Literary Bleach

Starting to get reading again.  In the last few weeks I have finished a whole murder of horror collections, most of which I had started at some point in the past.
King's 'Nightmares and Dreamscapes' has its fair share of dodgy material, but with so many stories this is to be expected.  It's still entertaining and what I always take from King is his storytelling ability.  The stories are not always the greatest - just look at what too often ends up on the silver screen - but the telling is worth the journey.
Then I finished off Dennis Etchison's 'The Dark Country'.  A totally different kettle of fish.  Aiming more at the high-brow, his stories are resolutely downbeat.  After a point I got a little weary of the whole maliciousness of it all.  I put the book down over midway through some months back.  However, with less left to read I thought I'd try it again.  I am not sure what his problem is with organ transplants, and sometimes the ambiguity of the whole thing irritated me, but in the end he is definitely a voice worth hearing.  Not entirely my cup of tea, but fine in sips.
When I was young, Ray Bradbury, ripe prose and all, was someone I associated with the Twilight Zone style of story and as a result was one of my heroes.  Then I read some of 'Quicker than the Eye' in my later years and started to get a wee bit disillusioned.  Am I just maturing, getting older, or losing my childlike sense of wonder?  Whatever it is I read Bradbury's 'The October Country' a while back to give him another chance.  Not bad.  Some tales are nice and dark (the one about the husband and wife in Mexico, for instance.)  Still though it didn't blow me away and I started on 'The Illustrated Man' more for completeness sake than out of enthusiasm.  After a while I put it down.  Again in the last few days I thought I'd finish it off, and so I did.
I had read some of the stories in this collection before and okay, it is good.  But ultimately there's a superficiality to everything that kind of bores me.  The downbeat bleakness I took from other stories by Bradbury (such as 'The Small Assassin' or 'The Playground') is too tempered by an overdose of sentimentality here.  It's sad stuff, but paper thin too.
I suppose it's the likes of Etchison and particularly the next author I read that has raised my expectations a little.  Robert Aickman's apparently most 'accessible' collection, 'Cold Hand in Mine' is BIZARRE.  He is an excellent writer, but what on earth is he doing?  His description of his own stories as 'strange stories' is the most appropriate description anyone has ever made of their work.  Each one is full of unease, sexual tension and some sort of horror, but rarely is there any closure, and seldom any attempt at explanation.  'The Same Dog' is horrible, but what the hell just happened?!!  'Meeting Mr Millar' is full of the adult character you do not get in Bradbury, but again what is going on?  As to the masterpiece of the collection, 'The Hospice', I really do not know what it was all about, I just know it was nasty.  What was the cat bite about, not that it seemed to be a cat?  Was it a rest home for fans of the Seven Deadly Sins?  What was with the food, the lightbulb, the woman with the perfume, the changing Banner, the EVERYTHING?  Never before have I reached for my phone so many times to look up Aickman to find out what were his views on religion, women, Freud - who the hell was this guy.  He is bizarre, definitely not for everyone, but for those who can take the lack of solid answers, strangely addictive.  It says something that the one story that seems most straight-forward, 'Pages from a Young Girl's Diary', was for me the least interesting.  As a slow, slow reader I was surprised to find I had finished the book in just over two days.  Addictive.
Algernon Blackwood's 'John Silence' stories should be just the thing I like.  Silence is an investigator, or rather specialist, in the supernatural, something along the lines of Hodgson's Carnacki, and acting as a precursor to Kolchak and the X-Files.  However, the stories despite dealing with shape-shifters, mummies, possessions and devils are almost always too genteel to really get the blood racing.  After three or four stories again I had put the book down.  Anyhow there were only three stories left so I picked it up again last night.  'Secret Worship' deals with a coven of Satanists masquerading as monks running a posh, isolated school for toffs (not a million miles from Argento's 'Suspiria', for instance).  You can see immediately how influential it has been as a theme, and Blackwood's John Silence is always at the centre of truly mythic themes.  The story starts well following a former pupil's mysterious compulsion to visit his old school and it builds well too.  You can practically see poor old Christopher Lee, may he rest in peace, as Kalkmann the monk who opens the door and makes the visitor so welcome.  The tension builds.  Even the appearance of the devil is original enough to keep things on a good footing.  However, the entrance of John Silence (previously largely missing from the tale) is something of a damp squib.  He is literally compared to Jesus, and the best sort of English man, while the German monks are equated with evil.  Blackwood slyly amplifies this ludicrous dichotomy with an alignment of merchants and silk-selling with the forces of Goodness.  Capitalism is a very Good thing apparently!  Anyhow I will finish the thing, but Blackwood, for all that he wrote 'The Willows' and 'The Wendigo' is still an awfully silly, not to mention too laid-back, a writer.
Anyhow I am finally starting to clear the reader's block.

They're All Going to Laugh at You!

How many times can I watch the last half-hour of 'Carrie' without getting sick of it? Watched it twice over the weekend. It's the perfect mix of kitsch, opera, nasty but good vengeance and real human pain. De Palma's finest hour, I mean half-hour. Poor little Carrie White! She burns in hell, you know.

The Mist

The Mist
After 'The Shawshank Redemption' and 'The Green Mile', writer/director Frank Darabont returns to Stephen King territory with 'The Mist'. After a mysterious mist descends on small town, Castle Rock, bringing with it a multitude of strange man-eating creatures, shoppers find themselves trapped in the local foodstore. Soon, as in the Twilight Zone episode 'The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street', they find that they have as much to fear from the monsters lurking inside than the CGI ones stalking the car park.
I won't begin to spotcheck the variety of sources this movie, or rather the novella it is based on, references; it doesn't really matter. King's strength has never been his originality, but how he uses common genre tropes to achieve contemporary, socially relevant ends. (I will note, however, that there is an interesting contrast between this film and Romero's 'Dawn of the Dead'; one has a small number of people in a huge mall, while the other, representing small town America and all its prejudices, sees a large group of people trapped in a relatively small store.)Despite a little too much talk, this is a fascinating, and brave, horror. Indeed given that the norm in contemporary horror is to sacrifice character in the service of plot, it is refreshing to have something to think about while you squirm, and the characters - stereotypes one and all though they might be - are deliberately used to give us a microcosm of America. (It's also good to have a kid behave like a kid, even if that means being annoying; better that than the precocious beasts we more often have to suffer.)
Trapped in the store, prejudices (often centering on those who are not 'local') soon bubble over and create sides when everyone should be uniting. Fear, as the characters themselves point out, on the one hand puts us in the hands of monsters, and on the other, and indeed as a result, makes monsters of us all. Marcia Gay Harden's Christian fundamentalist is the primary source of the polarisation. Beginning as a figure of fun, she rapidly becomes a mini-Hitler. She is just the most visible human monster though; no one really survives the onslaught.
On the outside an impressive, but often very familiar, array of beasties keep the pressure on the survivors. I am not one for CGI appreciation, but though the pixels do sometimes show, the inter-dimensional monsters do their job, instilling terror in shoppers and audience alike. We are never in any doubt that what lies in the mist is best left there. Again though, they are something of a McGuffin, or rather a mechanism, to set the real monsters loose.
The movie had a lukewarm reception in America and probably won't break box office records here either. It's far from perfect. Certainly the damning portrait of the silent majority could not have helped in the US. The real reason audiences might baulk though is undoubtedly the ending. If what has gone before was Lovecraft, what finishes proceedings is pure Ambrose Bierce ('THE COUP DE GRÂCE' anyone?), and if the movie were tighter, this would be one of the best contes cruels of recent times. But contes cruels are an acquired taste and that ending probably won't help here either. Neither will the frequent longuers. However, for the cynical among us (and there's still a couple of us), the film's negative view of humanity, and indeed Fate, cannot but appeal. Yea, as Hobbes put it, 'Life is nasty, brutish and short'; and then there's those damn tentacled, inter-dimensional thingies. We just can't win!

1408

When reviewing a new Stephen King adaptation, the standard thing to do is point out the hit and miss nature of the many adaptations that have gone before. That's the extent of my bowing to tradition on that score; point given. The latest addition to this canon, '1408', is the tale of a debunker of the paranormal staying in a purportedly haunted hotel. Received wisdom (and something King himself often agrees with) is that King takes standard tropes of the horror genre 6 vampires in 'Salem's Lot', a haunted house/hotel in 'The Shining' - and injects new blood into them. Here is another case in point.The tale of the sceptic spending a night in a haunted room is an old one ( tales by W.W. Jacobs, Sir Walter Scott, and W. H. Hodgeson immediately come to mind). However, this is a gross simplification of King's work, and he has come up with more than his fair share of original stories too - a possessed car in 'Christine', a rabid St Bernard in 'Cujo'. His haunted places such as the Overlook Hotel, or its little brother, Room 1408 in The Dolphin, are rarely simply haunted places. Like Christine, they are 'born' bad, inanimate objects imbued with an alien malignancy (a more humdrum instance of Lovecraft's cosmic evil, you might say). Room 1408 causes death and madness from the outset and as such is not above using the victim's own mind against them.

Here it helps to have a strong central performance to anchor the psychological games being played, and John Cusack, as the investigating writer, delivers. He adds a class to the movie, it doesn't really warrant. (Samuel L. Jackson, good though he is, doesn't really deserve the half of the poster he gets; in every scene, this is resolutely Cusack's movie). It's just a shame that the result is so unoriginal. This is partly the fault of King's story which is at heart a shopping list of his past ideas. Besides the obvious 'Shining' examples, we get the ledge walk from 'Cat's Eye', and even an axe wielder, cigarette gimmick and lost manuscript from 'Misery'. The standard family tragedy is trotted out once more for some character development, lending Cusack the humanity his smart-aleck patter might otherwise hide. Len Cariou gets wheeled on as Cusack's father, but there is a feeling here that what had been intended as a more relevant part of Cusack's history has been removed, or at least pared down.

In the end then, '1408', is a popcorn movie, full of bumps and screams, but lacking any intellectual bite. Fine, you say, all I want is a frightfest; leave the philosophising to the others. Fine, but when you do leave the cinema you won't have Cusack's dictaphone to remind you of what you've just been through. You'd probably need it.