Skulls in the Stars

Richard Marsh was a prolific writer of horror, suspense and mystery stories in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I’ve previously blogged about his most famous work, The Beetle: A Mystery, an 1897 horror tale that was so popular that it outsold its contemporary Dracula for some time. The other night I finished reading another of Marsh’s works, his 1901 novel The Joss: A Reversion. The facsimile of the original cover is below:

I have to say that I enjoyed The Joss even more than The Beetle! I give a brief description of the tale below the fold…

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Have I mentioned how much I like Valancourt Books?  A couple of weeks ago, I reviewed their reprint of a rare Gothic classic, The Animated Skeleton, and even got a nice comment from the publisher/editor of Valancourt.  I vowed to look into more of Valancourt’s publications, but didn’t even realize that I already had!  In addition to publishing a line of classic Gothic literature, they’ve been printing classics of the 1890s, including a number of books by suspense/weird fiction writer Richard Marsh.  This is a real treat; as I’ve noted before in my discussion of Marsh’s book The Beetle, he was an extremely popular author of his time (even outselling Dracula for a while).  I’ve been looking into buying more of Marsh’s work, and had purchased Marsh’s The Joss: A Reversion and The Seen and the Unseen without realizing they were also Valancourt editions!

I’ll eventually get to commenting more on Marsh’s work on this blog, but I thought I’d mention that Valancourt is doing an excellent job reprinting these classic ‘lost’ works.  The book quality is excellent, and an added treat is that the covers are reproductions of the original editions.

Fans of classic horror, suspense, and mysteries would be well-advised to give these editions a look.  In addition, there’s currently a sale on a number of Valancourt’s titles, including some of Marsh’s work; check them out!

There were whispers on the message boards at Valancourt that they may produce a new edition of The Beetle, in which case I’ll be replacing my rather flimsy current copy…

I haven’t done a “Horror Masters” post for a while, and it’s long past due!

Even if you’ve never read a Dean Koontz novel, you’re familiar with his work.  Airport bookstores are constantly stocked with his books; finding a horror author whose last name doesn’t start with “K” can be quite a challenge when traveling (King, of course, being the other one).

Broadly speaking, it is easy at first glance to dismiss Koontz as a “pop” horror author of no serious depth.  Many of his novels, especially his early work, follow a certain well-defined plot structure: boy/girl hero meets girl/boy love interest, both are threatened by some mysterious entity, they flee, they have a final confrontation with said entity in some isolated location and live happily ever after.  Furthermore, his short stories, such as those compiled in Strange Highways, often seem clumsy and somehow ‘inefficient’.

It would be easy to dismiss Koontz as another pop horror author showering the shelves with forgettable drek (I’m lookin’ at you, Preston and Child!), except for one important, undeniable, unavoidable reality:

Dean Koontz’s story ideas are incredibly, almost maddeningly, clever - and they’re executed brilliantly.

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As I believe I’ve mentioned before, part of my motivation for writing this blog was to give myself a reason to reinvestigate one of my “lost loves”: horror fiction. I’ve been reading massive amounts of horror since then, from some of the oldest Gothic works to the most recent publications. Some of it has been edifying, but some of it has also been rather disappointing.

One of the contemporary authors I’ve been investigating is Richard Laymon, who has been in print since 1980. I’ve never read his stuff before, but recently I gave two of his books a try. One, The Beast House, is from his early phase, and the other, To Wake the Dead, is only a few years old. I discuss both books, which are… okay, below the fold, but they also remind me of one of my pet peeves of contemporary horror fiction, which I feel like ranting about a bit.

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I haven’t been doing much horror blogging recently, though I have been busy with horror reading. A couple of books by Tim Lebbon recently caught my eye, and I thought I’d offer a few thoughts about them.

First, a rhetorical question: what is it with the U.K. and horror? So many of the best horror authors these days are British: there’s Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, and Graham Masterton, to name a few. Now we can also add to that list Tim Lebbon. Though I don’t necessarily rank him as the equal, yet, to the other authors I’ve mentioned, he’s an excellent writer with some intriguing ideas. His first novel came out in 1996, so he hasn’t been around as long as the others, either.

Two novels whose premises caught my attention that I had to read were Lebbon’s Berserk and The Everlasting, and I discuss them both below the fold…

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I have a tendency, when I start to study a subject, of pushing continuously further back in the subject’s history. This is certainly true of my horror readings, in which I’ve now regressed into studying early Gothic fiction.

I’ve mentioned before how today might be considered a ‘golden age’ of sorts for studying classic horror, because of the number of quality publishers printing extremely rare texts. Yet another publisher of this sort is Valancourt Books, which specializes in the publishing of early Gothic fiction. The first title I decided to read is The Animated Skeleton, by an anonymous author, and I discuss it, with some spoilers, below the fold…

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Cities, in spite of their liveliness, or perhaps because of it, can seem just as mysterious and unknowable as a lonely cemetery or underground catacomb. There’s always something going on in the city, and if you’re attentive, you can catch glimpses of unusual encounters, often in passing or out of the corner of your eye. What’s in the unusually-shaped package the man is carrying furtively down the street? What are the two men hunched over and examining in the alleyway? Is that dark figure upon the rooftop simply a silhouetted air vent, or something else? It often seems like there’s a hidden world behind the city’s outward façade, which might be entered if one is fortunate… or highly unfortunate.

It’s not surprising that numerous authors of horror and weird fiction in general have been inspired by thoughts such as these to give their own take on things that are happening behind the scenes. I came across one such story recently, and that inspired me to put together a short list of stories, long and short, about the secret goings-on of cities…

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As I’ve mentioned previously, Wordsworth Mystery & Supernatural is publishing an excellent collection of long out of print Victorian-era novels and short stories.  I just finished reading one of them, a neglected novel of suspense and the supernatural, Richard Marsh’s The Beetle: A Mystery.

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I haven’t stopped by Ramsey Campbell’s official website for a while, but it was updated since I last saw it with an introduction that talks about why he writes horror and why it is a worthy literary pursuit. It’s a great defense of a genre that shouldn’t need a defense; to quote a highlight:

An old saw states that horror and pornography are the only kinds of fiction that seek to produce a physical reaction. Presumably whichever human prune originated this twaddle was never made to laugh or weep by fiction. I think there’s nothing at all wrong with art that causes us to feel, but I maintain that horror fiction can address the intellect as well. I don’t want to scare people out of their wits; I’d rather scare them in.

I highly agree with this assessment, and I like to think that I’ve been pushing a similar argument in some of my previous horror posts. For instance, Lovecraft and his contemporaries were drawing in significant amounts upon the scientific discoveries of their era (relativity, quantum mechanics, evolution) to unsettle, by exploring what might be considered to be unpleasant consequences of our increasing understanding. I’ll have more to say on this in a few days, after I’ve collected my thoughts a bit more…

Update: Via Trudi Topham, I’ve found that Campbell is currently, and for a couple of weeks, answering questions at the Pantechnicon Forums.  If you’ve ever had a question for a horror master, here’s a good chance to ask it!

I’ve previously described Max Brooks’ first book, The Zombie Survival Guide, which I found to be a both amusing and chilling fictional field guide written in the wake of a world-wide zombie holocaust.  My favorite part of that book was its appendix of ‘historical’ zombie outbreaks, a collection of vignettes about human encounters with the living dead throughout history.  The terseness of these little stories made them especially creepy, as the reader feels that he/she is lacking crucial pieces to the puzzle.

Brooks’ 2006 follow-up, World War Z, continues and expands upon this narrative style.  It is written as an oral history recorded after the zombie holocaust by a U.N. worker.  Tales begin with the Chinese outbreak which starts it all, through the collapse of civilization as we know it, to the turn of the tide of battle and eventually the aftermath of the decidedly Pyrrhic victory.  The tales are at times fascinating, humorous, horrifying, and even inspiring, and as a whole I found the book nearly impossible to put down.

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