Halloween Reading
Oct. 30th, 2019 04:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhThe Rim of Morning: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror by William Sloane. This is a collection of two novels, "To Walk the Night" and "The Edge of Running Water", both originally published in the 1930s and the only horror novels Sloane ever wrote. Which is surprising, because these are very accomplished and confident works. There's a very Lovecraftian tinge to both novels, though less in the sense of "cults and elder gods" and more in the sense of "scientist discovers things man was not meant to know". Also: much less racism and anti-semitism. Unfortunately Sloane does not entirely escape being a writer of his time; his attitude toward women in both stories is fairly appalling, though more so in "The Edge of Running Water".
"To Walk the Night" begins with the narrator arriving at the house of his best friend's father, carrying the ashes of that best friend, who has just killed himself. The father – understandably! – asks the narrator to explain what drove his son to suicide, and they pass a long night staring out into the dark as the narrator tells the story of how he and the friend went back to visit an old college professor, only to discover his freshly murdered corpse. It's a particularly mysterious death, and even the police have no answers as to how it was done or who wanted to kill him. The friend slowly becomes obsessed with a) solving the mystery, b) working on the equations about Einstein's theory of space-time the professor left behind, and c) hooking up way too soon with the professor's hot widow. These three strands eventually come together into a terrible revelation the friend couldn't live with.
In "The Edge of Running Water", our narrator is himself a professor, this time traveling to rural Maine to visit another professor, a former friend of his who dropped out of the college scene five years previously after the sudden but not mysterious death of his wife. It turns out that he's spent this entire time trying to invent a machine for communicating with the dead. While our narrator struggles to find a nice way to tell his friend that he needs therapy and the machine is definitely fake, he deals with the creepy surroundings: a small town of locals who distrust all outsiders; the strange woman who seems to be taking advantage of his friend and who claims to be a medium; weirds sounds emanating from his friend's laboratory; and the disappearance of his friend's housekeeper. There's also the friend's step-daughter, who the narrator fondly reminisces about babysitting as a preteen while currently commenting on her body and kissing her, but let's skip that part, shall we? Indeed! As you probably could guess, the novel concludes with a literal bang when it turns out that the machine isn't so fake after all.
Both stories are heavy on a creeping sense of dread, spending a great deal of time establishing the characters, setting, and coming darkness. They're both extremely slow builds, which is certainly part of their appeal but also my main complaint. Perhaps the ending revelations were more shocking in the 1930s but they're easy to see coming today and taking so very long to get to the climax lessened the impact for me. I think they would have made great episodes of The Twilight Zone, not least because shortening them to a thirty-minute runtime would have cut out the extraneous material. Nonetheless, the writing is effective at pulling you into the world, and I raced through both novels. Sloane is particularly a master at creating evocative scenery; the descriptions of barren mesas in the New Mexican desert in "To Walk the Night" will stay with me for a long time. Recommended for anyone who's into the history of the horror genre, though the scares here are quite mild.
The Dinosaur Tourist by Caitlín R. Kiernan. A collection of 19 short stories, mostly in the horror genre though frequently more mildly creepy than outright horrific. Despite the stories being disconnected, there are images and themes that appear repeatedly: paleontologists (though dinosaurs themselves appear only as fossils or, once, as a cheesy tourist attraction); lesbian couples; protagonists who grew up in the southern United States only to spend their adult lives up north; sitting in a psychiatrist's office describing bad dreams based on weird but not directly traumatic childhood experiences; vivid descriptions of locations in the US's north-east, mostly NYC, Boston, and Providence; the scent of the ocean and/or rivers; explicit Lovecraft references, most often to Mother Hydra, here repeatedly depicted as an evil Venus of Willendorf. As a whole, the stories are a mixed bag; some of them I loved, and some I found far too vague and ambiguous.
My favorites included:
"The Cats of River Street (1925)" – the pet and feral cats of Lovecraft's Innsmouth come together on the spring equinox to fight back a tide of sea monsters. A wonderful portrayal of a diversity of personalities in a specific time and place.
"Far From Any Shore" – three paleontologists dig up the Mother Hydra statue and succumb to mysterious illnesses while revelers celebrate the end of the world. Creepy and understated; very well-done.
"Fake Plastic Trees" – in a world somewhat like Vonnegut's Cat Cradle (though in this case nanobots have turned everything to plastic), a teenage girl makes a horrific discovery. Nice tension and worldbuilding here.
"Elegy for a Suicide" – a woman touches what looks like a fungi, only to find her body rotting and an ancient power consuming her inner self.
Unfortunately too many of the other stories are meandering and unclear, in that way of literary fiction in which nothing actually happens but it's all very weighty and meaningful. Frequently I was bored enough that I had to force myself to keep reading. The other books I've read by Kiernan didn't have this problem, so I was disappointed to encounter it here. But that said, the stories that worked, really really worked.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
"To Walk the Night" begins with the narrator arriving at the house of his best friend's father, carrying the ashes of that best friend, who has just killed himself. The father – understandably! – asks the narrator to explain what drove his son to suicide, and they pass a long night staring out into the dark as the narrator tells the story of how he and the friend went back to visit an old college professor, only to discover his freshly murdered corpse. It's a particularly mysterious death, and even the police have no answers as to how it was done or who wanted to kill him. The friend slowly becomes obsessed with a) solving the mystery, b) working on the equations about Einstein's theory of space-time the professor left behind, and c) hooking up way too soon with the professor's hot widow. These three strands eventually come together into a terrible revelation the friend couldn't live with.
In "The Edge of Running Water", our narrator is himself a professor, this time traveling to rural Maine to visit another professor, a former friend of his who dropped out of the college scene five years previously after the sudden but not mysterious death of his wife. It turns out that he's spent this entire time trying to invent a machine for communicating with the dead. While our narrator struggles to find a nice way to tell his friend that he needs therapy and the machine is definitely fake, he deals with the creepy surroundings: a small town of locals who distrust all outsiders; the strange woman who seems to be taking advantage of his friend and who claims to be a medium; weirds sounds emanating from his friend's laboratory; and the disappearance of his friend's housekeeper. There's also the friend's step-daughter, who the narrator fondly reminisces about babysitting as a preteen while currently commenting on her body and kissing her, but let's skip that part, shall we? Indeed! As you probably could guess, the novel concludes with a literal bang when it turns out that the machine isn't so fake after all.
Both stories are heavy on a creeping sense of dread, spending a great deal of time establishing the characters, setting, and coming darkness. They're both extremely slow builds, which is certainly part of their appeal but also my main complaint. Perhaps the ending revelations were more shocking in the 1930s but they're easy to see coming today and taking so very long to get to the climax lessened the impact for me. I think they would have made great episodes of The Twilight Zone, not least because shortening them to a thirty-minute runtime would have cut out the extraneous material. Nonetheless, the writing is effective at pulling you into the world, and I raced through both novels. Sloane is particularly a master at creating evocative scenery; the descriptions of barren mesas in the New Mexican desert in "To Walk the Night" will stay with me for a long time. Recommended for anyone who's into the history of the horror genre, though the scares here are quite mild.
The Dinosaur Tourist by Caitlín R. Kiernan. A collection of 19 short stories, mostly in the horror genre though frequently more mildly creepy than outright horrific. Despite the stories being disconnected, there are images and themes that appear repeatedly: paleontologists (though dinosaurs themselves appear only as fossils or, once, as a cheesy tourist attraction); lesbian couples; protagonists who grew up in the southern United States only to spend their adult lives up north; sitting in a psychiatrist's office describing bad dreams based on weird but not directly traumatic childhood experiences; vivid descriptions of locations in the US's north-east, mostly NYC, Boston, and Providence; the scent of the ocean and/or rivers; explicit Lovecraft references, most often to Mother Hydra, here repeatedly depicted as an evil Venus of Willendorf. As a whole, the stories are a mixed bag; some of them I loved, and some I found far too vague and ambiguous.
My favorites included:
"The Cats of River Street (1925)" – the pet and feral cats of Lovecraft's Innsmouth come together on the spring equinox to fight back a tide of sea monsters. A wonderful portrayal of a diversity of personalities in a specific time and place.
"Far From Any Shore" – three paleontologists dig up the Mother Hydra statue and succumb to mysterious illnesses while revelers celebrate the end of the world. Creepy and understated; very well-done.
"Fake Plastic Trees" – in a world somewhat like Vonnegut's Cat Cradle (though in this case nanobots have turned everything to plastic), a teenage girl makes a horrific discovery. Nice tension and worldbuilding here.
"Elegy for a Suicide" – a woman touches what looks like a fungi, only to find her body rotting and an ancient power consuming her inner self.
Unfortunately too many of the other stories are meandering and unclear, in that way of literary fiction in which nothing actually happens but it's all very weighty and meaningful. Frequently I was bored enough that I had to force myself to keep reading. The other books I've read by Kiernan didn't have this problem, so I was disappointed to encounter it here. But that said, the stories that worked, really really worked.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
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Date: 2019-10-31 02:37 am (UTC)Ah, I knew I had picked up this book based on someone's review, but I couldn't remember who; it must have been you! Thank you for the link; it was interesting to read again now that I've read it myself.
while there is really only one woman in the plot and eventually it's an open question whether describing her by gender is accurate and/or relevant at all, she is definitely a person, whatever else she is.
This is true, though I did get annoyed at the number of times the narrator thought, "wow, she literally knows nothing! I guess that's just how pretty women are". Of course, it's quite possible that was intended as characterization and not Sloane's own opinion, even if I disliked it. But on the other hand, I very much enjoyed the portrayal of the narrator's mother. It was refreshingly direct about her not exactly being the kind of woman the narrator wanted as a mother, but who nonetheless was very good at being herself.
I also love this story.
It had such excellent cats, but also a great depiction of an entire small town (even without the sea monster part).