But Enough About Me #6

Actually, despite being the sixth installment of this ongoing series of non-fiction reprints, this one is a bit of an anomaly in that it is sort of about me. It's a little slice of memory first committed to paper at the request of the great and good Mr. Peter Crowther of PS Publishing, who commissioned it as a guest editorial for the 16th issue of PostScripts, a special Halloween issue. Given that we're currently in gear-up mode for this Halloween's Rolling Darkness Revue (see previous post for details), it seemed the appropriate time to give it another airing...

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Thank You, Mrs. Phillips

Halloween is when we're allowed to dream in public.

Sure, there are other outlets -- bragging to your mates about shit you'll never do, painting your face to feel like you're actually part of the winning team instead of just another idiot in the stands, pressing three red buttons on a plastic guitar and thinking that makes you Jimi fucking Hendrix -- but Halloween is the one that gives special leeway to our wilder imaginings. Not 'what if I could play the riff from Voodoo Chile?' Not 'what if I could bend it like Beckham?' But the deeper darker dreams: What if death is not the end? What if this isn't all there is? What if the world is infinitely stranger and richer than it appears to be on the morning commute or another evening down the pub?

Halloween is when we talk to the dead. We don't really believe that anymore, of course. Not literally. We don't lay out food on ritual tables for the returning dead the way the Celts did at Summer's End (or Samhain), and if we did we'd be more than a little surprised if they showed up and ate it. But every year on that single special night we open the door to them still -- the door of imagination at least -- and the ghosts walk with us, not as haunting revenants, not as unwelcome midnight visitors, but as invited and honoured guests.

When I was a kid in the 1960s, Britain didn't celebrate Halloween as openly and fulsomely as did the United States. Costuming and trick-or-treating were known to me only via American movies or books. I gather (I've been an exile for nearly twenty years now) that that's changed over the last decade or so and that these days the darkening hours of any October 31st find the streets of Liverpool and London just as full of midget demons and miniature Draculas as those of New York or Los Angeles. But that just wasn't the way it was when I was growing up. Best I could hope for was a quick game of duck-apple and a bullshit session on a home-made Ouija board.

And then came Peter Phillips' Halloween party.

Creepy little bastard that I was, I was already deeply in love with horror by the time I was eight or nine. The thanks for that go to the usual suspects when it comes to my generation; Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, the Pan Book of Horror, Mars Attacks bubble-gum cards, and Castle Films' 8mm movie-digests (Oh, much-loved 50ft. extract of Son of Kong, where are you now?). But in 1964 I was still two years away from my first reading of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, so the thanks for Halloween -- at least as the special and spectacular holiday that it could be for my particular kind of misfit -- go to Peter Phillips' mum.

Thing was, I didn't even know Peter that well. We were in the same class at Heygreen Road County Primary and were friendly without being close friends -- didn't hang out, never been to each other's houses, you know what I mean -- so it was a surprise when he invited me to his party. I like to think, in retrospect, that his mum had told him only to invite people who were likely to appreciate it, but I've really no idea. Pretty small group, though; the only invitees were me, Lynne Robinson, and Barry Armour (Yeah. Armour. I know I make shit up for a living, but that was really his name. Honest).

The Phillips family lived in a flat above a glazier's shop on a corner of Picton Road. To this day, I haven't a clue what the flat looked like in real life, because it certainly couldn't have looked like it did that night.

I'd pressed the bell on the door on the side street quite some time before it was finally opened. It wasn't Peter. It was a woman dressed completely in black.

"Welcome," she said, not smiling. "There are no lights."

Which, I suppose, explained why she was holding in her hand the kind of flaming torch I'd only previously seen in stills from Ghost of Frankenstein in the pages of Famous Monsters.

Yeah, alright, it was a black rubber Woolworth's flashlight with crumpled orange tissue paper wrapped around the bulb housing but, trust me, it was fully and magically convincing to my eight year old eyes.

The street door gave directly on to a narrow staircase which led up to the door of the flat itself. "Upstairs," said Mrs. Phillips -- at least, I think it was Mrs. Phillips; she never broke character all night, God bless her -- and turned to lead the way.

Oh. Little aside to those of us past puberty. I'd love to tell you that this was like following Morticia Addams upstairs but the truth is -- with all love and respect to Mrs. Phillips -- she was actually more Margaret Rutherford than Carolyn Jones. Sorry to rain on that particular parade. But anyway.

The staircase was steep, narrow and dark and the light emanating from the flat doorway was yellow and dim and, as I made my way toward it, I was deliciously, fabulously, terrified.

The flat was a cave. A black cave. Mrs. Phillips must have bought up every sheet of black craft paper in Merseyside and taped them to the walls and ceilings. There were broomsticks, too, and witches' hats. And pumpkins and candles and pictures of black cats.

Sure, there was also a table arrayed with sandwiches and sausage rolls and bottles of pop. And Mr. Phillips was sitting in the corner watching the evening news on a depressingly normal telly. But none of that mattered. This was a Halloween House and I'd never seen anything so wonderful in all my life.

Peter was there, and Barry and Lynne, and I'm sure we played games, ate like pigs, and did whatever else eight year olds do at parties. I can't remember the details. All I remember is that, whatever we did, we did it in the shadowed confines of a witch's cave, overseen by the lady in black and her flaming torch.


Storytellers come in all sorts of guises. Mrs. Phillips, to the best of my knowledge, never wrote a word in her life but she belongs spiritually, I think, to the same tribe as writers do. Not just because she obviously loved Halloween -- and her son -- but because she creatively embraced the idea of Halloween and, in effect, made a narrative out of it, a narrative through which we lucky children on that long ago night could move, imagine, dream.

I'm forty-four years late. But thank you, Mrs. Phillips. Thank you very much.

But Enough About Me... #3

Back in 2006, novelist, short story writer, and all-round good egg Mark Morris put together a nifty little volume called Cinema Macabre, a collection of essays by genre writers about their favourite horror movies.

Mark, being a wise and generous editor, allowed his contributors a fairly catholic definition of 'horror' -- Jo Fletcher wrote about Carousel, for example -- which meant I could slip in a piece about a movie that, while not exactly a shoo-in for the torture-porn crowd's seal of approval, is nevertheless a milestone of the fantastic and a recognised classic of world cinema. Here 'tis:

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Orphee

For lust of knowing what should not be known,

We take the golden road to Samarkand.

-- Hassan, James Elroy Flecker

Orphee, Jean Cocteau's poetic masterpiece of 1949, is a rich enough film to reward several different readings of its mysteries, while its ultimate meaning remains as elusive and intangible as the 'meaning' of the Mona Lisa. Cocteau himself had a superbly patrician contempt for the reductive nature of critical analysis anyway -- "Beauty detests ideas," he was quoted as saying. "She is sufficient unto herself."  Still, at the risk of offending his departed spirit, I'd like to consider Cocteau's film, his beautiful mystery, from one particular angle.

Orphee has much in common with my two other favourite movies, King Kong (1933) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). They're all three in black-and-white, all three fantastic in nature, and they're all three pretty much guaranteed to deliver a good time to even the most jaded of viewers. It's something else they have in common, though, that makes them my own particular holy trinity of cinefantastique. All three of them could be called -- were one to reluctantly don one's pretentious hat for a moment -- examples of Gnostic Cinema, by which I mean that all three of them are overtly about what all horror/fantasy is so often covertly about; the quest for knowledge. Forbidden knowledge, to be specific -- knowledge that is arcane, occult, metaphysical.

Now, it's of course true that many a thoroughly enjoyable but less imaginatively courageous B-movie is fuelled by something similar -- a mad scientist's search for the secret of life, for example, or a bunch of Nazis' quest for the Ark of the Covenant -- but the difference in Orphee (and in Kong and Bride, for that matter) is that the search for knowledge -- the lust of knowing what should not be known -- is celebrated, either textually or sub-rosa, rather than condemned.

In Cocteau's film, the secret being sought is, on one level, the secret of artistic success. Orphee (Jean Marais), once the hottest poet in post-war Paris, is being supplanted by a bunch of young turks (whose flagship journal, Nudisme, consists -- hilariously but significantly -- of blank pages) and wants to get his mojo back. Thanks in part to secret and surreal messages broadcast over a ham radio (in scenes consciously reminiscent of wartime transmissions to the French resistance), he begins to get a clue. It's another clue, however -- the one which comes in the frighteningly delicious form of Maria Casares as cinema's ultimate femme fatale -- which modulates the sought-after secret into a matter of life and death.

All supernatural movies are about the relationship between the rational and the irrational. And the good ones, I suggest, are about reading that relationship as a romance rather than anything else. Metaphorically, they are about our urge -- acknowledged or otherwise -- to consummate our blinkered lives with the unblinkered Beyond. The reductio ad absurdum of many of these pictures, good or bad, is "There's a girl and there's a monster and he'll do his best to get her". And when the monster proceeds to do his best, when the surface message becomes that he wants to cut her up or bring her to the dark side or impregnate her with the devil's seed or generally give her a good seeing-to for having had unmarried sex with some other beautiful teenager, the sub-textual message is much simpler: He Wants Her. The heroine has been chosen as the Bride of the Uncanny. She must be taken. And any rival males must be destroyed. What's fascinating in Orphee is that the genders are reversed. Though Orphee will ultimately play the questing male when his own wife Eurydice (Marie Dea) is taken into the underworld, he is also the 'bride' at whom Death has set her cap -- Death here being incarnated by the aforementioned Casares as a Princess from another country who drives her Rolls Royce, along with its motorcycle outriders, between the worlds of the living and the dead.

A superficial psychological explanation of that gender switch is the fact that Cocteau was gay, but that does a disservice to the real radicalness of the idea. In Orphee, the questing gnostic hero (here artist rather than scientist, interestingly) can become the centerpiece of his own story, can be a Carl Denham who needs no Ann Darrow to mediate between him and Kong, can be a Henry Frankenstein (or a Dr. Pretorious) who needs reanimate no dead female flesh to glimpse the mystery.

Much of Cocteau's work in the cinema has an overtly otherworldly quality, whether it be the surrealist dreamscape of Le Sang d'un Poete or the fairy tale worlds of L'Eternel Retour or La Belle et la Bete. Orphee, on the other hand, has the look and feel of the kind of unblinking monochromatic neo-realism that became dominant in much post-war European cinema. It nonetheless remains an unapologetic tale of the supernatural, and one which paradoxically gains power from its quotidian portrayal of post-occupation Paris while ultimately transcending it; the magic emerges from the mundane rather than from denying it -- and is all the more magical for it, a diamond that shines not in a jeweler's prepared setting but in, and because of, the rough rock through which it sparkles.

Recasting the Orpheus myth in a Parisian demi-monde where the most venal of motives (the snatching of someone else's work to restore a vanishing fame) can lead to the most transcendent of fates (a trip through the looking-glass and the unconditional, and ultimately self-sacrificing, love of an Elemental), Cocteau creates a world of beautiful cruelty and unexpected grace. Despite the narrative's humanist and sweetly satisfying ending in which the mortal lovers are reunited, Eurydice is experientially its almost disregarded victim; all human affections are as nothing, the film seems to say (albeit with poignant regret) to the romance of the poet and his muse. Even when -- especially when -- that muse is Death.

 

But Enough About Me... #1

I realized the other day that I have quite a backlog of non-fiction pieces about books, movies, famous friends, etc. The articles all appeared originally in magazines or anthologies which are now mostly out of print, and it occured to me that this blog might be a handy place to archive them. So every now and then, in between the usual and shameful I-fuckin'-rock postings, I'll put up one of these things in the vain hope that it'll make me look less of a self-centred asshole.

This first one, an appreciation of SOME OF YOUR BLOOD by the great Theodore Sturgeon, first appeared in 2005 in HORROR: ANOTHER 100 BEST BOOKS edited by Steve Jones and Kim Newman.

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Theodore Sturgeon's Some of your Blood

The writer who died as Theodore Sturgeon in 1985 had been born as Edward Waldo in 1918. The "Sturgeon" came from his step-father, the "Theodore" was (I'm guessing) reverse-engineered from the diminutive it has in common with his real first name. He wrote prolifically from the late 1930s to the early 1960s and sporadically thereafter. The life is over now, but the work survives. And the work is wonderful.

Sturgeon was of that generation of fantasists whose work was routinely classified always as science fiction, whatever its actual nature. Certainly Sturgeon wrote science fiction (and the best of it was genre-expanding, influential, and quite marvellous stuff) but he also wrote westerns, mysteries, and fantasies -- some whimsical, some not-so-much, and some downright horrifying.

The science fiction field is keeping Sturgeon's memory alive and his work in print -- for which we should all be grateful -- but it means that some of his work, marginal to SF proper, is in danger of not being remembered or celebrated. Case in point; Some of your Blood, an almost unacknowledged masterpiece of unflinchingly dark vision and -- at least for the popular fiction of its day -- innovative execution.

This refreshingly short 1961 novel begins with medical and military curiosity regarding a minor piece of violence in the army, moves to a long story of a particularly deprived childhood in rural Kentucky, and ends as a reminder of how and where, and perhaps why, there are monsters among us.

Readers unfamiliar with the book who don't want part of its pleasures compromised should perhaps stop here and go read it, because there's a kind of punchline to the novel -- not quite an O. Henry or Frederic Brown all-in-the-last-line zinger, more a series of cumulative revelations in the last thirty pages -- which I will have to reveal at this point.

Though the nature of what's going on in Some of your Blood is unveiled slowly, it eventually becomes clear that it is in fact a vampire novel, albeit one blessedly free of the ossifying and irritating conventions of the genre. It overtly stacks the deck against there being any supernatural cause for its psychotic protagonist's condition, though his parents "come from the old country" and his father's phonetically rendered accent is a contextually-disguised joke: "Poy, dat schmells goot!" is the kind of line, we realize in retrospect, that could have come from the mouth of another, more well-known, bloodsucking emigre, had the latter not been of a more aristocratic lineage.

Another nod to Dracula is that Some of your Blood is, like its predecessor, an epistolary novel (or, more precisely, that particular riff on the form that includes various found documents, not all strictly letters) which allows the story to reveal its secrets obliquely, in patchwork glimpses of alternating analysis and revelation.

Some of the voices in the surrounding documents -- the vernacular of middle-class military men of their time -- may strike the modern reader as a little dated but the central voice of the book, a beautifully-observed prose that never steps outside the halting and uneducated voice of its 'writer' but nevertheless achieves a poignant folk-art poetry, is not only assured and masterful but is also a sustained demonstration of the bravura hide-in-plain-sight technique by which Sturgeon conceals the truth about his protagonist. Sentences which make perfect (if disturbing) contextual sense in what we believe to be the novel's reality take on deeper significance upon a second reading.

There are moments in the book which, nearly fifty years on, retain a stunning power. The protagonist’s innocent readings of the Rorschach tests given to him by a well-intentioned psychiatrist, for example, are both revelatory and deeply disturbing, exposing as they do the utterly alien drives within a character for whom we have previously felt at least pity and perhaps sympathy and affection.

Though Some of Your Blood is also, in its own bizarre way, a love story, it is by no means a “vampire romance” and it’s sobering and sad to compare this neglected gem to today’s best-selling bodice-rippers-with-blood, those fantasies (in the least generous sense of the word) in which the legions of Anne Rice imitators trot out their wearying tales.

Richard Matheson's I am Legend and Stephen King's Salem's Lot both receive deserved praise as novels which revivify vampire mythology by marrying it to well-observed contemporary (or, in Matheson's case, near-future) settings. It's easy to forget, of course, that that was also true of Stoker's Dracula upon its first appearance. Sturgeon's novel more than deserves a place in that particular pantheon. It recasts an ancient boogeyman as a terrifyingly and truthfully rendered contemporary monster. Over and above its real-world milieu, it possesses an emotional and behavioral truth that renders it a timeless classic of dark fantasy.