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The Lake of Darkness by Ruth Rendell

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I follow a few authors who use pen names to explore other parts of their writer’s identity or psyche. There’s Joyce Carol Oates (aka Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly), Stephen King (aka Richard Bachman), and Ruth Rendell (aka Barbara Vine). I was first introduced to Ruth Rendell through a Barbara Vine book, King Solomon’s Carpet, when I began going through my subway obsession, which is ongoing. My friend Tamsin recommended the book, and I had to buy a tatty paperback copy off eBay because my library didn’t have the title. A big part of the book has to do with the London Underground, and the detail that has stuck with me is the amount of hair that clots in the tunnels–human hair–and has to be cleaned out regularly.

I was waiting for the second Felix Castor book to come in at the library and found myself without reading material, so I picked up Ruth Rendell’s The Lake of Darkness. Rendell, the proper name of the author, writes mysteries and tight suspense novels while Vine seems to deal with more macabre and gothic topics.

In The Lake of Darkness, Martin Urban is an upper-class Londoner who has always been lucky; it seems to follow him around. He has recently become reacquainted with an old school buddy whom Martin believes to be a homosexual and has a few peculiar fantasies about. This friend introduces Martin to the football pools, which he wins, and rather than selfishly spending the money on himself, Martin decides to disperse it among those who are less fortunate but according to his stipulations. Shockingly, Martin finds it rather difficult to give the money away.

The people Martin randomly touches touch him back and sometimes in ways he does not expect. Finn has a strong interest in the occult through his mother and works as a handyman; sometimes, too, he works as a contract killer, though he has bungled most of his commissions in one way or another. Finn’s mother is one of the unfortunates that Martin aims to help, but Finn hopelessly misunderstands Martin’s intent and acts in ways Martin could never imagine.

Rendell’s talent is neatly tying up the story she creates while making none of the coincidences or misunderstandings feel artificial or forced. Her plots and characters click neatly into place until you can see no other way for the story to end. I always notice this with the Rendell titles; endings are a looser ball of stuff in the Vine novels I’ve read.

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The Devil You Know by Mike Carey

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My latest assignment for Hachette was the third book in Mike Carey’s Felix Castor dark fantasy series, and I prepped by reading the first book, The Devil You Know, over the holidays. The main character Felix Castor is something of a paranormal sleuth based in London; he is an exorcist in a world where the newly dead constantly impinge on the living world and finds his services needed a fair amount. After the millennium, the world found itself full of ghosts, zombies, werewolves, and demons, and Felix has been able to ply a childhood talent into a livelihood.

When The Devil You Know opens, Felix has given up exorcising for the moment and tries to pay off his friend and landlord by freelancing as a magician. Felix mucks that job up, but he is offered one that he can’t refuse–to exorcise a ghost who is haunting a library archive and causing bodily injury to its employees. Felix takes on the task, and with his instrument of choice at hand, he makes contact with the ghost at the archive.

Felix’s particular way with exorcising is through music–using his tin whistle he is able to find a melody that represents the essence of the apparition and to send it away beyond the earthly dimension. Where the spirits go, Felix doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care until he takes on this job and is unexpectedly saved by the ghost whom he is supposed to be destroying.

Carey excels in describing the paranormal in his Felix Castor series. The fifth dimension comes alive in a new and fresh way, past the usual clichés of hair raising on the back of the neck and creaking floorboards. In The Devil You Know, Carey takes the reader through a blow-by-blow affair with a succubus, doing what she does best, who becomes a delightful character in the story. Carey’s zombies are sentient, and he gives a credible explanation of their decomposing flesh and what a zombie can and cannot do to prolong their life.

Though Castor battles the undead, he finds that one of the most important questions about humanity, What happens to us when we die?, is still unanswerable. Indeed, he encounters many of the undead grappling with that question still, unwilling to give up their steely grip on the earthly plane. These are weighty topics, but The Devil You Know reads almost as black comedy so witty is the main character Felix Castor. Castor has much in common with Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe right down to the highly original similes that he spouts. I’ll definitely be pursuing this series in the future.

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The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up

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Often real life is more horrific than anything that could be dreamed up. Liao Yiwu risked his life to bring stories from post-Cultural Revolution China and has been jailed for his truth-seeking, which led to a mental breakdown. At times he had to commit the information he gleaned from interviews to memory, so he wouldn’t be caught with the evidence on his person.

The Corpse Walker is a collection of these interviews, which Yiwu has smuggled out of the country in bits and pieces to be put up on the Internet because of the censorship laws in China. It’s a heartbreaking collection. During the famine in China from 1958 to 1961, one interview subject recounts his life in the mountains of China and how children went missing, especially girl children. The villagers were turning into cannibals because of starvation, and girls were deemed less valuable because of Chairman Mao’s one-child-per-family rule.

Another thing some of the people did to stave off hunger pains is eat bricks made of clay. There was no nutritional value in them, but they did keep the belly full for awhile. One unfortunate consequence of eating the bricks was very bad constipation, and an interview subject describes in detail coming upon a scene where oil enemas are being given.

One story that particularly got to me is of two brothers. Before Mao rose to power, the brothers inherited their father’s land and accumulated wealth. One brother squandered his fortune on opium and women, becoming a drug addict. The other worked his land and saved and scrimped to raise his family in comfortable circumstances. After Mao declared landowners evil, this hardworking brother is reduced to the most miserable circumstances, forced into poverty and shunned by his community. His drug addict brother rises to a prominent position within the party and tells his brother essentially, “You should have been like me–all your hard work has come to nothing.”

All of these interviews expose a system where the undeserving are rewarded, and those whose values would be lauded in the Western world (honesty, perseverance, loyalty)–well, those people are punished and forced to shoulder unimaginable burdens.

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Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand

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I’m beginning to wonder if Maine is the new wonderland for horror novelists. Of course, Stephen King turned it into his own Yoknapatawpha County with all of his horror stories, but now a new generation of horror writers have set up shop there or place their stories there. Elizabeth Hand both lives in Maine and has made it the eerie setting of her novel Generation Loss.

The main character of Generation Loss is Cassandra Neary, a photographer with a darker-than-death vision who struck it big during New York’s punk scene, and then … nothing happened. Cass has muddled through some thirty years in an alcohol- and other substance-fueled fugue, whiling away her life as a stock clerk at the Strand bookstore.

Through sketchy circumstances, Cass gets a shot at redemption. She is given the chance to go interview one of the photographers who inspired her as a youth: Aphrodite Kamestos. Aphrodite lives as a recluse in a remote area of Maine, but according to Cass’s source, Aphrodite specifically requested Cassandra as her interviewer of choice. With speed in her bloodstream and a few paltry possessions packed up, Cassandra hits the road.

Generation Loss shines with its cast of female characters, who span generations and are all artists. There’s Cass with blocked vision in the middle of the spectrum, past middle age and unlovely as well as unlovable, but she seems to revel in this. At the older end is Aphrodite who has kept her elfin looks through a diet of booze, but has not produced anything of note since the groundbreaking books that endeared her to Cass. And then there’s Mackenzie, a Goth teen stuck in Maine with nothing to do, but who is teeming with ideas and wants to get out to make her mark on the world.

Cass is flawed and an unlikable protagonist, which I thoroughly enjoyed. For most of the story, Cass is the one who is singled out as the monster lurking in this insular Maine community, and it’s not hard to believe with her sneaking around and spying and thieving. In the harsh wintry setting, she rediscovers her art, and everything else can be sacrificed or disregarded as she goes for her shot. Her character reminds me very much of Strickland from W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, one of my favorite books.

I like it that in Hand’s novel, women are able to lay claim to this territory, artist as megalomaniac, and be as unlovely as they want to be.

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Come Closer by Sara Gran

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When this book came out in 2003, I had it on my to-read list. Unfortunately, the title was only available as a one-week loan, and I learned my lesson with that one a few years ago, trying to read Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell in a week. That didn’t happen. I needn’t have worried with Come Closer; I finished the book in two days.

Come Closer follows Amanda, an upwardly mobile New Yorker, who slowly is taken over by a demon entity. Her first hint that something is off happens when she hears unexplainable noise in her apartment. I like how benign this demon possession starts. In New York, it seems, there is always an unexplainable noise. My sister built a shelf underneath our kitchen window so we have a ledge to put our coffee cups on as we survey the industrial landscape that serves as our backyard. This last week in the evening while sitting nearby I heard an unexplainable clatter and both the shelf and the radiator vibrated with motion. I thought at first it was one of the earth tremors that happen occasionally in New York, but after a couple more episodes of this, I figured out that it was the neighbors next door climbing up and down the fire escape into their apartment window.

It would seem most New Yorkers are ripe for demon possession if unexplainable noises are the hallmark of a demon rapping on your door. After that, the maddeningly normal Amanda becomes more spontaneous, shoplifting lipstick and buying clothes and shoes that she normally wouldn’t pick up in a million years. She comes to resent her boring, routine-oriented husband Ed, and they begin to fight–something that has not happened before in their marriage.

At the same time, Amanda is looking better, sexier, but she starts to lose great chunks of time that she cannot account for. I think my favorite scene–I guess I can’t call it a scene since the situation is never fully spelled out–occurs after a New York newsstand vendor is unspeakably rude to Amanda. Who has not wanted to dispatch a surly MTA worker at one time or another? In Amanda’s case, the demon allows Amanda to act on her impulses, and that’s the gist of Come Closer: What if a woman is allowed to act on her impulses (not beaten down by marriage, career, or children) and could blame it on a demon?

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Rosemary’s Baby

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I saw Rosemary’s Baby this last weekend at the Film Forum with a group of friends, and it had been nearly ten years since I last saw this film on a big screen at the old theater in Austin, Texas. It was such a different experience for me with this audience, who laughed often, making this horror film seem more like a black comedy when it is so not.

So many more details came across on the big screen compared to when I watch Rosemary’s Baby on my tiny twelve-inch-screen TV. Mia Farrow’s fragile, freckled beauty is emphasized by the dark, oppressive architecture of the Bramwell and the concrete backdrop of New York, making the character appear so small and alone.

In this viewing, I was really struck by the use of color and tone. When Rosemary and her husband go to view the “perfect” apartment, they’re bright surrounded by all this dark wood and heavy, drab fabric while being led by a realtor who seems more like an undertaker.

Then they get their dream apartment and there’s a montage as Rosemary goes into nesting mode, having the apartment painted in white, yellow, and apple green colors, covering shelves in a mod print for their closet, and having furniture in a light wood delivered. Later when she’s become impregnated by the devil’s spawn, she goes about decorating the nursery in the same fashion–a palette of yellows, so hopeful, while her guilty-as-sin husband stands back with a hangdog expression on his face.

I think a lot of the audience’s laughter had to do with the contrast between male and female roles in the film and how it actually is today. Rosemary is the perfect housewife–so young, fresh, and eager to please–while her husband Guy is a lout, concerned only with his career. The night after Rosemary is drugged, raped, and scratched to ribbons by the devil’s fingernails, her husband smacks her on the ass to get her out of bed so she can make his breakfast.

The tension in the last few scenes is wonderful as Rosemary puts it all together and realizes who and what everybody is. Waddling and heavily pregnant while venturing through New York City on a brutally hot summer day. Trapped and sweating in a telephone booth and then thinking she has found salvation in a clean, sterile doctor’s office. It’s hard to think of when I’ve seen vulnerability so well done.

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Shelley’s Daughters by Terrence Rafferty

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In time for Halloween, I suppose, the New York Times Book Review section published a horror roundup focusing on women writers (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/books/review/Rafferty-t.html). I applaud the effort, but feel like the critic Terrence Rafferty trivializes women who “dabble” in the horror genre. Take this backhanded compliment, for instance: “Women horror writers, who seem less certain these days than men, have been doing some of the most original and freshly unnerving work in the genre.”

Because women were cloistered for so long, I think that accounts for Rafferty’s opinion that “women are more likely to shrink from the contemplation of pure, rampaging evil.” There was no shrinking; women found the evil much closer at home–in their houses, in their neighbors, or possibly even in their beds.

I don’t agree with Rafferty’s assertion that Shirley Jackson wrote very little horror. I find a healthy streak of horror in most things she’s written, but it is far subtler than a werewolf or zombie. Jackson’s writing falls more toward psychological horror, as in her masterpiece We Have Always Lived in the Castle, where the sister characters are hemmed in by both men and their kitchen. (Horror that Jackson herself experienced in her lifetime.)

I do agree with Rafferty about the new sub-horror genre: paranormal romance. I can’t abide the stuff either, and when Anne Rice started down this path with her witch series many years ago, I had to leave her behind. To me that isn’t horror, it’s erotica. I am happy to have a list of these new female writers but bridle at phrases in Rafferty’s piece–such as when he calls Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” a mundane domestic horror. I find that short story every bit as scary as Le Fanu’s Carmilla or Stephen King’s vampires. Just because the horror takes place inside doesn’t make it any less.

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Boston/Salem Haunted Tours

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I was in witch country this last weekend, celebrating Kristi’s birthday. First we were in Boston for a couple of days and then we went on to Marblehead where we stayed in the top story of a house built in 1710 while making day trips to Salem.

While in Boston we took a haunted tour, which I really enjoyed. I’ve been on two before–one in New Orleans that I think will always be my favorite and one in Philadelphia that was just so-so. It really does seem to depend on your tour guide whether the experience will be worthy or not.

The Boston haunted tour featured ghosts in the subway tunnels near the stop at Boston Common, ghosts (many) in the Common where they used to hang people, and a ghost that was seen in the Boston Atheneum by Nathaniel Hawthorne for two weeks running. There were also sordid details about the Boston Strangler and the true-life backstory of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” which is rooted in a live burial that took place in Boston. All in all, a solid tour.

Then we went to Salem, which I was already hating on from the minute we stepped in it, with haunted houses and exhibits resembling those you’d see in a shopping mall. I love the graveyards and the architecture of Salem, but the mall culture laid on top of all that history in order to appeal to the tourists–that was depressing.

Our last night in Salem we lined up for an evening ghost tour and our guide introduced himself as Silvus, his stripper name I guess. He gave some background on Salem complete with sound effects that were quite annoying and encouraged the audience to act as paparazzi. From there, we went on to the Salem Atheneum, and guess what? Silvus told the same Nathaniel Hawthorne ghost story but littered it with terrible pop culture references to tuna fish sandwiches and Tupperware. Our tour guide was more suited for bad stand-up comedy than ghost stories.

After that the tour was spoiled for me, and I didn’t believe anything Silvus said. Near the cemetery, where the most horrific witch execution occurred (a man named Giles Corey was pressed to death by boulders piled on his chest), Silvus began telling us about the man’s ghost. Supposedly he appears before something awful occurs, and then Silvus launched into a story that involved the ghost in September of 2001. I cringed, thinking this would eventually tie back to 9/11. Thankfully, it didn’t go there.

A little fact checking in our rooms at Marblehead proved that the atheneum haunting written about by Nathaniel Hawthorne did indeed occur at the Boston Atheneum. Once home in New York, I picked up Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables from the bookshelf and began reading. The novel begins with a witch execution and a curse while the townspeople spout hypocritical Puritan values, which I can still see going on in our country today. This was the Salem I had been expecting.

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Gothic

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Last year in my vampire literature class we started with the origin of the vampire story, which begins with a fragment by Lord Byron, whose story was later taken over by John Polidori and published in 1819. These vampire stories all come from a rainy weekend in Geneva in 1816 when Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Polidori, and Mary Shelley’s stepsister Claire Clairmont were all cooped up, reading gothic horror stories to one another. Lord Byron proposed that they each write a horror story that weekend, and one of the theories for this is that he wanted there to be a duel of the poets.

Percy Shelley wasn’t interested and abandoned the project, but Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori went at it. The most famous work to come out of this weekend was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Lord Byron began a tale (and most likely told the rest of it to his peers) about the vampire as the noble cosmopolitan we are now familiar with, and John Polidori told a perfectly awful tale, according to Mary Shelley, about a scary woman who had a skull for a head.

John Polidori was a physician employed by Lord Byron to travel with him, and they argued often during their summer travels, until Polidori was dismissed by Lord Byron. A few years later, Polidori adapted Lord Byron’s fragment and published it as his own story called “The Vampyre.” A few years after that, Polidori committed suicide.

Ken Russell’s Gothic attempts to dramatize this evening in Geneva, which has all the makings of a great story, and the movie starts out well. The Shelleys arrive with the Byron-infatuated stepsister in tow, and we get a strong sense of Lord Byron (played by Gabriel Byrne) as manipulator and hedonist. All of Lord Byron’s scandals are touched on within the first twenty minutes of the movie: his homosexuality, his rumored incest with his sister, and his womanizing ways. We also see his gift with words; parts of the actual fragment he wrote are quoted in the dinner scene.

Timothy Spall as John Polidori is effective at portraying the corrosive relationship between the doctor and Byron, playing the man as a foolish Polonius so bedazzled by his employer that he becomes crushed when he’s not recognized as a fellow genius. Based on Spall’s performance, it’s easy to see how Polidori went on to betray Byron by taking over his work, then entered the ministry, and then committed suicide.

Those are the only good things about this movie really. After the five indulge in laudanum and perform a little spell, the movie turns into a mishmash of drug-fueled nightmares, with the emphasis on drugs. Natasha Richardson as Mary Shelley is the moral center of this movie, if there could be such a thing, but we never get a clear picture of what inspired Byron’s vampire tale or her Frankenstein. Instead, there’s lots of couplings with almost every combination imaginable and an “it was all a dream” epilogue to the movie with historical facts tacked on in scrolling text at the end.

The absolute rock bottom is Myriam Cyr as Claire Clairmont, naked and smeared with mud as she swings to and fro on an iron gate crazed out of her mind. I feel sorry for the actress having to do such a scene, and it’s easy to see why she didn’t get much work after Gothic. The movie mostly plays as a commercial for why not to do drugs. No genius here.

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Dead Until Dark

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I jumped on the bandwagon with this one, but I don’t think I will continue with Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse vampire series after reading Dead Until Dark. When I heard that Alan Ball had a new series out based on Charlaine Harris’s books, I wanted to read the source material first before I became prejudiced from seeing what Ball makes of the novels. I was sore that I saw the first season of Dexter before reading Darkly Dreaming Dexter and think I would have appreciated the novel more if I didn’t picture Michael C. Hall’s face all the time while reading.

Harris has some clever ideas going on in her book. Sookie is psychic and can read almost anybody’s thoughts until a vampire steps into her bar one night. Quickly the waitress gets involved with him, finding him a worthy lover since she can’t picture his thoughts of her undressing, how he regards her butt, and so on. There is an Elvis-like character who is introduced, explaining all the Elvis sightings in the world, and all of the vampires in the world have “come out.” Many try to incorporate themselves in regular society but struggle with day-to-day domestic woes that are especially troublesome since the vampires cannot appear in daylight, when most chores are done.

Along with the fresh ideas are plenty of stale ones. When Sookie gets involved with her vampire Bill, they have orgiastic sex with plenty of bloodletting that bottoms out into vampire porn. After three successive chapters of this, I almost dropped the book. The murder mystery that makes up the story line of this novel is rather predictable, and of course, the vampires are darkly glamorous–there’s not really an ugly one in the lot, unless you count Elvis who didn’t “turn” right.

I realize that the vampire books I prefer play against the darkly glamorous type of vampire. Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire comes to mind with tender-hearted Louis and the child vampire Claudia going to the Old World to seek out the origins of their kind and finding zombielike vampires rather than intelligent creatures. And then there’s Stephen King’s Our Town-style Salem’s Lot, where the plain folks become vampires. My favorite couple in that book is the town garbageman who takes up with the high school glamour puss Ruthie after making her undead.

I’d like to see more of these abnormal vampires. Somebody really corpulent from the Renaissance who must deal with body issues as fashions change or maybe a vampire with a cleft palate. That would be a brilliant plot device right there, just dealing with how this vampire gets his or her blood with such a deformity.