Horror: The 100 Best Books (23 page)

Cold sweat drained over me in the dark hutch. I myself hated many people. How many times had I dreamed of the time when I would be strong enough to return, set their settlements on fire, poison their children and cattle, lure them into deadly swamps. In a sense I had already been recruited by the powers of Evil and had made a pact with them.

But even that, perhaps terrible, revelation gives way to numbing objectivity and distancing when he witnesses a Kamluk raid. In a sense the protagonist, as silent witness to Kosinski's diorama of horrors, is emblematic of the reader . . . or perhaps just this reader. The shock of his experience as a wanderer, outsider, and evil-eyed "gypsy", leaves him mute, only able to watch, no longer disbelieving, unable, in the final analysis, even to rationalize. As he watches the Kamluks destroy a village, raping and looting and murdering in every disgusting manner possible (and the author in his introduction to the book emphasized that "Every village of Eastern Europe knew of such events, and hundreds of settlements had suffered similar fates"), he becomes a camera for us, a neutral eye, since the marvelous eye, the mirror that could reflect the whole world, is indeed broken. Unlike most genre horror novels and stories (and this is not to denigrate those forms in any way), the shocking element is that of reality. In the genre, the horror element is the supernatural, which is often symptomatic or symbolic of our fears and frustration. But Kosinski's
The Painted Bird
cuts to the bone because the experience itself is not easily digested, and we -- like Kosinski's protagonist -- are left frightened and perplexed after this brush with the dark, perverse antinomies of human nature. My own writing has, to some extent, been a reaction to this book. From my horror story "Camps" to
The Economy of Light
, a novel-in-progress about the possibility of moral transformation, I have felt the obligation to "testify", to try to become "a marvelous mirror" and perhaps transfuse a bit of our past into our present. It may well be a superstitious hope that if we can only remember our past, we won't repeat it; and fiction, which John Gardner called "a waking dream", is one way of experiencing and remembering. But as Kosinski has shown us, sometimes superstition is our only defense. -- JACK DANN

Dr. Edward Sanders travels to West Africa to investigate reports of a strange phenomenon. He discovers that a growing expanse of the jungle has been turning crystalline, fusing the flora and fauna into a glittering mineral formation. Finally, Sanders is compelled to travel into the abstract sculpture jungle himself, hoping to merge with the landscape.
The Crystal World
follows Ballard's
The Wind from Nowhere
(1962),
The Drowned World
(1962) and
The Burning World
(1964) (a.k.a.
The Drought
), and forms the final part of a loose quartet of disaster novels dealing with the four elements. While the first book in the sequence was conventional SF in the John Wyndham vein, the later books are increasingly bizarre, surreal and unclassifiable.

***

Disaster is a proud tradition in fantastic literature, from H. G. Wells' Martian invasion to such modern-day bestsellers as
Swan Song
and
War Day
. The fifties and the early sixties were a particularly fertile time for disaster novels, what with new awareness of atomic bombs and ecology, producing such end-of-the-world (or end-of-humanity) classics as John Wyndham's
Day of the Triffids
and Richard Matheson's
I am Legend
. It is in this tradition that J. G. Ballard began writing his book-length fiction, culminating in his fourth novel,
The Crystal World
. The central disaster in Ballard's book is quite simple. Something is happening in remote tropical sections of the world. The landscape is transforming, changing from lush, humid vegetation, to cold, arid crystals. But how Ballard handles this disaster is quite atypical. Instead of fighting the disaster with non-stop action or the latest scientific marvels, his characters act almost as if the change wasn't even taking place, and in a way that is most certainly secondary to their immediate emotional concerns. Death and decay are everywhere in
The Crystal World
. The opening image in the book is one of rotting vegetation along black river water. The protagonist, Dr. Sanders, a specialist in leprosy, searches for a former lover who has, herself, contracted the disease. In the book's most dramatic sub-plot, two men fight violently over a woman who is dying of some wasting illness. And, moving slowly but unstoppably, is the crystalization of the jungle and the world. Ballard describes this transformed jungle as a place of great beauty -- the crystals pulse with a light of their own -- but it is a place without heat, and a place of total silence. Everything, vegetation, water, birds, animals, humans, perhaps even air, is being turned to crystal and frozen in place. Ballard sets up the universe of
The Crystal World
as a place of opposites, foremost among them the living/rotting jungle versus the dead/magnificent crystals. The protagonist has two loves: Suzanne, who contracts leprosy and is drawn to the crystal world, and Louise, a journalist investigating the phenomenon, who wants to return to the unaffected outside world with Sanders. But Sanders cannot resolve either of his love affairs, and all the opposites in the book seem equally unresolvable. Life goes on, for the most part passively, as the crystals approach. The only moment of true passion in the book occurs when a character, rescued by Sanders from a crystal shell and returned to bleeding, aching flesh, demands to be taken back, to be frozen again in crystal . In the end, Sanders decides to return to the crystals, to be frozen forever. In fact, none of the characters leave, not even Louise. Perhaps no one can leave. It is the end of change. The world, the sun, the universe, everything will turn to crystal. And this end of change, Ballard implies, is what all of us desire. It is this unique combination of the psychological and the physical that makes
The Crystal World
a very quiet, yet very effective, work of horror fiction. -- CRAIG SHAW GARDNER

Sub Rosa
is an original collection of ghost stories -- or "strange stories", to use the author's preferred term -- concentrating on ambiguity, unease and stark terror. It consists of eight novella-length tales: "Ravissante", "The Inner Room", "Never Visit Venice", "The Unsettled Dust", "The Houses of the Russians", "No Stronger Than a Flower", "The Cicerones" and "Into the Wood". Aickman's other collections, all of a similarly high standard, are
Dark Entries
(1964),
Powers of Darkness
(1966),
Cold Hand in Mine
(1975),
Tales of Love and Death
(1977),
Painted Devils
(1979) and
The Wine-Dark Sea
(1988).

***

At the beginning of "Ravissante" our anonymous narrator recalls meeting a married couple at a party. The man told him he had given up painting for easier and more lucrative employment editing coffee-table books. His wife the narrator describes as a "nearly invisible woman". She did not speak. "I remark on this," says the narrator, "simply as a fact. I do not imply that she was bored. She might indeed have been enthralled. Silence can, after all, mean either thing. In her case, I never found out which it meant." The Latin tag
sub rosa
means "secretly; in strict confidence". The estimable E. Cobham Brewer explains that "Cupid gave Harpocrates (the god of silence) a rose, to bribe him not to betray the amours of Venus. Hence the flower became the emblem of silence." Robert Aickman tells us secrets, secrets we would generally rather not know; secrets so bizarre we do not know how to take them; secrets so private we may doubt whether he has told us anything at all. He has. He has shown us views of the domain of Harpocrates: told us something of the nature of the silence. In the silence there may be anything. Most often it is sex or death, or for Curtis in "No Stronger Than a Flower" as for Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, one wearing the mask of the other. We long for silence as we long for sleep; as we long for one another. We do not know the face of what we long for; but when we see it, we know it, and with that we are extinguished. The editor of coffee-table books leaves an account of the horrid experience that induced him to give up painting. In a foreign country, in a house he did not know, the squat, ugly widow of an artist he much admired subjected him to a sexually degrading ritual before a canvas he immediately recognized as his own work, but which he knew he had never painted. It was to keep out of this region of terror and humiliation that the man gave up his art and married a woman who would efface herself for him; or perhaps because he had been there already. "The Inner Room" tells how a woman shelters from a storm in a house that resembles entirely the macabre doll's house she owned briefly as a child, but could never open. The musty, embittered inhabitants show her a photograph of herself when young, pierced with a rusty needle. Robert Aickman's "strange tales" enter into secret limbos and private hells where the outer world has come to resemble the inner. Coded out of gestures, urges, and hesitations, their landscapes are no more comprehensible and no less compelling than the scenarios of dreams. "These areas," says Aickman in "Into the Wood", "are not uncommon if you know how (or are compelled) to look for them." Trant, the central character of "The Cicerones", comes with ease among the tombs of the bishops of St. Bavon. "The gate had every appearance of being locked, but in fact it opened at once." In this story it is Christianity itself, with its mechanisms of martyrdom and election, that generates horror. At the last it is not clear whether Trant has been saved or damned, only that he has been removed from the world of guidebooks and wristwatches. Aickman's characters are tourists and travellers, solitaries abroad. Nugent Oxenhope, in "The Unsettled Dust", is an official forced to put up at a dreary stately home, the barely tenanted husk of a former grandeur. Aickman thought this a suitable image for Britain in the twentieth century. In "Never Visit Venice" and "Into the Wood", as in "Ravissante" and "The Cicerones", Britons carry their disappointment and loneliness into Europe, where different forms of paralysis await them. In "The Houses of the Russians" a British surveyor's clerk on business in Finland is given a gratuitous vision of an Orthodox heaven and hell, and a protective talisman. Harpocrates too can be kind. Aickman's was not a malign universe, or even a retributive tragic order that automatically punished transgressions and oversights. Rather he maintained, in the stories of his eight collections (one collaborative, one posthumous), that human existence is a narrow path through the absolute unknown; and we occasionally, inevitably, stray. Introducing the ex-painter's manuscript, the narrator of "Ravissante" says: "The sheer oddity of life seems to me of more and more importance, because more and more the pretence is that life is charted, predictable, and controllable." In the house of the dead artist, so the manuscript records, the writer suddenly noticed a small black poodle in the room. "It seemed to me, as I looked at it, to have very big eyes and very long legs, perhaps more like a spider than a poodle." He lost track of it, and mentioned it to the widow. She had not seen it. "If it's not yours," he told her, "it must have got in from the darkness outside." -- COLIN GREENLAND

Maurice Allington, owner of a pub in Fareham, Hertfordshire, called The Green Man -- which numbers Brian W. Aldiss among its patrons -- begins to see ghosts. A heavy drinker and a womanizer, Allington is at first more preoccupied with his complicated day-to-day life, specifically his attempts to get his wife Joyce and mistress Diana to join him in a bout of troilist sex, than the supernatural visitations. However, the sinister presence of Dr. Thomas Underhill, a dead magician, soon persuades him to take an interest. It develops that Underhill has plans to return from the beyond; plans which involve Maurice and his young daughter Amy, not to mention the imposing folklore figure after which the pub is named. A witty, scary combination of typical Amis social/sexual comedy and the M. R. James tradition,
The Green Man
includes several fine digressions on the natures of death, ghostliness and the ghost story itself. Although Amis has tried his hand several times at science fiction, this remains his only major venture into the horror field. It was adapted by Malcolm Bradbury as a three-part BBC-TV serial, starring Albert Finney, in 1990.

***

The Oxford English Dictionary
gives as its definition of Horror, "A painful emotion compounded of loathing and fear".
The Green Man
provides plenty of fear and loathing, as well as painful emotion in its own right. Unlike some novels, which take a while before introducing their frisson,
The Green Man
begins briskly: a ghost arrives on page four of the text. This relatively harmless -- that is, merely disconcerting -- female apparition serves as a prelude to a series of malevolent figures, some more substantial than others, all capable of raising the fear and loathing level. We meet an old man, a young man, an unpleasant bird, and the particularly unsettling creature of the title. This might sound like gilding the lily, but not in Kingsley Amis' hands. An acclaimed novelist makes his horrors telling by staging them in the prosaic setting of a public house, The Green Man, eight miles off the M1 in Hertfordshire. The owner of the pub is Maurice Allington, a man with a drink problem and several other problems of a personal nature which lead to the disaffection of his second wife and the alienation of his young daughter.
The Green Man
works as a novel, rather than just as a horror tale, its strengths being the rough-edged character of Allington and the lucidity with which his pub and its working life are described. A reader soon feels that he could find his way round the premises alone at night, from the bedrooms to the bar. Not that this would be the most desirable of activities. For The Green Man is home to the evil shade of a 17th-century practitioner of the black arts, Dr. Thomas Underhill. Allington comes up against him in what is now the pub dining-room, once Underhill's study.