Poe's children: the new horror : an anthology

621 Pages·2008·2.15 MB·English

by  Straub Peter

CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
INTRODUCTION • Peter Straub
THE BEES • Dan Chaon
CLEOPATRA BRIMSTONE • Elizabeth Hand
THE MAN ON THE CEILING • Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem
THE GREAT GOD PAN • M. John Harrison
THE VOICE OF THE BEACH • Ramsey Campbell
BODY • Brian Evenson
LOUISE’S GHOST • Kelly Link
THE SADNESS OF DETAIL • Jonathan Carroll
LEDA • M. Rickert
IN PRAISE OF FOLLY • Thomas Tessier
PLOT TWIST • David J. Schow
THE TWO SAMS • Glen Hirshberg
NOTES ON THE WRITING OF HORROR: A STORY • Thomas Ligotti
UNEARTHED • Benjamin Percy
GARDENER OF HEART • Bradford Morrow
LITTLE RED’S TANGO • Peter Straub
THE BALLAD OF THE FLEXIBLE BULLET • Stephen King
20TH CENTURY GHOST • Joe Hill
THE GREEN GLASS SEA • Ellen Klages
THE KISS • Tia V. Travis
BLACK DUST • Graham Joyce
OCTOBER IN THE CHAIR • Neil Gaiman
MISSOLONGHI 1824 • John Crowley
INSECT DREAMS • Rosalind Palermo Stevenson
CREDITS
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
COPYRIGHT
Introduction
I
could say: Kelly Link created a world, and it then had been there all along. Or:
John Crowley entertained the possibility of a grand possibility, and after that it
had always been in place, available for use. Something similar could be said of
all the superb writers in this book, which category includes every one of its
contributors, from Dan Chaon to Rosalind Palermo Stevenson. Each of these
writers either came through to the recognition, or were permitted by a generous
environment early on to understand, that the materials of genre—specifically the
paired genres of horror and the fantastic—in no way require the constrictions of
formulaic treatment, and in fact naturally extend and evolve into the methods
and concerns of its wider context, general literature. Yet most professional
reviewers of fiction instinctively tend to protect the categories that simplify their
tasks. Therefore, when faced with work that, while indisputably though perhaps
even in some not-quite-definable sense connected to a genre like sf or horror,
also possesses literary merit, they tend to fall back on the convenient old shell
game of expressing their admiration by saying that the work in question
transcends its genre.
Now, let us be clear about this. Claiming that a work transcends its genre is
almost exactly like saying, as people once were wont to do, that an accomplished
African-American gentleman, someone say like John Conyers or Denzel
Washington, is a credit to his race—the unstated assumption of course being that
the race in question needs all the help it can get. (One day I’d like to hear an
after-banquet introducer describe some silver-haired New England WASP as a
credit to his race.)
By my own ground rules, then, I have been called a credit to my race maybe
half a dozen times, directly or indirectly, and about half of those times I was
dumb enough to feel flattered. These days, publishers market a product they are
happy to call “literary horror,” but when I first appeared everyone understood
that horror was inherently trashy, unliterary to the core, actually rather shameful,
literature’s wretched slum. Teenaged boys and other degenerates were its natural
demographic. Of course Poe had somehow crept into the canon, maybe because
Baudelaire’s translations had fooled the French into mistaking him for a
reputable figure; hints and echoes of the supernatural filled Hawthorne’s books;
Henry James had written “The Turn of the Screw” and “The Jolly Corner” and
other great ghost or horror stories; and Edith Wharton had written many
wonderful ghost stories. These figures, so important to me that in my 1979 novel
Ghost Story I had not only named two principal characters James and Hawthorne
but inserted into its first part what I called a “junked-up” version of “The Turn of
the Screw,” were nonetheless safely in the past. During the late seventies, when
you thought of horror, you did not think of the Master of Lamb House, Rye.
What came to mind instead were paperbacks with graphics of broken dolls,
severed heads, or minimalist mouths letting slip single drops of blood.
(When at a lovely, crowded party in London in 1977 I complained about the
dripping severed head on the newly released paperback of my latest book, its
publisher told me, “Peter, that book isn’t for people like you.” Too stunned to
reply, I turned around and aimed for the bar.)
Really because of the marketing approach reflected in those gaudy paperback
covers, which included packing the newly popular category with far too many
titles by authors whose ambitions went no further than that market, “horror” as a
category overflowed its banks during the late eighties and flooded the chain-
stores’ shelves with malevolent orphans, haunted brownstones and haunted
farms and haunted subway cars, ancient curses, things in bandages, evil toddlers,
zombies at play, Nazi vampires—” underwater lesbian Nazi vampire turtles,” my
now-deceased friend Michael Mc-Dowell joked while impaneled at a genre
convention in Rhode Island. In the early nineties, in a Guest of Honor speech at
a World Horror Convention in New York, I responded to the decaying world I
saw around me by saying that horror was a house that horror had already moved
out of.
The statement earned me some hostile glances during the evening’s
celebrations, for far too many younger writers present had trusted that their
extravaganzas about back-country zombies or teenaged vampires were one day
going to settle them on or near the best-seller lists, in the vicinity of their favorite
books by V. C. Andrews, Ann Rice, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and a few
others. It never happened. None of these twenty-and thirtysomethings who had
plotted Regicide and Koontzicide while the well-padded target at the podium
dispensed urbane twaddle about Emerson and All Things Glittering and
Gleaming (or whatever it was; he was having an Emersonian moment) into the
microphone ever got near any best-seller list, and over the next decade a lot of
them faded from view.
Which helped prove my point of view. The process has nothing to do with
best-seller lists, but time has a tendency generally to support the proposition that
very good work survives, while work that is not very good does not. Who now
reads, to pick three of the best of the pack, Ken Eulo, Robert Marasco, or Frank
deFelita, all of whom once had great success with books that now seem more
than a bit, well, gestural?
What I had not anticipated, though, was that over the next ten to fifteen years
there would appear a number of writers of fantasy, science fiction, and horror—
among them, Kelly Link, M. Rickert, Graham Joyce, Elizabeth Hand—who had
far more in common with one another and perpetual wild cards like John
Crowley and Jonathan Carroll than they did with those writers who were
supposed to epitomize their fields. They were literary writers and genre writers
at the same time. When Bradford Morrow invited me to guest-edit Conjunctions
39: The New Wave Fabulists (2002), I accepted on the spot, thinking that his
much-respected, smart, and intrepid journal would provide the perfect showcase
for these writers, most or all of whom would be unknown to its regular
subscribers. The benefits of such an encounter should, I thought, flow both ways.
And so, as far as I can determine, it proved: the issue was widely reviewed,
much praised, and it went into three or four printings. It also inspired a couple of
other anthologies edited by people who understood exactly what we were trying
to do.
Poe’s Children very much continues on from The New Wave Fabulists, and
this time I am free to include work by breathtaking “literary” writers, who in this
newly liberated atmosphere have no problem embracing their inner Poe, or to
put it another way, no problem making use of the strengths and insights made
available to them from their own personal engagements with horror and sf. (For
reasons having to do with length, along with many other people I wanted to
include, Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem are not represented in this
volume, but they fall into the same category.) This crossover is entirely
welcome, I think, as it erases boundaries and blurs distinctions that sometimes
seem designed mostly to keep everyone in their proper place.
In November 2003, when Stephen King was awarded the National Book
Award’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, he went out
of his way to invite the resplendent audience before him to read the latest fiction
by a number of his writer friends. He went on to praise the books. Not long
afterward, the distinguished novelist who had just won the NBA for Best Novel,
and whom until that moment I had admired, included in her acceptance speech
the remark that she did not think those present needed to be given a reading list.
At that moment, Stephen King and I had the same thought: you’re wrong, lady,
you could really use that reading list.
The beautiful, disturbing, fearless stories in Poe’s Children make up a kind of
reading list for anyone who wants to experience what I think is the most
interesting development in our literature during the last two decades. It has been
taking place in small presses, genre journals, and year’s best compilations, and it
has been gathering steam as it goes. You have to be open-eyed and flexible as to
category to get what is going on, but some vital individual breakthroughs are in
the wind. We are all fortunate, readers and writers alike, to participate in a
moment of such amplitude, luxury, and promise.
Peter Straub
New York City
The Bees
Dan Chaon
G
ene’s son Frankie wakes up screaming. It has become frequent, two or three
times a week, at random times: midnight—3 A.M.—five in the morning. Here is
a high, empty wail that severs Gene from his unconsciousness like sharp teeth. It
is the worst sound that Gene can imagine, the sound of a young child dying
violently—falling from a building, or caught in some machinery that is tearing
an arm off, or being mauled by a predatory animal. No matter how many times
he hears it he jolts up with such images playing in his mind, and he always runs,
thumping into the child’s bedroom to find Frankie sitting up in bed, his eyes
closed, his mouth open in an oval like a Christmas caroler. Frankie appears to be
in a kind of peaceful trance, and if someone took a picture of him he would look
like he was waiting to receive a spoonful of ice cream, rather than emitting that
horrific sound.
“Frankie!” Gene will shout, and claps his hands hard in the child’s face. The
clapping works well. At this, the scream always stops abruptly, and Frankie
opens his eyes, blinking at Gene with vague awareness before settling back
down into his pillow, nuzzling a little before growing still. He is sound asleep,
he is always sound asleep, though even after months Gene can’t help leaning
down and pressing his ear to the child’s chest, to make sure he’s still breathing,
his heart is still going. It always is.
There is no explanation that they can find. In the morning, the child doesn’t
remember anything, and on the few occasions that they have managed to wake
him in the midst of one of his screaming attacks, he is merely sleepy and
irritable. Once, Gene’s wife, Karen, shook him and shook him, until finally he
opened his eyes, groggily. “Honey?” she said. “Honey? Did you have a bad
dream?” But Frankie only moaned a little. “No,” he said, puzzled and unhappy at
being awakened, but nothing more.
They can find no pattern to it. It can happen any day of the week, any time of
the night. It doesn’t seem to be associated with diet, or with his activities during
the day, and it doesn’t stem, as far as they can tell, from any sort of
psychological unease. During the day, he seems perfectly normal and happy.
They have taken him several times to the pediatrician, but the doctor seems to
have little of use to say. There is nothing wrong with the child physically, Dr.
Banerjee says. She advises that such things were not uncommon for children of
Frankie’s age group—he is five—and that more often than not, the disturbance
simply passes away.
“He hasn’t experienced any kind of emotional trauma, has he?” the doctor
says. “Nothing out of the ordinary at home?”
“No, no,” they both murmur, together. They shake their heads, and Dr.
Banerjee shrugs. “Parents,” she says. “It’s probably nothing to worry about.”
She gives them a brief smile. “As difficult as it is, I’d say that you may just have
to weather this out.”

But the doctor has never heard those screams. In the mornings after the
“nightmares,” as Karen calls them, Gene feels unnerved, edgy. He works as a
driver for the United Parcel Service, and as he moves through the day after a
screaming attack, there is a barely perceptible hum at the edge of his hearing, an
intent, deliberate static sliding along behind him as he wanders through streets
and streets in his van. He stops along the side of the road and listens. The
shadows of summer leaves tremble murmurously against the windshield, and
cars are accelerating on a nearby road. In the treetops, a cicada makes its
trembly, pressure-cooker hiss.
Something bad has been looking for him for a long time, he thinks, and now,
at last, it is growing near.

When he comes home at night everything is normal. They live in an old house in