Shocksrun Station: Nightmare Seasons (Charles L. Grant)

 

                                                                                

October is time for quiet and atmospheric horror, and while many people have done, are doing, and will do it well, there's only one Charles L. Grant. Among the man's many atmospheric horror books are four collections of linked novellas (sometimes closely linked, sometimes much less so) which fall somewhere between "collection of stories" and "paste-up novel": Nightmare Seasons, Dialing the Wind, The Orchard, and The Black Carousel.  All of these are set in Grant's haunted, affluent enclave of Oxrun Station, Connecticut, and each consists of four novellas, along with framing prologue and epilogue. 

Nightmare Seasons was the first, in 1982, and won a World Fantasy award the following year; "Night's Swift Dragons" also garnered a World Fantasy nom. So what are we waiting for? It's OXRUN TIME!

Prologue

Synopsis: The narrator (presumably Grant himself) is wiling away a crummy early winter in the Oxrun Station library when Oxrun fixture Nat Clayton gives the author a rare, unattributed book of town history. Our hero begins to read. . .

Thoughts: The framing narratives for the Oxrun Quartet are a mixed bag, but this is an entertaining set-up. In contrast to the gloom that permeates most of the Oxrun Quartet, this is a chummy opening, and Grant winks at the weird fiction convention of the mysterious, unholy text. 

It's not all brandy and smiles, though; Grant puts us in the right mindset with some of his atmospheric writing, in this case about the grimness of January weather.

Weather is one of those things which can be a drag to read (there's the great Mark Twain bit where he put the weather as an appendix for the reader to pick through at leisure), but Grant makes it sing. The fact that I personally agree with his assessment helps, but I like to think this is objectively good. 

Thou Need Not Fear My Kisses, Love

Synopsis: Spring, 1940: Samantha is successful and ambitious, but fears she may be sliding into spinsterhood. It doesn't help that something is killing her love interests.

Thoughts: Damn the Publisher's Weekly blurb on the back of my paperback copy for giving away the game here (and, to a lesser extent, the game for the other stories, although this is near-spoiler territory), although it doesn't get in the way of my entertainment too much, because even knowing what's going on doesn't solve the question of who? 

And this is an entertaining whodunit, packed with effective and memorable characters. Even the first victim, who we never meet before his off-page offing, stands out through Sam's description of the man. And, like a satisfactory whodunit, the answer is fair but surprising; I'd been hedging my bets between suspecting two different characters--the obvious suspect and the dark horse candidate--only to fall for Grant's trickery.  

A strong start all-around to the Oxrun Quartet. 

Comes There Now a Darker Day

Synopsis: Summer, 1950: A mysterious newcomer steals the hearts of Oxrun Station's men, but she and her daughter have dark secrets. 

Thoughts: Electrifying, and one of the best Grant stories I've ever read. The secret is that it threads the needle between a horror story with an explanation (think of The X-Files, where the horror generally has some sort of explanation, even if it's "hundred year old liver eater" or "human-alien hybrid") and the "literalized metaphor" breed of quiet horror that Grant and Steve Rasnic Tem and others often practice, where the climactic moment of horror is as much a moment of mental/spiritual crisis as an event corresponding to physical reality. 

The icing on the cake is that the link between the two is both a tangible object and an item of metaphorical significance. 

But there's emotional heft, as well. Whatever this...phenomenon... is, it prays on the weak and lonely men in town, and there's a cool moment of realization when our hero wonders why he's been targeted, and realizes that maybe he is less satisfied than he thinks. 

What is satisfying? The ending here, as vivid and violent and shocking as a bolt of lightning in the bright blue sky of a summer's day. 

Night's Swift Dragons

Synopsis: Autumn, 1960: Oxrun Station's aging postmaster and a handful of employees are besieged in the post office by a sinister motorcycle gang. 

Thoughts:  The first of three "Rio Bravo" scenarios we'll encounter in the Oxrun Quartet, and one that cropped up elsewhere in Grant's writing (from the top of my head, both the story "Secrets of the Heart" and the novel Raven used the device).  When done right, the "diverse group of people holed up in a location battle enemies without and within" is electric; just think of Night of the Living Dead or "The Mist" or "Nightcrawlers." 

This story has strong visual style. The faceless biker gang, all identical in their precise, Nazi-chic iconography, still stand out in my mind. That, combined with some of the deaths here, raises the choreography of violence to almost Italianate levels. As an aside--for all that's been made of Grant's quiet horror approach and dislike of splatterpunk's excesses, he could sling effective grue quite well. The difference, I think, is that there's almost always an emotional underpinning to the violence, so it's heightening a pre-existing horror and not standing on his own.

This thinking, by the way, puts him right back in the same camp as the best of the splatterpunk tradition and their associates, as anyone who's spent meaningful time with John Skipp or Jack Ketchum's work should appreciate. But I digress...

The problem with the story is that Grant falls too far to the literal side of things. In the preceding story, the ultimate answer to "what's going on" isn't explained; Grant throws some hints as to what it might be, but even if we take those as accurate, that's a lot of wiggle room. In contrast, we get a very specific explanation of what's going on. And. . . it's slightly ridiculous. Even if we understand it as partly allegorical, it's just silly. 

Grant teases an alternate explanation for the events, which he abandons here, but will go on to use in "The Last and Dreadful Hour." It's a simple idea, and not even a new one (hint: it's conceptually similar to one of the other works I've mentioned here), but he executes it perfectly there. Here, by contrast, we have plenty of executions but not as much perfection. 

The Color of Joy

Synopsis: Winter, 1970: Melanie Harwood thinks she's overcome the traumas of her mother's murder and her brothers' deaths in Vietnam   But there's a strange figure stalking here.

Thoughts: SPOILERS (for this story and the preceding)

Up to now we've had minimal continuity from one story to the next; the protagonists of the second and third stories each appeared in the preceding story, but without a meaningful link. Here, we have a direct link: Melanie's the daughter of poor Karen Harwood, who perished in the Oxrun Station Post Office Massacre (my appellation, not Charlie's) in 1960. 

This is also one of the rare times in the Quartet where there might be a direct link between the horrors of two of the stories: The shadowy figure in "Color of Joy" is reminiscent of the biker gang in "Night's Swift Dragons" in both appearance and brutality, and Pat had fantasized about young Melanie in the station. Is it possible that Pat actually did embrace a version of the bikers' darkness and show up now, bonded to her?  

I don't think so, although it's an interesting possibility. There isn't evidence, though, that we shouldn't assume this is what Grant tells us, a psychic manifestation of Mel's worst impulses under pressure, taking the form of an overzealous protector or Forbidden Planet style Id-Monster. Unfortunately, that leaves us with a much less interesting version of similar material from "Now There Comes a Darker Day." 

This is the weak one of the bunch, I'm afraid, because Melanie isn't that interesting of a main character, and her relation to the horror elements doesn't really cohere. Some of that is the nature of the story, which almost dictates that Melanie be more passive while vengeance is wreaked on her behalf. 

Let's be clear, though: "Weakest story" in the context of Nightmare Seasons is still a top story in most collections or anthologies. There is more than enough to like here, including the evocative description of a Christmas party in the first few pages, the confrontation at Christmas lunch that reminded me of Shirley Jackson stories, and the nasty sexual kick of some of the killings. 

Epilogue

Synopsis: Our narrator closes the book, and compares the facts he knows about Oxrun Station to the extravagant fantasies of the stories. A clever and expensive prank, he thinks. But why does he feel uneasy. . .

Thoughts: Wraparound stories and framing devices are rarely the best part, or even a good part, of a portmanteau horror, although there are exceptions (Dead of Night and Asylum jump to mind). Often a wraparound story in an anthology/collection ends with one final lunge at the camera, as the teller turns on its audience, or the listener becomes corrupted by evil. Occasionally that works well, but too often it feels like one last twist of the knife "just because." 

Grant, as you'd expect, doesn't go for such excesses. Instead, we have a recap of what's known (and what's not) about the Oxrun residents in the stories; as we'll see throughout the quartet, this sometimes hits and sometimes misses. The idea of comparing what the stories say happened to what "really" happened is a good one, but it has a tendency to undermine what are fine stand-alone stories. The one exception is "The Color of Joy", which was ill-served by Grant's overly glib final line and instead gets a good, grim, evocative send-off. 

Still, for all my whining around the edges, this is a great book; probably the second-best of the Oxrun Quartet.