Tag: horror

the book even of my secret soul (about books, again)

I love books. I want books. Post-Christmas I’m in the enviable position of having – not money, but in a way even better, virtual money that can only be spent on books. What I don’t have though, is a lot of space for books. So, periodically pruning the library (too grand a word) or book collection (worse?) or “my books” (better) is a painful necessity. But what to prune, and why? So far, every single time I’ve put together a box of books and dispersed it to charity shops I’ve almost immediately ‘needed’ one of the books I purged. On a few occasions (see here) I’ve bought back books (not the same actual copy though; I’m not that bad, yet) that I got rid of. And I’ll probably do it again, but I’m trying not to.

Why is it painful to get rid of books? Pompously, because the books you own are a reflection of yourself; of skins shed and personalities outgrown and discarded, and in a way a direct line back to your (possibly alarming) former selves with their sometimes alien tastes and enthusiasms.* Less pompously, because in general, I want more books, not fewer. I can’t think of an occasion when I got rid of a book simply because I didn’t like or just didn’t want it, though I’m sure it’s happened. And so, for decades I still owned (and may still have somewhere) the little red Gideons Bible that was given out to pupils when starting high school (do they still do that?). Its bookplate (ex-libris? Both terms seem very archaic) hints strongly at the typical kind of 12 year old boy that it was given to: Name: William Pinfold Form: human. Similarly, I may still have the books given to me in the street by Hare Krishna followers, which seems not to happen now but was a frequent enough thing in the early 90s that I can still remember without checking** that they were credited to and/or consisted of teachings by “His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami.” They often had nice, pleasingly psychedelic cover paintings but were invariably disappointing to try to read because, even when they had amazing titles like Easy Journey to Other Planets, they were all about Krishna consciousness – who knew?. But these are books that would be impossible to replace (in a personal sense; easy enough to get hold of different copies of them). More complicatedly – and just annoyingly, with space at a premium, I have multiple copies of some favourite books and will probably buy even more copies of them, if I come across them with covers that I like but don’t have and if they are cheap.

*case in point; I had forgotten how much I liked Camille Paglia in the days before libertarianism was an essentially standard right-wing-asshole viewpoint and when her provocative/confrontational ideas didn’t yet include being disingenuously frivolous about child abuse

** I’m only human though; I spelled his name wrong until looking out a picture of the book, Possibly absorbing his teachings might have helped?

So yes, I have quite a lot of books; but although ‘book collectors’ exist, I don’t qualify as one. Collecting is deliberate and with presumably, a specific end point in view; a collection. Collecting things is fun up to a point, but ultimately a thankless and frustrating task without the required personality type. It (fleetingly) irritates me when an author I like has written four or five books and the publisher changes the cover design or size after the first few, so the mismatched chaos of a complete collection is not for me. Not to mention that there are writers – Michael Moorcock, in print since the 1950s and as far as I know still writing, is the obvious example for me – who have, over the course of decades, written a ridiculous number of books, which have appeared under countless imprints in myriad editions and countries and therefore offer an opportunity for an epic and soul-crushingly futile quest for the true completist. I am not that completist.

who wouldn’t want a beautiful Aubrey Beardsley ex-libris in all their books? But who would want to actually paste them into all their books?

On the other hand, following the old stately home-library tradition of having a personalised ex-libris/bookplate/sticker thing, with its individualistic iconography always seems like a nice idea – even if it’s essentially just a picturesque way of writing your name in a book, which I would never do. It’s nice see a decorative ex-libris in an old book, but although the thought of having one’s own books personalised in that way is nice, the reality of actually sticking them in the books – fun for maybe the first ten or twenty, but after that too tedious to consider, is not so appealing. So, not a collector; but even not a true bibliophile either, at least in the sense that sometimes is written about. I do love books, but not all or any books, I don’t contemplate, like a wine taster, the smell of old books. There are of course books with distinctive odours, some pleasant (to me) like the dry and somehow slightly spicy smell (probably best to not think too much about) of old calf-bound volumes from the 18th century and earlier, others less so, like the peculiarly vomit-like bouquet of new children’s books. And though browsing through shelves and rooms of books can be and usually is an entirely pleasant pastime, after the excitement has faded there can be something a little depressing about looking through piles of chilly, mildewy, corrugated and fat-with-damp paperbacks in the bigger, more drafty and warehouse-like charity shops or auction rooms.

the uninspiring cover that inspired me to read beyond my taste, strangely

Still; books are artifacts in themselves and not just valuable for their contents. Though judging books by their covers is frowned on, that’s kind of what the covers are for. I’ve written about this stuff in several places before so won’t go on about it here, but there’s never been a time that I’ve read as hungrily or as indiscriminately as when I was a child, and until I found authors that were trustworthy – I will try to get onto the second part of that Robert Westall feature some time this year – covers were the thing that drew me in. I loved fantasy, history and sci-fi, so covers were what made books leap off the shelves of the local library or school library. And there were somehow never enough books to read, so that when, aged 12 – 14 or so, our English teacher required pupils to take books out of the school library every week, it was a perfect opportunity to branch out. After a fairly short time the kind of books I automatically wanted to read had been exhausted and it was necessary to try something else. It’s a strange thing, reading not-for-you books, kind of like trying on other people’s clothes, but I gave it a go, as I have a few times since then*. The book that stands out in my memory – or at least its cover does – is Desmond Bagley’s Bahama Crisis (1980). Being a newcomer to men’s thrillers (still an alien world mostly) I think I was expecting, without much excitement, James Bond (never a fan)-style action, but as I very hazily remember the book was mostly a soapy kind of story about the difficulties of running a hotel in the Bahamas.(??) I didn’t mind it, but although records tell me** that I got more Desmond Bagleys out of the library – I had to get something – none of them, or their titles or even their covers stick in my mind at all.

*reading not-for-me books, not trying on other peoples’ clothes                                                                             ** there’s a list in an old school jotter which I never threw away

It’s hard to imagine, as the world has become ever-more commercially driven, but it feels like publishers nowadays underestimate the seductive power of a good cover design (though what constitutes a good one is obviously subjective). There are several authors I liked as a young adult – Milan Kundera, Ian McEwan and Truman Capote spring to mind, but so (who would have thought it?) does Jean-Paul Sartre – who I might well never have read at all if I didn’t find the covers of their books so alluring. In retrospect the late 80s/early 90s seems like a golden age of book design to me, and don’t think it’s entirely because of the age I was when I first saw them. I was still only in my early 20s a few years later when book jackets became dominated by neon, acid colours and deliberately jarring designs and those left me cold at the time and look dated now. The covers I associate with that ‘golden age’ are entirely typical of the look that much literary fiction was going for at the time.

Milan Kundera’s books are actually about 50% better when read with these covers

Have there ever been cooler looking books than the 80s Faber & Faber or “King Penguin” (whatever happened to King Penguins?) Milan Kunderas? Or Russell Mills‘ genius covers for Picador’s Ian McEwans? Is it just a coincidence that they have a lot in common Dave McKean’s graphic novel designs of the time like Violent Cases and Arkham Asylum or Bill Sienkiewicz’s Stray Toasters? And though Penguin Modern Classics still look good now have they ever looked better than the pale green spines and black and white photo covers of that period?

assorted Ian McEwans, graphic novels & Penguin Modern Classics
bilious mid-90s book design
Boris Vallejo good; John Norman bad

Of course covers can mislead too; much as Peruvian painter Boris Vallejo is some kind of genius, one quickly learned that his covers were no guarantee of quality. Everything about John Norman’s Gor series – the sub-Tolkien/Robert E Howard setting, the Vallejo (and Vallejo imitators – of whom there were many) artwork, the swords and sorcery and gratuitous violence and sex – were guaranteed to appeal to the male, teenage fantasy fan; and yet the books were bizarrely dull to read. Actually, to be fair to Norman, the sex in the Gor books is hardly gratuitous, since it’s basically the whole point of the series; but the endless, tedious essays about masculine power and the bondage fantasies that pepper his books; without the thrill of the quest or even an alleviating sense of humour, is definitely an acquired taste. It was good to read, years later, Micheal Moorcock – along with Tolkien my favourite fantasy author – writing about how boring and tacky the Gor books were. I didn’t think it could just be me. Of course, Moorcock attacked Tolkien too, but though his essay Epic Pooh is not only a good read, but also hard to argue with at times (Moorcock’s main point is that Tolkien is conservative in his worldview and reproduces the class outlook and prejudices of his generation in his fiction) somehow Tolkien’s books resist the criticism effortlessly, if you’re a fan. I think it’s because for Tolkien, the background and history and world-building (as I believe they say nowadays) was the main point of interest, whereas for most subsequent heroic fantasy authors, all that is just the window dressing, so that Middle Earth feels real and believable in a way that most fantasy “realms” don’t. I don’t think there’s any point in Lord of the Rings where the reader has a question that they feel Tolkien couldn’t answer satisfactorily. That said, I imagine sex-related questions would have made him uncomfortable, whereas John Norman might not be able to tell you the detailed history and folklore of Counter-Earth as Tolkien could with Middle Earth, but he could definitely tell you which ropes, gag or whips are favoured by which tribes.

So; looking through my books there are many different versions of myself; because you read books that reflect your interests but often you also get those interests from books themselves. From the age of 8 or so, the Fighting Fantasy role-playing game book series cut across many of my interests. But even then, those books appealed to the child-me in the first place because I loved history and mythology and legends and Asterix the Gaul. But I’ve written more about children’s books and related subjects here and here and here and here and probably elsewhere too, so will try not to repeat myself. It’s easy to think of books that had a big influence on my interests as a child – the version of me that wanted to be an archaeologist wasn’t just thanks to Indiana Jones; before I ever saw Raiders of the Lost Ark I was already fascinated by the Aztecs and Incas because of Tintin and the Romans via Asterix – but also those things plus Ancient Egypt, Ancient China, the Normans, medieval history and knights etc via a big book called The History of the World that I got at a Primary School “Bring & Buy Sale” when I must have been 8 or so. That book had – still has in fact – painted illustrations that I remember vividly; ancient Sumerians, Julius Caesar being stabbed to death in the forum, ancient Greek ladies in strange clothes that exposed their breasts; mysteriously exciting even to an 8 year old, Genghis Khan on his horse, Viking raiders etc, etc. The me who loved space stuff was partly thanks to excitement about the space shuttle program (admittedly that cooled off after the Challenger disaster) and Star Wars, but also 2000 AD comic and the very badly-bound but beautiful reprints of old Dan Dare comics that Paper Tiger published in the early 80s)

But all this is getting away from the point, which is that book ownership is not just about reading. Books like the Bible or Easy Journey to Other Planets are not being kept to read, any more than E.W. Hildick’s Deadline for McGurk, a towering masterpiece as a kid but probably unreadable as an adult, or the different variants of The Fellowship of the Ring or JG Ballard’s Crash that take up valuable shelf space. Getting rid of them would feel wrong, at least unless there was a good cause or if more worthy books come along and the space must reluctantly be yielded to them. That’s the not-so-great thing about having book tokens to spend; the need to consider, plan and use them wisely. I probably won’t.

Book lover’s regrets – should have bought it but didn’t! Perhaps the greatest book cover of all time

a portrait of the author as a young arse

 

 

 

early attempts at writing (and drawing)

Between the ages of 19 and 21, I wrote a series of notes (the longest is about a page, so somewhere between a sketch and a mini-essay I guess) that made up a kind of summary of my worldview at the time. At this point I don’t remember why I wrote them, but I’m sure it wasn’t for its own sake; they were probably things that were to be “boiled down” and processed and incorporated somehow into poetry, strange though that sounds. From an early age, I always wanted to write. The first things I remember voluntarily writing are simplified versions of the kind of fantasy gamebooks that were then hugely popular with kids. The Swords & Sorcery series (more about that by one of the other authors of the series here) emulated Steve Jackson and Ian Livinstone’s Fighting Fantasy single-player role-playing game books pretty shamelessly but were a lot of (complicated) fun to write, though few of them were actually finished. These were followed by (and/or parallel to) various short horror stories, but in the long adolescence that seems to have lasted in my case from 15 until 25 or so, I mostly wrote poetry. It’s fair to say that it was not good.
The notes though, are fun.

They cover a range of topics – politics, religion, aesthetics, social issues, ecology, the monarchy – and are exceptionally embarrassing to read. But interesting too, because although I do of course remember being 19-21, I otherwise only have the distorting mirror of my own memory to go by, and my own taste in music, books etc, which give a kind of connection to ur-me. But these notes are pretty much what I thought, expressed to the best of my ability (or thereabouts). They reveal some interesting things I had not realised about my younger self. Although I generally did fairly well in English at school, I now see that my spelling was quite erratic (especially on words ending in -itely, which I always wanted to make -ately, like ‘definately’) and that I must not have learned the it’s/its rule until later. The pieces are typed, on an actual typewriter as I didn’t own a computer at the time, which was not actually all that strange then. More to the point though, by that age my always-terrible handwriting had deteriorated to the point where I myself found it hard to read things I had written after any length of time had lapsed. The socio-political/geographical background to the notes was the bitter, tail end of the UK’s thousand year Tory Reich that I grew up in. Thatcher had by then gone, but the evolution/mutation into the Major era had made very little difference, except insofar as John Major himself was vastly inferior as a hate figure than Thatcher had been.

It’s funny; the arrogance and certainty of youth is well-known, but I am very surprised to find it in myself. I have rarely met anyone less sure of themselves or more reticent than my late-teens/early-20s self, but that doesn’t really come across at all, except in a few deliberately self-deprecating caveats, and there’s an infuriating cockiness to some of the writing that I not only don’t identify with, but really detest; what’s mortifying is that I was genuinely trying to think deeply about the issues I covered so shallowly. Oh well, I hope I wasn’t actually that obnoxious in everyday life, but who knows? (anyone who knew me). On the other hand, my actual views don’t seem to have changed as much as I would have expected. I was more of a libertarian, albeit a left-wing one then, perhaps a bit more pessimistic, but on the whole I would still find myself on the same side of most of the arguments I am making, which is reassuring.

I don’t intend to transcribe very much of the writing here because I can’t bear to, mostly, but here’s a synopsis of the contents of the documents and there will be a couple of more extended examples below that illustrate how much/little/comically times have changed since then (the mid-1990s)

I don’t know if these were ever in any order, but here’s what I have:

“Classic Myths” – examining, in very little depth or detail, how things become “classics.” It ends with the question (re. literature) “how many great works have disappeared into the mists of time due to personal taste or political, religeous [sic] or moral qualms on the part of the academics of the past?” At this point I was reading the long out-of-fashion (and out of print) poetry of Robert Southey which was, to be honest mostly pretty hard going – but I was determined to like his early, pro-revolutionary work from his ‘Pantisocracy’ days with Coleridge, and I did, when I could find it anywhere.

“The Eye of the Beholder – One” This was me complaining about how Hollywood/popular culture/fashion were making standards of beauty ever more bland in a diminishing returns/vicious circle kind of way. Its exceptionally snooty tone was coloured by the fact that I was discovering the movies of the silent and pre-Hays code era and my own personal objects of desire were people like Louise Brooks, Joan Blondell and Marlene Dietrich. Sample of tone: “Sadly this means that when a certain actor or actress is in a hit film, similar actors and actresses will appear in similar films and so on and on, to ever-diminishing effect, until a new trend (snowboarding and dark hair, perhaps) transforms the screen for a few months or weeks(…) this ever-growing supply and demand for something familiar makes it hard for original voices to be heard, or any kind of innovation or talent to gain an audience.” 😬


“Religion Crazy” – This is pretty much what you’d expect from an atheist teenager, full of such blinding revelations as “Religion has often looked to me like a cunning scheme invented by some ancient tyrant to keep the peasants in their place” and, even better, “intolerance of religion and the religious is a vice I magnanimously allow myself to indulge in.” My own lack of belief hasn’t changed in the slightest since the days when I used to look around the room during the morning recitation of the Lord’s Prayer at Primary School, to see who else had their eyes open. But I though I don’t necessarily disagree with him (and actually am him), I don’t really feel much kinship with the writer of these lines, or especially his tone, now: “Am I to believe in a petty, small-minded god who creates something only to punish and destroy it? Maybe in a bored or indifferent god, as is suggested by its (had to correct it, sorry) conspicuous absence in the last few centuries. Perhaps it is more interested in ants than people, and appears to them all the the time.”

“Sexuality and Children” Luckily I was aware even then that this was an alarming and “rather dodgy” title, but essentially it was about the debate then ongoing about gay parents adopting children. My attitude (as with many of my then-attitudes) was essentially a slightly shaky but very teenage libertarian one: who is entitled to tell other adults how to live their lives? “Aside from (fairly ridiculous) superstitious quibbles which can be disregarded at once, (by me anyway) there is no reason on Earth why it is the business of any but those directly involved.” I still think the same thing, more or less but again the tone is, to be kind, insufferably annoying.


“Not Winning isn’t Losing” – politics, kind of. Contains nuggets like “My ideal political situation is unworkable (…) (it) amounts to well behaved anarchy.” But again, I still believe parts of it, despite painfully naive bits, like “The impossibility of a left-wing political ideal does not mean it is hopeless – indeed the opposite is true. Because it can never be attained, there would always be a working towards it – the lack of destination would improve the journey. The effect of a constant working towards a state of freedom and equality would inevitably lead to and ever-improving state of more freedom and more equality – which can not be bad.”

“Books” – this is funny, so I’ll write about it in more depth later


“Power Crazed”  This is one single line, which I hope isn’t true: “There can never be a good Prime Minister, because Prime Ministers are people whose ambition is to rule the country.”

“Limits” – an excruciating piece about nationalism/patriotism and so forth, in which our author pompously concludes “As far as I’m concerned, I find it absolutely impossible to feel either proud or ashamed of anything that occurred completely beyond my control – race, sex (I guess I meant as in gender), sexuality – or where I was born.”

“Money” – a blindingly obvious revelation that the idea of money is, when you look at it, kind of silly. “Why is gold a valuable metal? Presumably because it looks nicer than other metals, and there is less of it.” etc, etc


“Tripping on the Catwalk” In which I make my ignorance about the fashion industry obvious, and which includes the bizarre statement that “its nearest relative is perhaps the academic world of the university. It is completely self supporting, untouched by recession, mainly due to the fact that it is run by bored rich people for bored rich people.” I am now fairly sure that this isn’t 100% true. I also predicted “an eighties-style big shoulders revival (though with a nineties twist of course) before the turn of the millennium.” I don’t remember if that happened or not, but it’s happened since then.

“Royalty at the End of the Millennium” – Oddly, this is one of the longer pieces. As it’s as topical in the new reign of Charles III as it was then (?) I’ll deal with it later

“Part(l)y Politics One” Despite the parenthetical ‘l’ this is pretty much about party politics. In short; the Conservative Party is contemptible (“I have to assume some right-wingers are intelligent, though I have seen little evidence of this”). But I also seem to be saying that because conservatism is based on the fear of change and the desire for stability, plus an array of standard human failings; ignorance, fear, confusion, greed etc, it will always appeal to a large part of the population.

I theorise, not entirely inaccurately, about a pattern that I hadn’t then seen in action and which I later saw parts of in action – because Conservative governments appeal to the worst in people, they REALLY have to mess up before they get voted out. So therefore, any prospective left-wing government will spend a good deal of time un-wrecking the country, with consequent hardships. The public and opposition will naturally blame those in charge for those hardships, the problem then becomes that a progressive party gets voted out, but the incumbent right wing party inherits a country on the mend, which they take credit for, before ruining everything again. That’s not exactly how Tories – Labour – Tories played out in our time but it still feels plausible and at least not untrue.

“interlude” – between the two “Part(l)y Politics” pieces there’s a short kind of non sequitur in which I claim that the politics of the left, taken to their furthest extreme (i.e. ideologically, rather than in real life) is “a nice, if unworkable idea based on equality and human rights” while the politics of the right taken to their furthest extreme is ”at best an extremely nasty and distressingly workable idea based on hatred, repression and manipulation.” Not sure I agree with either of those statements now, though I think my heart was in the right place.

“Part(l)y Politics Two” – in which I complain that the Labour Party (and by extension any party of “the workers” is hopelessly compromised by a system in which becoming an MP is an ordinary middle class career choice, rather than being a kind of glorified shop steward. This was the Neil Kinnock/John Smith/Margaret Beckett era and I complain about the same thing that every Labour-voter-by-default has complained about ever since: that Labour in opposition try too hard to be all things to all people, appeal to Tory voters, are middle-of-the-road and inoffensive rather than truly progressive etc. It’s all very pessimistic: “We can only hope that this [middle-of-the-road inoffensiveness] is a sort of ruse to gain power, whereupon the new and hopefully forceful, idea-led Labour Party will throw off its current greyness, the spectre of past success and failure and emerge as a strong socialist party for the twenty-first century (…) The conservatives ‘accuse’ the Labour Party of being the same old socialist party underneath. This seems sadly unlikely – we understand socialism to be a system based on fairer distribution of wealth and of equality etc etc – the Labour Party does not seem to be offering this. We will vote for them, because there is no one else to vote for.”

“Opposites Attract” – this is a self-pitying whine about how “the plain or ugly are naturally attracted to the good looking, the handsome, the beautiful. The good looking, the handsome and the beautiful are naturally attracted to the good looking, the handsome, the beautiful. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but few beholders’ eyes will want to linger very long on the truly unattractive person.” I actually wrote this stuff down.

“Inhumanity” Here it is: “’Man’s inhumanity to man’ is a phrase used to describe acts which are definingly human. What other species would (or could) have had the atomic bomb, or the holocaust? It is a deceptive and cowardly phrase.” Well alright then.

“Food Philistine” – A strange and very silly short piece in which I discover that my attitude to food (though I had “no aversion to it”) was “the same as my attitude to sleep – if I could do without it, I would.” I don’t feel that way about either food or sleep now, really and until now I didn’t realise I had ever felt that way.

“Money, money, money” In short, class = wealth. The problem with Britain is (I seem to be saying) that the upper class control the wealth of the working class while the complacent middle class are indifferent as long as they are comfortable & therefore provide the upper class with a comfortable mattress to insulate them from the should-be-revolutionary consequences of their greed. It may be true?

“The Eye of the Beholder Two” – this time it’s all about how I prefer brutalist architecture to old churches etc and prefer the “drab emptiness” of municipal parks, deserted backstreets etc to epic, panoramic landscapes. Nowadays I like all of those things.

“Responsibility” A “pro choice” rant that, I’m glad but surprised to say, reads exactly like the social media posts of ‘pro choice’ people in the last few years – it begins “The anti-abortion lobby, for all their rhetoric about the sanctity of human life, seem to disregard entirely (and with great relish) the quality of human life. Indeed, they seem to enjoy inflicting misery wherever they go.” And it ends with the even more 2020s-ish: “To the anti-abortionist, the human being is only a human being until it is born. After that it is not their problem.” I was right then and still am now: yay me.

“Censored” In which I get on my high horse about the right to watch violent horror movies: “When I hear that a member of the British Board of Film Classification has embarked on an orgy of violence and mayhem using a chainsaw, I will begin to believe that film violence has an effect on the viewer (if it happens twice.)” I DO think it has an effect on the viewer – actually, I hope it does, or why even bother? Disturbing things should be disturbing. But my views on censorship (if no harm is done in the making of it then who has the right to say an adult shouldn’t watch it) are pretty much the same. I probably believe in ‘classification’ and parental responsibility more now than I did then though.

“A Fair Day’s Pay…” Manual workers should be at the top of the pay pyramid as their work is harder and more necessary, but pen pushers are in charge of wages etc so it’ll never happen, he seems to be saying.

“Animals” A very dubious piece in which I query the relative value of human beings and other animals, slightly in favour of other animals, or at least not in favour of us humans.

“Power Corrupts – Small time” “Power corrupts – this is an indisputable fact,” I say – but is it? Anyway, my premise is that dictators are bad and all, but for really corrupt power you have to look at school teachers and small-town police officers.

“Grown Men and Women” – Me, moaning about sport

“How to Spoke Proper” – In short,“speaking properly” (in the UK sense) is a classist fantasy based on the random fact that the BBC happened to be founded in the south of England. This may or may not be true.

“Rules of Attraction” – “Sexuality has nothing to do with morality,” he says, “I am attracted to members of the opposite sex because I was born this way – so if I saw a member of my own sex who looked like a member of the opposite sex in a way that I found attractive, I would naturally be attracted to them, for as long as they looked like an attractive female. I do not see how there can be anything wrong with this, or any variation of it.” This sounds like an argument with some lurking real-life subtext, but to the best of my knowledge now, it wasn’t.

“The Sea” – it’s about the sea, which I apparently felt very strongly about. I still love the sea but can’t imagine writing very emotionally about it.

“Philosophy” – As an atheist is there any more logical philosophy than to live a life of pure hedonism? I seem to conclude not, but for me at the time this was a purely hypothetical question

“Against Nature” –  Here it is in full: “Humankind is natural, as much a part of nature as anything else on the planet. Everything humankind does is natural. The worst it can do (selfishly speaking) is to kill itself off, which in a universal sense, would be no big loss.” I was in some ways a very standard teenager I guess. Joy Division was probably my favourite band at that point

So, here are the more extended bits.

Firstly, I’ve chosen “Books” because it is the one that most amusingly makes the 1990s seem like it was a million years ago. My main argument is that though people were (as they always seem to have been) predicting the death of the printed word, books are unlikely to be replaced by anything else. But let young Will explain it, as his Nostradamus-like powers of prediction don’t seem to have anticipated the Kindle. More strangely, he does not seem to be aware of laptops, didn’t they already exist in the mid-90s? Surely! To be fair to him though, “we” still prefer a book to a kindle or tablet which I can’t stand using unless it’s the only way to read something.

Anyway, the death of books will not happen, he says, because…
“They are convenient, we [he often calls himself ‘we’] cannot imagine taking even a small computer on a train or plane, or to the beach or on holiday in our suitcase – though this may be possible in the future. We like to go back a page and reread something, whilst[!] keeping our place on the page we have reached. We like the thought, whether we actually do it or not, of being able to read Wordsworth in the mountains of the Lake District – we feel that a keyboard and a screen would take away a rather large part of the romance of this.”

“Royalty at the End of the Millennium” is fun because it’s surprisingly still topical (up to a point) and begins by saying things, far more grumpily, that I probably still think. I’ll transcribe as much of it as I can bear, with the faulty punctuation and repetition intact because the tediousness is part of the fun. Still, it’s odd and a bit alarming to find a UKIP-ish tone intruding re. the funding of the Royal family, even if I thought I was playing Devil’s avocado (as I might have said) at the time.

“Why do (how can) people like the Royal Family? I don’t know. What is even stranger than this affection is the public liking one member of the family, and (apparently randomly) not another. ‘Fergie’ seems to be disliked for acting like any normal person suddenly coming into a huge amount of money i.e. spending it. People who claim to dislike her because of affairs etc seem to forget or dismiss the affairs of (practically all) other family members.
People liking (or even loving) Princess Diana is one of the biggest mysteries of our age. The myth of Diana as a beautiful woman started before the Royal Wedding and continue to this day. Are these people blind? Do they really believe it? Are they just trying to sell newspapers or cash in on Royal memorabilia? Who knows? The fact is that she is an average, ordinary-looking woman in her thirties with a large nose, large chin, and even larger amount of money to make the most of what she has with.*  (The reader may be forgiven for assuming that the writer of these words must be very handsome, to stand in judgement of other peoples looks – this is certainly not the case – but I do not have a media conspiracy trying to convince people that I am).
More seriously (and it is a serious matter when a country is in a serious[!] recession, and yet it’s people give millions of pounds a year to keep one family in, well, the lap of luxury would be a gross understatement – especially when this one family already has millions of pounds of inherited private wealth). What are the reasons for and against the Royal Family?

Well, the for argument usually falls into two compartments[?] – tradition, and (feebly) that the Royals are good for the economy via the tourist trade. The first of these is the stronger of the two and yet doesn’t really bear close inspection – is it necessarily good because it’s traditional? Yes, the family is descended from a long line of noble (i.e. rich) families – but they are not necessarily British families. They are Greek, they are German, but there is not an awful lot of British blood in there. As far as I am concerned, this would not matter, except that the arguments for usually draw attention to it being a great British tradition, or institution. I can only say that it’s not much of a native tradition that has the British public paying money to a European family to make them even richer.”

Some more highlights – this is just too tedious to write out in full:
“There are few things as irritating as hearing how hard the Queen works – give me a few million pounds a year and I will be glad to attend dinners, meet dignitaries and travel abroad – not many people would turn down an offer like this.”
“The arguments against are much easier to state – they don’t do anything, we pay for them for being related to people, they are a British tradition which involves few British people, they could exist in comfort without public money, they represent an outdated (and according to the Prime Minister) non-existant class system, they stagger from one scandal to another and in a country with an underfunded health service, underfunded system of education, a large homeless population and mentally ill people being turned out onto the streets** they are a mockery of and insult to our supposedly democratic society.”

So there we have it, an unexpected meeting with my apparently slightly intense, smart-assed but ridiculous younger self. Nice to catch up but I’m not sure I’d want to hang out with him!

*Yes, I genuinely wrote “to make the most of what she has with”

**I assume this has something to do with the “care in the community” scandal that seemed to be unfolding during the last few years of the Thatcher/Major era

 

 

 

gateways to horror: the watch house by robert westall

 

What was the first thing that scared you? The answer to that question is no doubt buried deep in your subconscious and could be almost anything. What was the first thing you sought out because you wanted to be scared? That should be easier to answer but for me at least, it isn’t really.

Well, there was Halloween, and Guy Fawkes Night still used to have a certain frisson in the days when effigies were burned on communal bonfires; an archaic-sounding memory now that November 5th is marked, if at all, by a few fireworks and now that Guy Fawkes has a new life as the face of anonymous protest, thanks to the weak movie adaptation of David Lloyd and Alan Moore’s classic graphic novel V for Vendetta. Whether many of the people using the likeness of “V” know that the real Fawkes’s aim was to restore an absolutist Catholic monarchy, rather than to restore power to the people, or whether most of them even know who Guy Fawkes was, I can’t say.

the terrifying Groovie Ghoulies, which dates from 1971 but was still being aired a decade later

At some point in early childhood I became aware – as we all do – of the classic horror villains; Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, werewolves, the mummy. Those same creatures in fact that, as horror film-loving adults, are famous as ‘the Universal monsters’ – an appropriate/fortuitous name as they are or at least were a kind of lingua franca for kids in the western world. But at the same time, it’s hard to say when exactly one became aware of them. I was bought (and still own), Dracula’s Spinechillers Annual (more about that here) for Christmas when I was eight – but that was hardly my introduction to Dracula. So what was? The earliest memories of these icons that I can pinpoint are parodies, things like The Munsters which, though already a couple of decades old were still regularly aired when I was a child. Then there was Carry On Screaming and of course specifically made-for-children cartoons like the Groovie Ghoulies – also of a certain vintage by then and the more up-to-date The Drac Pack. But although these were all light and funny, even when watching them as a young child, Dracula/Frankenstein/The Mummy etc remained first and foremost horror characters and the enjoyment of those comical versions depended on knowing about the ‘real’ ones. I remember thinking that The Drac Pack wasn’t scary enough. But compared to what?

the somehow very 80s Drac Pack (1980)

In Dracula’s Spinechillers Annual – surely aimed squarely at the hardback annual audience (was this only a UK thing?), the same kids who bought, or were given, the Grange Hill Annual, the Beano or Dandy or Jackie or the annual Blue Peter book. And yet, in the Dracula annual there are beautifully drawn comic strip adaptations – as faithful as they can be for their brief length – of a couple of classic Hammer horror movies. Dracula (1958) and Twins of Evil (1971) were “x-rated” at the time of their release, but by the 80s would probably have been rated 15 – but even so, the comic adaptations come complete with titillating glimpses of nudity and splashes of blood that weren’t typical for kids annuals, to say the least. I hadn’t seen the movies at the time but I remember that even then I was aware of Hammer films, and thought of them as something old and harmless, rather than actually scary. I’d seen bits of them late at night on TV, mainly sequels; I saw Dracula, Prince of Darkness and The Scars of Dracula years before I ever saw the original, superior 1958 Dracula, but nothing from them sticks out much in my mind so, I can’t imagine I was particularly scared by them.

the edition of Shaun Hutson’s Spawn that nearly made me vomit the first time I read it

But at some point, as an older but still pre-teen child, I became a horror fan. While the theory of gateway drugs has been discredited regarding actual drugs, there’s a lot to be said for the idea in different contexts – as a teenage heavy metal fan you (it seemed inevitably) wanted to find music that was heavier, faster, more harsh. As a young reader of what passed for children’s horror fiction (I have the vaguest memories of enjoying Terrance Dicks’s Wereboy! and Cry Vampire! as mentioned here) you equally wanted to find ‘harder stuff’ – if not more scary, then at least more nasty and graphic. Which is not to say that (in either literature or music) you inevitably stick with the hard stuff; my liking for Stephen King long outlasted my liking for Shaun Hutson. In Hutson’s defence, his books were, as a teenager, ‘cool’ in a way that Stephen King’s only sporadically were, and although I don’t remember ever being actually scared by a Shaun Hutson book, he had other virtues; the pace, the energy, the humour – and to this day the opening of his 1983 classic Spawn (mentioned in various places, notably here) – my first encounter with his work – is the only time that reading a horror novel has made me feel physically sick. No wonder he became a favourite of my teenage years.

But I’m getting ahead of myself; if Shaun Hutson marked the zenith of my teenage horror addiction, the initial drug that set me on that road to excess happened a good few years earlier. There were children’s books borrowed from the library which for the most part didn’t really stay with me, although I remember the cover of a book of ghost stories I read then (surely edited by Peter Haining) vividly. As far as being scared goes, the things I remember most from childhood fall into the category of genuine not-fun fear (fear of older kids, skinheads, stuff like that) but also fun real-life fear; walking by a house where a ‘bad man’ lived, being on the streets at Halloween or (to some extent) Guy Fawkes night. The decline of November 5th is often attributed to the tightening of safety rules around fireworks, but I’d say its unique atmosphere actually died out just before that, when the making and burning of effigies (I still knew what “Penny for the Guy” was but I don’t remember kids of my generation doing that) was replaced by the bigger and more exciting (but less intimate and far less peculiar) spectacle of bigger and better communal firework displays.

the first horror movie that really made an impression on me – The Omen (1976)

I was still at Primary school when I saw the first horror film that seemed genuinely creepy to me, The Omen. But it was essentially a dead end for a few years as primary school kids then had no way of accessing real horror movies, at least not without the collusion of adults and a budget beyond what I think was normal in my peer group. So my main route to being what could be termed a horror fan (though I don’t think it would occur to me at that point that it was a specific genre I was drawn towards) was through reading. There’s another story to be told that begins with the hugely popular Fighting Fantasy series of game books, which leads (with some help from Iron Maiden’s mascot Eddie; an important horror icon in his own way) towards HP Lovecraft, but for me, I think the real gateway drug that led me directly to Stephen King and James Herbert was Robert Westall.

the TV tie-in paperback edition of The Machine Gunners

Westall is best remembered now as a children’s author who wrote about WW2, and especially the Blitz. His most important book will probably always be his first, the iconic 1975 novel The Machine Gunners, winner of the Carnegie medal, which was made into an equally iconic TV show. And it deserves its fame – its story of a gang of Tyneside (actually, Garside; like most of his books The Machine Gunners is set in the fictional town of Garmouth, standing in for his own home town of Tynemouth) teenagers who ‘liberate’ a machine gun from a crashed German bomber plane and set up their own fortress to defend themselves and their town against the predicted Nazi invasion, in the face of what they see as the inadequate response of adult society to the situation. It remains both gripping and moving and is expertly told by a writer who had been a child during the war and was able to give a vivid account of the child’s eye view of ‘the home front,’ but who had also been a teacher with a teacher’s insight into children and their behaviour. Like most of the best children’s fiction it never talks down to its audience, and even allows its protagonists to swear when the realism of the story demands it, which was, quaintly, hugely impressive to children of the ‘80s.

The Machine Gunners TV series was broadcast when I was 9 and I first read the book around that time. It’s not a horror novel in any sense, but there are horrific elements within it. Aside from the general dread and tension of wartime, one scene in particular made a big impression on me, not only because of the gore, but also the subtly ominous build-up to the moment of horror, something which Westall would employ even more effectively in his horror-oriented novels. Near the start of the book, its hero Chas McGill has ventured into “The Wood” which

“was bleak and ugly[…] Some said it was haunted, but Chas had never found anything there but a feeling of cold misery, which wasn’t exciting like headless horsemen. Still, it was an oddly discouraging sort of place” (Machine Gunners, 1975, p.13)

This time though, Chas does find something; the remains of the tail end of a German bomber plane which has been shot down, but which still has its machine gun attached. He climbs the wreckage to get the gun, and the description of what happens next stayed with me for years:

“He peered over the edge of the cockpit.
The gunner was sitting there, watching him. One hand, in a soft fur mitt, was stretched up as if to retrieve the gun; the other lay in his overalled lap. … His right eye, pale grey, watched through the goggle-glass tolerantly and a little sadly. He looked a nice man, young.
The glass of the other goggle was gone. Its rim was thick with sticky red, and inside was a seething mass of flies, which rose and buzzed angrily at Chas’s arrival, then sank back into the goggle again.
For a terrible moment, Chas thought the Nazi was alive, that the mitted hand would reach out and grab him. Then, even worse, he knew he was dead.” (Machine Gunners 1975 p15)


After The Machine Gunners, the next Westall book I read was his excellent ‘Brave New 1984’-style dystopia Futuretrack 5 – again, not horror, but often horrifying, especially the scene near the beginning where the narrator Henry Kitson, head boy at an expensive public school, first becomes aware of the very different lives lived beyond the boundaries of his own privileged existence, and which for me entirely overshadowed the whole book when I first read it:

“… Peering through my jungle, I saw a man with no nose.
He’d had a nose; I could see where it had been. Now he just had two holes to breathe through. He’d no eyebrows either. Just purple rings around his eyes, making them look tiny and staring.”
(Futuretrack 5, 1985, p. 18)

This is Kitson’s first sight of an “Unem”, one of the army of unemployed who is killed shortly afterwards by the authorities. When Kitson asks his father what an Unem is (children asking adults awkward and difficult questions is a recurring theme throughout Westall’s books for children), the reply is chilling;

‘Shut up’, shouted my gentle father. ‘All you need to know is this – if you ever tell anybody what happened, you won’t have a home or a father or a mother.’ (Futuretrack 5, 1985, p.19-20)

After Futuretrack 5 I read as many Robert Westall books as I could get my hands on, and four in particular, all of which fit more or less within the horror genre, have stayed with me and at times unnerved me probably as much any book I’ve ever read has. In fact, they remain creepy now, if read in the right frame of mind, and are for me the most enjoyable of Westall’s many good books. Those four are The Wind Eye (1976), The Watch House (1977, now scandalously out of print), The Devil on the Road (1978; ditto) and The Scarecrows (1981), which, like The Machine Gunners, won the Carnegie medal. The Wind Eye is probably the least good of the four, but it has some powerful scenes. The action, which involves the bleak Northumbrian coastline, time travel, satanic goats and St Cuthbert, takes place when a troubled family (the central characters are three children from two broken marriages, whose incompatible parents have recently married) go to stay in the house of a distant and eccentric relative who has disappeared and been declared dead. But one of the book’s most effective moments comes right at the beginning, before the family even reaches the predictably ramshackle and spooky house:

“Oh, I’m shocking our little Christian here. So unlike her beloved Father. Don’t be such a prig, Beth. It doesn’t mean a thing.” And she placed her blue shoe on the black marble slab.
Nothing moved; nothing fell. But in that instant Beth knew that someone had become aware of them.” (The Wind Eye, 1976, p.12)

This anticipates some of Westall’s most creepy moments, especially a key scene in The Scarecrows, but although The Wind Eye builds to an appropriately stormy and tempestuous climax, The Watch House is far more effectively chilling throughout, probably because, like Westall’s later horror-oriented novels, the action revolves around a single, complex and isolated character rather than a group.

the sadly weak 1988 TV adaptation of The Watch House is still worth a look for lovers of eerie kids TV

The Watch House, which, like The Machine Gunners, was the subject of a TV series – though a sadly inferior and often laughable one – is the most traditional of Westall’s horror novels. The book is a kind of haunted house story, where a troubled teenage girl, away from home while her parents go through a difficult separation, becomes the focus of ghostly activity. The haunting initially centres around the Watch House, the somewhat dilapidated home of the Garmouth Volunteer Life Brigade, a kind of down-at-heel, local RNLI founded when the town was still a busy fishing port.

The atmosphere, landscape and ingredients of the story are established with skillful economy within the first few pages as the heroine Anne, driven by her spoiled and unsympathetic mother, arrives in Garmouth, where she is to be dumped on her mother’s old nanny for the holidays while the separation is hammered out at home. Garmouth, already depicted in The Machine Gunners as a town whose best years perhaps lay behind it, even in the 40s, is seen in more detail here. It’s a typical fishing town, still busy but slightly dowdy in the recession years of 1970s Britain. Decay is everywhere; Anne is introduced early on to the Black Middens, great rocks in the estuary of the Gar, historically the source of the shipwrecks which are at the book’s heart, but now tamed by great concrete piers. A sea wall, begun but discontinued when funding ran out, snakes along the foot of the cliffs on which the Watch House stands. The cliffs are crumbling, as are the ruins of a medieval priory with its slightly dilapidated coastal graveyard; “The sea must eat away the cliff, thought Anne. Some wild nights, bones long buried in earth must receive final burial in sea.” (The Watch House, 1977, p.10)

And then of course there’s the Watch House itself, established almost immediately as a sinister, but fascinating and alluring presence:

“The road ended at the Watch House, which loomed over them as they got out of the car. Built of long white planks, sagging with the years, it had a maritime look. Like a mastless, roofed-in schooner becalmed in a sea of dead grass. Through its windows showed a dark clutter of things that couldn’t be recognised. This clutter and a lack of curtains made the windows look like eyes in a white planked face.” … “The Watch House was well-named. It did seem to watch you. But it was only the effect of dark windows in white walls.” (The Watch House, 1977, p.10-11)

For the first two parts of the novel, the Watch House is at the centre of the supernatural action. A working base for the now-rarely-needed Life Brigade, by this time a group of old, retired men, it also houses their memorabilia. Like the house in The Wind Eye it’s full of fascinating curios. But whereas the house had belonged to one man with a fascination for the past, the Watch House is a repository for generations’ worth of knick-knacks; old photographs, items rescued from shipwrecks, ship’s figureheads, even the bones of the dead found among the Black Middens but never identified. Initially a project for Anne to pass the time, the cleaning, organising and documenting of the Watch House’s contents becomes an obsession and initiates the connection between Anne and a ghostly presence, known affectionately to the members of the Brigade, as ‘the Old Feller.’ Hitherto known and only half believed-in as a somewhat playful spirit who knocks things over and leaves messages in the dust, when Anne arrives his messages become frequent and unambiguously urgent and personal; they are a cry for help.

the Puffin Plus edition of the Watch House that I first read at Primary School

Anne’s status as a sympathetic outsider, as well as the somewhat lonely figure at is reinforced throughout the novel, where the other characters are almost all arranged around her in paired opposites. There are Purdie and Arthur, the elderly couple she is staying with, she old fashioned and disapproving, he mischievous and childlike; the friends Anne makes, Pat and Timmo, Pat cosy and docile, the simian Timmo energetic, cerebral and inquisitive; the two clergymen, Father Fletcher – the local Church of England vicar, cheerful, straightforward and relaxed, and Father da Souza, an American Catholic priest, fiery, dynamic and antagonistic. Even Anne’s parents, peripheral but essential elements in the story, fit in with this pattern, Anne’s mother is fashionable, demanding, cold and impatient while her father – who barely appears – is warm, caring, disorganised and ultimately, perhaps a less sympathetic figure than the author intends. Finally, there are the ghosts themselves; the Old Feller, harmless, terrified and childlike, and the real villain, the ghost of a murderous army officer named Hague, who is bullying, menacing and violent. In each of these cases Anne comes between the other characters, at times more-or-less harmoniously (keeping the peace between Purdie and Arthur and Pat and Timmo) and at others inadvertently stoking tension.
Anne’s own personality, less flamboyant than most of the cast, is mainly brought out in contrast with the others and essentially we see her as an ordinary, lonely teenager. She’s clever and industrious, mild-mannered, but also easily bored. There’s a sharper side to her nature too, mainly expressed when her mother is around, which can be surprising and no doubt  helped to earned the book its Puffin Plus (older children and teens) status. We meet this side of Anne right at the beginning of the novel, when, approaching Garmouth, her mother warns her about Arthur;

“Never made anything of himself, even by their standards. He takes advantage, given half a chance. You’ll need to watch him.”
“What is he – a rapist?”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that” (The Watch House p.9)

Anne, already not thrilled at this enforced holiday with near-strangers, is clearly trying to antagonise her mother, but as we discover, her cynicism is well-founded, not because of Arthur himself (who is a harmless, if irritatingly childish old man), but because she is used to the unwanted attentions of her mother’s boyfriend, the loathsome “Uncle Monty”. Late in the novel, when her mother threatens to take her home to London:

“’I don’t want to live with you. I can’t stand having that man around the place the whole time.”
[…] “You mean Uncle Monty? He’s just a friend, you silly goose. He’s just helping me settle in, that’s all.’
‘By spending all night in your bedroom while Daddy’s away? […] He can’t keep his hands off me either. He’s always trying to touch me, when you’re not watching. And give me wet open-mouth kisses.’ It was true. So why was it so terrible to say it?” (The Watch House, p.158)

We are reminded throughout the book that Anne is a teenager and not a child; she is at her most teenager-ish when she goes to the local Youth Club disco in the hope of meeting people her own age:

“She’d thought hard what to wear at the Youth Club, and finally decided on plain Wranglers with a Wrangler top. […] Nothing for little cats to get their tongues around; nothing for them to pick holes in. Course, they’d pick holes anyway. But not such painful ones.” [The Watch House, p.65]

Initially, all of the ghostly activity happens within the Watch House itself and takes the form of writing in the dust on the display cases and flickering lights, but when, a few years after reading The Watch House, I first read Stephen King’s IT, the scenes where that novel’s young protagonists first encounter Pennywise irresistibly reminded me of Anne’s first unambiguous encounter with ghosts after the Garmouth carnival, a beautifully effective and atmospheric piece of writing:

“As she got further along the pier, and the sky darkened, the family groups thinned out. She passed through the last, and was alone. Except for one small person in Victorian top-hat and frock-coat, hurrying ahead of her towards the lighthouse. Head down and hands behind his back. Alone among the crowds he looked anxious. He kept peering over his shoulder at her, his face a white blur in the dusk.
[…]
Didn’t she know him?
Of course not. It was just that he looked like that picture of Isembard Kingdom Brunel, who built the Great Western. Except Brunel had looked so much cockier with that big cigar. Not so scared…
And then she knew, quite certainly, that she was looking at a ghost. Because the light on the South Pier came on, and shone right through his face.
[…]
‘It’s me, Anne,’ she took a step forward.
The ghost writhed away.
‘Whatever’s the matter?’ Her voice rose to a scared shriek.
This had happened before to her. Where? Where? In the orchard with Cousin Jane. She had walked towards Cousin Jane, and Jane had shrieked with terror. Because Anne, all unknowing, had a spider in her hair, and Jane was terrified of spiders.
[…]
Anne whirled round. Something faded round the curve of the lighthouse. Something red. There was a strong gust of seaweed; the smell of the bottom of a river.
[…]
She tried doubling back. Nothing. The Old Feller was gone. She was alone with something red that stank of the river and had terrified a ghost.” (The Watch House p.116-7)

During the first two acts of the novel, Westall expertly raises the tension and confounds expectations, the simple haunting becoming something more complex and less predictable as Anne’s not-always-harmonious relationship with her newfound friends complicates things further. Then, as we enter the novel’s final phase, The Watch House has a feature that I’ve always loved in horror novels and one which I associate with (again) IT in particular – the period of research, usually during a lull in horrific activity after the threat has been established. In The Watch House, Anne initially assumes that the ghost – The Old Feller – is trying to engage her help to save the Watch House – which he, as founder of the Garmouth Volunteer Life Brigade had built – from financial and physical ruin and by extension save the Life Brigade itself. But once Anne has helped to secure the future of the Watch House as a museum and the hauntings don’t stop, it becomes clear that more than one spirit is involved.

After a session of hypnosis with her new friends Pat and Timmo proves both disturbing and revealing it becomes clear that understanding the problem requires more detailed local knowledge than Anne has. She talks to the oldest member of the life Brigade, the 95-year-old Bosun, who gives her an eye witness account of events she has previously seen under hypnosis, through the Old Feller’s eyes. She again enlists the help of Timmo. Introduced in the guise of ‘Doctor Death’, an eccentric DJ running the youth club disco, Timmo is an older teenager, a medical student with a huge variety of interests and expertise, but no real attention span. Timmo is knowledgable and freakishly intelligent, but his interest in the paranormal is as playful and skeptical rather as it is genuine and after the dramatic first hypnosis session, Anne only reluctantly agrees to do it again. Before that happens, Anne insists on some more concrete research, but as is common during these kinds of interludes in horror fiction, she suffers from a sense of dislocation that makes rational thought difficult:

“Next morning, Timmo had to bully her all the way up the hill to Front Street. If he hadn’t called for her, she would never have got out of bed. Her legs felt like lead; she had hardly slept.
Front Street, full of shoppers and red double-decker buses, was insubstantial, like a dream. It was the real world that was ghostly now.” (The Watch House, p.131)

The novel’s final act brings the story to a feverish pitch as the supernatural events become more deadly and Anne’s mother arrives in Garmouth, threatening to take her back to London. The climax, involving the two priests in an extended exorcism – surely influenced by the final scenes in the movie version of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist – is powerful but, like the ending of this article, a little bathetic. Although narratively satisfying, it’s loud and apocalyptic where the novel’s most effectively eerie moments are quiet and understated. The scenes that lingered in my mind – and which remain the most vivid to me decades later – are those when Anne, alone in the Watch House, is menaced by Hague, or when she is stalked by a mangy, grave-digging dog in the old Priory churchyard. As horror fiction, these are among the finest scenes that Westall ever wrote. Anne too, is a surprisingly vivid and sympathetic character; Westall’s female characters are often on the verge of caricature and his usual (youthful, male) protagonists tend to have a manly impatience with the women in his books. I would hesitate to call Westall’s books misogynistic, but there is sometimes a strain of male chauvinism to them which seems to belong to the author as much as it does to the characters. It’s also an oddity perhaps worth mentioning that of all the books I read as a child – and there were quite lot of them – Westall’s are the only ones I recall which almost invariably have a flippant reference to rape in them, which definitely feels bizarre in the 21st century. The Watch House itself is very much a product of the 1970s – with much that that entails; chauvinism, mild homophobia, flared trousers – in a way that The Machine Gunners wasn’t, which possibly accounts for its currently out-of-print status. But it’s a shame, with some kind of preface/disclaimer about its dated attitudes and language, it could easily go on to scare new generations of children, and get them hooked on the mysterious delights of the horror genre.

shooting the messenger; moral panics, the 1980s, American Psycho turns 30

 

Marshall Arisman’s superb artwork used on the Picador first edition of American Psycho

Happy New Year! I’ve written before about the way that new decades seem to bring their own distinct identities with them (probably too often; here was I think the most recent time) and as we ascend/descend/just go into 2021 an auspicious anniversary approaches; 30 years since the publication of Bret Easton Ellis’s classic novel American Psycho, a book which seemed to set the seal on certain aspects of the 1980s, preserving them in a concentrated form for future… hmm, enjoyment seems the wrong word (but it’s not).

Moral panics (“an instance of public anxiety or alarm in response to a problem regarded as threatening the moral standards of society” is how the internet defines the term) don’t occur very often, though something tells me that in the next few years they may be one of the few areas of growth in the UK, and moral panics about books are even more rare. But American Psycho caused one, and until it was to some extent defused by Mary Harron’s excellent (though necessarily less graphic) 2000 film adaptation* the novel remained (appropriately I guess) a kind of bogeyman, in some countries (still?) only being displayed in shrinkwrap lest an unwary child catch a glimpse of the dangerous words it contains.

*the film managed to avoid great controversy partly I think because it confirmed what many of the book’s defenders had always maintained; that it was (among other things) a satirical black comedy

At the heart of any moral panic there is generally one catalyst, but it usually overlays a more or less complex set of issues. These tend to be fundamental things like; should there be limits to free speech? Should human beings have control over their own bodies whatever the consequences to their health? How much control should parents exercise over their children? Is it important to be able to clearly define individuals within specific traditional pigeonholes and if so, why? Interestingly though, the point of the panic (generally sparked by a newspaper, politician or an interested pressure group) is usually, perhaps always to avoid the discussion of these issues, and instead to simply wish whatever it is – ‘video nasties’, drugs, loud music, raves, books, certain kinds of people – out of existence entirely. The unstated aim is the reiteration of a prevailing – often obsolete – orthodoxy; films that aren’t explicit, children that are ‘seen and not heard’, Christian ideas of morality). And coincidentally or not, whatever the panic happens to be about, it’s usually the same orthodoxy that is being reinforced and promoted.

one of the UK’s classic moral panics; punk

Literature and cinema have a special place in the moral panic spectrum, because, unlike, say drugs, prostitution, hoodies or (more ridiculously) ‘happy slapping,’ those defending them (to be fair I don’t think anyone really defended happy slapping) almost always have to use, or at least generally do use, arguments that are unrelated to the charges the accusers make. DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover is probably the most famously banned book in Britain, but when it was finally un-banned it was because of arguments about the quality of the book. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is indeed an important book, written by an important writer, it is ‘literature’. But, typically, the people who wanted it banned didn’t care about that, didn’t even necessarily dispute it, or disapprove of the acts that were considered so outrageous when described in print. After all, even most Festival of Light type people don’t believe that no-one should ever have sex. Mostly, what they cared about was the actual words used in the book; and, strangely, the words that were considered most offensive in the 1920s (when it was written) and the 1960s (when it was printed legally) are mostly still the same ones that are considered offensive – which is handy for the arbiters of public morality. If your tactic is simply to be outraged, you can count the number of bad words in Lady Chatterley, just as, 30-odd years after that was printed in an unexpurgated edition, critics could count the swearwords in a novel by James Kelman or Irvine Welsh, preventing them from having to address whatever uncomfortable things the books might actually be saying.*

* although swearwords are routinely still censored in print in newspapers (f**k and whatnot), the irony is that this kind of censoring only works for people who already know the words. If you know a word and are offended or horrified by it, but read it with some letters missing, does it become less offensive? Recently I’ve noticed people self-censoring non-swearwords that (I presume) might cause discomfort, such as writing ‘r*pe’, rather than ‘rape’. But a) does the use of the word ‘rape’ itself cause trauma? and b) if it does, does reading it in context as ‘r*pe’ cause less trauma? Because although it’s possible that the word I am assuming is ‘rape’ might be be warning me about ‘rope’ or ‘ripe’ – but rape is the only word that makes logical sense. And seeing that the sentence will only make sense if you understand that “r*pe” is “rape,” is the letter ‘a’ really the problem there? Are the letters “uc” the problem with the word “f**k”? This seems different to me from something like self-censoring a word associated with, say, racial abuse, where the censoree is avoiding an offensive term while also showing that they recognise its offensiveness and are distancing themselves from its casual use. But I am no authority!

the much maligned 1987 film of Less Than Zero is surprisingly faithful, perhaps because it was a product of the milieu that it depicts.

What was often lost in the furore surrounding American Psycho is that Ellis’s first two novels, Less Than Zero (1985) and The Rules of Attraction (1987) had also been controversial; it’s just that they were controversial in a way that was more comfortable for literary critics and especially for publishers. After all, you don’t get to be an enfant terrible without being young (Ellis was 20 years old when Less Than Zero was published), or in some way terrible. With Less Than Zero, it was as much the described world itself – decadent, affluent, mid-80s consumerist LA with its drugs and excess and callousness – as the behaviour of the protagonists which shocked reviewers. And (which is also true of his second novel The Rules Of Attraction but definitely not American Psycho) the positive reviews selected for quotation for the book’s cover were largely admiring of that excess, in the classic, coolly jaded ‘yes-it’s-all-very-shocking-if-you’re-old-and-shockable’ vein:

This is the novel your mother warned you about. Jim Morrison would be proud (Eve Babitz)

Bret Easton Ellis is undoubtedly the new master of youthful alienation … makes Jack Kerouac and his Beat Generation seem like pussies (Emily Prager).

the Picador Rules of Attraction paperback is a definitively 80s artefact

For whatever reason, nobody said that American Psycho made Charles Bukowski or Norman Mailer or even Stephen King seem like “pussies,” even though, in the sense that Prager means it, it certainly does. With The Rules Of Attraction, set in more or less the same social milieu as Less Than Zero, only on a New England College campus, the controversy was again more moral than literary; promiscuous sex! Drugs! These young people are amoral, unpleasant and cynical, why would anybody want to read, let alone write about them? But again, this is the kind of controversy that critics and especially publishers are comfortable with; low level outrage that is shocking enough to attract new readers but not shocking enough to require justification for publishing. This time, the approving review used by the publisher (at least of the UK Picador edition I have) is less gloating and perhaps slightly more defensive – yes he’s young and outrageous but please note that he’s a good writer too – appealing frankly (and I think accurately) to the literary precedent for books like Ellis’s:

Compelling … and sympathetic to his “lost generation” the way only Fitzgerald was about his (nameless Vanity Fair reviewer).

Interestingly, although Simon & Schuster in the USA sparked and fuelled the controversy of American Psycho by declining to publish it, Ellis’s UK publisher Picador didn’t follow suit, and the blurb and reviews chosen for the first UK paperback edition are instructional; they knew exactly what they had on their hands tabloid-wise, and it’s interesting to look at what the publisher says they are selling:

a bleak, bitter and aversive novel about a world we all recognise but do not wish to face, but also an explosive novel which brilliantly exposes American culture today and finally a black comedy, a disturbing portrait of a madman [strangely archaic phrase that], a subtle send-up of the blatant behaviour of the ‘80s – and a grotesque nightmare of murder and insanity.

It may be all of these things, but the word that, having just re-read the novel, feels at first oddly out of place there is ‘subtle’. American Psycho does not feel subtle. It’s a maximalist (is that a thing?) novel, roughly twice the length of the author’s first two, and perhaps half of that length is made up, in effect, of lists; what – in detail – every major and minor character is wearing when Patrick Bateman (the psycho of the title) encounters them, what kind of hygiene or beauty products characters are using, what food is being eaten and where, detailed analyses of the careers of the narrator’s favourite musical artists.* As mentioned before, until the film adaptation of American Psycho was released, the blackly comic aspect of the book – although explicitly mentioned in the blurb – was mostly overlooked (or outright denied), but one of the things that makes the nasty parts of the book so effective (and they are still bracingly explicit and intense 30 years on) is that they don’t happen until half way through the novel, at which point – if not for the title – the book is to all intents and purposes an immersive dip into the more absurd aspects of New York/Wall Street consumer yuppie culture.

* interestingly and humorously, outside of those few psycho-approved artists (Huey Lewis, Whitney Houston, Phil Collins) and current 80s hits (Madonna, INXS), every musical reference Bateman makes – to what is playing on the radio, or in a cab – he gets the artist wrong; when asked towards the end of the novel for the saddest song he knows he names You Can’t Always Get What You Want by The Beatles (sic)

Christian Bale, iconic as Patrick Bateman in Mary Harron’s 2000 adaptation of American Psycho

What Ellis does – and significantly, it’s what made Less Than Zero such a formidable debut – is to adopt a strangely blank and hypnotic voice (a bit like the famously ‘glazed’ tone used by JG Ballard – about whom more later – in his classic Atrocity Exhibition/High Rise/Crash period), which somehow (I guess this is the subtle part) ends up being the opposite of cold or uninvolving. In The Rules Of Attraction, one of the novel’s protagonists, Sean Bateman (as it turns out, the brother of American Psycho’s  Patrick), is a generally unpleasant, amoral, cynical opportunistic drug dealer, but the reader realises (though Sean himself seems not to) that this attitude is at least in part a defence mechanism to protect the more sensitive and romantic aspects of his nature that he would rather not acknowledge. In American Psycho, the reader has direct access to Patrick Bateman’s thoughts and feelings; not just what he really thinks and feels, but also, in some of the book’s stranger moments, what he seems to think he should think and feel. There’s a very odd page-and-a-half long monologue where Bateman lectures a group of friends and acquaintances on a kind of socially responsible, enlightened conservatism that is comically at odds with the reactionary nihilism we usually read in his thoughts:

Well, we have to end apartheid for one. And slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger… Better and more affordable long-term care for the elderly, control and find a cure for the AIDS epidemic, clean up environmental damage from toxic waste and pollution, improve the quality of primary and secondary education… (American Psycho, Picador, 1991, p.15)

It’s never entirely clear if this is Bateman being funny – he does have a sense of humour, but usually he tells us if he’s making a joke (his jokes are however – importantly – not the funny parts of the novel). Or if it’s his way of making his friends uncomfortable while trying to impress people who aren’t from his social circle, in this case a bohemian couple, which seems quite likely. Or if it’s just anomalous parts of his submerged and fragmenting personality coming through; throughout the book there are moments when we realise that this is, more or less, how he’s perceived by the other characters; the ‘boy next door’, an unusually sensitive and perhaps even shy member of their set, which reaches a comic climax when he leaves a confession of his hideous crimes on the voicemail of another of his interchangeable set of yuppie acquaintances. It’s treated as a not-very-successful joke by the recipient, who like everyone in the book, has trouble differentiating between the people he knows and thinks that Patrick is someone else:

‘come on man, you had one fatal flaw: Bateman’s such a bloody ass-kisser, such a brown-nosing goody-goody, that I couldn’t fully appreciate it…. He could barely pick up an escort girl, let alone…  Oh yes, ‘chop her up’’ (American Psycho, Picador, 1991, p.387)

the still-pretty-cool US first edition

The fact that Bateman is on the surface a normal member of his peer group, and by their standards even a fairly laudable example of the 80s yuppie is of course one of the things that made the book uncomfortable in 1991. A couple of years before American Psycho was published I had read and enjoyed Slob (1987) by Rex Miller. It’s a novel about a grotesque (and unlike Patrick Bateman) grotesque-looking, remorseless, obese sadistic outsider maniac who, having previously been utilised, hopefully improbably, by the government as an assassin in the Vietnam war, returns home and continues his ‘work’. It’s more or less relentless graphic violence and sex (in that order), not really a searing indictment of anything, (although obviously not pro-serial killer either) but as far as I know the publisher had no qualms about publishing it and, far from feeling the need to defend it in the blurb or quotes, took pride in its extremeness; Slob is almost too crudely terrifying to be read… (said Stephen King, quoted on the front cover) But it is too compelling to be put down. 

a powerful indictment of overweight people wielding chains

Well yes; Slob is genre fiction after all, and therefore weirdly immune – on an individual level at least* – to the vagaries of the moral panic. It’s a fact that questions like ‘would American Psycho be published today?’ still pop up in newspapers from time to time, while the excesses of gory 80s horror are, if they are still in print, (rightly) still there in bookshops to be read by anyone who wants to do so. And some of those books really are mindlessly violent or repellently misogynistic, without the publisher feeling any particular need to defend them. No shrinkwrap is required, no literary reviewer was disappointed to find that their faith in a promising young writer had been repaid by Slob and nobody (or at least nobody powerful or influential) made to feel uncomfortable by the things it was saying about the country. If it had been written by, say, Jay McInerney and called American Slob perhaps there would have been some concern about teenagers buying it and circulating it among their friends; possibly it would also have sold more copies (though I think it did pretty well); because of course the ultimate irony of any moral panic is that it creates an interest in and appetite for what it condemns. Notoriety is good publicity.

*while it’s rare – though not unheard of – for a single genre book or film to be targeted by a moral panic there is always the chance that the ‘powers that want to be’ will try to remove a whole genre or sub-genre at once as with the UK’s notorious ‘video nasties’ furore. In a way the horror genre is always stuck in a kind of self-perpetuating, positive/negative loop – horror can ‘get away with’ pretty much any kind of extreme and transgressive material it wants to, because that is part of its raison d’etre. On the other hand, it’s very hard for that transgression to have much of a wider impact beyond the horror genre because it’s ‘just’ horror.

The reviews used by Picador on the back cover of American Psycho are as interesting at its blurb. Retraité terrible* Norman Mailer is quoted;

He has forced us to look at intolerable material, and so few novels try for that much anymore.

Clearly, Mailer had not been ‘forced to look at’ Slob. Or anything by Skipp and Spector, or Clive Barker, or Shaun Hutson (whose Spawn made me feel physically sick on first reading, which American Psycho, presumably because of the influence of Spawn, and lots of other books like Spawn, did not. More about that kind of thing here). That ‘forced’ is fun too; forced how? Because he was paid to review it?

* Vieil homme terrible? if I could speak any French at all I could have made this joke more confidently; in English I’d say something like ‘OAP terrible Norman Mailer’. Which is as good a point as any to mention a particular paternalistic and I think class-based kind of censorship that used to exist in the UK. Several times I’ve come across older books (most recently a book about the historical figure Erzsébet Báthory (the real Hungarian ‘Countess Dracula’) by Valentine Penrose, the wife of surrealist Roland Penrose, that was written in French and translated into English by the wayward Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi. Translated apart, that is, from any especially salacious parts, which were left in French, presumably so that only well educated British people could be traumatised by them. 

(American Psycho is) a very disturbing book, quoth Joe McGinnis, but the author is writing from the deepest, purest motives. Which may be true, but is it relevant? Pan books did not feel the need to reassure readers about Rex Miller’s motives. In fact, Picador, when selling Less Than Zero, chose quotes which actively encouraged the idea that Ellis’s motive with that book was to shock people. But surely if shocking readers is a valid motive (it is) then American Psycho was far more successful even than Less Than Zero? If Bret Easton Ellis’s motives had been to provide the reader with some kind of complicated entertainment, to amuse and entertain and make them think, or if he wanted  to lecture them on morality or to disgust and repel them, or even if, as his detractors said, he just got off on writing about violence, sex and Phil Collins, does that change the book itself? These are questions, I’m not sure about the answers.

Although the book contains horrifying scenes, said Nora Rawlinson, they must be read in the context of the book as a whole; the horror does not lie in the novel itself, but in the society it reflects. This book is not pleasure reading, but neither is it pornography. It is a serious novel that comments on a society that has become inured to suffering.

This seems fair enough, but it also contains some odd statements; that ‘but neither’ is strange, isn’t it? Being neither ‘pleasure reading’ (whatever that means) nor pornography suggests firstly, that pornography isn’t pleasure reading; maybe not, but what is it then? People seemed to be reading the Fifty Shades… books for some kind of pleasure, which is, believe it or not, not a judgement of the books. And secondly, it suggests that a novel can be read for something other than pleasure – which it obviously can, but a novel, even a polemical novel (and American Psycho isn’t that) still isn’t a lecture. JG Ballard – him again – was less squeamish about what his books were or weren’t, and wrote, for a 1995 edition of his most controversial novel Crash;

I would still like to think that Crash is the first pornographic novel based on technology. In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way. (Crash, Vintage books, 1995, p.6).

This – although he later slightly recanted and said that Crash was purely a ‘psychopathic hymn with a point’ – seems to me a more valuable observation than any of those printed on the back cover of my edition of American Psycho. (Interesting but value-free information; Vintage, the publisher of that edition of Crash, was also the publisher that picked up American Psycho in the US after Simon & Schuster refused to print it. And James Spader, who plays a slimy drug dealer in the movie version of Less Than Zero is also in David Cronenberg’s Crash. Connections! But what of them?)

transgressive 80s classic

There is more than one way of dealing with a controversial novel; and the fact that Picador was squeamish or at least cautious about the book they were publishing comes through clearly in that careful choice of quotes from positive, but very sober reviews. That several of those quotes are from women is also probably no coincidence; the book was attacked (most visibly by Gloria Steinem) as being misogynistic. And indeed it is, insofar as the narrator and his milieu, and the 1980s, and consumerist capitalist culture are and were. But the book is called American Psycho; not What Bret Easton Ellis Thinks About Women and it seems surprising that, coming just as Gordon Gekko and his ilk seemed like historical figures and the 90s had established its own distinct identity, a very personal satire of the 1980s, written by an author whose earlier work was both a thoughtful product of and also an embodiment of that era (and also not misogynistic), should be taken at something less than face value. Too soon, and too extreme perhaps? But if it had come later it would suggest an absolving clarity that can only come with hindsight, and if it had been less extreme an absolving kind of a shrug; but it is what it is because the 80s were what they were; a kind of wild, extravagant, decadent but above all exclusive party; exhilarating, on the surface, for a while; if you were invited and could afford to attend. In a way, Picador missed a trick; given the book’s pre-publication notoriety, they might have been better to quote from both positive and negative reviews, as Abacus did with Iain Banks’s 1984 debut The Wasp Factory. In both editions that I have owned (a mid 80s paperback and a 2005 reprint), the book has several pages dedicated to reviews which say things like Perhaps it is all a joke, meant to fool literary London into respect for rubbish (The Times). Of course, these kinds of reviews are really a selling point, just as, in the 90s, an author being sneered at by Tom Paulin and Allison Pearson on The Late Show was usually a promising sign.

Funny Games; it’s not very nice though this poster reminds me of the one for Howard the Duck somehow

But if, as the positive reviews said, American Psycho isn’t to be read for pleasure then what is it to be read for? Education? Certainly it has – especially over time – gained a kind of educational value as a time capsule or artefact of some aspects of – and the texture of – 80s American culture. But is that what it is for? Or should it be seen as – which Rawlinson’s quote seems to be suggesting – a kind of literary analogue to a something like Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games, where the director is saying ‘so you like to watch horror films? You like violence and torture do you? Well here you go. Not very nice is it?’ But that isn’t how American Psycho feels exactly, despite being published at the height of the early 90s serial killer boom (there’s a phrase), a time when Jonathan Demme’s straightforward and well made horror thriller The Silence of the Lambs was somehow elevated to Oscar-worthy, cultural event status; clearly something, like the stench emanating from Dennis Nilsen’s drains, was in the air.

If JG Ballard’s aforementioned 1973 novel Crash was, as Ballard sometimes stated, cautionary as well as pornographic; a novel to be read for (peculiar sexual) pleasure, but also a vision of the future concerning how humanity might be shaped by the very environment it had built to suit its needs and whims; a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape is how he put it in that introduction (Crash, Vintage Books, 1995, p.6), then in American Psycho, it was already too late for caution. This is a historical novel; this, says Ellis, or at least says Patrick Bateman, is what we became in the 80s. In the chapter End of the 1980s, Patrick himself gives us an extremely Ballardian kind of collage:

The dreams are an endless reel of car wrecks and disaster footage, electric chairs and grisly suicides, syringes and mutilated pinup girls, flying saucers, marble Jacuzzis, pink peppercorns(…) A month ago was the anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death… Football games flash by, the sound turned off… All summer long Madonna cries out to us “life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone…” (American Psycho, Picador, 1991, p.371)

This is still recognisably the author of Less Than Zero, but where Ellis seemed before to coolly comment on the state of the society he was talking about, here he is immersed in it. As before, the author shows us a group of people who are numb, alienated from the world and from each other, possibly looking for some kind of connection with humanity while also (inadvertently? deliberately?) distancing themselves from the possibility of it. But while outwardly, Bateman prides himself on just this kind of cool detachment, from our position inside his head we can see that however unreliable he is as a narrator (it’s never clear what really does or doesn’t happen, partly because, like everyone else in the book, he can’t really tell one person from another, outside of his closest friends), he is anything but emotionless, but instead a mass of obsessive, raw neuroses, circling endlessly around status, wealth, sex and (increasingly) age; turning 30 is something that would probably fill him with nameless dread, as many things do. Whether or not he really murders anyone (a source of frequent debate, though the publisher’s blurb takes for granted that he does), the title still stands. And it’s an important title too; after all, Robert Bloch’s Psycho was also American, but only because Robert Bloch was. American Psycho is deliberately specific.

I’ve mentioned JG Ballard’s Crash a few times, because for all its differences, it met with a similar response to American Psycho (not least from Ballard’s publisher – had Ballard been a mainstream and not genre author, it would have been an ideal contender for moral panic status. Something similar happened with the movie, where the fact that it was made by director David Cronenberg, maker of legendarily peculiar horror films, to some extent defused the more controversial aspects of the film although the Daily Mail etc tried, bless them). Like American Psycho, Crash‘s mixture of extreme violence and sex remains potent and shocking decades after its original publication. Like American Psycho too, it’s often a funny book, although the humour was not really translated to Cronenberg’s good but oddly restrained film version. Partly the film is less comical because toning down the mayhem (a film that really looked like the book reads would have been banned everywhere in the world) makes it less funny*, but also because robbing the story of its very specific object of obsessive desire, Elizabeth Taylor (presumably because she was still alive at the time; the stuff about Jayne Mansfield is still in the film) makes it less absurdly funny. The film version of American Psycho is still humorous (especially regarding the swapping of business cards), but the novel’s funniest scene, which is also one of its most strangely moving, is not included for – I presume – similarly practical reasons.

*see also Paul Verhoeven’s classic RoboCop, where the cuts administered by the BBFC to some of the more ludicrously violent scenes made what was brutal and blackly funny into something that was just brutal; do these people not want extreme violence to be funny??

Throughout American Psycho, we see Bateman revelling in, and/or boasting about his alienation from the human race, his merciless coldness and basic inhumanity etc etc, but there are several scenes where, against his will, he is forced into some kind of intimacy with another character. Usually it’s Luis Carruthers, a friendly acquaintance who mistakenly believes that Bateman is in love with him and unfortunately reciprocates, or Jean, his secretary who Bateman assumes is in love with him, but whose feelings, we learn, are more complex than Patrick realises. But strangely we see Patrick at his most naked and human and afraid at a U2 concert where, to his alarm, he shares a rare and intense moment of connection with Bono, of all people; the horror. This is not the kind of relationship that Bateman has with the artists he really likes. There is though, an almost equally funny moment in the late chapter Huey Lewis and the News (the last of Patrick’s disarmingly straightforward, cheerful and perceptive rundowns of his favourite artists’ careers) when his veneer of normality starts to crack – as well it might – and he says The album [Small World, 1988] ends with “Slammin’,” which has no words and it’s just a lot of horns that quite frankly, if you turn it up really loud, can give you a fucking big headache and maybe even make you feel a little sick.

What I have perhaps not stressed enough here is the general sincerity of the book. Some critics felt that Ellis was being sneeringly cold and cynical about the people and lifestyle he portrays, but (to me at least) it doesn’t feel that way, especially compared to his first two novels. Obviously American Psycho isn’t, thankfully, autobiographical in a narrow sense, but Bret Easton Ellis was still – more than ever – concerned with the fate of his ‘lost generation.’  These were successful young American people for whom a whole culture had been built to fulfil their every whim and enrich – albeit at a price – every element of their lives, but which instead seemed only to emphasise its own emptiness. You might think that it’s hard to feel sorry for people who have (in material terms) everything, and you might be right; but these are his people. That the worship of visible success makes anything that isn’t visible success look like abject failure seems like a glib kind of lesson, but it’s only one element of a richly textured, (sometimes literally) tortured and yet funny and readable book. Thirty years on, what’s funnier (in more than one sense) now than it was in 1991 is Patrick Bateman’s Donald Trump obsession – also less of a feature in the film – which, from the perspective of 2021 seems quite surreal but also strangely fitting. American Psycho is, after all, largely Patrick Bateman telling us, based on his experience, how the world works, and sometimes he’s right.

the television will not be revolutionised; Stranger Things, Dark and blockbuster TV

I suppose I should warn people: this is pretty much all spoilers.

Television has always had one big advantage over cinema – time – which should really make it the better medium for drama. After all, the novel is almost always superior to the short story for depth, breadth, detail, plot and character development; and yet, there are more of all of those things in, say, the three hours of Scorsese’s Goodfellas than in 60+ years of Coronation Street. What happens in fact  – even in shows that only last a few seasons –  is more often stagnation, repetition, a growing sense of desperately trying to fight for ratings by increased sensationalism or controversy. But despite the smartass and I’m sure unoriginal title here (I intentionally haven’t checked), I don’t think television needs to be revolutionised, it just needs to act as though its virtues – especially the time and intimacy it has – are virtues, and not try to import the features of a Hollywood blockbuster into a more modestly sized format. But there is one thing that TV could and should learn from cinema; the satisfying (all different kinds of satisfying) ending that is mostly mandatory in film and in most cases isn’t just a tacked-on afterthought.

TV advertising as movie posters; Stranger Things embodying its 80s setting, Dark its disorienting fractured quality

I first saw mention of Dark online just after season one had launched, where it was described as a kind of German Stranger Things. The two shows are almost entirely unalike, but the comparison is a natural one; both belong to the world of the Netflix blockbuster, both are somewhere in the sci-fi/horror genre, both feature young protagonists, both are set (in the case of Dark, only partly) in the 80s. And both seem to owe something to successful movies, but the contrast here is a significant one; Stranger Things (especially in its opening, best season) owes a lot to JJ Abrams’s nostalgic, fun, Spielberg-esque Super 8 (2011), an end-of-the-70s-set movie that is in equal measures a sci-fi adventure movie and a rites of passage film about teenagers and friendship, ET-meets­-Stand By Me. Super 8 is essentially a story about young teens trying to find their place in a world/universe that is bigger and scarier than they realised and discovering along the way that ‘the authorities’ aren’t to be trusted and that their parents are really just as in the dark about everything as the kids are themselves. And a space monster. It succeeds because it’s slick and well made and has a lot of heart, but also – especially – because the young cast were great; Stranger Things season one mirrored almost all of those things too.

the Super 8 movie poster, underplaying its 80s blockbuster feel

But there is – thankfully, so far – no sequel to Super 8. In borrowing so heavily from highly cinematic sources, Stranger Things also borrowed the structure – including the big finale –of a Hollywood blockbuster. But like many of those, because it was successful it therefore demanded a sequel that was in no way implied by the original story. So what you had instead was a fairly enjoyable season two, with even more sense of “the 80s”,  not the actual 80s experienced by people who were alive then, but endless, not always concurrent pop cultural references that in the end made it feel as weirdly dislocating as the 60s of a TV show like Heartbeat where Elvis Presley, the twist, hippies and the summer of love all seem to be happening at the same time. The story to season two though did have the authentic-in-a-way feel of an 80s horror movie sequel – a fun but slightly unsatisfactory Freddie’s Revenge, we-made-a lot-of-money-last-time, what-can-we-do-now type sequel. And then season three was the inevitable diminishing returns sequel, only now it didn’t even pretend to be the actual 80s at all, just the 80s that people who have seen cheesy Hollywood movies would experience, where Soviet Russians really were the almost robot-like villains of Rocky IV or Red Dawn. I feel like younger people might want to know that this was American paranoia/propaganda, rather than historical fact. Although I’m sure there really were Soviet spy stations (with people wearing actual military uniforms!) hidden under malls all over the US. This was a disappointingly stupid show and also – inevitably –  suffered from the kind of awkwardness that always happens with casts of children as time passes, an issue from the Our Gang and Bowery Boys franchises of the 1930s onwards. Imagine what it might have been like if they’d made a Goonies sequel a couple of years later with teenage Goonies instead of children – the pre/early teens are very different, friendship-wise from what comes later, and although there’s a lot of bittersweet drama to be found in that, Stranger Things was barely concerned with it at all. But it was successful, so there will be more of it.

the Stranger Things kids, ageing in real time

This is the downfall of blockbuster TV; whereas movie franchises limp to their inevitable demise, becoming weaker and weaker carbon copies of what went before, TV dramas (and sitcoms too, if they go on too long) devolve into soap operas, concerned more with the relationships between the protagonists instead of putting those characters into meaningful stories. And then, when the viewing figures fall, they get cancelled. Stranger Things 4 may be great – I hope it is – but it might also be a lot of squabbling teenagers in what should probably be the 90s by now but which may be marked – appropriately I guess – by references to Ghostbusters 2, Back To The Future 2 (or Friday the 13th Part 7 and A Nightmare on Elm Street 5), hair metal and whatever commercials, candy and hairstyles the producers think shout ‘late 80s’ most loudly. It would be nice though to have a bit of imagination and a proper ending. In TV terms I’d say it’s far better to have an end in sight and be missed when you go than to be cancelled and remembered as something that was once good but got milked to death; but that’s just me maybe.

the Donnie Darko poster, looking very of its (2001) time, in a good way

Meanwhile Dark felt cinematic too, but in a very different way. Whereas Stranger Things seemed to have its genesis in Super 8, Dark seems to owe some of its ideas and a lot of its atmosphere to Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001), a very different 80s-set film in which a troubled teenager is caught in a series of strange events caused by a loop in time which must be undone in order to restore equilibrium to his/the world; but at a tragic cost.  The basic themes of Donnie Darko are not really a million miles removed from those of Super 8, but whereas that movie’s protagonists are in the awkward, bittersweet children-into-teens phase, discovering the boundaries of their childhood friendships and the awakening of sexual desire etc, Donnie is a depressed, disillusioned but still idealistic 17 year old, looking for answers to the big questions of life and death but finding that – like the Super 8  kids – no-one, however much authority they seem to have, really knows any more than he does. And it’s also about time travel.

the three ages of Jonas; Louis Hofmann, Andreas Pietschmann and Dietrich Hollinderbäumer

What Dark did (I write this assuming they won’t spoil it with a 4th season) is what TV drama so rarely does, but which cinema almost always does – it has a sense of overall structure, an ending in mind even as it begins (more than that, that’s one of the major themes running through the show itself).  Unlike with Stranger Things, seasons two and three of Dark were not only implied by the events of season one, they have to happen to bring the story to any kind of satisfactory close. One of the strengths of Stranger Things is that if it had been cancelled after the first season it would have been just as good; but Dark would have been incredibly frustrating. This is quite a fundamental difference; when the plot of a (drama) show becomes secondary to the characters it can absolutely still be great, it’s just that, while it remains popular enough to justify making it, it has no real need to be any good, like the aforementioned Friday the 13ths

On the other hand, a strength (and I guess from the financial point of view, a weakness) of Dark is that, as it stands now, the show can only be continued by ruining it and undoing the perfectly formed story that was told. That story (as implied from the beginning but explicitly mentioned from season two onwards) was an increasingly complicated knot (the moment where one character was revealed to be her own grandmother and therefore her own granddaughter was perhaps the pinnacle of the show’s brain-hurting complexity) and, in the end, Alexander the Great-like, the writers simply cut through it. But although that sounds disappointing – and initially, the final season felt like a sidestep rather than a continuation – it ultimately made total sense and explained every bizarre and apparently illogical detail of what had come before it, as well as reinforcing the significance of background details that were there from the very beginning of the show, such as the strange trefoil symbol that appeared on the doors to the time portals.

the symbol that sums up the show

But although I’ve stressed the importance of the plot, where Dark really utilises the virtues of television over film is in the time it spends developing a whole set of characters, at various stages of their lives, in ways that make them feel real and believable. Some of the show’s initially least likeable secondary characters, such as the local Policeman Egon Tiedemann, in the end become tragic figures, not because of anything especially dramatic (though lots of dramatic things happen to them) but just because we see them, young, middle aged, old, repeating their mistakes, invariably making the wrong decisions and never really coming to grips with their own lives before they are over. It also makes us re-evaluate the villains as well as the heroes (sometimes there is no difference between the two). At the beginning of season one it’s immediately obvious that the apparent itinerant preacher Noah is a (slightly cheesy) villain. By the end of season three it turns out he wasn’t any kind of evil mastermind but was no better off than anyone else, a tragic, literally misconceived figure, trapped in circumstances beyond his control, doing horrible things in apparently good faith, to no avail whatsoever.

Hannah Kahnwald in the 80s and 2010s, Ella Lee and Maja Schöne – the casting of Dark played a major role in the show’s success

The representation of the same characters in different time periods is occasionally done in cinema – Richard Linklater and Martin Scorsese spring to mind – but it comes far more naturally to television, with its ability to really stretch out; and yet it hardly ever happens. Soap operas can run literally for decades, with actors ageing in real time and yet never lose the feeling of utter triviality that separates them from great drama; perhaps because although the characters inevitably end, the show trundles on; like life, arguably, but I’m not going to pursue that metaphor. It’s no coincidence that most soaps (in the UK at least) are named after their location, the one immutable element in the show.

Katharina Nielsen; Nele Trebs and Jördis Triebel

The fact that – as in Donnie Darko – the ‘happy ending’ of Dark involves the death (or in this case the non-existence) of characters who the viewer has come to like, love, identify with, empathise with etc – and yet still feels like the right ending – is testament to the skill of the makers of the show. And more importantly – and here it goes beyond Donnie Darko – the final reveal of the origin of the temporal anomaly surrounding the town of Winden was right. Not some random occurrence like the aeroplane engine that ‘should’ have killed Donnie, but an event that logically implies all that follows and explains some of its more enigmatic characters (not least her-own-grandmother-and-granddaughter Charlotte).  Written down, the basic theme sounds a bit trite – trying to change the past can destroy the present and future  – but onscreen, with well drawn and (very) well acted characters,  the idea (kind of like in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary) that in trying to bring back the dead you can awaken other things, is both powerful and emotionally engaging.

All of which is a very long way around to say that television doesn’t need to be revolutionised, it just needs to be seen for its own virtues and not as a kind of surrogate cinema. Hopefully the makers of Stranger Things get it right next time.

 

time for a change; the death of a decade

 

Between the ages of 14 and 16 or thereabouts, the things I probably loved the most – or at least the most consistently – were horror (books and movies) and heavy metal.

These loves changed (and ended, for a long time) at around the same time as each other in a way that I’m sure is typical of adolescence, but which also seemed to reflect bigger changes in the world. Reading this excellent article that references the end of the 80s horror boom made me think; are these apparent beginnings and endings really mainly internal ones that we only perceive as seismic shifts because of how they relate to us? After all, Stephen King, Clive Barker, James Herbert & co continued to have extremely successful careers after I stopped buying their books, and it’s not like horror movies or heavy metal ground to a halt either. But still; looking back, the turn of the 80s to the 90s still feels like a change of era and of culture in a way that not every decade does (unless you’re a teenager when it happens perhaps?) But why should 1989/90 be more different than say, 85/86? Although time is ‘organised’ in what feels like an arbitrary manner (the time it takes the earth to travel around the sun is something which I don’t think many of us experience instinctively or empirically as we do with night and day), decades do seem to develop their own identifiable ‘personalities’ somehow, or perhaps we simply sort/filter our memories of the period until they do so.

“The 80s” is a thing that means many different things to different people; but in the western world its iconography and soundtrack have been agreed on and packaged in a way that, if it doesn’t necessarily reflect your own experience, it at least feels familiar if you were there. What the 2010s will look like to posterity is hard to say; but the 2020s seem to have established themselves as something different almost from the start; whether they will end up as homogeneous to future generations as the 1920s seem to us now is impossible to say at this point; based on 2020 so far, hopefully not.

I sometimes feel like my adolescence began at around the age of 11 and ended some time around 25, but still, my taste in music, books, films etc went through a major change in the second half of my teens which was surely not coincidental. But even trying to look at it objectively, it  really does seem like everything else was changing too. From the point of view of a teenager, the 80s came to a close in a way that few decades since have done; in world terms, the cold war – something that had always been in the background for my generation – came to an end. Though that was undoubtedly a euphoric moment, 80s pop culture – which had helped to define what ‘the west’ meant during the latter period of that war – seemed simultaneously to be running out of steam.

“The 80s” (I actually owned this poster as a kid, which seems extremely bizarre now)

My generation grew up with a background of brainless action movies starring people like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, who suddenly seemed to be laughable and obsolete, teen comedies starring ‘teens’ like Andrew McCarthy and Robert Downey, Jr who were now uneasily in their 20s. We had both old fashioned ‘family entertainment’ like Little & Large and Cannon & Ball which was, on TV at least. in its dying throes; but then so was the ‘alternative comedy’ boom initiated by The Young Ones, as its stars became the new mainstream. The era-defining franchises we had grown up with – Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Police Academy – seemed to be either finished or on their last legs. Comics, were (it seemed) suddenly¹ semi-respectable and re-branded as graphic novels, even if many of the comics themselves remained the same old pulpy nonsense in new, often painted covers. The international success of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira in 1988 opened the gates for the manga and anime that would become part of international pop culture from the 90s onwards.

the 80s: book covers as faux movie posters – black/red/metallic; extremely non-psychedelic

Those aforementioned things I loved the most in the late 80s, aged 14-15 – horror fiction and heavy metal music – were changing too. The age of the blockbuster horror novel wasn’t quite over, but its key figures; Stephen King, James Herbert, Clive Barker², Shaun Hutson – all seemed to be losing interest in the straightforward horror-as-horror novel³, diversifying into more fantastical or subtle, atmospheric or ironic kinds of stories. In movies too, the classic 80s Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th franchises – as definitively 80s as anything else the decade produced – began to flag in terms of both creativity and popularity. Somewhere between these two models of evolution and stagnation were the metal bands I liked best. These seemed to either be going through a particularly dull patch, with personnel issues (Iron Maiden, Anthrax) or morphing into something softer (Metallica) or funkier Suicidal Tendencies). As with the influence of Clive Barker in horror, so bands who were only partly connected with metal (Faith No More, Red Hot Chilli Peppers) began to shape the genre. All of which occurred as I began to be obsessed with music that had nothing to do with metal at all, whether contemporary (Pixies, Ride, Lush, the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Jesus Jones – jesus, the Shamen etc) or older (The Smiths, Jesus and Mary Chain, The Doors⁴, the Velvet Underground).

Revolver #1, July 1990: very not 80s

Still; not many people are into the same things at 18 as they were at 14; and it’s tempting to think that my feelings about the end of the decade had more to do with my age than the times themselves; but they were indeed a-changing, and a certain aspect of the new decade is reflected in editor Peter K. Hogan’s ‘Outro’ to the debut issue of the somewhat psychedelically-inclined comic Revolver (published July 1990):

Why Revolver?
Because what goes around comes around, and looking out my window it appears to be 1966 again (which means – with any luck – we should be in for a couple of good years ahead of us). Because maybe – just maybe – comics might now occupy the slot that rock music used to. Because everything is cyclical and nothing lasts forever (goodbye, Maggie). Because the 90s are the 60s upside down (and let’s do it right, this time). Because love is all and love is everything and this is not dying. Any more stupid questions?

This euphoric vision of the 90s was understandable (when Margaret Thatcher finally resigned in 1990 there was a generation of by now young adults who couldn’t remember any other Prime Minister) but it aged quickly. The ambiguity of the statement ‘the 90s are the 60s upside down’ is embodied in that disclaimer (and let’s do it right, this time) and turned out to be prophetic; within a month of the publication of Revolver issue1 the Gulf War had begun. Aspects of that lost version of the 90s lived on in rave culture, just as aspects of the summer of love lived on through the 70s in the work of Hawkwind and Gong, but to posterity the 90s definitely did not end up being the 60s vol.2. In the end, like the 80s, the 90s (like every decade?) is defined, depending on your age and point of view, on a series of apparently incompatible things; rave and grunge, Jurassic Park and Trainspotting, Riot Grrrl and the Spice Girls, New Labour and Saddam Hussein.

That tiny oasis of positivity in 1990 – between the Poll Tax Riots on 31st March and the declaration of the first Gulf War on the 2nd August is, looking back, even shorter than I remember, and some of the things I loved in that strange interregnum between adolescence and adulthood (which lasted much longer than those few months) – perhaps because they seemed grown up then – are in some ways more remote now than childhood itself. So… conclusions? I don’t know, the times change as we change and they change us as we change them; a bit too Revolver, a lot too neat. And just as we are something other than the sum of our parents, there’s some part of us too that seems to be independent of the times we happen to exist in. I’ll leave the last words to me, aged 18, not entirely basking in the spirit of peace and love that seemed to be ushered in by the new decade.

¹ in reality this was the result of a decade of quiet progress led by writers like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Frank Miller
² although 100% part of the 80s horror boom, Barker is perhaps more responsible than any other writer for the end of its pure horror phase
³ Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, though dating from earlier in the 80s, appeared in print with much fanfare in the UK in the late 80s and, along with the more sci-fi inflected The Tommyknockers and the somewhat postmodern The Dark Half seemed to signal a move away from the big, cinematic horror novels like Pet Sematary, Christine, Cujo et al. In fact, looking at his bibliography, there really doesn’t appear to be the big shift around the turn of the 90s that I remember, except that a couple of his new books around that time (Dark Tower III, Needful Things, Gerald’s Game for one reason or another didn’t have half the impact that It had on me. That’s probably the age thing). James Herbert, more clearly, abandoned the explicit gore of his earlier work for the more or less traditional ghost story Haunted (1988) and the semi-comic horror/thriller Creed (1990)– a misleadingly portentous title which always makes me think of that Peanuts cartoon where Snoopy types This is a story about Greed. Joe Greed lived in a small town in Colorado… Clive Barker, who had already diverged into dark fantasy with Weaveworld, veered further away from straightforward horror with The Great & Secret Show while reliably fun goremeister Shaun Hutson published the genuinely dark Nemesis, a book with little of the black humour – and only a fraction of the bodycount – of his earlier work.                                                                                    ⁴ the release of Oliver Stone’s The Doors in 1991 is as 90s as the 50s of La Bamba (1987) and Great Balls of Fire (1989) was 80s. Quite a statement.

 

You Shouldn’t Always Get What You Want; cautionary tales of the 80s by Stephen King & Ramsey Campbell

The 1980s is a decade most often defined – at least in Western countries by some of its most visible features; greed and consumerism, accelerated capitalism, wealth-as-glamour, blockbuster entertainment (and not just in Hollywood; what could be more 80s than the novels of Jackie Collins and Jeffrey Archer?)  Even charity – one would think the polar opposite of everything the decade stood for – took on a big, glossy, stadium-filling character. One of the decade’s most beloved humanitarian events, Live Aid was for all its positive impact, complicated at best; essentially an advertisement for the very culture that created gross inequality which simultaneously attempted to right some of its wrongs. If the 70s had been ‘the me decade’ with its post-hippy focus on the discovery and nurturing of the inner self, the 80s turned that focus outwards; now you know who you are it’s time to get what you want – all well and good if you had the means to do it.

Given that context, it’s no surprise that during that decade, horror authors should have taken on the venerable theme of the Faustian pact; the true cost of getting what you want. The most extreme and morally complex version (that I’ve read) is probably Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart (1986; filmed by its author as Hellraiser a few years later), but this article was inspired by a recent reading of two novels: Needful Things by Stephen King (published 1991, but written between 1988-91) and Ramsey Campbell’s Obsession (1985).

The stories are dissimilar but have a kind of 80s horror family likeness; both concern the effect of evil, perhaps supernatural forces in small, ‘sleepy’ communities (Stephen King’s Castle Rock and the seaside town of Seaward in East Anglia) and both depict the lives of their characters unravelling after they are granted their heart’s desire (or at least what they think their heart’s desire is) at a cost which is not apparent until afterwards.

Although more than twice the length of Obsession, Needful Things, in some ways the last of King’s big 80s blockbusters, is the simpler of the two stories. It concerns the arrival in Castle Rock of the sinister Luciferian salesman Leland Gaunt and his shop Needful Things, wherein the town’s residents find objects with apparently great personal value (a signed baseball card, Elvis memorabilia, a fishing rod) at surprisingly affordable prices; but in addition to the cash price, Gaunt also requires his customers to perform duties for him, in the guise of ‘pranks’ which range from the innocuous to the seriously criminal.  At the heart of the book are the opposed forces of darkness – Gaunt himself but also the various underlying rivalries and tensions within Castle Rock which he brings to the surface – and if not light, then at least law and order, in the stolid shape of Sheriff Alan Pangborn.  Needful Things is a very self-referential novel; King takes for granted that readers will recognise allusions to other ‘Castle Rock’ stories; most obviously The Dark Half (1989) which introduced Pangborn, but also Cujo (1981) and The Body (1982, filmed as Stand By Me), which introduced Leland Gaunt’s petty criminal henchman “Ace” Merrill as a juvenile delinquent teenager. It’s also typical of King’s long (790 pages) novels of the 80s in that it weaves together various plot strands and characters, bringing the story to a dramatic (in fact almost apocalyptic) climax reminiscent of the final, blood-drenched act of the typical 80s horror movie (though the movies themselves were arguably orchestrated in that way because of the influence of King’s earlier works like Carrie (1974).

Sometimes this structure works better than others. For me, it’s at its best in It (1986) where the final catastrophe has an inbuilt logic and even inevitability. The entity terrorising Derry (best known as Pennywise; and really, people think clowns are cool nowadays?? Surely even more lame than finding them scary) pre-dates the city itself and shaped its sinister history. So the destruction of the creature naturally entails the destruction of Derry. It works less well (again, just for me) in Apt Pupil (1982) where the genuinely disturbing opening (one of King’s best) and rising tension is undermined by the ludicrously spiralling body count and in Pet Sematary (1983) where the very human bleakness and nihilism at the novel’s heart is weakened by the over-the-top supernatural carnage of the closing chapters.

Needful Things falls somewhere in the middle; the town being literally blown up at the novel’s climax never feels as necessary or as cathartic as the destruction of Derry in It, but on the other hand, it’s a fitting end to a novel whose main villain is larger-than-life, theatrical and slightly campy and whose hero has a sideline as an amateur magician. If there’s a moral to Needful Things, it’s not only the proverbial ‘be careful what you wish for’ but also a very 80s one; if a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Obsession (Campbell’s preferred and superior title was For The Rest of Their Lives) is less of an extroverted, cinematic rollercoaster ride than Needful Things, but ironically has the blood of a bona fide slick 80s blockbuster – and not a particularly inventive one – running in its veins. The novel’s genesis came when the author was sent to review Rocky III (1982) and became intrigued by the scene in which Apollo Creed agrees to train Rocky with one condition; with the caveat that he won’t find out what that condition is until the training is complete. In Campbell’s story, a troubled teenager in the 1950s receives an anonymous letter offering aid (WHATEVER YOU MOST NEED I DO) with the somewhat vague price of something you do not value and which you may regain. He and four friends take up the offer, with the short term effect that their wishes come true. A quarter century later, the friends are still in Seaward, living outwardly successful lives which proceed to horrifically fall apart.

Stephen King and Ramsey Campbell’s writing styles make for an interesting contrast; as a teenager I found Campbell’s books a little slow and understated for my taste, but in fact one of the most noticeable things about Obsession (which I just read for the first time) is that it feels a little rushed, unfolding over 280 pages where it could comfortably have been twice as long and half as fast-moving. Positively, this brevity makes the story fly by, but it also feels a little disjointed and illogical at times, especially in the final climactic chapters. Where King’s writing is largely conversational in tone (chapter one of Needful Things begins, In a small town, the opening of a new store is big news.* Campbell’s is very carefully-worded and precisely descriptive, although ironically this precision sometimes works against the effect, producing oddly un-illuminating pictures of the people and places involved. In contrast to Needful Things‘s almost cornily old-fashioned opening, Obsession begins Twenty-five years later, when Peter realized at last what they had signed away, he had still not forgotten that afternoon: still remembered the waves flocking down from the horizon to sweep up the fishing boats, the glass of the classroom windows shivering with the wind, chalk dust drowsing in the September sunlight, his throat going dry as he realized everyone was looking at him.** It’s typical of the ambiguous tone of Obsession that after reading what is quite a long descriptive paragraph the reader doesn’t really have a firm idea of the kind of day it was – sunny and windy presumably, but could equally be mellow and warm (chalk dust drowsing) or stormy and cold (waves flocking, windows shivering).

* Needful Things, 1991, New English Library, p.13

** Obsession, 1985, Futura Publications, p.9

Stephen King’s cast of characters is vividly and firmly drawn, a familiar mix of wholesome youngsters gone bad, feuding neighbours, eccentric old timers etc, whereas Campbell’s – at least the four main protagonists – are a little indistinct and interchangeable, not helped by their (entirely plausible but bland) names: Peter Priest, Robin Laurel, Steve Innes and Jimmy Waters. As adults, all four of them lead successful but somewhat tortured existences (Peter is a social worker, Steve an estate agent, Jimmy a police officer and Robin a doctor), all make strange, inconsistent and illogical decisions and can be a little irritating. Where Campbell really excels though is in the antagonists; not larger-than-life supernatural forces of evil like Leland Gaunt, but believable, intensely annoying and depressing people like Robin’s unbearable senile mother and the sinister but ultimately just petty and small-minded brother of one of Peter’s clients.

In keeping with its broad, movie-like feel, Needful Things gives us (relatively) clear dividing lines between good and evil, and shows us the tainting of one by the other, personal gain taking precedence over empathy, but Obsession has no real sense of good and evil at all. None of the main protagonists initially acts out of purely selfish motives, and few of the horrors that happen do so because anybody really means any serious harm. The main characters never seem to fully grasp the bigger picture of what is happening to them or why, and neither, in the end, does the reader. In Needful Things, implausible things happen and the reader, immersed in the story, makes the required suspension of disbelief. In Obsession, whether intended or not, the everyday action – small town dramas involving rival estate agents(!), romantic relationships, sci-fi conventions and drug smuggling – feels as peculiar and implausible as any of the perhaps-supernatural occurrences.

And yet, Obsession is the opposite of unreadable; the dowdy seaside town ambience is irresistible, the almost tangible feeling that the characters are trapped within their own lives, whatever the outcome of the actual plot, makes it both immersive and oddly depressing for an 80s horror novel. Stephen King builds slowly to a frenzied, bloody and cathartic finale where those who commit acts of evil are punished and/or expelled and good, however temporarily, prevails. Ramsey Campbell shows us a world where good and bad are punished equally, peoples’ lives are destroyed, a town is perhaps haunted, but essentially not much of substance ever changes; Stephen King gives us another (efficient and gripping) Hollywood blockbuster, Ramsey Campbell gives us Friday the 13th Part 7 directed by Ken Loach.

What the books share is that they are variations on that cautionary, Faustian tale. The small town settings and down-at-heel characters mean that they aren’t really commentaries on 80s consumerism in the manner of the more imaginative end of horror cinema like David Cronenberg’s surreal Videodrome (1983) and John Carpenter’s satirical They Live (1988). Instead, and appropriately for the Faustian theme, they are concerned with human nature, and as such both books fit into the generally conservative nature of 80s horror (punish the transgressors, restore the status quo!); and although Campbell’s novel is less black and white than King’s, its very ambivalence strengthens that core message; be very careful what you wish for. You can’t always get what you want – and probably, you shouldn’t.

old books, old eyes, new readings

 

In Richard Linklater’s reputedly anti-nostalgic, but actually still quite nostalgic 1993 film Dazed and Confused, Matthew McConaughey’s Fonz-like character Wooderson articulates his Fonzhood in a way that – as far as I remember – the actual Fonz never does*: “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.” That quote popped into my head, in a sardonic kind of way, when I recently re-read the book that was the subject of this previous article, Richard Laymon’s Tread Softly. When reading books you first loved at an impressionable age, time makes Woodersons of us all; it’s the slightly eerie feeling of meeting old friends, only you have aged and they have stayed the same; except of course that in staying the same, they have changed too, because your perspective has changed. What once seemed profound may seem trite, what “you” once related to, you may not; re-encountering your youth – or even more so, your childhood – through books is as complex a feeling as looking at old photographs of yourself can be.

* to be fair to the Fonz, it would be hard for him to have this kind of perspective on the creepier aspects of his Fonzhood since, by the time he was in his 40s, the Happy Days “high school students” he lurked around were themselves in their 30s

What Wooderson specifically draws attention to, and what we are forced to do, is to relate to the things we once liked from the perspective of an older person. And this is where the “genre fiction” comes in. As a teenager, especially from the ages of I think 13 to 17, my preferred reading was, in order of importance, horror, heroic fantasy and science fiction. Recently, in addition to Tread Softly, I have re-read a few books that were among my favourites in my mid-teens (The Rats, Lair, Shrine, The Dark and The Fog by James Herbert, It and Carrie by Stephen King and Weaveworld by Clive Barker) and, for the first time, what struck me about all of them (ego alert) was that I am now older than all of the main protagonists, including the ‘grownups’ in It and the parents in Tread Softly. Which of course is partly because I am now older than the authors of those books were when they wrote them; a strange thought – it’s possibly just me, but I don’t think one ever feels older than an author whose books you read when young, even when their youth is obvious. Not that the age of an author necessarily correlates to the age of their characters, but there seems to be something about the horror genre in particular that makes writers simplify and sketch the main – non-villainous – characters, rather than draw them in vivid detail. Perhaps it’s because some degree of identification with the main character makes the horror more effective, and a certain amount of vague/generic-ness is necessary to make as many readers as possible identify with those characters. I think this is pretty much explicitly what James Herbert did with his ‘everyman’ heroes.

For a variety of reasons, it’s a strange thing to try to engage with your teenage taste in books, far more difficult than it is with music, or with the books one loved as a child. For a start, and with no disrespect intended to the authors, what has to be borne in mind with some of these books is that they weren’t necessarily (or definitely weren’t) aimed at the 14-15 year old who was reading them. When reading childrens’ books, adult me can be – CS Lewis’ Narnia books are perhaps the classic example – uncomfortably aware of the feelings and attitudes – the ‘adultness’ in fact – of the author behind the book. Sometimes – as with Jan Mark’s Thunder & Lightnings (there’s an insightful article about this excellent book here), or the best of Robert Westall’s novels – it gives me a new respect for a writer who until now I was mainly nostalgic about. Other times less so; for all the informative qualities, animal welfare concerns and anthropological information in Willard Price’s Adventure series (which I loved), the core idea of the two wholesome young American boys travelling the world, encountering its cultures with genuine (if occasionally paternalistic) respect and then catching its animals & shipping them off to zoos and safari parks, feels pretty uncomfortable. Far more so in fact than Biggles or Bulldog Drummond, where even child-me was aware of the dated imperialist attitudes and (in Bulldog Drummond especially) almost (or I’m tempted to think actually) parodic levels of jingoistic racism. But Willard Price wasn’t dealing in knowingly crass, simplistic thrills as  “Sapper” was.

childhood favourites

He was a genuinely philanthropic, genuinely respectful, extremely knowledgeable naturalist and social worker and I did in fact learn a lot from his books. But one of the things I learned – and I don’t think it was a bad thing to learn – was that the enlightened attitudes of yesterday, although certainly preferable to the unenlightened ones – are not necessarily the enlightened attitudes of today.

the beginnings of horror fandom? Dracula’s Spinechillers Annual
Julio Vivas’ artwork for The Drowning Pond

My interest in horror was probably first awakened when I was still very much a reader of Biggles & co. I loved the Dracula’s Spinechillers Annual I had got for Christmas when I was (I think) 8 or thereabouts. Around that age I also loved the (vastly inferior 80s) Eagle comic  horror spin-off Scream! (which only seemed in my world to exist as ‘specials’ and never as a regular comic) Nevertheless, various things from Scream!, most notably a somewhat folk horror-ish story called The Drowning Pond with its illustrations of a skeleton with flowers in its long hair is still very vivid in my mind. And here it is!

 

 

Non-comics-wise, I remember borrowing (Doctor Who author) Terrance Dicks’ Cry Vampire! And Wereboy! from the Mobile Library (itself a very 80s detail although I’m sure they still exist) and loving them, and, later in Primary School Robert Westall’s The Scarecrows, The Watch House, The Wind Eye and The Devil on the Road made a big impression on me (and still stand up well when read as an adult). As a devotee of the phenomenally successful Fighting Fantasy gamebook series, I recall being particularly impressed by the horror-themed House Of Hell, which was very different from the swords & sorcery (or sci fi) leanings of the rest of the series.

“Zinja” Jesus.

Interestingly (I use that word advisedly, with the caveat; ‘to me’) my interest in gore was parallel to, but not at all dependent on horror. I remember in my English class, at the age of (I think) 12, having to write a story based on Robert O’Brien’s Mrs Frisby And The Rats Of NIMH, and writing, under the influence of Robert Shea’s supremely dodgy Shike: Last of the Zinja books, about ninja rats attacking their enemies and slicing their intestines into ‘spaghetti’. So I was quite ready for James Herbert already.

Herbert wasn’t the first ‘adult’ horror author I read though. I think that was HP Lovecraft, who I came to through two sources he would probably have found incomprehensible. Firstly, heavy metal (he is quoted on Eddie’s gravestone on arguably Derek Riggs’ finest – and certainly my favourite as a child – Iron Maiden album cover, Live After Death (1985)) and I came across him again a little later, through the roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu. Not that I played it (though I would have liked to) but as a subscriber to Games Workshop’s White Dwarf  magazine (essentially, I now realise, for the pictures) I became aware of it and my interest in Lovecraft grew.

Derek Riggs’ finest (Iron Maiden) painting? Live After Death (1985) Lots of blue, lots of yellow & a bit of white; genius
Games Workshop’s 80s edition of Call of Cthulhu

Before reading any actual Lovecraft, I’m pretty sure that I borrowed the game itself in its hardback book edition from the local library (this would either be the Rats of NIMH year or the year after). Shortly thereafter I then borrowed (from the same library – Cupar) a hardback edition of Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out Of Time and other stories and since then, Lovecraft has been one of the few writers I’ve never ‘grown out’ of, or lost interest in. As such, he fades from this article now except for two more observations; firstly, Lovecraft’s protagonists – sensitive, articulate, terrified – are clearly Lovecraft himself. The author died when only a few years older than I am now, but both Lovecraft and his characters will I think always feel older to me than I do. People – like Michael Moorcock (another teenage favourite) – who don’t like Lovecraft’s writing, usually don’t like the florid style and neurotic tone of his stories – the elements which to me are his real strengths as a writer and make his writing – although widely imitated – genuinely inimitable; no-one else captures that tone. Secondly, that first Lovecraft book I read had no illustration on the cover (on the whole I think Lovecraft has been badly served by artists and illustrators, though I love many of their efforts – and anyway it’s his own fault the illustrators so often fail). but two pictures were instrumental in making me want to read his work; there was the art for a Call of Cthulhu module called Green And Pleasant Land that was advertised prominently in White Dwarf, and a Les Edwards painting (possibly unrelated to Lovecraft in origin) used in the Call of Cthulhu book. (Edwards’ Croglin Vampire*, also used in the book was a superb picture too, though less Lovecraftian*)

Lovecraftian inspirations: the cover of a sourcebook for UK based Cthulhoid adventures (left; still love tentacle-meets-cricket) and a Les Edwards painting used in Call of Cthulhu

*Still very interesting however; read about the ‘real’ Croglin vampire here

So anyway; although I have very shadowy memories of reading the opening of Cujo (I think my mum had it) and seeing the film versions of Cujo and Christine, the first horror novels I remember reading in their entirety are James Herbert’s The Rats and Stephen King’s Pet Sematary and It. I remember an interview in FEAR magazine issue two, James Herbert said that the characters in his novels were ‘everyman’ – and in his early novels in particular, it’s a very specific kind of everyman; In The Rats (1974), we meet Harris, “teaching art to little bastards whose best work is on lavatory walls. Jesus Christ!” and “At thirty two he was back [in the East End], teaching little facsimiles of his former self…” while in The Fog (1975) we find that “At thirty-two, [environmental investigator] Holman was still young enough to be angered by the seeming lack of resolution shown by his superiors when he himself had taken great risks to ferret out the proof they asked him to provide.”
Variations on these characters – tough, working or lower-middle class, cynical about the motives of those in charge; thirty two – are essentially versions of the young(ish) James Herbert himself, which is understandable, and they were to appear in the majority of his books until the mid-to-late 80s, when he seems to have become interested in characters with a little more individuality. Those ‘everymen’ – Harris, Holman, Pender, Culver, Bishop – are little more than ciphers, characters made of a few (mostly) well-selected details but overall as relatively simple as the dangers they face – that is, rats, fog, more rats, a fog-like darkness etc.

When the stories get more complex, as with The Spear, The Jonah and the aforementioned Shrine, it’s noticeable that the characters do too. In Shrine, the hero, Gerry Fenn is actually younger than usual (29) but even more jaded; a wannabe tabloid journalist(!) who we first meet “tired, angry and a little drunk” and ranting about “rent-a-left” loonies. As a teenager I took James Herbert’s statements about politics at face value (this isn’t quite a quote but I’ll keep the inverted commas as what he said in that issue of FEAR was definitely something like “I’m not anti-right, I’m not anti-left, but those in power always look after themselves”). Now – especially after reading his final novel Ash (2012) perhaps the most unintentionally funny book I’ve ever read – Herbert’s apparently apolitical stance seems – like his everyman character and his ‘have your cake and eat it’ attitude to sex (describe it in titillating detail but punish the characters who indulge in it illicitly) – pretty reactionary, although his point about the powers that be is of course a valid one. But still; maybe the strangest thing about reading James Herbert as an adult is not the paranoia about what governments get up to, or the preoccupation with violent death; it’s that supposed everyman. I guess as a young teenager I saw him/them as simply ‘an adult’, but as an adult – and an older one than most of those characters are – I see him/them as… a bit of an asshole really, which mars the enjoyment of the books a little for me. But maybe just for me; possibly ‘everyman’ really is a centre-right-to-borderline-fascist asshole. Complicating things further, sometimes – as in Shrine and especially some of Herbert’s later books like Creed – it seems like we are definitely supposed to view the character as unsympathetic/unpleasant, which is odd in that it diminishes the effect of the horrors they experience to some extent; the effect is a little like those ‘ghost hunters’ type of TV shows, where noisy, aggressive people blunder around in the dark taunting spirits for not showing themselves and then scream like hysterical children at the least noise or drop in temperature; good.

icons of 80s horror

By contrast, Stephen King is interesting, in that the book that made his name – Carrie – has no hero at all to speak of, just Carrie herself, and the impersonal voices of the various documents that tell her story. As a teenager I wasn’t very keen on the book and found it, despite its brevity, far harder to read than It. I don’t think I really understood its popularity either. Reading it now, I find it far more impressive and effective, maybe because as a teenager, King’s insight into teenagers and their lives seemed unremarkable (ie I literally didn’t give it any thought) whereas now I think it’s one of the key features of almost all of his work that I like the most. In Carrie, as in It, the vividness of the horror is increased by the framing of the story. In It the story is being told “now” (although now is obviously the 80s) and segues into the 1950s sections in a self-consciously cinematic (or televisual) ‘flashback’ kind of way, whereas in Carrie, we know right from the beginning that Carrie’s story has already ended and become history. Although that sounds like it should have a distancing effect, what it actually does is give a feeling of reality. We don’t so much empathise with the characters as look on at their plight – but King is a good enough storyteller to engage the reader’s empathy without having to put them directly into the characters’ shoes.

Stephen King and James Herbert both brought a sense of modern-ness to the horror genre in the 1970s (not that they were the only ones, but for me they were the most important for the 80s horror fiction explosion, Herbert possibly less so in the USA), but they did so through almost opposite means. Both abandoned the gothic/melodramatic/romantic element of horror that had been at the genre’s heart, but after that, they part ways. Herbert is modern via the immediacy of his bluntly explicit descriptiveness; a very 1970s matter-of-factness; cold, harsh and almost industrial (the Throbbing Gristle of horror literature maybe?); horror with no politeness. Carrie, has a cold, clinical, matter-of-fact quality, but it’s entirely unlike Herbert’s – it isn’t about the viscera. With The Rats, James Herbert was telling a nasty story, as vividly and convincingly as he could, to make it feel real. With Carrie, Stephen King heightens the reality by saying this isn’t a ‘story’ at all; this is what happened. As a teenager I mostly preferred James Herbert, but as an adult I find that Stephen King is far easier to enjoy. From the adult perspective, King’s teenagers are still teenagers; in fact even more so than they seemed at the time; whereas Herbert’s adults are ciphers, or in his more developed characters, people who on the whole I just don’t like.

Although I mentioned James Herbert, Stephen King and Clive Barker as a kind of trinity of 80s horror in my Richard Laymon article, Barker is and always was the obvious odd man out of the trio. Firstly because – with a few exceptions – the standard idea of ordinary people encountering horrible things isn’t his primary kind of story. In fact the idea of ‘ordinary people’ isn’t one that I associate with Barker at all; not because (as far as I can tell) he is dismissive of everyday kind of characters, it feels more like he just doesn’t really believe in them. In Weaveworld (1987), the hero is to all intents & purposes ‘ordinary’ – “His name is Calhoun Mooney, but he’s universally known as Cal. He is twenty-six, and has worked for five years at an insurance firm in the city centre.” We first meet Cal trying to catch an escaped racing pigeon. A working class Liverpudlian in the 80s seems the very epitome of ordinariness, but as his name indicates, there’s always something a little otherworldly about Cal (even compared to for instance, the villainous, magic-using  Shadwell, who fits in in Cal’s prosaic world far more easily than Cal himself seems to). I can’t remember if I felt this way about Cal, or the book itself when I first read it (another library acquisition I think, I certainly read it at the time of its first paperback edition if not before). He seems a younger, stranger character than I remembered; but then the whole book feels stranger. Not so much the overtly fantastical parts, but the Liverpool-set opening chapters.

Without thinking much about it, I had always assumed that Weaveworld was set “nowadays”, i.e. in the late-80s, when it was published, but there are odd mentions, such as the police arriving in a ‘Black Maria’ – I don’t know when the UK police stopped using black vans, but I know that even in my earliest recollections (late 70s/early 80s) they were white – that make the Liverpool Barker describes feel both specific and vaguely unreal. Is this intentional? Clive Barker grew up in working class Liverpool himself, in the 60s and 70s, but was not much older than Cal Mooney when writing Weaveworld (I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he started writing it when he was 29 in fact). And yet;  I remember seeing him on TV around the time the book was published and being surprised at his relative lack of a Liverpool accent; perhaps because of his background in theatre and experimental filmmaking he seemed at ease on television, but always has a hint of the otherworldly quality I associate with his work. Weaveworld  has been ‘in development’ in Hollywood for years, but I’d say that unless they can somehow go back in time and get the young Clive Barker, the production will never have the right Cal Mooney. In fact this 1988 interview with both Clive Barker and James Herbert could almost be with “Mooney” and “Harris” and probably tells you everything you need to know about the differences between the two authors’ work; If Harris, Holman et al are James Herbert and the gritty urban settings of London and its environs are their natural habitat, then Cal Mooney equally is Clive Barker, and ghost-Liverpool and the magical world of The Fugue is his. And I’m not sure either author had it in them – at that time at least – to write convincingly about the world of the other, even if they had wanted to.

So what of it all? I don’t know; are there conclusions here? Reading favourite teenage books is like visiting your school long after you left it – everything is familiar, but smaller than you remembered. Genre fiction is by its nature somewhat generic, and is largely plot, rather than character-driven. Lovecraft again is an exception, because somehow his stories manage to be neither plot, nor character driven, so much as they are perspective-driven; sometimes the horror, omnipresent in his best work, has very little narrative to fuel it, just a tone of voice. The heroines and heroes of most of the horror, fantasy and sci-fi I used to devour as a teenager were mostly there as stand-ins for the reader, or for the writer. Most horror authors whose careers last any length of time start to write novels about writers, just as successful musicians start writing songs about being on tour. Going all the way back to Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker, the villains in horror have always been more memorable than the heroes (actually, Frankenstein is more complex than just hero/villain, but I’ll stand by it), in the 80s with horror cinema this becomes even more noticeable…

At some point a real conclusion will come to me and I’ll add it here; until then, the thing I love about these stories? I get older, they stay the same age.

 

‘Cheryl Heard A Wet Thud’: Tread Softly by Richard Kelly

 

There’s a moment in Peter Bagge’s immortal Generation X soap opera comicbook Hate¹ where a character says “That need to reclaim a dusty corner of your youth can be overwhelming at times” and even when I first read that in my late 20s, the truth of the statement seemed obvious; and of course the need only gets stronger as time goes by and your youth recedes into the distance.²

And those corners can be pretty dusty. Today, for the third time, I bought a copy of Richard Laymon’s Dark Mountain (1987). My introduction to this book now seems archaic, although it was fairly typical of its time. When I first read Dark Mountain, in 1988, horror novels made up the bulk of my reading. If I had had to name my favourite writers at the time I would probably have listed four main ones, in any order; James Herbert, Stephen King, Clive Barker and Shaun Hutson, although I had an open mind about anything that looked gory.

The first UK edition of Tread Softly, with Danny Flynn’s classic cover art

 

Like Dark Mountain itself, this is a very 80s story. When I first heard of the book, it was called Tread Softly and nominally by “Richard Kelly”, a pseudonym Laymon mysteriously (to me at least) used to write several novels of exactly the same type and in exactly the same style as the bestsellers he was known for,  such as The Cellar and The Beast House. I have never read either of those, but they are worth mentioning because both titles are invariably appended to the phrase “Richard Laymon, author of…” in my memory³; I read the blurbs on at a lot of books back then.

I first came across Tread Softly via a negative review (oddly, not the only time I’ve been intrigued enough by a bad review to check something out) in Fear Magazine, an invaluable resource (that is, “a good magazine”) for horror fans such as myself in those pre-internet days. The review (not sure by whom unfortunately) obviously made an impression on me – I remember with apparent clarity (possibly not accurately, I don’t have my Fears anymore to check, alas) that the writer referred to ‘lashings of teeny sex’ (the selling point to me I would imagine) and concluded with ‘…a downbeat ending. Does nothing for the genre.’ (that last phrase makes me think it may have been written by Fear editor John Gilbert, whose concerns with literacy, imagination and quality pushed me towards writers like Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell and Nicholas Royle, where my instincts might have led me more towards Guy N Smith and – of course – Tread Softly). But it was one thing to read a review and see a cover picture (another selling point) in a magazine – how to get the book itself? In a way, this was possibly even easier then than it would be now for a young teenager with no money; I asked for it in my local library. Within a few days, I had my clammy adolescent paws on the WH Allen UK hardback copy of the book, its dust jacket pristine beneath the clear plastic protective cover. I remember distinctly mine being the first stamp on the card, which was obscurely pleasing.

Fear issue 1 with cover art by Oliver Frey

As that detail suggests, this whole story is one of those memories that is more vivid than it has any reason or right to be.⁴ There was no real frisson, I had no sensation of forbidden fruit; I had read far more extreme things, such as Shaun Hutson’s Spawn (borrowed from the same library, incidentally), one of only two novels to ever make me feel physically queasy (I got over it though. With the other one, Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, I haven’t yet and hope not to). But still, it was exciting. The cover by Danny Flynn was eye-catching, if extremely typical of its era (partly, it turns out, because Danny Flynn painted lots of the covers that define that era for me, including the several key Shaun Hutsons) and a million times better than the style-less and boring edition I bought today), but part of the excitement was because of the resemblance it bears to the artwork of the thousands of alluring, generic slasher movies that then lined the shelves of video shops. It might be worth mentioning for younger readers, that video (rental) shops then existed in any town bigger than a small village, but even in small villages, the local ‘convenience store’ would usually have at least a couple of shelves of videos. These movies were all the more alluring because at that point, they were still beyond my grasp. It was odd to me then and is still odd to me now, that at 13 or 14 I could buy, borrow and read, without any adult objection beyond the odd funny look, books about any kind of violent or depraved act imaginable (which was good), but couldn’t rent even the lame, often almost bloodless Friday the 13th clones that were a staple of 80s horror cinema and which – surely – had little appeal to the over-18s they were in theory restricted to. In fact, the ideas in both the movies and most of the books I was reading were deeply conservative and (especially in the films) relied on the equally conventional reaction to them for what little shock value they had. And in fact, Tread Softly was – and Dark Mountain remains – more like an 80s teen horror movie than any other book I’ve ever read.

The story (two families, both with sulky teenage children, go on a camping trip in the wilds of California, where they are terrorised by a “swamp witch” and her depraved idiot son) and the structure of the book are, it feels, deeply indebted to the standard slasher movie. There’s a brief, establishing but fairly restrained prologue (couple attacked in tent), then the introduction of the families and the tensions within them, before the vacation – and the horror – begins. It’s extremely formulaic; the women examine their naked bodies critically in mirrors for the reader’s benefit, the men are ‘rugged’ and clear eyed, teenage boys are ‘athletic’, teenage girls have ‘smooth curves’ and pout sulkily –  and extremely predictable. As with films though, you can get away with any number of well worn formulae as long as the execution isn’t boring. Tread Softly was rarely boring but, more surprisingly – by Shaun Hutson standards at least, and something else it had in common with the standard slasher film – it wasn’t all that bloody, really.

The story is fairly perfunctory, as one would expect; the group goes camping, the idiot son attacks them, is killed, the witch tries to avenge him, all against a backdrop of hot, insect infested summery swamps and simmering teenage hormones. The ending – spoiler alert I suppose – is kind of downbeat,  but only in the bathetic sense that it’s actually upbeat;  it’s unexpectedly happy and harmonious and lacks the final, punchy, expected-unexpected twist that a film would have had. But teenage me found it wholly satisfactory. In fact, I found the whole sentimental, nasty adventure extremely enjoyable. It may not have done much for the genre, but it did something for the part of me that enjoyed and still enjoys Friday the 13th Part 3 and Police Academy 5: Assignment Miami Beach more than many obviously better movies. Clearly, when I read the bad review that lured me towards Tread Softly,  I didn’t want it to be “good”, I wanted it to be exactly what it is; trashy and titillating and simplistic, and – with no insult intended – it didn’t disappoint me. 

I didn’t buy the book at the time, but oddly, although better books (back then this would have meant things like IT, Weaveworld, Domain and Victims) and theoretically similar books (Rex Miller’s Slob springs to mind) came along, I never forgot Tread Softly. Why the appeal? No doubt it had something to do with the teenage protagonists and my own adolescence. That conservatism – the (mildly) dysfunctional families pull together and defeat the threat, the teenagers pair off as the reader is supposed to want them to, the arrogant characters become humble, the insecure ones find their courage and all is well with the world – has a deep appeal to teenagers. The formula of the teen horror movie – even the cynical twist ending that Tread Softly strangely lacks – wasn’t only there to sell more, similar movies. The comfort of the familiar, the safe scare is a huge part of the appeal of the genre to a young audience. As one gets older, that appeal fades (I find at least), but, from browsing in bookshops (I still usually have a quick look at the horror section) it would appear that the ‘young adult’ wing of horror fiction (now very much a specific subgenre) seems to be in healthier shape than horror as a whole.

the inferior 90s “Dark Mountain”

I have read a few other Richard Laymon books since, but although they were essentially very similar to Tread Softly, they were enjoyed (albeit to a lesser degree) and then almost immediately forgotten. But then, I didn’t read those when I was 14. But. At some point in the late 90s, I nostalgically bought Tread Softly itself in a charity shop, and though I found it sillier than it seemed before, it remained just as enjoyable and – far more unexpectedly – the emotional attachment to the hackneyed story and the sketchily drawn characters (or to my 14 year-old self?) remained intact. But – annoyingly (it was an original Richard Kelly edition) – I didn’t bother to keep it. Then, in the early 2000s, I ended up buying a copy of Dark Mountain. The title was wrong, the cover was wrong, but the book was still very much right. And then I let it go again; like it though I do, it never feels like a priority when having a clear-out.

Now, inevitably, I have bought it once more; seeing it, even in its inferior form, brought back the memories; of the book, of the library, of that bad review. And, having started re-reading it, the magic, more mysteriously than ever, is still there. This time it has the dubious bonus of being paired with an earlier Laymon novel, Beware! With fairly low expectations (I didn’t read that when I was 14 either), I’ll give it a go.

the incredibly perfunctory 2009 edition of Beware!/Dark Mountain – nice barcode placement!

**** 2021 Postscript****

Now, in the midst of a pandemic that the 14 year old me would have thought was like something out of a horror novel, although a surprisingly boring one, I finally possess the classic 1988 Richard Kelly edition again. Finally, because this time I feel like I’ll probably keep hold of it; but who knows?

back on the shelf – the 1988 Star edition

¹ That moment, fact fans, is in the bottom left hand panel on page 24 of Buddy Go Home! Vol IV of the complete Buddy Bradley Stories from Hate (Fantagraphics Books, 1997)

² There are several good articles about this and related subjects on the blog Into The Gyre, most recently this one

³ See also Burt Hirschfeld, “author of Fire Island” (not read) and Guy N. Smith, “author of Night of the Crabs” (read and liked)

⁴ Another pointlessly intense memory from the same period – essentially a memory of sitting in a room not doing much – was awoken in a Proustian kind of way recently by hearing the intro to Alice Cooper’s classic late 80s comeback single ‘Poison’ in a cafe

Further Reading; Paperbacks From Hell by Grady Hendrix is an excellent & highly entertaining book that’s well worth a look for any fan of 80s horror fiction, or anyone nostalgic about it

 

Weekly Update: Halloween Horror – Outsider Music & Venusian Death Cell

It’s Halloween next week; and what better time to write a few words about the parallel universe of outsider music? ‘Outsider music’ is one of those nebulous but still quite useful terms that litter the language of music. Like “singer-songwriter”, it doesn’t really denote a specific style, genre or sound, but also like “singer-songwriter”, it conjures a specific image, or set of images; the lonely, perhaps crazily talented, perhaps technically inept, perhaps emotionally unstable or mentally ill musician or songwriter who definitely has something unique to communicate; but not something that the majority of listeners will want to hear, and therefore not something that the mainstream (or even non-mainstream but still commercial) music industry thinks it can sell, at least initially.

keyoz

The (relatively speaking) successful outsider artist garners an inevitably niche/selective/small fanbase over time (the definition of a ‘cult following’) and these fans are drawn to their music for a variety of reasons; various hues of sheer curiosity, amusement, a genuine love of the outré qualities of the artist’s work, or just a recognition that, however it has expressed itself, there is a genuine talent at work, albeit one working outside of the usual boundaries of popular music and/or taste. Every now and then an outsider artist even becomes genuinely successful and achieves ‘insider’ status (I just made that up; Christ knows what ‘insider music’ would be), but mostly even the successes; Syd Barrett, Captain Beefheart, Daniel Johnston, Tiny Tim – end up inhabiting a kind of twilight zone version of fame that is far removed from the experience of the mainstream artist. People usually discover their work because of its notoriety; by chance, or by reputation, but rarely because it’s played in public spaces, on the radio or on MTV (or Spotify, for that matter).

Jandek's 'Staring at the Cellophane' (1982)
Jandek’s ‘Staring at the Cellophane’ (1982)

It’s notable too, that outsider artists are rarely made famous in the first instance by the public (honourable exception; Tiny Tim, but it seems fairly likely that the public at the time saw him – not surprisingly – as a comedy novelty act, rather than the genuinely peculiar character he seems to have been.) Mostly, it is musicians, followed by critics, who initially recognise the appeal of outsider artists; probably because on the whole they tend to listen more closely to a greater volume/quantity of music than most people and are therefore attuned to listen for something different, whereas those within the talent-spotting wing of the music industry also hear lots of music but have, by and large, been listening for something similar to whatever is successful at the time, or at least something saleable. In a few cases (mostly those already mentioned, but also, far more shockingly, Jandek; a fascinating artist whose massive body of work is surely one of the most forbiddingly bleak and uncommercial in the ‘singer-songwriter’ sphere) the musicians enjoy some critical acclaim and are invited to come in from the cold, to play some shows and gently erode their mystique. In becoming something more than outsiders, but something far less than mainstream celebrities, the classic outsider artist loses something of their appeal, perhaps because entertaining (or ‘entertaining’) a real audience, made up of fans and interested parties leads to a significantly different kind of music from communicating with oneself or, at best an imaginary and perhaps ideal audience. It’s basically the same process that happens with any artist when they exchange whatever their lives and inspirations were, for the life and experiences of a successful musician.

Naturally, there isn’t a vast amount of literature on outsider music; or demand for a vast amount songzof literature on outsider music, but for a highly readable and well-researched overview, Irwin Chusid’s Songs in the Key of Z, The Curious Universe of Outsider Music (Chicago Review Press, 2000) (and the associated compilation album) is still pretty unbeatable (although the old RE/Search books ‘Incredibly Strange Music’ vols 1 & 2 from the early 90s are also packed with great stuff, not all ‘outsider’, but all worth a look).

Not appearing in any those pages though, is one of my favourite purveyors of outsider music, the one-man (David Vora) Irish band Venusian Death Cell. I’m slightly reluctant to write about VDC because (a) I have only heard a fraction of his music and (b) labelling someone as an ‘outsider artist’ feels a bit harsh in a way. Theoretically (and perhaps actually at some point, judging by his extensive bio below) some kind of metal band, there is no metal to be heard on any of the VDC albums I own, perhaps because (judging by sound alone) it’s difficult to approximate heavy metal with one guitar, no distortion/effects pedals, a small drum kit, a four-track recorder and one man working everything, and also hard to be metal-to-the-max when singing about soya desserts or ‘actor Ian McCulloch’ and when one’s cover art – though on its own terms highly evocative and suited to the music – is not quite up to the standard of the archetypical Derek Riggs style metal album cover.

bio

So, the appeal of VDC – in the albums I have – is mainly not its metallic or heavy element. Sonically, the artist Vora’s music most resembles is the aforementioned Jandek , but – and it’s a crucial part of the appeal of outsider music generally – the personality/atmosphere and themes imbued in Venusian Death Cell’s work are entirely unique. Whereas Jandek’s work was/is lo-fi as music but mysteriously professional (or at least not hand-made) in its presentation (back in the early 80s he was putting out vinyl albums with picture sleeves just like (well, not just like) any small indie band on an actual label, Vora’s is unashamedly home-made, distributed on CD-Rs with photocopied artwork and lyrics. He is also a more accessible person, insofar as his own name, address and email address appear on the album inlays, while Jandek works through the austerely impersonal facade of the quasi-corporate  ‘Corwood Industries’.

aband

The VDC discography as far as I can make it out is below, it may not be complete and titles of the measly few albums I own are in bold. I will get more of them eventually. Some names may be wrong; I got them from the bio above and they aren’t all easy to read.

p a r t i a l  d i s c o g r a p h y

1996 – Reap Invert (tape)

1997 – Natural Harmony (professional 24-track studio recording!)

2000 – Mystery

2001 – Moods(?)

2002 – Fiends

2003 – The Darkest Globe

2004 – VDC/Shitoba?/Miasma/Colin Cross (4-way split tape, P.O.P. Shitcords)

2005 – Half Born Dead

2006 – The Devil’s Land

2009 – Abandon The Desolate

2010 – Fines?

2011 – Raging of the Blind Mice

2011 – The Eagle

2012 – Schizophrenia

2013 – Collector of Death Metal

2013 – Day

2013 – Halloween V: Halloween Horror

Halloween V was my introduction to Venusian Death Cell and is possibly my favourite of the three I have. It’s definitely the least aggressive-sounding, more like a one-man version of The Shaggs than the metal I expected, despite the imagery and songs with titles like ‘Lucifer’, Cold Cancer’ and ‘Zombie Flesh Eaters’ (full lyric below, just because). It also has some oddly wistful, quite affecting songs like the haiku-esque ‘For You’ – “You are depression/Breaking free/Now Happiness/You were alone/Now you’re happy/Lovely for you.” 

2013 – Abandonned Race (sic)

Far more chaotic and noisy, mainly because it has far more and louder percussion and therefore more shouted vocals, Abandonned Race is also a far less happy experience than Halloween V, but as good in its way.  Topics are bizarrely wide-ranging, from religion, black metal and relationships to mental health and soya products (‘Milkland Millennium’)

2014 – Honey Girl

The most recent of the VDC albums I’ve heard, Honey Girl  is also the shortest (8 songs in approx ten minutes) and is very much in the mould of Abandonned Race; sonically slightly harsher than Halloween V, it’s a bracing blend of performance poetry, crude proto-noise-metal and therapy; the lyrics are preoccupied with what were presumably Vora’s circumstances at the time:

“Heavy drugs, weight gain/Strange happenings/Psychosis and madness” – Psychotic

Terrible paranoid fear/affecting my happiness/eating my mental health…” – Terrible Fear

Despite the explicit unhappiness, Honey Girl isn’t the harrowing experience one might expect. Vora’s art is cathartic, rather than suffocating, and the cheerful note on the back of Honey Girl‘s booklet – “Honey Girl is a labour of love! Thanks for listening, hope you enjoyed!” captures the feeling of the music; in unloading his woes, somehow Vora doesn’t dump them on the listener. And that, at least partly, is the appeal of the not-very-musical music and apparently random subject matter of Venusian Death Cult. The seeming lack of any kind of artifice is, given the sophistication of most popular music, very appealing. What Irwin Chusid refers to as “the outsider sine qua non of earnestness” is present everywhere in Vora’s music. When he writes in the sleevenote to Abandonned Race, “Abandonned Race is a musical journey mainly for my own pain & pleasure rather than proving anything to those who happen to hear it.” it rings absolutely true. And this is not a kind of quasi-childlike ‘innocence’; Vora’s lyrics may not be written in the usual rock music language, but they are highly sophisticated, albeit in a matter of fact way:

Romancy – 1871 Lunacy Act in Ireland/Governs consent issues – /100% capacity to decide or none/Court makes all decisions about your life/(Criminal Law Act 1993)/Offense to have intercourse with mentally impaired/outside marriage (Halloween V: Halloween Horror) The explanatory note after the lyrics reads; “Lyrics are about those with extra support needs and their relationships”. 

lyrix

There are also forays into both Irish-language and French-language lyrics; which mean nothing to me, alas, but again underline that this is not a naive talent, just an unorthodox one. Whatever the language, VDC’s songs are mostly not all that easy (for me) to relate to; Vora’s preoccupations are not necessarily shared by everyone, or very many people at all – but that doesn’t make them less engaging. In fact, it’s the feeling that the listener is getting a glimpse into the normally private world of another human being – a sometimes troubled mind in all its seemingly unedited variety, brought to you by the medium of (nearly) music, that makes hearing Venusian Death Cell – and outsider music generally – such a refreshing experience. In the universe of Venusian Death Cell, with its seemingly random connections, weird logic and strangely semi-familiar landscapes, you (or at least I) and your everyday world are the outsider. It’s an interesting sensation.

Zombie Flesh Eaters

Ian McCulloch stars in films/Zombie Flesh Eaters, Zombie Holocaust and Contamination

Chorus: Zombie Flesh Eaters x 3

Daughter goes to find father/With Ian, the journalist/Zombie adventures on an island

Repeat Chorus

Video…nasties/Eye…gouged/Shark and zombie fight

Repeat Chorus

Notes: Lyrics are about the film Zombie Flesh Eaters, video nasties and the actor Ian McCulloch

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