The sixth Bury Me With… features the impeccable taste of Thespian and dark-scribe, Reggie Oliver:
“The book I would like to be buried with is A Dance to the Music of Time.
Recently I went to a talk by the revolutionary intellectual and radical 60’s icon Tariq Ali at my local Literary Festival. In the course of an interview he revealed, to my amazement, that, like me, he was a devotee of A Dance to the Music of Time, the twelve novel sequence by Anthony Powell. This is a work which divides opinion considerably. Some see it a dull and snobbish series of novels, mainly about Old Etonians and their spouses written in a slightly circuitous mandarin prose. Others, like Tariq Ali, Ian Rankin (and I) see it as a unique vision of 20th century English society which charts the course through life of some memorable characters.
The most memorable of these is, of course, Widmerpool whose rise and hideous downfall is marked by a series of comic and sometimes horrific vignettes. For the moralist Widmerpool is a masterly study in the destructiveness of egoism; to a political thinker like Tariq Ali he is the quintessence of the ruthless establishment man who walks the British corridors of power, to a fellow writer he is a superb lesson in how to build and develop a credible but memorable fictional character over a period of time.
And why should a horror writer in particular admire this work? Well, Powell is a writer who has no dogma or ideology to speak of but who is fascinated by the sheer strangeness of life and human nature. There is a fascinating occult and supernatural thread running through the books: there is Mrs Erdleigh, the fortune teller; Dr Trelawney the mage, based partly on Aleister Crowley whom Powell had met; there is the New Age occultist Scorpio Murtlock who proves to be Widmerpool’s nemesis. A ghost features unapologetically in the fifth novel, The Kindly Ones. And there are scenes of true dark horror: for example the deaths of X. Trapnel and Widmerpool whose last episode reflects as in a distorting mirror the first time we see this character in the very first of the novel sequence, A Question of Upbringing.
Powell is a writer who sees life as a strange dance, full of mysteries and coincidences, whose pattern only half emerges as you approach its end. I think you will find that vision shared and expressed by many of the best writers in our genre.”
More information on A Dance to the Music of Time is at Wikipedia.
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About Reggie Oliver:
Reggie Oliver has been a professional playwright, actor, and theatre director since 1975. His biography of Stella Gibbons, Out of the Woodshed, was published by Bloomsbury in 1998. Besides plays, his publications include four volumes of stories: The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini (Haunted River 2003), The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler (Haunted River 2005), Masques of Satan (Ash Tree 2007), and Madder Mysteries (Ex Occidente 2009), and a novel Virtue in Danger (Ex Occidente 2010). An omnibus edition of his stories entitled Dramas from the Depths is published by Centipede, as part of its Masters of the Weird Tale series. His stories have been published in Zencore, Shades of Darkness, Tails of Wonder and Imagination (an anthology of cat stories) and many other anthologies including successive editions of such series as Exotic Gothic, Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Black Book of Horror and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror.
Sometime late in the afternoon of March 28th, I found myself sitting in the A&E ward of Eastbourne District General Hospital receiving a severe telling off from a very young doctor.
“Clearly you’ve been overdoing things,” he said.
“Perhaps,” I replied.
“What the hell have you been doing these past few days?” he asked.
“Ah, I was at World Horror Con!”
Thursday
I received an email from Joseph and Mathew asking me, at the last minute, if I fancied going to the Con and doing a little reporting on behalf of Horror Reanimated. With little time to spare, I packed my rucksack, donned my hiking boots and headed off to that most peculiar of south coast towns, Brighton. The Royal Albion Hotel, just across the road from the pier, was the venue for the convention and in due course I found myself in the reception area picking up my Convention ID and goody bag.
The hotel was packed with authors, artists, editors and bloggers; everyone jostling to get to their rooms, get to that familiar-looking face, get to the bar. Me, I was heading for the Dealer’s Area, looking for the two gentlemen who’d made it possible for me to be there. Hard to find at first, the Dealer’s Area was tucked away in the basement; a baking hot room that had everyone looking fit to drop from heatstroke. So many desirable books, so few coins in my purse!
The Convention got properly going a few hours later with opening ceremonies overseen by Amanda Foubister and Jo Fletcher. We were duly prompted to read our pocket programmes, a phrase which became something of a mantra as the weekend progressed.
From then on it was a matter of picking and choosing what I wanted to attend; and there was just so much to choose from. I took a deep breath, wished for the ability to clone myself and then tried to make it to as many panels and readings as possible.
The panel which really caught my attention on the Thursday evening was Who Cares What You Think? Do Reviews and Blogging Really Matter? I blog, I review, I had to be there. The conversation got off to a slightly controversial start with one of the panellists claiming that anyone who was reviewing for free was, in essence, a scab. I’m still not sure whether this person was playing devil’s advocate or if this is something they strongly believe. Either way, it got the audience’s attention and made for an intense hour’s debate with a lot of input from both panellists and audience. It’s a topic which seems to be doing the rounds this year, with EasterCon attendees talking along similar lines and various bloggers coming together to discuss it at social networking sites.
I made it to three readings that night: Joe D’Lacey, Peter Crowther and Michael Marshall Smith.
Most of the Convention readings took place in the hotel basement, in a small, soft-lit room far away from the mayhem of other Convention areas. More than once I heard people mention this room as a place to hide out and relax as well as catch up on readings from a wide variety of authors.
From Michael Marshall Smith’s reading, I made it to one of the bars. I had a love-hate relationship with the hotel bars for the entire weekend. I had vowed to behave myself and not end up spending vast amounts of money (which I didn’t have anyway) on beer and socialising. Thursday night was a success in terms of steering clear of beer. I had a couple of soft drinks, babbled somewhat nervously at Joseph, Gary McMahon, Steven Savile and Mark Deniz then wandered off into the night back to my lodgings. One day down, three more to go.
Friday
And so to Friday; the first full day of World Horror Con. I spent my first hour at the hotel kicking myself for missing the Adam Nevill reading; I’d planned to go, but was waylaid by a delicious breakfast and a lengthy explanation to my host of just what I was getting up to at the convention. I’m still not sure he “gets it”. I met up with Mark Deniz and Carole Johnstone to attend the Guest of Honour Interview with Tanith Lee.
I’ve been reading Tanith’s work since my teens although it’s been a few years since I’ve read any of her later stories. After a very pleasant hour listening to Tanith chatting with Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, I hung about to listen in on some of the next Guest of Honour Interview with Dave Carson. I don’t know a great deal about artists working in the horror genre but, after spending time talking with one or two and seeing their work, it dawned on me just how long some of the iconic imagery has been in my life. I generally pay more attention to the words than the images but somehow those images have lasted equally as long as the words, testament to the power of a decent book cover. Dave Carson’s hour talking with Stephen Parsons ended on an unexpected note, discussing the possibility of illegal downloading having the potential to make an impact on the work of genre artists.
Back down in the basement, I caught a moment or two of both Yvonne Navarro’s and Barbara Roden’s readings. Next up was a brief and thoroughly welcome appearance from lunch; one sandwich, one coffee, then back into the thick of it.
Friday afternoon saw me attending yet more events; the Brian Lumley Reading and Q&A, the Ash-Tree Press book launch and the Guest of Honour Interview with Hugh Lamb.
Listening to Brian Lumley was a little like stepping back in time. As with Tanith Lee, Brian Lumley was a name I grew up knowing well, and again it’s been a long time since I read any of his work. This was, for me at least, a theme which was to run through the entire convention, reacquainting myself with some familiar names and promising to revisit some of those stories in the near future.
The Ash-Tree Press book launch was the only book launch I managed to attend all weekend. I was too late for cake but I did find time to get a photo or two of some of the authors who were launching books.
Back in the main lounge the next Guest of Honour Interview was with Hugh Lamb, overseen by the lovely Barbara Roden. This was a full hour of geek heaven for me; I edit for a living, so listening to someone who knows the industry as well as Hugh was a real treat.
Two more panels got my attention that afternoon. Life Sucks: Do We Really Need any More Vampire Books? and Deal or No Deal: How Do I get an Agent?Life Sucks was incredibly good fun with the conversation occasionally veering back to the subject of the Twilight books, something which raised a mild hiss every time it was mentioned. Deal or No Deal was a feisty and very informative hour of discussion on the work of agents; what they do, how to get one, how to lose one.
By then it was time for a long break. I caught up with my convention “buddies”, Mark Deniz and Carole Johnstone, taking off for dinner and a chance to talk over the event thus far. We rounded off the day by going to the screening of Let The Right One In complete with an introduction (and small magic show) by John Ajvide Lindqvist.
Saturday
I started Saturday off with coffee and a catch-up in the bar, only just making the tail end of Keeping Them Reading: What Happens When Harry Potter Grows Up.
It was then time for one of the largest gatherings of the Con, From the Sublime to The Ridiculous: A History of “The Pan Book of Horror Stories. I’d spoken with Johnny Mains, moderator of the panel and editor of Back From The Dead; The Legacy of the Pan Book of Horror Stories, on the first day of the Con where he confessed to feeling as nervous and overwhelmed as myself. All those nerves had vanished as he stood on stage with several of the original Pan authors, all gathered to talk about the book series. This was undoubtedly one of the best attended panels of the whole weekend. I doubt there was a person present who hasn’t spent time reading these books at some point in their lives.
Straight after the Pan panel was one of the liveliest panels of the entire Con. Femme Fatales: How Can We Get More Women in Horror was well attended with an excellent panel (Suzanne McLeod, Sarah Pinborough, Maura McHugh, Allyson Bird and Ellen Datlow). This was an intense hour taking into consideration not just female horror writers but also thinking about women readers, female protagonists and the stigma of paranormal romance.
From this lively panel, I went to my first Guest of Honour Interview for the day, David Case. He was being interviewed by Ramsey Campbell and the whole hour had a very sweet feel to it; more like two old boys sitting and reminiscing in the pub than a real interview and, despite its poor attendance was possibly one of my favourite hours of the weekend.
Next up was another Guest of Honour Interview, this time with James Herbert. As I made my way from one room to another I spotted Neil Gaiman who, it transpired, was to be a “super-secret” guest and interviewer of James Herbert. This caused a hell of a stir as word got around about his arrival with people descending on the main lounge from all over the hotel. Again, Herbert is an author I know well from years gone by but I haven’t read much in recent times. Once more, I was left with an urge to go back and re-read some of his earlier works.
After a hastily scoffed lunch I made it to yet another panel, When is Horror not Horror? Crossover Genres. Again, this was a well attended panel with a great discussion on defining those books which have crossover “appeal” and the resurgence of horror as a marketable product.
From here, I popped my head into the main lounge where the next Guest of Honour Interview was taking place with Ingrid Pitt. I’d decided to get a couple of shots of her, then try and grab a coffee and a rest. As I tried to leave the room, she stopped me in my tracks asking where I was going. I quickly mumbled something about bathrooms as I made my escape. I was told afterward that she sprung that little surprise on anyone who attempted to leave the lounge during her talk.
Straight after Ingrid’s interview was a special surprise, Kim Newman interviewing Neil Gaiman for half an hour. Once again, the main lounge was packed out as Kim and Neil chatted about the old days before moving on to what Neil is up to at the moment, which would appear to be “everything”.
Following the Newman and Gaiman chat were two equally interesting panels. State of the Art: Masters of the Craft assess the Genre and Into the GoreZone: Can you Go Too Far in Horror? It was soon obvious that the planning for these two panels was slightly out, with State of the Art needing to move to the larger of the two panel rooms. Ramsey Campbell took charge and got the rooms switched, with people milling about in a slight state of confusion in the hotel reception not quite knowing which panel was where.
The Awards
I took myself off for a long break then, grabbing food and a spare set of camera batteries before making my way down to Brighton Pier to catch the Bram Stoker Award Ceremony. The ceremony began with an embarrassingly bizarre video introduction from Deborah LeBlanc. May I never have to see anything like this ever again…
The awards went as follows…
Tanith Lee and James Herbert were named Grand Masters
Basil Copper received a Lifetime Achievement Award by the World Horror Convention (a slightly different award to those won by Brian Lumley and William F. Nolan)
Brian Lumley and William F. Nolan received Lifetime Achievement Awards
The Richard Layman President’s Award went to Vince Liaguno
The Silver Hammer Award (for volunteer work on behalf of the Horror Writers’ Association) went to Kathy Ptacek
The Specialty Press Award went to Tartarus Press (Ray Russell and Rosalie Parker)
The Stoker winners were:
Novel: Audrey’s Door, Sarah Langan (Harper)
First Novel: Damnable, Hank Schwaeble (Jove)
Long Fiction: The Lucid Dreaming, Lisa Morton (Bad Moon Books)
Short Fiction: In The Porches Of My Ears, Norman Prentiss (PS Publishing)
Anthology: He Is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson, Christopher Conlon (ed.) (Gauntlet Press)
Collection: A Taste of Tenderloin, Gene O’Neill (Apex Book Company)
Non-Fiction: Writers Workshop of Horror, Michael Knost (Woodland Press)
Poetry: Chimeric Machines, Lucy A. Snyder (Creative Guy Publishing)
The Horror Writer’s Association also announced three new award categories for the awards – Screenplay, Young Adult and Graphic Novel. No announcement on when these new categories will be added though, perhaps next year?
From the Award Ceremony, it was back to the hotel for parties. Two or three parties were taking place, scattered between the Royal Albion and the nearby Radisson Blu (which had played host to the conventions KaffeeKlatsches and writing workshops). It was here that my mission to remain beer-free suddenly hit a magnificent pint-shaped obstacle; it was also here that things got a little bit hazy for me. Mark, Carole and I wandered from the Albion to the Radisson and back again before settling down to a very long night of drinking, aided and abetted by Joseph D’Lacey, Charles Rudkin and Bill Breedlove.
We were politely, and very firmly, asked to leave the hotel around half six in the morning having been caught helping ourselves to the beer; I should point out here that Joseph had long since vanished and took no part in the beer theft.
Sunday
By Sunday lunchtime all I was fit for was lounging in the sun room of one of the bars, drinking coffee and muttering oaths of abstinence to anyone who was unlucky enough to be sat with me.
World Horror Con was not just my first horror genre convention, it was my first convention ever; and, as several people pointed out during that long weekend, it was a real baptism of fire. I have nothing to compare it with but can say in all honesty it was one of the most intense, interesting and funny weekends of my life. Apparently, World Horror Con has never taken place outside of the U.S; I’m glad I got to be there on its first trip away from the States and reckon it won’t be long before the U.K. gets to play host again.
So, what were my favourite moments of Horror Con? Now there’s a list that could go on for a long time but, narrowing it down, I’d have to say that getting to hang out with my boss from Morrigan Books, Mark Deniz comes top of the list. We work together but live a fair old distance apart so getting to spend time together talking shop and wandering around the various panels was a lot of fun.
And then, in no particular order; meeting authors I grew up reading, getting to listen in to a lot of industry talk (mind-boggling at times but mostly very informative), meeting authors I’ve reviewed and interviewed for my own blog, meeting fellow bloggers and reviewers and even the occasional Facebook Scrabble friend. I’d started the weekend feeling entirely out of my depth but by the time I was heading home I was left with the feeling that I’m part of that community now.
The fifth Bury Me With…, and we’re thankful to Michael Marshall Smith for providing an insight into the book that has influenced him more than any, the book he’d like to take with him to his grave…
“It’s tempting to say the book I’d like to be buried with is an iPad, of course – as that way I could not only take a ton of books but be able to chase deadlines beyond the grave, too. But assuming that’s not within the spirit of the thing, then I’d have to say Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis. I first read it when I was about thirteen, and it made a huge impression on me. I read it and re-read it, countless times, and it probably informed my sense of humour more than anything else I’ve ever read. Amis’ ability to find comedy in life’s slings and arrows, to use words as precise little hammers to attack the countless impotent little furies and frustrations of existence, has been an inspiration ever since. It was also the very first book that gave me an inkling that I might like to try writing for a career. Though if I’m allowed to entertain the idea that I might still be able to read in the grave, I might substitute a really big entymological dictionary instead. I love words, and especially enjoy reading about their journeys through time, shifts in their meanings reflecting changes in society an attitude, and how each of them – as Butler said – tries to enclose the wilderness of an idea. In effect every word is a little story in itself. With an eternity to get through, a couple of hundred thousand of those might help pass the time…”
More information on Kingsley Amis can be found at Wikipedia.
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About Michael Marshall Smith:
Michael Marshall (Smith) is a bestselling novelist and screenwriter. His first novel, Only Forward, won the August Derleth and Philip K. Dick awards. Spares and One of Us were optioned for film by DreamWorks and Warner Brothers, and the Straw Men trilogy – The Straw Men, The Lonely Dead and Blood of Angels – were international bestsellers. He is a three-time winner of the BFS Award for short fiction, and his stories are collected in two volumes – What You Make It and More Tomorrow and Other Stories (which won the International Horror Guild Award). His Steel Dagger-nominated previous novel – The Intruders – is currently in series development with the BBC.
His new novel Bad Things is now in paperback in the UK, and will appear from William Morrow in the US in 2010.
February 2009 also saw the UK paperback publication of The Servants, a short novel under the new name M. M. Smith.
He lives in North London with his wife Paula, a son and two cats.
In the fourth in the series of Bury Me With…, we asked zombie-rage-master David Moody about the book that has influenced him more than any, the book he’d like to take with him to his grave…
“The book I’d like to be buried with is The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham.
When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.
I was 10 when I read ‘Triffids’ for the first time. Probably far too young, but I’d just watched the opening episode of the classic 1981 BBC TV adaptation (infinitely superior to the dreadful 1962 movie and the awful 2009 BBC TV adaption) and I was captivated. I can still clearly remember the horror and unease I felt at the time. I guess the story was my first real introduction to post-apocalyptic fiction, and it had a profound effect on me.
I’d finished reading the whole book by the time the second episode of the series was broadcast – I was so overwhelmed by the story that I couldn’t wait for the BBC to catch up! It affected me on many different levels… the terror and helplessness of a suddenly blinded population of millions; the encroaching danger of thousands of virtually silent, emotionless predators; the horror witnessed by the few sighted people struggling to survive; a world falling apart without power, sanitation and other basic necessities… I’d never come across such a terrifying, all-consuming, nightmare scenario before – the entire world rendered helpless, literally in the blinking of an eye.
Looking back now, Wyndham’s story seems to have been the blueprint for many of the countless other ‘End of the World’ tales which have followed. In fact, the Triffids themselves seem to be the vegetarian alternative to my apocalyptic scenario of choice: zombies. Mute, devoid of all emotion, driven and relentless, preying on the last few remaining survivors in massive numbers… sound familiar?
Although it’s had its fair share of detractors, The Day of the Triffids remains an exceptional story which had a huge impact on me and which set me on the path to writing the kind of books I love – books in which the ordinary world becomes extraordinary in an instant, and there’s nothing you can do about it but try your damnedest to survive. Okay, elements of the novel seem twee and dated now, many of the characters are paper-thin and the horror has muted somewhat over time, but it’s intelligent and bleak and it still makes you think.
It certainly made me think. And that’s why I’d like to be buried with it.”
More information on John Wyndham can be found at Wikipedia.
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About David Moody:
David Moody used to give his books away for free. This unconventional marketing approach resulted in the film rights to Hater being sold to Guillermo del Toro (director, Hellboy 1 & 2, Pan’s Labyrinth, the upcoming Hobbit series) and Mark Johnson (producer, The Chronicles of Narnia series). Another of his novels, Autumn, was also adapted for screen as a movie starring the late David Carradine and Dexter Fletcher.
With the official publication of Hater and its highly anticipated first sequel, Dog Blood, David is rapidly becoming a leading voice in modern dystopian fiction.
He lives in Halesowen, UK with his wife and a houseful of daughters and step-daughters. This may explain his pre-occupation with Armageddon.
In a special third ‘episode’ of Bury Me With…, we asked many-fingers-in-many-pies Chris Golden about the book he’d like to take with him to his grave…
He said: True Tales of Resurrection
True Tales of Resurrection was published in a special edition of Christopher Golden’s imagination only.
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About Christopher Golden:
Christopher Golden is the award-winning, bestselling author of such novels as The Myth Hunters, Wildwood Road, The Boys Are Back in Town, The Ferryman, Strangewood, Of Saints and Shadows, and (with Tim Lebbon) The Map of Moments. He has also written books for teens and young adults, including Poison Ink, Soulless, and the thriller series Body of Evidence, honored by the New York Public Library and chosen as one of YALSA’s Best Books for Young Readers. Upcoming teen novels include a new series of hardcover YA fantasy novels co-authored with Tim Lebbon and entitled The Secret Journeys of Jack London.
A lifelong fan of the “team-up,” Golden frequently collaborates with other writers on books, comics, and scripts. In addition to his recent work with Tim Lebbon, he co-wrote the lavishly illustrated novel Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldierand the Vampire with Mike Mignola. With Thomas E. Sniegoski, he is the co-author of multiple novels, as well as comic book miniseries such as Talent and The Sisterhood, both currently in development as feature films. With Amber Benson, Golden co-created the online animated series Ghosts of Albion and co-wrote the book series of the same name
As an editor, he has worked on the short story anthologies The New Dead and British Invasion, among others, and has also written and co-written comic books, video games, screenplays, the online animated series Ghosts of Albion (with Amber Benson) and a network television pilot.
The author is also known for his many media tie-in works, including novels, comics, and video games, in the worlds of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Hellboy, Angel, and X-Men, among others.
Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. His original novels have been published in fourteen languages in countries around the world.
In the second in the series of Bury Me With…, we asked scary Gary McMahon about the book that has influenced him more than any, the book he’d like to take with him to his grave…
“I had to think about this one for a long time, and two or three books immediately demanded my attention – books that had a profound effect on my entire life when I first read them. Alan Garner’s Elidor, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. But in the end, I went back to the first book I thought of when I saw the question:
Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson.
Johnson’s book consists of a bunch of episodic short stories, all narrated by the same character – a nameless junkie in 1970s America. The stories chart his drug addiction and his ennui, but they also show us so much more about the character and the people around him. The narrator’s voice has a fragile poetic quality, but there’s also a grinding realism to the descriptions of the world he moves through.
There’s beauty here, and pain, and even transcendence. The spirituality of the book has little to do with God or religion, but provides striking insights regarding humanity in all its shattered glory. Everyone the narrator meets is as broken as him, and rather than wallow in self-pity he is overcome with the melancholy beauty of the human condition. His observations and insights are tender and life-affirming, yet he is a true lost soul. When he tells us “I knew every raindrop by its name”, we believe him, and we feel his sense of awe as he says it.
If you’ve never read this book before, do yourself a favour and track it down. My own copy is never far from hand. I’ve only ever read it all the way through once, but I dip into it often, licking the frost off the dream (to steal and abuse a line from Charles Bukowski).
Jesus’ Son is a masterpiece: it’s a book that reminds me what it is to be human.”
More information on Denis Johnson can be found at Wikipedia.
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About Gary McMahon:
Gary McMahon’s fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.K. and U.S and has been reprinted in both The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. He is the British-Fantasy-Award-nominated author of Rough Cut, All Your Gods Are Dead, Dirty Prayers, How to Make Monsters, Rain Dogs, Different Skins, Pieces of Midnight, Hungry Hearts, and has edited an anthology of original novelettes titled We Fade to Grey.
Angry Robot/HarperCollins will publish the novels Pretty Little Dead Things and Dead Bad Things in 2010 and 2011. The Concrete Grove trilogy will be published by Solaris Books from 2011 onwards.
In the first of what hopefully become a regular series, Horror Reanimated asks genre authors about the book that has influenced them more than any, the book they’d like to take with them to their grave… first up is Canadian author Simon Strantzas:
“The book I would like to be buried with is such an obvious selection for me that it hardly seems worth the effort to explain. Anyone familiar with my writing might guess the answer, but for those in the dark I suspect I’d most like to be buried with The Collected Strange Stories of Robert Aickman. Aickman didn’t write a lot of fiction over his lifetime, but what he did write continues to fascinate and befuddle those of us who enjoy his work. He dealt with dreamscapes, with symbols and metaphors, and while many of his tales lack a clear explanation for what exactly has occurred in them, they are often like the best of our dreams – at times illogical, yet always adhering to their own internal logic.
Reading Aickman one can’t help but feel that it’s the reader, not the author, who is at fault if things aren’t clear – the tales make sense, one can feelthat they do, even if howremains frustratingly elusive. To study these ciphers, to tease out their true meanings, would take eternity, and I suspect, trapped in that coffin beneath the ground, I’d have nothing more to do than put my mind to it once and for all. Imagine: to be the only corpse in the yard who understood Aickman… I wager I’d be the belle of the undead ball that year.”
The first two volume edition of The Collected Strange Stories of Robert Aickman was published by Tartarus Press and Durtro Press in 1999 and is now out of print, but available through several specialist dealers.
More informaton about Robert Aickman can be found at Wikipedia.
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About Simon Strantzas:
Simon Strantzas is the author of the critically-acclaimed Cold To The Touch (Tartarus Press, 2009), a collection of thirteen tales of the strange and supernatural. His first collection, Beneath The Surface (Humdrumming, 2008) was called “possibly the most important debut short story collection in the genre [in years]. . .” by multiple award-winning editor Stephen Jones. Strantzas’s stories have appeared or are due soon in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Cemetery Dance, Postscripts, and elsewhere. In 2009, his work was nominated for the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction. Current projects include a third collection of short fiction, a novella, and a short novel. He also hopes to one day catch up on a voluminous amount of reading.
He has lived in Toronto, Canada, for his entire life and has no plans on leaving for sunnier climes.
It happens less frequently than I’d like; a contented glow of time well-spent: 103 minutes of hybrid sf/horror that one is happy to place alongside peers such as Event Horizon, the Alien series, The Dark Hour, Pitch Black and…, well there aren’t many more to add to that list. Pandorum is a prime example of learning from what’s gone before and upping the ante to create an effectively tense and challenging experience with an originality all of its own.
Many years from now, as the Earth becomes a nuclear battleground for ownership of its failing resources, the Elysium is sent into deep space with a cargo of 60,000 sleeping people and the DNA of most of the planet’s flora and fauna; a modern ark, maintained by several crews who will be woken-up in turn as the years pass, bound for the single planet that has been identified as earth-like, Tanis; their mission, to start again.
Astronauts Bower and Peyton, from Team 5, wake from their hyper-slumbers into a world of claustrophobic darkness: the Elysium is shutting down, its reactor gradually slowing and the power drained from all but the most basic of functions. Added to this is the memory-loss that long-term sleepers suffer upon waking – and they’ve been asleep a long, long time; and the increasing threat of mental breakdown and violent paranoia – Pandorum. As Bower explores the ship, attempting to make his way to the reactor he encounters several other survivors turned feral, and a race of possibly mutated and ferociously ravenous savages straight out of The Descent/Ghosts of Mars creature blender.
So what’s new, I hear you cry. Nothing much if I’m honest, but as I wrote above Pandorum takes certain tropes and specific elements from the sf/horror sub-genre and convincingly makes them its own. The atmosphere and cinematography are downright grimy, the Elysium is Nostromo’s big brother – all its corridors are dank and dripping after years of decay. None of the crews have been around to maintain the ship’s vast, maze-like structure and systems. The creatures are hyper-violent, scuttling across the corroding surfaces of the cavernous Elysium, and although the reason for their being there is rather nebulously explained, their presence and constant stalking threat ramps up the tension to almost unbearable levels á la The Descent.
The gradual return of Bower and Peyton’s personal and professional memories, combined with the stories of the survivors, develop into a history of the last moments of the human race on Earth, the breakdown of the crew of the Elysium, and a desperate fight for its future in a colossal sleeper-ship that knows it’s time to die.
As with The Dark Hour, Pandorum’s ending is wonderfully surprising, powerfully apt and contrasts completely with what’s gone before. It allows for a sequel, (although it’s unlikely as it didn’t perform well in cinemas), but they should leave it as it is: a clever, terrifying and uplifting film that will surely develop a cult following on DVD.
Poppy Z Brite photo by J.K. Potter; Creative Commons license
As a writer Poppy Z Brite took the lost and the depraved, the vicious, the misguided, the outsider, the deviant and the freak by the hand, she lead some home, some to the sadistic salvation they would discover in the extreme ecstasy and pain to be had from “violating the sanctity of a dead boys ass”, abandoned baby vampires into violent pansexualized father/son fuckfests and even others towards the relative safety found in the “transubstantiation of culinary delights” and I loved every fucking word.
As a 16 year old boy, growing up gay in a small backwater her novels became a beacon of hope – or despair, depending on whatever disposition you favoured – breaking through the psychotic monotony of my teenage years – each of her books were connected by one fundamental thread – her characters where for the most part lithe young boys who wanted to be girls, avenging resurrected photographers, dirt poor chartreuse soaked teenagers, gentle mystics, grunge musicians, vampires and necrophiliac cannibals in love. She effortlessly, exquisitely took the mantle of the masculine – Brite identifies as a non-operative transsexual – and offered a uniquely feminine fetishism of the gay male - beautiful descriptions of hard-core gay sex, lurid descriptions of violence and prose as elegant as anything Shirley Jackson or Oliver Onions ever put on paper overlapped seamlessly.
Her wordplay was pictorial in its depravity, think B-movies or quasi-horror cum skin flicks with an intellectual bent and you’re not even halfway there. Her oeuvre connotates the absurd, the sexual, the glorious Grand Guignol in a bracingly intelligent, sometimes serious and sometimes even light-hearted fashion. She had an ear for macabre whipsmart dialogue, extraordinarily vivid characters; her fiction had me delight in the weirdness and inherent brutality of existence beneath the dark miasma that hung over most of her characters’ lives. What can I say, I’m a sadist. She worked me like an addiction I never wanted to break. Her frames of reference incorporated everything from The Church of The Subgenius to the cyber-punk/avant Goth subcultures which populated the seamy seedy French Quarter in New Orleans, Trent Reznor, AIDS terrorism, filicide and filleting boys.
Because this is Women in Horror Recognition month I’ve decided that the focal point of this piece is going to be on Brite’s earlier body of work – in her later novels Brite’s moved away from – though not completely out of – the horror genre: The Value of X, Liquor, and D.U.C.K are more akin to the writing of Faulkner, Flannery O’ Connor and Harry Crews; I’ve also chosen to omit her commercial projects (the unauthorized Courtney Love biography) and her “franchise fiction” (The Lazarus Heart – which is a tie-in of The Crow).
In her debut novel Lost Souls (Dell bought it in 1991 and a few months later she was signed to a six-figure three-book contract) I was introduced to a triumvirate of psychotic vampires called Zillah, Molochai and Twig – creatures I wasn’t sure I wanted to fuck, or flee from. After subjecting a young woman to a night of alcohol-fuelled crazed lust – they disappear. An unfortunate side-effect of humans mating with vampires is that said young woman won’t survive the pregnancy, therefore forcing another of their kind to leave the orphaned vampire baby on a doorstep in grim suburbia; the baby, who grows up to become a reclusive teenager and goes by the name of Nothing, rejects the dull normies and the stifling small-town he was forced to grow up in and leaves it all behind in search of his true heritage. The Lost Souls of the title are the heartbroken musician Steve and the fey psychic Ghost, residents of Brite’s fictitious Missing Mile (apparently inspired by Athens in Georgia, where Brite resided before making New Orleans her permanent home). Eventually Nothing hooks up with his real family and embarks on an incestuous affair with Zillah – the leader of the pack and his own father. At first Nothing is easily seduced by the lure of these creatures’ hyperreality. Nothing finds his own way into the damnation – that is the easy part – however, he soon realises that after witnessing some of his new family’s more unsavoury antics he might need to find a way back to the light. The morally conflicted little vamp finds allies when he finally encounters Steve and Ghost, but the pack isn’t prepared to give up one of their own without a ferocious fight.
Lost Souls was listed by Fangoria as one of the best vampire novels ever written and Brite was crowned as the reigning Queen of the Macabre – dethroning even Anne Rice. The contract with Dell left Brite free to write full-time – up until this, she had been making ends meet as a stripper, artist’s model, mouse-caretaker (she cleaned up after them at a cancer research lab) and short order cook.
It took only another nine months for Brite to produce her second baby, Drawing Blood. The setting may have been the same (being almost exclusively based in Missing Mile) but although this novel had supernatural overtones, it was a very different book in tone and subject-matter than her previous one. In the opening chapters a father brutally kills every member of his family, sparing only his young son Trevor. Years later – much like his predecessor Nothing – Trevor returns to the place of his birth, now a stoic young illustrator, and the house where his family perished. In New Orleans the cyber-hacking, slutty Edward Scissorhands lookalike Zach needs to get out of dodge post-haste when a shadowy government agency begin tailing him. He is aided and abetted by the sultry exotic dancer Eddy Chung (perhaps the only female I remember as a mainstay throughout the novel, though in Brite’s earlier work, gender, pretty much like everything else was debateable). Trevor returns to his home and meeting Zach offers him sanctuary. The boys fall in love but soon the malevolent force that runs through the house starts to assert itself. The ultimate solution for Trevor is to find his way through and out of a mysterious liminal dimension known as Birdland. Brite’s conjuration of Birdland took my breath away – her allusions to the insane architecture of such a place can be traced as far back as the now-defunct 1920’s fantasy/horror publication Weird Tales which had lurid, garish covers of archetypal monsters and other assorted ghouls. One sequence in a cinema had me leaving the lamp burning for three whole nights – it was as if Todd Bronwyn had cast the characters that lived there.
Drawing Blood was perhaps the most gentle and tame of her Gothic Line. It was around the same time that Brite had her first short story collection Swamp Foetus (or Wormwood in the UK) published and saw her cover similar if no less unsettling terrain and even had cameo appearances from some of the characters of her earlier novels.
This brings me to Brite’s most controversial novel to date Exquisite Corpse. A novel which took me to the shocking, acid-skin-stripping, viscera full frontiers of psychosexual obsession and corpse-revelry and I fell in love. A tour-de-force with a taunting, teasing, thrilling and tortuous narrative trajectory that undoubtedly had maniacs salivating on the frontlines of the lunatic fringe. So extreme in content was this that her publisher Dell refused to publish it – her UK publishers also declined. Eventually it was picked up by Simon and Schuster in the US and Orion in the UK. This was so much more though than just another “extreme” novel; even with Lost Souls and Drawing Blood Brite took incredible risks and happily gave the V to any of her detractors. She wrote a novel that dragged you into the darkest realms of humanity – but her characters weren’t “monsters.” Caitlin R. Kiernan wrote in the afterword of Self-Made Man:
“At the root of all the anxiety and alarm seems to be Poppy’s decision to portray the novel’s two cannibalistic serial killers as human beings instead of reducing them to one-dimensional monsters who could then easily be dismissed by readers as Not One of Us. That Andrew Compton and Jay Byrne are shown as men with passions and fears, strengths and weaknesses, that they are humanized rather than demonized, putting the reader at risk of gaining some insight into appetites so alien to their own, and so taboo to their society. And, I suspect, a fear that even the most disgusted reader may find a spark of empathy.”
This novel wiped the floor with the Brett Easton Ellis pussy-hating, chainsaw cub-scout Patrick Bateman. Delving deep into the psyche of the most damaged “monsters” and indeed, as Kiernan pointed out, giving us an insight into another world. Brite was a braver writer than another so-called-subversive enfant terrible, A.M Holmes, who took an intellectual and infuriatingly moral stance in her exploration of paedophilia in The End of Alice. The tabloid detachment of Holmes’ style sickened me while the intimacy of Brite’s full-blown love affair with the “monsters” or the “freaks” offered me a better understanding of the depth of things – however depraved and vile those acts may be I never felt the urge to scald my skin after reading. She led me to other subversive writers like Dennis Cooper (Frisk) Matthew Stokoe (High Life) Laura Albert (the writer formerly known as JT Leroy) and the divine former pro dominatrix Christa Faust (who collaborated with Brite on Triads and is the author of Money Shot) and many other writers who weren’t afraid to grab life by the dick and suck it (or in Andrew Compton’s case, bite it off).
With Exquisite Corpse she really raised the stakes – this was before Eli Roth could shave the hairs on his balls or Takashi Miike and The French New Wave got behind a camera. Before the gang-rape and violent retribution of Virgenie Despentes’ Baise Moi or the small-press deciding Charles Manson is worth publishing. Not that I’m diminishing any of these people and their endeavours, I’m just pointing out that Poppy Z. Brite was writing material at a time – the early nineties – that you probably wouldn’t get away with doing today. This is why I felt honoured when Joseph D’Lacey (who runs this site) asked me to write a piece on one of my favourite writers; his own novel Meat is one seriously fucked up, intelligent, though like Exquisite Corpse, a significant piece of work with staying power and violence and grace. And something which actually tells us, rather than dictates something very real about humanity – even if we might not yet know what that is.
I’m also going to mention a few more female writers you might want to look up which are: Caitlan R Kiernan, Laura Hird, Joyce Carol Oates, Helen Zahavi, Darcey Steinke, Val McDiermud, Joolz Denby, Sarah Langan, Sarah Pinborough, Cathi Unsworth, Rhodi Hawk, Gabrielle Faust, Christa Faust, Megan Abbott, Vicki Hendricks, Lydia Lunch, and Alexandra Sokoloff.
And if you fancy finding out more about Women in Horror Recognition Month, you can always visit these places:
There’s something afoot this side of Christmas: dark skies over real-world book retailing, and a black vein of change for UK genre magazines.
Maybe this change can be referred to as evolution, or as some might say, a devolution. But would anyone go so far as to think of the developing situation as an opportunity?
The future of the Borders book chain is looking less than rosy. This affects me on both a professional and a personal level. I for one will miss that particular quirky retail experience. There was always the possibility of finding something new and interesting on the genre shelves, and the magazine section, well, I’d regularly hotfoot it down to pick up the latest issues of HorrorHound, Fangoria, The Darkside, Rue Morgue and Death Ray, have a flick through Interzone(as I’m a horror boy and subscribe to Black Static), and generally nose about the imported titles until I sniffed out something new. That small high street pleasure is denied to me now, (and I’m sure there are others out there like me).
Will Waterstones start stocking imported magazines? I think not. Although, in some stores that I’ve visited, (Exeter and Kingston), there are encouraging stocks of imported genre books.
How will we obtain copies of Canada’s excellent Rue Morgue now? There’s the subscription option, which is actually great value, but the delivery has always been plagued by delays in my experience, with some titles arriving three months late. Maybe that has changed now. I hope so as I need my RM fix on a monthly basis.
HorrorHound is another favourite, a fanboygeek collector’s magazine of all things horror merchandise, plus some great articles on the 80s video invasion, classic films, and the like – a thoroughly modern magazine with a nostalgic editorial bent. No delivery issues here at all as far as I remember.
I stopped subscribing to these magazines a year or so ago – not because I had lost faith in them, far from it – but because I wanted to pop into a shop to buy them, (despite the high import prices). I enjoy that experience and Borders could pretty much guarantee they’d be there, all in one place.
There are other options for us paper-collecting genre geeks, at least in London. Forbidden Planet stocks all these titles, but not consistently as far as I can tell, and you can’t purchase magazines on their website. The Cinema Store stocks these titles and loads of others too. Outside London? Fab Press’ website stocks issues of Rue Morgue, but again it’s unlikely you’ll be able to pick up the latest RM there, as they have to wait to receive them, just like the rest of us. Although looking at their website today, they’re up to date with the November 2009 issue.
I think it might be time to return to the subscription option. But, will there be any (UK) magazines left for us to subscribe to?
Shivers died a year or so ago, and the inevitable demise of Borders has coincided with what are most likely to be the final death-throes of several magazines: The Darkside has not been seen since September. A wiki entry states it might return. Let’s hope so. A thread on the Frightfest Forum has a little more information. Although maligned by some, the magazine appealed to the pulp in me. In its lastest editorial Gorezone rather tastelessly claims some credit for the end of The Darkside, but as the discussion on Monster Kids Classic Horror Forum shows, other non-genre titles are dropping like flies too.
Black Fish, the publisher of Death Ray and newly-launched sister title, Filmstar, appears to be in trouble as both titles are on hold by the looks of things:
As some of you may have heard, and others who popped along the shops to pick up the latest issue of Filmstar may have feared, Blackfish’s two magazines, Filmstar and Death Ray, are currently ‘on hold’. What this means is that there will not be another issue of either of them along for a number of weeks – or, likely, months. Indeed, whether there will ever be another issue of either is a moot point, and at this moment in time impossible to answer. But we hope so.
Quite what the future holds for Filmstar, Death Ray – and, indeed, Blackfish – remains unclear, but we hope to have more definite news over the next week or so. Keep watching this space, because as of now quite literally anything (or nothing) could happen.
Who’s to say what the future holds for genre magazines in the UK, but I think there’s always been an element of uncertainty hovering around such titles, as finding the niche audience on the high street can be challenging regardless of which shop you can get yourself in.
What reassures me about this situation, and the worlds of genre in general, is that the brains behind these magazines have it in their blood, they must give life to their visions, and I genuinely hope they are able to resurrect their titles in one form or another in 2010.
And as John Gilbert’s comment on The Great White Space states, there might well be life in an old dog yet…
“The book I would like to be buried with is A Dance to the Music of Time.
About Reggie Oliver:
“It’s tempting to say the book I’d like to be buried with is an iPad, of course – as that way I could not only take a ton of books but be able to chase deadlines beyond the grave, too. But assuming that’s not within the spirit of the thing, then I’d have to say Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis. I first read it when I was about thirteen, and it made a huge impression on me. I read it and re-read it, countless times, and it probably informed my sense of humour more than anything else I’ve ever read. Amis’ ability to find comedy in life’s slings and arrows, to use words as precise little hammers to attack the countless impotent little furies and frustrations of existence, has been an inspiration ever since. It was also the very first book that gave me an inkling that I might like to try writing for a career. Though if I’m allowed to entertain the idea that I might still be able to read in the grave, I might substitute a really big entymological dictionary instead. I love words, and especially enjoy reading about their journeys through time, shifts in their meanings reflecting changes in society an attitude, and how each of them – as Butler said – tries to enclose the wilderness of an idea. In effect every word is a little story in itself. With an eternity to get through, a couple of hundred thousand of those might help pass the time…”
About Michael Marshall Smith:
It happens less frequently than I’d like; a contented glow of time well-spent: 103 minutes of hybrid sf/horror that one is happy to place alongside peers such as Event Horizon, the Alien series, 
Astronauts Bower and Peyton, from Team 5, wake from their hyper-slumbers into a world of claustrophobic darkness: the Elysium is shutting down, its reactor gradually slowing and the power drained from all but the most basic of functions. Added to this is the memory-loss that long-term sleepers suffer upon waking – and they’ve been asleep a long, long time; and the increasing threat of mental breakdown and violent paranoia – Pandorum. As Bower explores the ship, attempting to make his way to the reactor he encounters several other survivors turned feral, and a race of possibly mutated and ferociously ravenous savages straight out of The Descent/Ghosts of Mars creature blender.
The gradual return of Bower and Peyton’s personal and professional memories, combined with the stories of the survivors, develop into a history of the last moments of the human race on Earth, the breakdown of the crew of the Elysium, and a desperate fight for its future in a colossal sleeper-ship that knows it’s time to die.
