Nine Horrors and a Dream by Joseph Payne Brennan (1958): The Goo Goo Muck

When it comes to pulp horror fiction, I don't think there's any doubt that "Slime" is one of the perfect gems of the style. Originally published in a 1953 issue of the venerated magazine "Weird Tales," Joseph Payne Brennan's 30-odd page tale is rife with all the weaknesses and all the glories of pulp horror in full flower. Brennan overuses words and phrases ("hood of horror" and "black mantle"), utilizes some weak analogies (alien as... some wild planet in a distant galaxy), and his country dialogue makes "Hee-Haw" sound like Olivier reciting the Bard. Indeed these "weaknesses," when delivered with conviction and narrative skill, are to my mind the most enjoyable aspects of vintage pulp.

 Cover story, March 1953. Illustration by Virgil Finlay

The central image of "Slime" is a roiling mass of sentient, ravenous black muck formed at ocean bottom—when the earth and sea were young—and is so utterly disgusting, so enthusiastically detailed, so shivery wrong you will be, forgive the pun, sucked right into the story. An embodiment of the inchoate unconscious, straight from the nightmare world of our worst fears, slithering about on the lightless, unknowable sea floor (man this style is contagious). Brennan imbues this noxious goop with predatory sentience:

It was plastic, essentially shapeless... by turns viscid and fluid... It was animated by a voracious, insatiable hunger... When the lifting curtain of living slime swayed out of the mud and closed upon [its victims], their fiercest death throes came to nothing... The horror did not know fear... The black mantle reigned supreme.

After an undersea volcanic upheaval sloshes it up from inky oceanic depths, the slime finds itself in a swamp outside a rural town. Images of it streaking out of the fetid grove of trees, vines, moss, and mud, onto land, over fields, to raise up and pounce on its hapless victims is nothing short of revolting. "O God," cries a woman who saw it but survived, "the darkness came alive!" You can imagine what occurs, all the story beats and characters and the efforts to dispatch this slimy blackness that had no essential shape, no discernible earthly features... a black viscid pool of living ooze which flowed upon itself, sliding forward at incredible speed. No doubt about it: "Slime" is a stone-cold horror classic about a perfect eating machine.

It is the lead story in Nine Horrors and a Dream, one of the oldest books in my horror paperback library. A slim Ballantine paperback from 1962, it's part of a series of that publisher's horror paperbacks, known as "Ballantine's Chamber of Horrors." Other titles from gents such as Fritz Leiber, Theodore Sturgeon, Charles Beaumont, and those of like mind were included. This collection contains stories (mostly) published also in "Weird Tales" throuhout the early 1950s; it is Brennan's first of many short horror fiction collections.

A garishly creepy Richard Powers cover of surreal shapes, swirls, squiggles, and something like spider legs adorns the Brennan cover, with more of the Powers abstract imagery in the ad for the other books on the back cover, as seen above. Why, yes, that's Zacherle! Now, I myself prefer the folksy cover for the original Arkham House hardcover from '58, with Frank Utpatel art, a more accurate representation of Brennan's style and content. But, you know, that's just me!

Brennan was a lifelong resident of Connecticut, where virtually all of his work takes place, and wrote horror, fantasy, and poetry. He created Lucius Leffing, an occult detective, but I haven't read any of those stories. Brennan also created horror magazines to encourage other fans and writers of the supernatural, and was an early bibliographer of Lovecraft. "Slime" is easily his most famous work, and rightly celebrated, but Nine Horrors contains one other stone-cold masterpiece, so let's move on to that, shall we?

Concerning a desolate plot of land and its effects on the owner, "Canavan's Back Yard" has also long been lauded by horror fans, and if you haven't read it, please do so at your earliest opportunity. Narrated by a writer who befriends a bookseller who's moved himself and his wares into a house on the outskirts of town, this tale features not the overheated pulp stylings of "Slime," but a more somber and reflective tone:

a long desolate yard overgrown with brambles and high brindle-colored grass. Several decayed apple trees, jagged and black with rot, added to the scene's dismal aspect. The broken wooden fences... appeared to be literally sinking into the ground. Altogether the yard presented an unusually depressing picture...  

Brennan (1918-1990)

Our narrator spends his mornings writing and his afternoon in this fellow's little bookshop (ain't that the life!), and soon notices Canavan becoming preoccupied with this landscape, always gazing out his window, even to the detriment of his mail order bookselling business. One day he comes in and outside spies Canavan coming out of the tall grass in the yard, a lost bewildered expression on his face. He tells our writing pal, "I'll have no rest till I solve the riddle of that piece of ground." Next visit and Canavan is nowhere to be found inside. Then, with infinite dread, our narrator looks through the window:

The long stalks of brown grass slide against each other in the slight breeze with dry sibilant whispers. The dead trees reared black and motionless. Although it was late summer, I could hear neither the chirp of a bird not the chirr of a single insect. The yard itself seemed to be listening.

What happens after I won't spoil. The precise, measured pace of the telling heightens the horrific reveal; in fact I (re)read it late at night before bed and yes, its uncanny mysteries lingered.

The other stories here are competently written, but rather minor and for "Weird Tales" completists, I feel. Set-ups reminded me of he likes of Roald Dahl, Gerald Kersh, Fredric Brown, short story writers like that, but not as fiendishly clever or brutally unexpected. They take moments to read, and the twist endings barely register; they simply restate what was obvious from the opening passages: "If you ask me, chum, the murderin' thing in the black raincoat was something dead that came up out of the sea!" 

"I'm Murdering Mr. Massington," besides sounding like a classic Smiths song, is a non-supernatural work first published in Esquire mag, so, you know, class. You know how writers always get that query, "Hey, my life story would make a great book, you write it and we'll split the money," or "I have a great idea for a story, etc." (and that idea is always just an old "Twilight Zone"), well here a writer meets a melancholy fellow in a bar, and said fellow finds the idea of being forgotten after his death intolerable: ridden by a single, overwhelming obsession. Fellow begs narrator to write a story about him so he will be remembered, a record of his person. The twist is fatal. Poor guy.

"The Hunt" is about another poor guy being followed on a train by a man who, for some unknown reason, is scarcely short of terrifying. Of course he cannot escape this stalker, and their final confrontation in the last sentences would work a lot better if it weren't marred by some perplexing dialogue. "The Mail for Juniper Hill" gets some decent mileage out of a raging snowstorm setting, the kind of tale you just know Stephen King read as a kid, with New England old-timers marveling at "Big Ed" Hyerson, the local ne'er-do-well, a hard-drinking, skirt-chasing rascal. Told in flashback, we learn Ed is super-reliable as a mail carrier, no matter the condition of road or weather. Aforementioned snowstorm only makes Ed more determined to deliver sacks of mail, and he does; but not before freaking out all those old-timers, giving them a deadly chill which was not of the storm.

"Death in Peru" presents some decent travelogue descriptions, especially in the description of a treacherous mountain hike: he seemed to have entered another world, a world composed of soundlessness and space, a timeless world of brooding mystery where even the eons left hardly a sign. The reveal is predictable, alas. I enjoyed "The Calamander Chest," dude buys a fancy chest for cheap then it starts to creep him out for a very valid reason; the tale ends with a perfect line of fatal irony, a permanent change of locale indeed—which would have made for a much better title, methinks. "Levitation" is cute enough, like something from early Bradbury in "dark carnival" mode, while "On the Elevator" and "Green Parrot" are inconsequential.

Other than "Slime" and "Canavan's Backyard," Nine Horrors isn't an essential unless you collect Powers covers or the other "Chamber of Horrrors" titles; better is Shapes of Midnight, a 1980 paperback with a King intro (see above), featuring those two tales and later Brennan works I enjoyed more, such as "The Willow Platform" and "The Horror at Chilton Castle" (the latter collected by Ramsey Campbell in his 1988 anthology from Tor, Stories That Scared Me, which scared me too but I haven't reviewed here yet). Pleasant enough reading to while away a couple hours, however, and you'll forget neither that loathsome "hood of horror" nor the otherworldly curse of "Canavan's hellish back yard!"

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson (1908): Into That Great Void My Soul'd Be Hurled

An unassailable classic of supernatural horror and science-fantasy, The House on the Borderland is a cosmic hallucination, a phantasmagoria of time dilation and psychedelic imagery, a monster mash of mind-expanding terror and loneliness across multiple dimensions and numberless aeons. William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) reached for the stars and beyond and gave us a novel that would deeply affect and influence H.P. Lovecraft (and of course many other genre writers); indeed HPL never hid the fact that he was indebted to Hodgson's visionary delirium [update: not as much as I'd previously thought; see comments]. It is the well from which so much weird fiction has sprung. But is that well still worth visiting today?

...perched almost at the extreme end of a huge spur of rock that jutted out some fifty or sixty feet over the  abyss. In fact, the jagged mass of ruin was literally suspended in mid-air. 

That's the house itself, as described by the two men who are tramping through the "dismal and and sombre" wilds of west Ireland. They come upon a striking landscape, a rushing waterfall and an enormous rocky cavern. Across it stands this house on the borderland, its crumbled remains high above the abyss. One of the men finds a crumpled old notebook in the debris; before the men can make their way back to their camp, an eerie wailing rises from the woods. Filled with "haunting dread," they hightail it out of there and read the manuscript later. Said manuscript is a nameless narrator's account of his life before this house fell...

Arkham House, 1946, cover by Hannes Bok

A widower who lives with his spinster sister and dog Pepper, the narrator relates how he'd moved into the garden-surrounded house 10 years before, that locals had said the devil built it, and that as years passed he became "aware of something unseen, yet unmistakably present, in the empty rooms and corridors." I'll say. Soon he's exploring the lightless depths of that chasm--"the Pit," he calls it--and battling with loathsome swine-monsters who swarm over the house! And that's not all.

One evening, the narrator is sitting in his chair and finds everything about him has become an insubstantial mist, and begins the first of several bodiless travels through the space/time continuum. It's the kind of thing would put the climax of 2001 to shame; eventually he's zipping along the cosmos, watching the Sun die, the earth freeze, stars born, collapse, and reborn. At one point he sees his own lifeless body still sitting in a chair and all covered in dust, sees his own home on a vast Plain in some other reality, crawling with creatures as in his own reality. Cosmic horror, complete with its incomprehensible deities and endless vistas, begins here.

Far to my right, away up among inaccessible peaks, loomed the enormous bulk of the great Ass-god. Higher, I saw the hideous form of the dread goddess, rising up through the red gloom, thousands of fathoms above me. To the left, I made out the monstrous Eyeless-Thing, grey and inscrutable. Further off, reclining on its lofty ledge, the livid ghoul-Shape showed--a splash of sinister colour, among the dark mountains. 

Hodgson was a badass athlete/author and died in battle in WWI

The ending itself you've read a million times before, but in the early 20th century I doubt it had been done much before then. Lovecraft popularized it but it quickly became a hokey cliché and I think you'll agree. And after the whirlwind of interstellar visions I think you'll find the climax a bit underwhelming. But. If you reorient your imagination by jettisoning from your memory the fiction it inspired, then House works like nothing before it. Even Hodgson's old-fashioned and comma-riddled prose can't impede on the power of some of the more hypnotic, disorienting passages.

Ace Books, 1962, cover by Ed Emshwiller, accurate depiction of events within!

House is almost two books in one, and my reaction to it was in places mixed. I enjoyed the adventure/horror of the narrator's battle with the Swine-people in the first part of the narrative but later found the seemingly endless pages of space-travel tedious. There seemed to be no anchor to the flights of fancy; just more and more riffing on the bizarre nature of traveling through the space-time flux, colored globes floating about, the sun speeding across the sky and changing colors, the world spinning faster and faster into the void--much like Lovecraft's fantasy tales, which were never my favorite of his. But Lovecraft shares with Hodgson a fascination, an obsession really, with the unexplored deeps beneath homes, beneath the earth, of places where other realities can slip through into ours, of an indifferent malevolence threaded through the very warp and woof of our universe.

Lots of good paperback editions have been released over the years, as you can see. My copy is the red one at top, Carroll & Graf, 1983 with cover by Richard Courtney; it and this one from Sphere, 1980 with cover by Terry Oakes, play down the cosmic angle in favor of the hulking, drooling, terrifying swine-people--and you'll note how prominently Lovecraft's name is featured on most covers (the quote is from his famed and essential Supernatural Horror in Literature).

The midnight-blues of this edition from Freeway Press, 1974 evoke the emptiness of outer space and the utter solitude the narrator feels when he's hurtling through it.

Manor Books, 1977. I'm struggling to recall if an ear of corn played any role in the story; that looks like a farmhouse on drought-struck land; pretty sure this cover was meant for a different novel entirely; E. Salter is the artist.

Panther Books, 1972. The ever-stunning Ian Miller's jacket art is delectably creepy and awesome; it well captures the wonkiness of Hodgson's visions.  

So in whichever edition you may read House on the Borderland, it'll be easy to see how it achieved its hallowed place in the pantheon of classic horror fiction. It's not always scary but it is always weird. He wrote other highly-regarded fantasy novels, like The Night-Land (1912) and The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" (1907) but it's upon this House which Hodgson's reputation is built.

Lee Brown Coye Born Today, 1907

 

Behold the mighty works of Lee Brown Coye, born today in Syracuse, NY, in 1907. A self-taught artist and illustrator, Coye's cover art for many Arkham House hardcover editions is well-known and loved. Years later he would illustrate covers for Stuart David Schiff's Whispers magazine, and was even the inspiration for Karl Edward Wagner's classic 1974 short story "Sticks." 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 For more on Coye, read here. He died in 1981.

Gahan Wilson Born Today, 1930

Besides Charles Addams, cartoonist Gahan Wilson is the most well-known illustrator of the macabre and the ghoulish. Wickedly witty, his dry one-liners accompany lumpen monsters and terrified humans at that line where horror and humor blur and overlap. For decades his work has appeared in Playboy, The New Yorker, National Lampoon, Fantasy & Science Fiction magazines, and his cover art for some Arkham House editions of Lovecraft is iconic in the field. His short stories have been published in horror fiction anthologies like Still Dead, Frights, and Dark Forces. In 1990 or so I met him at a comic book convention in NYC; he signed my Miskatonic U. Graduate Kit - which I cannot find anywhere in my possession now - and we chatted about how much Lovecraft would've hated the movie versions of Re-Animator and From Beyond... what Lovecraft would've thought of Wilson's work, though, went unsaid.
 

 

 

The Horror in the Museum by H.P. Lovecraft & Others (1970): Scary Monsters and Super Creeps

Can you believe I'm only getting around to reading The Horror in the Museum this month? It's true. Despite being pretty Lovecraft-obsessed since I was 15, I've always skipped over these stories which he'd ghost-written for people whose names dropped right off even horror/pulp fiction's radar. Figured there was no way they could be as weird, as unsettling, as wonderful as HPL's own. Aaaand... yes, okay, I was right, but still the best stories here, which HPL revised for other pulp writers throughout his career - yes, to detriment of his own original works - are welcome additions to Lovecraft's oeuvre. All the stories in Horror were published through the '20s, '30s and '40s in Weird Tales magazine.

Ballantine Books, 1976, cover art by Murray Tinkelman (thanks Uncle Doug!)

I discovered that many of the stories were only in the barest fragment form when they reached Lovecraft through the mail, and that one served as a sort of dry-run for his own soon-to-come masterpieces "The Shadow out of Time" and At the Mountains of Madness. If that doesn't get you to salivating at the prospect of discovering new untamed vistas of mind-blasting cosmic wonder and fright... you're reading the wrong blog, probably.

 Original Arkham House hardcover with art by Gahan Wilson, 1970

Most of the paperback editions included fewer than a dozen of the 20-odd tales included in the original 1970 Arkham House hardcover. I own the 1989 revised Arkham, but just read a sampling; most of the plots, prose, and characterization started to run together in my imagination, alas. It can get to be a bit much, all those scholarly types of tender disposition, delicate sensibilities, nervous system a hair's-breadth away from total collapse, moonish pallor and solitary habits who, with the aid of the racially-stereotyped, stumble upon ancient subterranean horrors, mind-boggling proof of alien gods with consonants and apostrophes for names (our pal Cthulhu affects the nom de guerre "Tulu" here), living corpses, and that final reveal in the last sentence. You know how it goes.

Revised Arkham House hardcover with art by Raymond Bayless, 1989

But I can recommend some titles you shouldn't miss. There are several tales from one C.M. Eddy, Jr., - a personal friend of Lovecraft's - none impressive save "The Loved Dead" (1923), which reaches purple heights of perversity in prose so ornamental the word "necrophilia" needs never be said (which caused some controversy for Weird Tales upon publication). First-person narrator, of insulated and awkward boyhood which leads to similar adulthood, relates his unholy lust, his obsessive search for his next conquest, literally writing the short tale as he lounges upon gravestones in a midnight graveyard. Dude becomes an assistant at a funeral parlor, of course.

 No case was too gruesome for my impious sensibilities, and I soon became master my chosen vocation. Every fresh corpse brought in to the establishment meant a fulfilled promise of ungodly gladness, of irreverent gratification; a return of that rapturous tumult of the arteries which transformed my grisly task into one of beloved devotion - yet every carnal satiation exacted its toll. I came to dread the days that brought no dead for me to gloat over, and prayed to all the obscene gods of the nethermost abysses to bring swift, sure death upon the residents of the city. 

Lush and pulpy as exotic rotting fruit, "The Loved Dead" is a solid if noxious gem in the collection, somewhere between the poison eroticism of Baudelaire and Gautier and the modern horror decadence of Poppy Z. Brite. And I'm sure Lovecraft wrote the bulk of it!

 

Del Rey trade paperback, 2007

"The Curse of Yig" (1928) and "The Mound" (1929), two of the more well-known stories, are by Zealia Bishop (I didn't read "Medusa's Coil"). Both are good and gruesome. It was a refreshing change-up to find these are set in the American Southwest, amongst its deserted mesas and spare vegetation, not to mention the convoluted mythologies of the Native Americans who've lived there for centuries. The latter features extensive descriptions of an alien race, one so debased and cruel it's clear HPL meant it as a real-life commentary, and in it are the horrific roots for his later, longer classics. The descent into what lies beneath that mound is nightmarishly captivating! The title story, from 1923 and ostensibly written by Hazel Heald, was fine, similar to "Pickman's Model" (which was written after the Heald story). Another Heald, "Out of the Aeons," overplays its hand, although I still liked it:

Even now I cannot begin to suggest it with any words at my command. I might call it gigantic - tentacled - proboscidian - octopus-eyed - semi-amorphous - plastic - partly squamous and partly rugose - ugh! But nothing I could say  could even adumbrate the loathsome, unholy, non-human, extra-galactic horror and hatefulness and unutterable evil of that forbidden spawn of black chaos and illimitable night.

Horror ends with with a whimper and not a bang - but what a whimper. "The Night Ocean," a revision of R.H. Barlow's (with HPL above) story, eschews all mythos blather - nary a shoggoth or a degenerate anywhere - becoming a meditative piece of eerie suggestion. Told by an artist seeking respite oceanside in a rented cabin after a bout of exhausting work, it is a fine and quiet tale rife with gloomy wonder. A series of drownings occur during his stay that get him ruminating on the sea and what hides in its dreadful brooding depths.

The people who died - some of them swimmers of a skill beyond the average - sometimes not found until many days had elapsed, and the hideous vengeance of the deep had scourged their rotten bodies. It was as if the sea had dragged them into a chasm-lair, and had mulled about in the darkness until, satisfied that they were no longer of any use, she had floated them ashore in a ghastly state.

Necronomicon Press chapbook, 1991, art by Jason Eckhardt

There is palpable near-romantic yearning for nothingness in this unassuming work. In its prose-poetry and philosophy of negation, of giving up oneself to powers - perhaps natural, perhaps not - beyond our ability to comprehend, it is a powerful predecessor to Ramsey Campbell and Thomas Ligotti, while also in the grand tradition of Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows."

I felt, in brief agonies of disillusionment, the gigantic blackness of this overwhelming universe, in which my days and the days of my race were as nothing to the shattered stars; a universe in which each action is vain and even the emotion of grief a wasted thing.

Panther Books UK, 1975, cover art by Bob Fowke

As for all these covers, the Panther UK ones are easily my faves (I find Gahan Wilson's work entirely too whimsical for Lovecraft), and the October 1971 edition from Beagle Books at top features a monstrous kaleidoscope by Victor Valla. While I found Horror in the Museum a worthy read, as a dedicated horror-fiction fan I couldn't help but wish old HPL had devoted those countless hours not to other, lesser writers but to giving us even more of his own still-unsurpassed weird tales.

Frigid Horror Fiction: The Cool Out

Anyone else in need of some chilling horror fiction with appropriate cover art to fend off the coming summertime blues? I've said before that freezing temperatures and blinding snow are settings for great horror. Two classic tales from the first half of the 20th century, At the Mountains of Madness and "Who Goes There?", help prove my point, while two classics of the vintage era, The Shining and Ghost Story, nearly secure it. But wait - there's more. Ahh, that's the stuff.