Horrible Trashy Old Shorts

Although I’m as much of a sucker for vampires and zombies as the next geek, I can’t really call myself much of a horror buff. As a teenager I was pathetically oversensitive to horror film cliches: I can remember lying on a sofa in a friends house as he watched the David Cronenberg remake of The Fly and refusing to turn to face the screen for the entire film. I’ve got rather less wimpy since then, but I guess some of that original distaste has stayed with me. I also have a fantasy-fan’s desire to explore the roots and details of fantastic creations and so I find the tendancy of horror writers to skip that sort of material in attempts to make what you don’t know all the more scary intensely frustrating. Never mind the fashion to focus on all-too human serial killers and sadists instead of the supernatural. But you can’t carry your nerd card without having a soft spot for at least some of this stuff, so I thought it might be interested to do a culture piece on what I am familiar with: an outsiders view of the genre so to speak.

And what I am familiar with, largely, is the Cthulhu Mythos, thanks mostly to the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, a title I have long admired but at which I have never encountered any sort of success either as a player or a keeper. Sessions have always either been mortally short or interminably boring and without atmosphere. But the game inevitably leads to the books and I think it’s fair to say that from the first I had a very mixed reaction to Lovecraft. And I think it’s also fair to say that a mixed reaction is exactly what the material deserves: it ranges in quality from dreadful pulp to the near sublime. Sadly the latter outnumbers the former by a considerable margin and indeed as I’ve grown older and become more confident in exercising my own critical faculties I’ve often had cause to pause and wonder why, exactly, he has proved such an enduring force of inspiration to generations of nerds. To top it all off so many of his tales reek of appalling racism that no matter how commonplace it might have been in the context of the time and place it was written, it can’t help but to revolt a modern reader. But he’s an all-or-nothing kind of writer I suppose. And when he gets it right, the results are spectacular. I’m with the critics who state that The Color Out of Space is his best story: it’s the only place where the sense of the utterly alien and uncaring cosmos that he strove to achieve really comes across. Too many of his other creations seem, bizarrely, actively malevolent to really be that totally different to humanity and indifferent to its fate: only the Color, which seems to destroy the Gardner family in such a horrific fashion almost as a byproduct of its own mysterious purposes manages fulfil that promise of distant menace. For the most part, it seems to me Lovecraft deserves praise and remembrance for inventing an entirely new kind of horror story: but the refinement and ultimate perfection of that new form he left to writers that followed in his footsteps.

But perfection and refinement is of course a perilous process filled with pitfalls into which many have stumbled. One of the most famous casualties is of course August Derleth: and while I hold his attempted moralisation and clinical taxonomy of the mythos in utter contempt, I have to admit that he could at least manage to weave a gripping yarn with a good atmosphere. That can’t even be said, unfortunately, for the lesser-known British writer Brian Lumley. Fans of the mythos may be familiar with his name as the creator of the infamous Cthonians and indeed it was in this context that I first sought out and read his work. Unfortunately Lumely not only has a pulp style which is so basic as to make Lovecraft at his worst look like high art, but he completely misses the point of exactly how and why the mythos is supposed to be scary. In Lumley’s vision of the cosmos, Great Old Ones are just big Godzilla-style beasties that can be (and often are) blown up with sufficient application of dynamite. I’m sure I don’t need to spell out that this has the - presumably intentional - effect of transforming what ought to be horror stories into bog-standard adventure tales, leaving the horror trappings like the baroque language and appeals for the reader to sympathise with moments of terror experienced by the protagonists adrift from the main thrust of the story and falling completely flat as a result.

A rather more successful follower of the original master is Ramsey Campbell. There are a few books that I find myself coming back to now and again to read “just one more time” and one of them is Campbell’s collection of Cthulhu Mythos short stories Cold Print. Beyond being a simple gathering of horror tales, what’s particularly interesting about Cold Print is that the author has been writing mythos tales on and off for most of his career and so the chronological arrangement of the stories acts as a snapshot of his gradually evolving style from a poor pastiche of Lovecraft to his later attempts to out-perform Lovecraft at his stated aims of portraying the un-portayable in stories that are stamped very firmly with Campbell’s own style. But for fans of old-school mythos writing there’s also plenty of highly imaginative material here in a more traditional style once you get past the initial offerings of dreadful juvenalia. It is unsurprising then that the stories generally improve as you go through the books and I’d argue that some of the later ones such as The Tugging and particularly The Faces at Pine Dunes succeed admirably, portraying the creatures of a mythos as an ever-present but never seen menace and breaking free of Lovecraft’s overblown prose style to create much tighter tales that are drenched in near-strangling claustrophobia. In his introduction the author states that he feels the final tale in the collection The Voice of the Beach is the most successful in this task. Personally I disagree: while a very fine weird tale it takes the concept of alien otherness too far into something that only barely belongs in the horror genre, let alone being identified with other tales of the mythos. Given the quality of the material on offer toward the end of the book I’m surprised that this is, and remains, out of print, although it seems not too difficult to pick up second hand copies.

Ultimately though I found what I was looking for in horror stories not in the mythos at all, but in an author who was widely admired by both Lovecraft and Campbell but who sadly seems to have slipped under the radar of geek culture almost completely. It’s a particular shame because the author in question is one of the very tiny number of fantasy writers whose works are deemed worthy of serious scholarly discussion by the literati. The gentleman in question is the Victorian British antiquarian M. R. James who remains, I believe, better known in his native country than in the states. James wrote traditional ghost stories in the sense that the supernatural nature of his creations were rarely particularly imaginative: they were always the faint echoes of the departed. However their peculiar attributes and the surroundings, backgrounds and stories in which they were portrayed were rarely so pedestrian. James is usually credited with inventing the style of plot that Lovecraft eventually made his own, in which ordinary people, often scholars, are pulled unsuspecting into a world of supernatural terror often through interaction with a seemingly ordinary old book or other mundane object. Again, like Lovecraft, James seeks to project terror through the unknown rather than through explicit description of the ghostly entities in his stories but I find his work rather more successful in this regard. It helps a great deal that James doesn’t have to fall back on trying to encapsulate the apparently impossible such as extra-dimensional geometry to get his point across, and also that unlike Lovecraft, James tends to extend this mystery to the motivation and background of the events he portrays: there are often loose ends in the stories that the reader is left to piece together from his own imagination. Another key difference is that, perhaps surprisingly for a Victorian writer, James frequently counterpoints the ephemeral nature of his ghosts with fairly explicit expositions about the often gruesome and violent fate that their victims meet, a juxtaposition which makes for some extremely effective shock moments. James wrote his tales with the intention that they should be read out loud, and indeed there have been some excellent TV and Radio adaptations of actors doing just that, including a particularly memorable series by Christopher Lee, surrounded by candles in the rooms of a Cambridge college, but they suffer in no regard when read privately. His stories have been reprinted in various collections many times but if you want a sampler either watch Christopher Lee or search online: many of the stories can be found for free on the internet.

So there you have it: a brief encapsulate of an outsiders voyage through the realms of the horror short story. I should be interested to hear what your own particular favourites are, and why. I should particularly like to know whether you’ve heard of Ramsey Campbell and M.R. James, whether my paragraphs inspired you to check them out, and what you think of them. And perhaps most of all I should like anyone who thinks they might be able to recommend some other authors in the same vein to let me know about them.