. This makes me think of something that comes up in two other works of horror--The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and the X-Files episode "Home"--that scare me every time. And a lot of it is that the distance between the 'normal' world and the threat is both temporally and physically small. In both of those works, the Gothic house of the threat is very close to the 'normal' world, and in both, we encounter and enter the house much earlier than we'd expect from a conventional horror script.
Similarly, the dive down to the alien structures beneath the ice doesn't, at first, take place in a darkened, isolated thalassophobic nightmare.
Instead, it's calm and clear, and Farris has a safety line and an escort of standby divers. But the sight of so much safety on the path to danger isn't reassuring, because it means the converse is true--danger and the unknown are right next to safety. So, top marks for genuine fear. I was actually, physically squirming with pleasant discomfort the full way. But what about when we get there?
In honesty, the journey is better than the destination: The dark heart of the thing in the ice reminds me of any number of generic HALO alien spaceship levels I blasted my way through in high school. The metaphorical/metaphysical level is a little more interesting, and I think I misread it the first time.
Farris believes the structure in the ice is some kind of interdimensional pitcher plant or Venus flytrap; a snare waiting patiently for "a consciousness with the correct configuration of criteria to arrive and trigger this reaction." The first time I read this, it was in context of Farris' self-loathing nature and with The Enigma of Amigara Fault's "This hole! It was made for me!" in my mind. I thought that Farris was specifically being punished, which felt more in line with the traditional "moral-allegorical" (per David Hartwell) approach to horror. That's an approach I enjoy, but it ain't cosmic.
Surprise, I was wrong. Farris doesn't actually suggest it was just for him, no more than it's just for any of the other weird little guys under the sea. Rereading the line, the point is that Farris was just one of the consciousnesses with the correct criteria, but it has nothing to do with him, no more so than a duck decoy or a turkey call is intended to personally apply to an individual organism. That's much better, and keeps with the theme of, you've got it, Naturalism. There's something darkly humbling and funny about having your apotheosis turn out to be a cosmic lobster-trap (similar to one reading of Gyzander's story, above).
This is one I'd slam together with F. Paul Wilson's "Night Dive" in the Bourjaily Book of Okay Horror Stories About Guys Who Are Great Divers But Kind Of Jerks.
"One Possible Shape of Things to Come" by Brian Hodge
Synopsis: Across the world, children are compelled to walk into corners--and never return.
Thoughts: An appropriately uncheery note to end on--the systematic extermination of the Earth's children by means of geometry! Written like that, it has a Nigel Kneale sound to it, but this has more the crushing doom of "The Screwfly Solution" or Children of Men. It is an oddball creative idea, and Hodge builds out the world well, with details about how, in the early stages of the pandemic, there's a run on camping tents without right angles, while years later on, home designs themselves have changed to be less angular. There's elements of resonance from the COVID-19 pandemic, and perhaps also from things like school shootings and mass violence as well. However, these are resonances, not allegories, which is how I usually prefer my social commentary in horror.
The meat of this story--the high-concept, Bird Box-y threat--is a good hook that Hodge fully develops (the details I mentioned above are just part of that). There are two other, competing ideas that the story teases, both of which are interesting, but somewhat clash.
The first is the notion that this is an attempt to clear humans from the world like we'd relocate or exterminate prairie dogs to build an underpass. The aliens (or whatever they are) don't necessarily need to obliterate us, they just want us out of the way, even if a few of us survive on the edges. It's a cool, grim idea, and it fits the impersonal, Naturalistic theme we've been exploring.
Unfortunately our adversaries switch tactics and by the end are not suffering anything with curves to live (I'll let you make your own fashion industry joke). Why? At the beginning of the story, one of the children are states that the voices that called him to the corner told him he needed to be "punished," and that they hate us all. And here's the second idea, a hideous synthesis of Lovecraftian cosmic indifference with that old time religion.
There's nothing new in the notion of an evil presence around that is actively, as the St. Michael the Archangel prayer goes, "prowling the world seeking the ruin of souls." Fortunately, in these traditions, it's relatively clear what you should do or not do, and you usually have some powerful spiritual allies both on this earth (clergy, in a broad sense) and on the other side (God, gods, saints, good spirits, etc.). The cosmic horror twist I think Hodge is implying is that truisms about "working in mysterious ways" and "seeing through a glass, darkly" don't begin to scrape the surface of the incommensurability between a divine being or beings (or beings sufficiently powerful and superior as to be at least an appropriate facsimile). In this version, the "sin" is not just something inherent to who we are; it's something that doesn't fit into the framework of right and wrong at all. The Lovecraftian survival strategy of staying on your "placid island of ignorance" won't save you when it comes knocking.
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