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.

 

Year's Best, Haunts, Gutshot

As well as my own collection, Rumours of the Marvellous, about which you're doubtless sick of hearing by now, I also pop up in a few other books this fall/winter season and I'm sure you're dying to hear about them. Your wish, my blemish, is, as ever, my command.

First, I'm lucky enough to appear for the second year running in Paula Guran's Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror from Prime Books. The lovely Ms. G selected my "Frumpy Little Beat Girl" (who first appeared in Curtain Call, last year's Rolling Darkness Revue chapbook from Earthling Publications) and got her all dressed up to be presented to a larger audience. Most grateful, ma'am. There are many great stories in this value-for-money doorstop of a book, but I want to give a particular shout-out to "The Broadsword" by Laird Barron, for one specific reason: Little fucker managed to scare me -- which, for a raddled old pro like me, is an increasingly rare pleasure.

Steve Jones -- master anthologist of his (or any other) generation -- has been kind enough to his old mate Pete to reprint "The Mystery", which was originally published in 2008's Spook City (edited by Angus McKenzie, from PS Publishing), in his new anthology from Ulysses Press. Haunts is a mix of reprints and new stories and -- as we'd expect from young Jonesy -- features a stellar line-up of authors and stories.  

In a previous post, I mentioned Conrad Williams' excellent 'weird western' anthology, Gutshot, and I'm delighted to say it has now been published by those old gunslingers at PS Publishing. Among its wonders, it includes the first appearance of my story "All Our Hearts are Ghosts" but, as I said before, don't let that dissuade you.

All three of these books are available from the usual online retailers and, if you're lucky enough to still have one, your friendly neighborhood brick and mortar. Christmas is coming, kids. Just sayin'.



But Enough About Me... #2

One of the coolest things about Gordon Van Gelder's magazine Fantasy & Science Fiction is the regular last-page feature called "Curiosities", where various people contribute snapshot reviews (300 words or so) of obscurish books they feel should be more appreciated. The F&SF website hosts an archive of scores of them, and I recommend a visit -- especially if you're a writer and are looking for a new source of procrastination; you can happily lose a whole day there (and then alleviate your later self-loathing by telling yourself, with some justification, that it was 'research').  I also, needless to say, recommend the magazine itself, still available every month in real ink on real paper at real newsstands.

I've written a couple of entries for the "Curiosities" series. One was on Arthur Machen's The London Adventure, which I'll reprint sometime in another of these "But Enough About Me" posts, and the other -- from the January 2003 issue -- was on a marvellous (and woefully underrated) Michael Fessier novel from 1935.

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Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind by Michael Fessier

"I was standing in front of the Herald and somebody fired a shot and I saw a fat man turn slowly on one heel and fall to the sidewalk."

With this economic attention-grabbing opener, Michael Fessier's first novel promises the kind of proto-noir pleasures which, while entertaining, are hardly unique amongst 1930s thrillers. Within a few pages, however, the reader discovers that the book is no conventional murder mystery but in fact a fantasy -- albeit one which elegantly hedges its bets before its poignant conclusion acknowledges that at least one of its characters is something other than human.

Fessier (1907-1988), the dedicatee of Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, was a screenwriter and the author of Clovis, a 1948 novel about a super-intelligent parrot.

Fully Dressed's 1935 printings are obscure enough that more than one bookdealer advertises the 1954 paperback as a first edition. Let us do them the kindness of assuming they are ill-informed rather than unscrupulous. Whatever edition you obtain, you're in for a treat. In exhilaratingly efficient prose -- so lean and speedy that even a slowpoke like me can read the book in two hours -- Fessier whips through his bizarre tale of a contemporary San Francisco penetrated by elements (and elementals) of the fantastic.

His style is facile and fun but his gaze is unblinking and dyspeptic -- there's a particularly disturbing scene involving the death of a child, for example -- and this collision of moral stances, as much as the plot's cross-genre delights, makes this seventy-year-old novel feel considerably more modern and alive than much of the swollen pap that passes for contemporary fantastic literature.

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.

Rumours about Rumours

Two extremely kind reviews of Rumours of the Marvellous have just appeared in cyberspace, courtesy of those lovely gents Ian Hunter (in the British Fantasy Society's Book Review section) and Paul Kane (in Mass Movement magazine). If I was the kind of old dog who wasn't allergic to new tricks, I'd do that smooth move of highlighting their names as hot links so that you could jump straight to the full reviews, but I'm rubbish at all that, so you'll just have to google -- which, as exercise goes, is much better for your fingers than that lazy single-click stuff. See how I look out for you?

In the meantime, here's a couple of what we author chappies like to call "pull quotes" (as in the bits one pulls from reviews so that one can instruct one's publisher to emblazon them on the full-page ads they're taking out in Entertainment Weekly and the TLS. Or, in these sadly reduced times, to cut and paste into one's blog): 


"One of the best and most original writers of horror and dark fantasy to come along in the last twenty years ... a great stylist with a truly original voice"  -- Ian Hunter


"Believable characters ... subtle surrealism  ... incredible originality; Atkins' fiction is totally unique. Very highly recommended!" -- Paul Kane


Some time in December, the wonderful Glendale bookstore Mystery and Imagination will be hosting a reading and signing by me and that charming Hirshberg fellow. I'll post actual date and time once I have them. Please come along if you're local (or, if you're not local, well-heeled and obsessive).

Why's it not Dark yet?

In response to numerous* queries, I want to assure people that the Rolling Darkness Revue isn't dead. Like King Arthur, the Kraken, or great Cthulhu, it merely sleeps...

For those who came in late, the Revue is an annual Halloween show featuring ghost-story readings, live music, and whatever theatrical trickery we can afford for six bucks and a tinker's smile. It was founded by me, Glen Hirshberg, and Dennis Etchison in 2004. Dennis retired after the first year (but has made an emeritus appearance or two) and Glen and I have been lucky enough to have persuaded many wonderful writers to guest with us in the years since: Michael Blumlein, Nancy Holder, Robert Massello, Robert Morrish, Kim Newman, Clay McCleod Chapman, Lisa Morton, Norman Partridge, Aimee Bender, Tamara Thorne, Kevin Moffett, Thomas St. John Bartlett, Barbara Roden, and James K Moran. The hugely talented actor Kevin Gregg has appeared with us in the wrap-around plays that frame the stories and, despite consistently showing Glen and me up for the happy amateurs we are, has been remarkably un-smug about it. Jonas Yip & Rex Flowers have provided superb ambient music for all our LA shows and we've been equally blessed -- for the out-of-town performances -- by music from Pets Gone Wild (Northern California), Dave Brewer (Arizona), and Liz Hysen (Ottawa).

But no show this year.

Nothing calamitous, just circumstance. Glen and I both had books to finish (more on this below), and each of us had other things going on that made it tough to find enough time to put together a show that would maintain the RDR's usual high standards (he says with a straight face). I know, I know. Halloween's totally ruined for you, and we suck, and we're deeply sorry. But we'll be back next year, we promise.

In the meantime, there are books!

My effort, Rumours of the Marvellous, has just been published by the UK's Alchemy Press. If you didn't buy it at FantasyCon, you've sadly missed out on the handmade chocolates and Hammer Horror Cupcakes that accompanied its launch (provided by the lovely and talented Mrs. Alchemy, Jan Edwards), but it is now available -- albeit chockie and cupcake free -- at amazon.co.uk and will soon be found, I am reliably informed, in the finest of indie bookstores.

Glen's magnificent new collection, The Janus Tree, is imminent from Subterranean Press and, in my far from humble opinion, you'll hardly be fit to call yourself human if you don't grab a copy at the first possible opportunity.




*Yes, smart-arse. As it happens, 3 is a number. So STFU.

Brighton Rocked

FantasyCon 2011 at the historic seaside town of Brighton in the UK was simply terrific. Superbly organised and run by Paul Kane and Marie O'Regan and their Con committee, it brought together over 500 practitioners and enthusiasts of  fantastic literature to meet, mingle, chat, argue, drink, and -- astonishingly, given the size and shape of most of us -- dance. (No, not me. Are you fucking insane? There were cameras present.)

Books were launched. Deals were made. Panels were pontificated upon. Awards were handed out. And, more importantly, each of us received the spiritual shot in the arm that is the real function of these events, the reminder that we're not alone in our love for the genre, that we're part of a family which -- however dysfunctional, however geographically scattered -- shares the bizarre belief that tales of ghosts or goblins, revenants or rocketships, are actually sort of important. Or, at the very least, fun.

Dana and I met a bunch of old friends, made some new ones, and had a wonderful time. I want to thank Paul and Marie and their team for inviting me and congratulate them on mounting an excellent convention. I've just heard they've been dumb enough to agree to do it again next year (along with powers-behind-the-thrones Steve Jones and Amanda Foubister), so do yourselves a favor and attend. It'll be great. There are even rumours that the hotel will have fixed the air-conditioning (though they promise hardcore fans of pre-war plumbing that the water-pressure in the showers will still suck).