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OtherRealms Issue 27 Part 10
Electronic OtherRealms #27
Spring, 1990
Part 10 of 11
Copyright 1990 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved.
OtherRealms may be distributed electronically only in the original
form and with copyrights, credits and return addresses intact.
OtherRealms may be reproduced in printed form only for your personal use.
No part of OtherRealms may be reprinted or used in any other
publication without permission of the author.
All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the author.
No Prisoners!
Laurie Sefton
Copyright 1990 by Laurie Sefton
If you ever want top find out exactly how much spare time you really
have, take my advice -- go enroll in graduate school. I'm in my third
quarter at Stanford University, allegedly studying Engineering of
Economic Systems (you can all get over the grimace now). Graduate school
is very sneaky. They lull you into a state of well-being by giving you
an easy class, and then, when you least expect it, you find yourself in
the Class From Hell. Or it's at least from another dimension. You've all
had classes like this; the homework has nothing to do with either the
lecture material or the assigned reading, and it appears that the
teaching assistant and the professor are mutually antagonistic, if not
completely hostile. You now get to spend your time slogging through
large chunks of reading, especially right before the mid-term and the
final. No, it's not your fault that you haven't read the material, it's
just that the TA didn't bother to hand out the reading list until 5 days
before the exams. And the homework -- ah yes, the homework. You thought
you'd never have to work out those nasty word problems again, and here
they are, back to invade your subconscious, and twist your perceptions.
Beyond this, 5-10 hours of homework a week, and another 5-10 hours of
hard core reading destroys any hope that you're going to get any other
reading done. You want to read something else, anything other than the
infinite number of case studies you've been trying to decipher. However,
good sense, and the fear of a bad grade prevails, and you save up all
those books you've been wanting to read for one large literary orgy
after you've finished the final.
And after you've had some sleep.
Sun-Runner's Fire [***]
Melanie Rawn
DAW Books, 1990, 479 pp.
Sun-Runner's Fire is the third in the Dragon Prince series. You do need
to read the first two books in the series, Dragon Prince and The Star
Scroll, if you hope to keep track of who is doing what to whom. The high
prince and princess of the desert, Rohan and Sioned find themselves the
fulcrum of a number of intrigues, the most obvious is that of Andry, the
leader of the Farahd'im, the Sun-Runners who act much as a
telecommunications system among the principalities, as well as an
intelligence gathering agent for both the High Prince and the Farahd'im
themselves. Not so obvious is the Diarmadh'im, the old-blood sorcerers
who were defeated 500 years past, and now want to reclaim their kingdom.
The theme of Sun-Runner's fire is that secrets kept to hurt others, or
to gain power will surely come back to haunt you. Secrets are kept from
all the characters in the book, some to ease what the keep may think
would be unbearable pain, some for selfish reasons on the keeper's part,
and some for just the sake of keeping a secret. When the secrets are
revealed, some on purpose, some inadvertently, tenuous relationships are
broken. While the 'good guys' still win the battle, you feel that all
involved will have decide who is an ally, and who is just a less
dangerous enemy. Sun-Runner's Fire drags a bit in the middle, but picks
up at the end and foreshadows much more to come.
A Candle for d'Artagnan [****]
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
TOR Horror, 1989, 485 pp
A few hundred years and a couple of lifetimes ago, I joined a collegiate
fencing squad. Wherever you have a fencing squad, and have more than
four romantics, you're going to have the four musketeers. Which
musketeer I was is left as an exercise to the reader.
I read all of Dumas' books on the musketeers, The Three Musketeers,
Twenty Years After, and The Viscount of Bragelonne. The central
character in the three books, is d'Artagnan, the Gascon who arrives on a
"buttercup yellow" nag and proceeds to work his way through the royal
courts of France.
Yarbro also has d'Artagnan as her central mortal character in the story.
Olivia, the ageless vampire from imperial Rome returns for her third,
and final, saga. Olivia is sent to the French court, as much as a noble
hostage as a clever solution to ridding the Papal lands of a wealthy
widow. Olivia is drawn into the web of intrigue at the court of Louis
XIII, and finds d'Artagnan as her savior and then her lover.
d'Artagnan is a different character from what is portrayed by Dumas, who
appears to have candy-coated the life of the musketeers, hiding the
pain, the dirt and the drudge of everyday life. Those who have
subscribed to the Dumas version of the musketeers may feel as if they've
been betrayed, but the portrayals the Yarbro provides are much more true
to character than the sometime archetypes that Dumas provided. Be
assured, though, that the French court, and the Cardinals Richelieu and
Mazarin are just as sneaky and two-faced as ever.
The Stand [***]
Stephen King
Doubleday, 1990, 1153pp
If we shift forward 350 years, we find that humanity hasn't improved
their lot, from either a moral or viral view. Stephen King's The Stand
takes a look at both, and delivers a rather nasty sermon on the nature
of mankind at the same time. I didn't read the original version -- this
is the current, uncut version, so I don't have a frame of reference of
what the first version was attempting to get across to the reader. I did
get two points from the book:
1. Mankind is pretty nasty
2. The judeo-christian version of God isn't much better
Talk about 'created in His image'. I suppose I should have been
horrified, both at the plague, and then at the destruction of society,
and then the "you can't win the war against evil, just the battle"
moral. Then again, I spent my childhood years growing up on the
periphery of the Chicago political machine. The dark man is sort of the
end result of a number of politicians I've known; someone who can go
through life trashing out everything around him, and just when you think
he's finally out of the picture, he pops back up with a new story and a
new constituency.
God isn't offering any help to the good guys in this story, either.
Enough minor miracles pop up for a good chunk of the people there to go
off blindly trying to take the dark man out. They don't do very well.
There are a number of biblical references in the book, among them the
story of Job. The trouble is, instead of being the respected opposition,
as Lucifer is portrayed in the story, we have the later, Christian (or
more accurately, the Zoroastrian) version of the evil entity, who takes
up a role of duality of power.
Theological issues aside, this is a very large, very long book. King
spends a lot of time setting up the characters, and then not a lot
leading them to their final destination. This isn't literature, but if
you're on a long flight, or just need something to read which isn't
taxing, this is it.
The Hawk's Gray Feather [***]
Patricia Kennealy
RoC, May 1990, 400 pp
If we skip ahead another 100 years or so in our time, but 1500 years ago
in legendary time, we're in the worlds of the Keltiad, with Patricia
Kennealy's latest, The Hawk's Gray Feather. Be warned, this is the first
book of a trilogy, and if you tend to read trilogies like I do, you'll
want to have all three books in hand before you start.
The Hawk's Gray Feather is another telling of the legend of Arthur, who
does exist in the historical timeline of the Keltic worlds. The story is
told from the viewpoint of Taliesin, Arthur's foster-brother and
Keltia's greatest bard. This has much of the feeling of the other
stories of the Keltiad; there are definite enemies and friends, and it
takes no time to decide whose side each character is on. And as with the
other stories of Keltia, the people of Keltia are very strong, brave,
beautiful, intelligent and talented. This will either enchant you or
enrage you -- some readers have a very low tolerance for the good guys
being truly good.
Lunar Activity [***+]
Elizabeth Moon
Baen Books, April 1990, 278 pp
Lunar Activity crosses times, worlds and categories. A lot of readers
will buy the collection of stories by Elizabeth Moon solely for the
fantasy story at the end from the Deed of Paksennarion venue and will
miss out on some good science fiction. I especially enjoyed the stories
with a medical/biological viewpoint -- it had never occurred to me the
problems with inserting an IV under zero gravity until I read about what
Moon had to say on the subject. Science fiction has a tendency to ignore
the biological story, in favor of high-tech, and biology and medicine
have as many possibilities. I'd like to see more exploration of these
areas, and I hope that Moon continues to do so.
The Agony Column
Rick Kleffel
Copyright 1990 by Rick Kleffel
This is my last OtherRealms column. It's been a very fruitful experience
for me, and I'd like to thank Chuq for the opportunity to tread on the
toes of the wide-eyed and innocent. I can understand his need to focus
his efforts, but for those who enjoyed the horror coverage, let me
recommend some publications that offer what you won't be finding here
any more.
First is Midnight Graffiti. Excuse the shameless self-promotion, but I'm
doing reviews for them and you'll also get fiction by many of the top
names in the field: King, Schow, Ellison and others. (Those interested
in my horror should keep an eye out for stories in upcoming issues of
Deathrealm and Thin Ice, too. But I digress).
Other magazines of interest are The Scream Factory, Mystery Scene, which
carries quality criticism by the best reviewers around, Rave Reviews,
Fear, especially for horror movies, Weird Tales and 2AM magazine,
especially recommended for the J.N. Williamson column.
Like most genre fiction, horror tends to get caught up in trends. Since
I've been writing Agony Column, we've seen the coming of the Vietnam
Veteran, the advent of Splatterpunk, and the serialization of horror.
Now a new trend is rearing its ugly head -- "real life horror". After
years of living in a supernatural world, horror writers are not
chronicling the terrors of everyday life. Not that this is a totally new
idea. From "The Telltale Heart" to Psycho to Misery, the twisted human
mind has been fertile ground for invention by horror writers, but in the
last few years, the supernatural forces really seemed to have taken over
-- until now. Last year Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs won the
World Fantasy Award. This year, we're seeing a proliferation of more
realistic novels -- Ray Garton's Trade Secrets and Kate Wilhelm's The
Dark Door, to name just two. Dean Koontz, in The Bad Place, features a
husband and wife detective team as his protagonists. Mystery writer Ruth
Rendell continues to make inroads into the horror genre in her Collected
Stories, and even court psychiatrist Ronald Markman manages to horrify
the reader in his true crime collection Alone With the Devil. For instance:
Meat [****]
Ian Watson
Headline, $6.00 (UK), 246pp
If ever there was a pristine, pure example of the axiom "Never judge a
book by its cover," then it's Meat by Ian Watson. Behind what must
certainly be the worst meat-cleaver cover of the 80s hides a book that
is full of good prose, excellent characters, an imaginative horror
premise, and a social and political conscience. This last ingredient
makes alone makes the novel worth reading, since it is all too rare in
the horror genre.
Meat revolves around vegetarianism, animal experimentation, social
rebellion and, and class structures in modern-day, middle-class England.
Saul and Diane Cobbett are struggling members on the fringe of England's
work force. Diane has a chip on her shoulder about eating meat, and it's
getting harder and harder for Saul, her husband, to deal with it. She
demands that they free their pet rabbit, because keeping it is
unnatural. This leads them to make the mistake of rescuing another
rabbit from a carnivorous, savage weasel, thus setting in motion a
surreal supernatural force that undermines their marriage and their
lives. When Diane demands that Saul finds her a way to join the Animal
Liberation Forces, we know they're on a one-way street to big trouble.
What we don't know is the exact nature of that trouble. Watson goes to
great lengths to keep us in suspense and succeeds admirably. When the
crux of the problem, is finally revealed, we're set adrift in a world
colored by a power not unlike that of Peter Straub's Ghost Story, one
that exposes the weaknesses of the characters in overt, horrifying
events. The interpersonal forces unleashed in the foundering marriage of
the Cobbetts are amplified by their involvement in a social and
supernatural force they can neither control nor understand. Despite the
ugly cover, Meat is a book you can proudly recommend to your sensitive
friends as a long, hard look at life in these carnivorous times.
Alone With the Devil: Famous Cases of a Courtroom Psychiatrist [****+]
Ronald Markman, MD and Dominick Bosco
Doubleday, 0-385-24427-4, 368pp, $18.95
According to Ronald Markman, the true face of horror in the 90s will be
the face in the mirror. In Alone With the Devil this Los Angeles-based
court-appointed psychiatrist presents a persuasive argument to support
this theory. Venturing into territory even the splatterpunks haven't
touched, this book is a must-read for horror fans who think they want to
know what happens in the minds of people who kill. Be forewarned: this
book describes some very horrific crimes.
Rather than dwell at length on one incident, Alone with the Devil tells
the stories of about two dozen killers and mostly limits itself to
Markham's examinations of them. Markman returns again and again to his
central thesis: that the thought processes that cause killers to kill
exist in every human being. It's circumstances that bring them out --
circumstances that he describes in elegant but horrifying detail. The
most terrifying case is the Sacramento Vampire, Richard Chase. This
young man developed a psychotic delusion that he needed fresh blood to
survive and satisfied those appetites, first with animals, then with
humans. The most horrifying aspect of the case is the ease with which he
entered houses -- you'll never leave your doors or windows unlocked
after reading this book.
Markman, who is both a psychiatrist and a lawyer, has no axe to grind.
He's not writing the book as a soapbox to espouse his views, but rather
to clarify the relationship of the medical profession in the legal
process.
Read this book -- if you can -- and take a lingering look in the mirror.
You're a horror fan. You know what the face of horror looks like.
Songs of a Dead Dreamer [*****]
Thomas Ligotti
Robinson Publishing, $12.00 (UK Import), 1-85487-022-X
Thomas Ligotti's contributions have seen growing acclaim in the small
press world. He's contributed to both Ramsey Campbell's Fine Frights and
Doug Winter's Prime Evil anthologies, so it's especially nice to see his
Songs of a Dead Dreamer, previously only available in an extremely
limited Silver Scarab Press edition available as a British trade
paperback. It may not be easy to find, but it's worth the effort.
Ligotti combines a gothic writing style with modern sensibilities. The
result is some of the most beautiful, haunting, horrific prose you'll
ever read. In "The Frolic" a psychiatrist at an asylum for the
criminally insane is confronted by a killer he cannot cope with, a man
who claims to be something other than human who takes his victims
frolicking to "...the black foaming gutters and back alleys of
paradise...". Other stories -- "The Dream of a Mannikin" and "The
Greater Festival of Masks" -- are so musical they seem closer to poetry
than prose.
Don't let the beauty of the language fool you. Ligotti uses his lovely
language to wrap the foulest, most disturbing images I've seen. He is a
master at the Lovecraftian ideal of showing only part of the horror and
letting the reader's imagination fill in the rest. Many readers will be
thankful that he doesn't show them the whole picture. In "Les Fleurs",
when the narrator accidentally lets a woman friend see something he's
rather not have her see, she is confused as to what it is. "It has
little teeth on these big tongue things....You might have better luck
passing it off as an animal than a plant, or a sculpture of a plant.
It's got a velvety kind of fur and looks like it might crawl away."
Not content with simple stories, Ligotti also experiments with two
pieces of metafiction in the style of Stanislaw Lem, "Notes on the
Writing of Horror" and "Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on
Supernatural Horror". These two are among the most successful pieces in
the collection, and emphasize an undercurrent of humor that runs through
his writing. This is a classic collection, different than anything that
has come out recently, and all the better for it.
The Dark Door [***+]
Kate Wilhelm
Tudor, $4.50, 343pp
Kate Wilhelm is an award-winning SF writer who is probably unknown to
most horror fans. The Dark Door should correct that error. Its packaging
alone should sell a few copies to those who gravitate towards those
garish grocery store specials, but the content proves to be rewarding.
Reminiscent of both Lem and Dean Koontz, this is a taut, thoughtful,
mystifying thriller.
The main characters are a married couple, Charlie Meiklejohn, former
arson investigator, and Constance Leidl, a working psychologist on the
lecture circuit. As Charlie is trying to retire and settle down, he is
asked to look into some apparently random cases of arson occurring in
hotels around the country. His wife is drawn into the investigation as
well, and their experiences as they uncover the truth are truly
horrifying. Horror readers should be aware that there's a talky SF intro
and exit in the book which destroys the mood created by the main
narrative, but beyond this we're in page-turning terror country. Wilhelm
is able to inject some strong imaginative speculations into typical
situations, setting the book apart from the rest of the SF Horror pack.
This isn't a whodonit, instead, it's a whatdonit.
Charlie and Constance make excellent guides for this tour and horror
readers will be impressed by Wilhelm's willingness to put her main
characters in mortal danger. While it's not overly bloody, there are
passages of this novel that will chill even the most hardened hearts.
That's an especially tough trick in the post-splatterpunk era. Aided by
better-than-average characters, the clever premise and a very tense
mystery, The Dark Door should be opened by lovers of SF, Horror and
Mystery as soon as they can find it.
Dark Fantasies [***+]
Chris Morgan
Legend/Century Hutchinson Ltd, 319pp,
Horror has recently become a house divided, and perhaps that's good for
the genre. The controversy created by the splatterpunks has caused
members of that group to stretch the boundaries of the field and become
better writers in the process. Conversely, the reaction to the
splatterpunks has caused the writers of the so-called "quiet horror" to
push the quality and elegance of their work further, also. Chris
Morgan's anthology Dark Fantasies is to quiet horror what The Book of
the Dead was to splatterpunk -- a calling card, signed, sealed and
delivered from some of the major writers of the movement.
The title of the introduction says it all -- "No Slime, No Chain Saws."
True to the quiet horror sub-genre, Morgan doesn't say much. He simply
notices the trend towards graphic horror and states that the writers of
this anthology will manage to scare you without resorting to the
dripping blood and extreme violence. He does point out, correctly, that
most people are more scared of losing their jobs or their spouses than
they are of getting dismembered by a mad chainsaw murderer. He also
provides a brief postscript to each story that gives an author biography
and a list of their recent work.
The stories cover a wide range, but seem to fall into two styles, the
mysterious, open-ended story and humorous, satiric tales of woe. The
first type emphasizes character and atmosphere over action and gore --
sometimes too much. One surprise is that the American giant of quiet
horror, Charles Grant, is absent. he's an expert at this and his absence
is conspicuous, accenting the bias towards British writers in this
collection.
The bulk of the stories are in the mysterious vein. In Brian
Stableford's "The Will", a woman is held by her guilt and father's power
over here, even after he dies. The prose is very evocative, but the
atmosphere stifles the story and the ending may seem to some too
inconclusive. This is one problem many mainstream horror writers have
with this sub-genre, but it doesn't crop up often in this book. The best
stories are open-ended without being confusing: Stephen Gallagher's
"Lifeline", for instance, in which the feel of lower-class London is
expertly conveyed. He tells a story of a young man's obsession with an
elusive phone service that might connect him with his dead lover. It has
excellent characterization and prose, framed by a beautifully described
urban setting.
New writer Nicolas Royle, who contributed one of the best stories in The
Book of the Dead, here sits squarely on the other side of the fence with
"Archway". Again, characterization and atmosphere rule as a woman takes
up new lodging in the Archway. Her desperation when she loses her job
drivers her towards the perfectly foreshadowed end of the story.
Ramsey Campbell checks in with "Being an Angel", a disturbing story that
is a tension-ridden tale of the mother-son relationship gone very bad.
You might guess the ending, but that doesn't detract from the power of
the work.
The humorous stories are a welcome addition to an otherwise dreary tone.
Chris Morgan's own "Interesting Times" is one of the best in the
collection, preying on an interesting fear -- the fear felt when your
daily routine begins to break down. When Keith Elder sends half of an
unexpected pay raise to a newspaper ad promising "interesting times" for
those who feel their lives are in a rut, he is promptly and rudely
informed by those who cashed his check that the whole thing's a scam and
that he's wasted his money. From that point things fall apart until
Keith's life reaches a breaking point. While being an enjoyable read,
the story is also bleakly horrific.
Ian Watson's "Tales from Weston Willow" follows the traditional "bar
room tall tales" format, stringing together three ironic short-short
stories. Finishing off the collection is the hilarious "Three Degrees
Over" by Brian Aldiss, the story of Alice Maynard's unfortunate return
to England after a lecture tour of the States. She's sitting next to
Felicity Paiva, a large,pushy woman who admits to being a writer of sex
novels. From there, the story slowly escalates to a disturbing, absurd
climax with a killer punchline.
While not everyone will like every story, everyone should find something
of worth in this fine collection. Even if it isn't the definitive
collection of quiet horror, it's a good indicator that there's a lot of
worthwhile material to be had here.
The House of Doors [****]
Brian Lumley
Tor, $4.95, 474pp
Following the direction he established in Necroscope III: The Source,
Brian Lumley once again offers a unique mix of SF, heroic fantasy and
horror in his latest work, The House of Doors. This book is not another
entry in the Necroscope series, but a standalone story that emphasizes
the SF-Fantasy themes. It's thoroughly enjoyable and a good way for
would-be Lumley fans to find out what all the shouting's about.
The protagonist is Spencer Gill, a man with psychic empathy -- with
machines. Given any machine, he can figure out what it doesn't, how it
works, how to take it apart and how to put it back together again. This
comes in handy when he and several others are trapped in The House of
Doors, a mysterious castle that suddenly appears on the English moors.
This attracts worldwide attention, but nobody is able to penetrate its
secrets until the day Spencer and the others are enveloped by the thing
(yes, it's a machine) decides to sample its new environment. The group
finds themselves inside a seemingly endless series of unfriendly worlds,
all manipulated by a malign intelligence. In true Ten Little Indians
fashion, one by one the numbers start to shrink as Spencer tries to
determine how the thing works.
Lumley is a prime example of the fun that can be had in the art of
storytelling. The House of Doors is written in an exaggerated, almost
tall-tale style. Lumley is a skilled writer in his prime. Like the
Necroscope series, The House of Doors demonstrates Lumley's writing
skill by its ability to entertain the reader and hides a wealth of
invention beneath the pure entertainment value. Ostensibly a portal to
the most hellish terrains a person can imaging, The House of Doors in
reality manages to offer the reader everything they could ask for.
The Bad Place [****+]
Dean R. Koontz
Putnam, 382pp, $19.95
Koontz outdoes himself in this latest outing, combining some of the best
good and evil characters he's ever created and sending them out for a
series of terrifying collisions. Those who found Midnight a bit on the
light side will be more satisfied by The Bad Place. While there are
elements of the supernatural and SF involved, it's basically a mystery.
Trade Secrets [****+]
Ray Garton
Mark Ziesing, 292pp, $25
Here's a book that defines hard-boiled for the 90s by the man that
shocked and depressed you in the 80s. A tense, well-written thriller
about slavery, kidnapping, torture and murder, with enough of the latter
to make Garton's splatter fans smile as they cringe. The absence of
supernatural elements makes this book even more horrific than his
previous works. This is Garton's best book to date and, despite the
gore, his most accessible.
Collected Stories [*****]
Ruth Rendell
Pantheon, $19.95, 536pp
Readers of this column will recognize the name and know what I think of
the author. This meta-collection has four of Rendell's previous
collections inside a single volume and is a wonderful way of getting
your hands on some really fine but out of print fiction. For those who'd
like to see horror return to its Edgar Allen Poe roots, this is the
place to start. Rendell can make you jump out of your skin without
resorting to blood or gore. In "An Outside Interest", an otherwise
normal married man decides to take up frightening woman as a hobby. He
waits in the park late at night and followed them until they flee.
Unfortunately, his exploits have an unforeseen side effect.
"Thornapple" features a boy who decides to start a poison collection,
building a level of tension that could tear you apart. For palpable
evil, read "The Fallen Curtain", which has the reminiscences of a man
who was kidnapped for eight hours as a boy. He doesn't remember what
happened, and his mother will only hint. All he knows is that he was
taken by The Man.
All of these stories have the clear-cut characterizations and beautiful
prose of Rendell. It's the one book this issue you don't want to miss.
------ End ------
