Blowing the Doors Off Those Crypts

The better to see you with…

Lately horror and the Weird have each been going great guns, entering an efflorescence unlike anything we’ve seen for decades. Tobias Carroll put up a fine essay at Electric Literature the other day about the state of literary horror—”‘Then, a Hellbeast Ate Them’: Notes on Horror Fiction and Expectations.” It captures the breadth of the authors who are making free with all things horrific these days, often in places where the word “horror” previously was unwelcome. Whenever I encounter a meaningful and unapologetic treatment of literary horror (or literary fantasy, for that matter) I feel a kind of excitement that goes bone deep.

Genre and literary snobs look down their noses at each other, particularly around formations like “literary [GENRE],” and phrases like “slipstream” or “magical realism” have both lost and gained precision over time, but at least that latter is finally a little less likely to be used as a term of contempt in genre. That said, literary genre work is a strange beast, and, pace Carroll, I think not actually all that common, to judge by the shelves at B&N. Little of it appears in the F/SF section, or to stay for long if it does, and so it’s off to sift through literary fiction to find eloquent novels about disaffected werewolves.

The Weird has had similar success of late, with a high-water mark being Jeff VanderMeer’s outstanding Southern Reach novels. He has a piece over at The Atlantic, “The Uncanny Power of Weird Fiction,” that is about as clear as sign as you’re ever going to see that this strange little niche is seeing more daylight than I ever could have hoped. Jeff’s piece is very well written and introduced me to, as every time I see something from him, writers of whom I’ve never heard.

The VanderMeers should bear, of course, a huge part of our gratitude for the recent surge. Jeff’s fiction was a part of the New Weird when that came along, of course, but it’s grown since then, strengthened by his omnivorous consumption of fiction in all forms and his well-documented efforts to focus intently on his writing. Ann VanderMeer’s stint as Fiction Editor at Weird Tales put the cat so much among the canaries that a veritable legion of living fossils rose up and cried “to R’lyeh shalt thou go, and no further.” Though flags have repeatedly been planted in the sand about the end of the avant-garde, such flags are ever meant to be torn down. Jeff and Ann blew the doors off with The Weird and everything that followed, debunking some of the Old Weird/New Weird/That’s Not Weird stupidity in the process. I do so love the Weird of the early 20th century, but people too often think of those guys as a terminus, when they were actually a phase.

Yesterday Laird Barron posted “New Blood,” calling out some of the current leading lights of horror, springboarding off of an introduction Stephen Jones wrote at the start of his 2011 A Book of Horrors that led with “What the hell happened to the horror genre?” I won’t repeat Laird’s excellent roll call, but I will point out that the average age of the contributors to A Book of Horrors (2011) was 55. A similar book with the same lineup could, with the right twists of fate, have shown up in Horror at B. Dalton Bookseller around 1989. Laird’s list is a little harder to suss, age-wise, in so far as the people he names haven’t all cast such long shadows yet that their biographical data is easy to find, but the “new blood” moniker is pretty apt.

This is no complaint about Olds: many writers come into their prime a lot later than people do in other fields of artistic endeavor. Some of the names on the roster of Jones’ anthology are ones that I respect and have loved to see work from for decades. And while some of what Jones has to say is distinctly get-off-my-lawn-y, there’s a certain truth in what he says that’s clear from the work of many of the authors on the list: many of them share a certain idea of horror, one that’s faded away. I expect that’s hard to deal with. When literary horror goes fallow a couple decades down the road, I’m going to be irritable.

Some months back I had a lengthy conversation with a friend about horror now vs. horror in the 1980s. As my friend said, while I was busy lamenting that Young Me never got to read Barron or Llewellyn, “you know, it was just a very different scene.” And that, folks, is truth you can take to the bank. Jack Williamson, Dennis Wheatley, Robert Bloch, Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice, Charles Grant, Clive Barker, Thomas Ligotti, Laird Barron, Justin Cronin, and Lauren Beukes all have something to do with horror, but they are not all doing the same thing. Not by a long shot. (To which I personally say “thank God,” but I digress.) While one writer may be more skilled than another, what we are writing now is… what we’re writing now. It’s generally more self-consciously literate, and much of it profits, one way and another, from the overall greater attention to good prose that prevails in U.S. fiction these days, thanks primarily to the development of BFA & MFA pedagogy, and the ripple effect it caused throughout literature.

Today, on this best, scariest, and most ooga-booga of days, I’ll say that I’m grateful for masks of all kind. A mask-maker who uses burlap and twine is trying to do something different from the injection molded and painted horrors of Party City. One’s no better than the other, and we’re the happier for having both. It’s a shit game, trash-talking your elders, and it’s likewise a shit game to trash-talk the young turks. You’d be smart to avoid doing either, not least because you either were once the New Blood, or will, with luck, wind up part of the Old Guard.

Happy Halloween.

Cosmic Horror: Credit Where Credit Is Due

Thomas Ligotti’s Noctuary

Sometime in the mid-90’s I picked up an anthology or year’s best collection (I no longer remember which one) and read a Thomas Ligotti [Amazon|B&N|Powell’s] story. I would like to think that it was “The Last Feast of Harlequin” that forever changed my view of what cosmic horror could be, but in truth I just don’t remember. I do remember going looking for a collection by him, and being blown away by Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I couldn’t lay my hands on a copy of Grimscribe at the time, so a year-ish passed, and then I picked up Noctuary at the library. (Some wit had scrawled on the title page, in thick lead, “Ob-noxuary,” which wound up being another lesson, of sorts.)

Noctuary gave me what I later realized was my first exposure to anything that felt like what we now call “flash fiction” in the third part of the collection, “Notebook of the Night.” Among the stories there, “Autumnal” blended what I by then recognized as Ligotti’s signature worldview with all things autumn and a scrap of story-feel, and moved me in ways that very short fiction rarely had to that point.

Reading Thomas Ligotti led me to hunt down Bruno Schulz, and also, I’m a little embarrassed to admit, Franz Kafka. It wasn’t that I’d never read Kafka at all–I’d read several stories, in both English and German–but I hadn’t made a point of seeking him out in the context of cosmic horror or weird fiction generally. For that nudge, and for everything else, I’m grateful to Thomas Ligotti.

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Low Red Moon, by Caitlin R. Kiernan

In 1998,  I was roaming some bookstore or other and picked up a copy of Silk, the first novel published by then-newbie Caitlín R. Kiernan [Amazon|B&N|Powell’s]. I read the back cover copy, opened it to a page at random, saw a bunch of made-up words and something about angels, and I put that book right back on the shelf. It was the late ’90s, and horror was a shit-stew of late Splatterpunk, sketchy vampire novels, and wailing about the “end of horror.” The greats were failing to turn in great work, and trying-too-hard crap like Silk was flying under the “H” banner, so I figured horror could stand to compost for a while. A few years later, I saw that “that Silk person” had put out something “Lovecraftian” that involved… what? Dinosaurs? Time-traveling dinosaurs? Set in Alabama? “What the fuck ever,” I thought, and moved on. Surely this hodgepodge bullshit was not worth my time.

Never have I been so wrong about an author.

Fast forward to 2005. I’d been busy with grad school and had barely written a word of fiction from about 1998 to 2002 or so, and I’d been warming the writing engines up again during library school.  I was wandering around in Magus Books in Seattle, and I came across a used copy of Threshold. It was $7.00, and I decided I’d give it a shot. Perhaps I might have been unwarrantedly dismissive. Reader, I have written at length in various places about the effect this had on me, but, in short, Caitlín R. Kiernan changed all over again my perception of what cosmic horror could be and do. I had been reading sundry Modernists for a while, and I’d developed the so-original idea of writing Lovecraftian fiction, but, like, with contemporary, taut prose, man. Reading Kiernan was exalting and devastating, because she did exactly what I wanted to do.

Not long after I read Low Red Moon, the sequel to Threshold, and it remains, to this day, one of my favorite novels of cosmic horror: delirious, beautiful, hinting at the shadowy world behind it all. I followed these up with a long-delayed read of Silk, which humbled me when I understood more about her aims, as well as Murder of Angels. About her short fiction it’s hard to say enough good things. If I one day manage to write a short story half as good as “Standing Water,” I’ll consider myself a real writer. When you can write an effective, striking story about a puddle, you have chops.

For her incantatory prose and leading me to think more broadly about the Lovecraftian tent, I’m grateful to Caitlín R. Kiernan.

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The Croning, by Laird Barron

At some point late in the Oughts I started to hear rumblings of a New Guy, who was the next cosmic horror sensation to watch out for: Laird Barron [Amazon|B&N|Powell’s]. This was years after I’d started up on LiveJournal, and I’d occasionally see this guy with Hemingway and other tough-guy userpics, and he seemed both smart and funny. I had come to grips with the idea that authors were, in fact, real people, but in the vicissitudes of LJ comments and conflagrations I hadn’t sought out any of his fiction. I was, after all, busy reading other things, and there was a whole world of other authors out there on LJ I wanted to read. Then, sometime in the spring of 2010, I picked up Occultation, his then-just-published short story collection, and, once more, I was off to the races.

You know where this is going, right? Laird Barron blew me away. The stories in Occultation were often long, which threw me for a loop at first. The 5-10,000 word story had never much appealed to me as a reader, and I still don’t do it much as a writer, but he made me consider the possibilities of the long story. En route, he mashed up Lovecraft, noir, and lengthy sentences, refusing to be rushed. I was impressed. I read interviews with him, followed his blog, and realized that here was another writer who cared about cosmic horror, not in the yes-I’ve-read-Lovecraft sense, but in a holistic, all-encompassing way that was more Weltanschauung than mere preference.

And then in 2012 came The Croning, his first widely-published novel. (His 2011 novel, The Light Is the Darkness, slipped under the radar and didn’t get very much attention.)  The Croning is an unforgettable novel of cosmic horror. Hallucinogenic, vivid, and terrifying, it manages to pay homage to the forebears without feeling stale. Likewise, it’s unquestionably horror, and would alone have justified a revival of the genre, if it hadn’t already been cranking back up after the collapse of the ’90s. Why do I single out this novel for credit, which I read barely two years ago? There are many reasons, but the one I’ll cite is this: it’s a good short novel of cosmic horror. Short novels have always been around, but they aren’t much in favor right now, and if I need to think about what cosmic horror looks like at that length, I go to The Croning. That it didn’t win any awards is unfortunate, but there is a very long history of excellent works not winning awards for all manner of reasons. If I’m still around fifty years from now, and if I’m still rereading the books I have loved over the course of my life, I expect that The Croning will be on the shelf by my bed.

I’m grateful to Laird Barron for writing what he writes, as well as he does, at the length that he does. His engagement with and references to (in his fiction, interviews, and non-fiction) the masters of cosmic horror and the weird tale are a constant reminder that we are part of a tradition, and that strong trees have solid roots.

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I’m grateful to these authors for the way their fiction has enriched my life and expanded my understanding of cosmic horror, and literature generally. I recommend their books to you, particularly those I’ve mentioned by name.