Vampires Overhead (2 page)

Both
Black-Girl
,
White-Lady
and
Prelude to Blue Mountains
were published by the maverick Arthur Barker, a sometime refugee from the mad Walter Hutchinson. Barker, when establishing his own imprint, had an open-arms policy to the off-beat, the salacious, the scurrilous, the ‘difficult’. Some excellent writers passed through his doors: Robert Graves, the fine American regional novelist Phil Stong (author of
State Fair
, etc.), the comic writers Thorne Smith and Noel Langley, A. G. Macdonnell (as ‘Neil Gordon’), the apocalyptic fantasist Thomas Tweed—although in many cases their books were published by Barker because no one else would touch them (e.g. E. F. Benson’s bizarre saga of sex and Black Magic
Raven’s Brood
and Noel Langley’s bawdy
Cage Me A Peacock
). What almost certainly attracted Barker to Hyder’s two novels is the writer’s earthy vision and at times even earthier language and imagery—e.g. ‘Primordial Sex quivered with desire under the spell of crooned Negro music’. Unfortunately, what seemed exciting and
avant-garde
in 1935 appears merely risible a generation or so later.

Hyder’s final two published works show his Jamaican roots even more clearly than his adult novels. These books were the visible results of the only fame—mild as it was—he gained during his writing career. During the 1940s he wrote a long series of well-received serio-comic children’s stories aimed at adults for the London
Evening News
, about a lively, mischievous, and irrepressible Jamaican ten-year old called Matthias Nehemiah Martingue: Matt for short. Seventy-six of these short-shorts were collected in
Matt
(1944) and
The Magic of Matt
(1950). The stories are mainly knockabout tales in which Matt either gets the better of fat constable Mermian, or gets whupped by his (equally fat) Mammy. The illustrations, by Hyder himself, are as crude and energetic as the stories.

In
Vampires Overhead
, by sitting down at the typewriter and banging off a pulp thriller, Hyder neatly avoided most of the solecisms exhibited in the rest of his work (of style, plotting, grammar, dialogue, characterisation), even though he still had terrible problems with descriptive adverbs, both in their use and their meaning—e.g., ‘“I’m not sure that you really do understand,” I told her falteringly’ (
seems calm enough to me
); ‘stared down at her worryingly’ (
what, like a dog shaking a rat?
). Hyder’s non-weird books strike me as having been written by one trying to make a name for himself as a mainstream novelist whose principal task is to explicate the human condition. This was patently beyond his capabilities.
Vampires Overhead
, however, looks to have been written by one who needed the money. Ironically, this seems to have liberated his (for want of a better word) muse.

After its storming start there are some genuinely horrible stretches throughout the narrative. Hyder’s vampires, for instance, are like few other vampires in fantastic and weird literature. I’m not at all sure quite where he got the central idea from: these are certainly predatory, blood-drinking creatures, but they are by no means the vampires of pre- and post-Stoker cliché. Hyder’s obsession with their eyes, and the fact that they hang in dreadful, silent clusters points, perhaps, to an experience of seeing some genus of large West Indian bat gathered together in jungle colonies. Often one’s own disgust fuels the creative juices enormously, and there are certainly indications throughout the story that Hyder is deliberately homing in on a personal fear or repugnance as a form of catharsis.

The general post-cataclysmic background—quite cleverly dabbed in through the narrative—is easier to identify.
The War of the Worlds
(1898), by the founding father of modern speculative fiction, H. G. Wells, may be regarded as a template for most British domestic disaster novels and stories of the first sixty years of so of the twentieth century. I cannot believe that Hyder did not at some time experience that still (even a hundred years later) absorbing narrative. Perhaps, too, the polymathic Grant Allen’s extraorinary novella ‘The Thames Valley Catastrophe’ (1897), in which a volcanic eruption drowns the western Home Counties in a roaring sea of fire.

Closer to Hyder’s own reality, the Great War had a profound effect on popular culture and the creators of both mainstream and imaginative fiction. The inter-war period, for all kinds of reasons, was a worrying time, and in worrying times writers, especially writers of popular fiction, write worrying books mirroring the general
angst
. So many threats seemed to loom over middle-class Britain, of which the Bolshevik menace (certainly in the 1920s) seemed the most blatant, and revolution and anarchy the most easily realisable—the bloody events recorded in Dennis Wheatley’s
Black August
(1934) summed up the prevailing mood of both writers and readers.

But this attitude gradually changed after the Wall Street crash brought terrible instability to the western world, and, even before the sinister events of 1933, the mood in Germany particularly began to turn muscularly against reparations and the botched Treaty of Versailles. Touched by paranoia, the visions of the fiction-writers became even bleaker and more apocalyptic. Already in 1926 the Irish novelist Shaw Desmond’s gloomy
Ragnarok
had foretold a war that hurled mankind back to the Stone Age, but now the actual horrors of the Great War, in the hands of seasoned thriller-writers, were magnified a thousandfold.

Gas that contaminated a mere hundred yards or so of trench networks became, a decade and a half later, a vast rolling cloud of doom that blighted half a nation—Ladbroke Black’s
The Poison War
(1933). Lumbering and relatively easily potted Gotha bombers of 1917 were transformed by the imaginative writer’s art into swift, sleek, unvanquishable machines of infinite destruction and terror—Moray Dalton’s
The Black Death
(1934).

At some point in all of these, and similar, narratives, England—more precisely the Home Counties—is reduced to a ravaged moonscape of tortured metal girders and stinking rubble: the kind of scene, in fact, that greeted the aghast travellers in Francis Sibson’s
Unthinkable
(1933) on their return from the southern Polar regions, unaware that while they have been incommunicado for months, war has virtually destroyed civilisation. All contain memorable scenes of destruction, devastation, and horror that find echoes in Hyder’s fantastic and at times gruesome yarn.

Even so, there are one or two explicatory gaps. That has to be admitted.

There is an old story of the lowly pulp-writer who, after a lifetime of pounding out low-grade tosh, is lauded by mainstream reviewers and
littérateurs
when one of his books becomes a roaring critical success.

This guy—let’s for the sake of argument call him John Schwarzenbrunner—is British and writes terrible private-eye novels set in California, to where he’s never been, filching all his backgrounds from out-of-date travel books. His thrillers (a misnomer if ever there was one) are formulaic to a degree: eight murders per book; the hero gets beaten up by the cops three times per book; every female in sight succumbs to his brutish charms except his rich, and stunningly beautiful, female client; he gets rich, and stunningly beautiful female client, in the last few lines of the final chapter; out of twenty chapters, Chapter Twenty is filled with mind-numbingly tedious explanations, Chapter Nineteen is all action, and Chapter Eighteen invariably ends with the hero in the most desperate straits, a grisly death staring him in the face (usually of a sexual and castratory nature), no help within a league. Schwarzenbrunner’s publisher is equally low-grade, utterly ruthless, psychopathically stingy, and has an obsession with cost-cutting.

So the situation is: the price of paper has suddenly rocketed, the publisher is now trying to cram full-length novels into less pages (by using smaller type and printing on fewer signatures), and Schwarzenbrunner himself has just delivered his latest and gone on holiday to the Galapagos Islands (this is the only note of sheer fantasy in the story: no writer of crap private-eye novels would get enough money to enable him to visit Lundy, let alone the Galapagos Islands). On the Galapagos Islands Schwarzenbrunner falls prey to an abominable disease gained from kissing giant tortoises and is out of action for a year. When he returns to the U.K. he discovers to his astonishment and delight that his latest has been published and, instead of getting two lines in the
Doncaster Argus & Courant
, is garnering reviews one would happily kill for in the
Times Literary Supplement
, the
London Review of Books
, and all the heavy broadsheets: ‘Schwarzenbrunner plumbs the heart of darkness that is contemporary
noir
’ . . . ‘There are no resolutions, happy or otherwise, in this mean-streets masterpiece’ . . . ‘The depths of nihilism: life’s a bitch, and then you die’, and so on. Uplifted by this deluge of praise, he gets invited to a book-signing. Idly riffling through the pages of his
chef-d’oeuvre
his face suddenly takes on a look of stupefaction which swiftly resolves itself into something akin to that seen on the phiz of the demon in the pantomime when baffled by buxom, be-tighted Jack. ‘My God!’ he croaks. ‘The bastard’s cut out the last two chapters!’

Well.

The point is: did Hyder cleverly and deliberately construct
Vampires Overhead
the way it has turned out? So that nothing is explained, nothing is resolved, and there are enough loose ends to knit an Arran sweater? A comet is mentioned. Though not pursued. There’s a vague possibility these vampires come from outer space. How? (Can one flap leathery wings in a vacuum?)
Why
? Are they simply a group
deus ex machina
, brought in to jump-start the narrative? Is the novel meant to be ‘like life’, in that in life, too, much is unvouchsafed to us? Is it ‘naturalistic’? There are certainly a few dollops of sex chucked in—though not of course explicit sex; this is, after all, 1935. Rape takes place—though off-stage, obviously. Did Hyder then want to write about the sexual and spiritual interaction between three people undertaking an epic journey under the most appalling conditions (‘It’s hell! We’ve woke up in hell!’) and decided to give it an SF cloak because no other seemed to fit?

Or did he simply sit down and write a pulp SF thriller, but didn’t have the breadth of vision or creative imagination to fill in the gaps?

Or are the explanations and tyings-up not there because Hyder simply forgot to write them?

An imponderable mystery—and, in the end, probably not worth pondering in the first place. And none of this in any case should detract from the genuine pace and genuine grue of one of the rarest vampire tales of the twentieth century.

Jack Adrian

August 2002

I

The Coming of Bingen

CONTEMPLATING RETROSPECTIVELY
the first days of terror and the ensuing weeks which alternated erratically between black despair and a curious happiness, it is incredible how horror merges into a dull background of dimly burning smoky flame whilst insignificant details are spot-lighted into prominence. Either it is that man is interested mostly in the minor, the understandable, or it is that Nature cunningly casts aside that which is too big, too terrible, for his comprehension. So that this narrative must needs be the record of what were, however appalling they may have appeared at the moment, trivial events happening in a land crouching in fear and dying.

So far as I know the first and only inkling of anything untoward—and it was unheeded portent to a careless world—came from Jamaica. The
News
had a small paragraph tucked away in the ‘News from All Quarters’ column concerning a sergeant and a sapper who, stationed at Fort Nugent upon outpost duty, reported having seen humped upon the ramparts two enormous bats. The
News
headed the paragraph ‘Rum?’ Not many people, I imagine, noticed it, and those who read forgot it immediately. I read it and remember joking about it with Clynes in the saloon of The White Hart. Holding glasses high we peered through the amber beer while questioning the barmaid, ‘No bats in here, miss?’ I recollect her lifted eyebrows, her majestic move to another corner of the bar. She was tightly laced, that barmaid, but above and below her corsets, curves bulged into the black lace of her dress, so that even while I wonder how she fared, I know.

Eight days after that three-lined trivial paragraph in the
News
, Bingen and I were crouching in the bowels of the earth like two alien shades in a vivid hell, and above, London flared away to a heaped grey mass of ash glowing redly here, leaving twisted stanchions from steel-framed buildings protruding like picked fishbones there.