Dig the new horror credo, as expressed in Steve Rasnic Tem's "Bodies and Heads," from Book of the Dead:
"I don't want to look," she said, on the verge of tears. "I don't want you to look either.
It's crazy, it's...Pornographic."
"Hey, I know this is pretty sick stuff, but I think it tells us something about the way things are out there.
Christ, they won't show it to us on the news.
Not the way it really is.
We need to know things like this exist."
"I know goddamn well they exist!
I don't need it rubbed in my face!"
Like the shambling zombies of their extremist fiction, modern day hottor writers refuse to die. Spurred on by heavy-metal mayhem, drug culture, slasher films, adolescent anguish, stephen King, and Clive Barker, they have taken the assault on cibilized behavior to graphic new frontiers of despair.
On the surface, which is almost all there is to it, modern horor is literature lacking (good) excuses.
The doomed denizens of these sad, angry little worlds stagger toward thresholds of vicarious pain way beyond slice-and-dice cinema.
As Warner Wolf might say, let's go to the text, which in this instance happens to be chan McConnell's "Blossom," also from Book of the Dead:
When he felt the muscle sever his penis like a wire cutter, he began to scream hoarsely.
None of his neighbors would pay any mind.
Weird games, aberrations, were the standard menu at Quinn's.
Suddenly freed, he sprawled backward.
Blood gushed...sputtering from his crotch.
He watched the stump of his still-stiff manhood vanish into a slick red schsm between Amelia's legs, overwhelmed by the sight of it being swallowed whole by the orifice that had bitten it off.
Not all new horror goes this far or so obviously wallows in vaginophobia. Why should it, when there are necrophilia, incest, decapitation, cannibalism, terminal s&m, dismemberment, and 57 other varities of shock fu to indulge in? As more than one recent genre writer has observed: There's a world of hurt out there.
For a couple of weeks last year, the new horor writers were referred to as splatterpunks, a marketing rubic deriving from science fiction's trendy cyberpunk tag. Splatter, its boosters argue, degothified the classic horror moves of Poe, Lovecraft, and King, driving the body count upward in rapid-fire bursts of hyperreal clarity, all the better to appeal to the lowest...uh, the largest possible audience for this sort of thing.
Included in the s-punk lineup are gory boys John Skipp, Craig Spector, Joe R. Lansdale, Ray Garton, Rex Miller, David J. Schow, Robert R. McCammon, and others, with Clive Barker as their patron saint. The splat pack wreaks its bizarre new permutations on our old friends Sex and Violence in the wake of Barker's chilly forensic exercises in the seminal Books of Blood. Needless to say, the new horror is also a reaction to such boring old farts as Ramsey Campbell, Robert Bloch, and even stephen King.
What follows is an anything-but-comprehensive trip through recent terror tropes designed to offend even the least prudish of sensibilities. As "literature" it nearly all falls in the Unreadable Crap category. But so what? Just as perfect moments can be found in even the most moronic pop, it regularly exceeds itself with pulp-lit hooks, outrageous jokes, and taboo fantisies exploiting seductively repellent (or vice versa) sexual and violent imagining. It's often difficult not to despise it, in fact, but the primal allure is undeniable.
Almost always written by-though not quite so exclusively for-young men, the new horror is embarrasingly adolescent in its simutaneous yearning for and rejection of love and sex as embodied by the mother. Rex Miller's Slob, David Schow's The Kill Riff, Chet Williamson's Dreamthrop, and Ray Garton's Crucifax Autumn all involve single-parent scenarios where the absent parent (usually the mother) is depicted as both problem and solution, victim and crime. In Crucifax Autumn, a pied-piper fantasy set in L.A.'s youth-culture bedeviled San Fernando Valley, the teenage male protagonist's mother is basically a good woman, but in order to support her children as a single parent, she secretly and guiltily works in a strip joint adn s a phone-sex object. When mom is a whore, the novel suggests, nothing is true adn everything is permitted.
weirdly moral, Crucifax Autumn exploits sex, drugs, and rock music to make an oddly retro plea for parental understanding. When a charismatic stranger named Mace("'I am the moldy bowl of goo-'he chuckled'-on the bottom shelf of your refrigerator.'")uses marijuana and music to organize the Valley teens into a suicide cult, there's a sensitive high school counselor ready to castigate their parents for not loving them enough. Less sensitive, Mace performs a cunnilingal abortion during the book's gross-out tour tour de force ("'It didn't even hurt, just...felt a little funny, that's all. In fact,'she smirked'it felt kinda good'").
For a writing so full of rock 'n' roll attitude, the new horror is often curiously ambivalent, or ironic, regarding the music's morality. In David Schow's The Kill Riff, a psycotic father avenges his beloved daughter's death-by-trampling at a heavy-metal concert by systematically murdering each member of the band. Schow goes out of his way to detail a certain backstage glamour and decadence, then has his incest-impassioned father bring it all down ("Write a jerk-off wet-dream child-molesting love ditty about this, you overpaid baboon").
Some of the new horror writers dispense with verisimilitude altogether, writing short, sharp works about sleaze culture itself. Besides Nightrunners, a sloppy, cruel Straw Dogs rip-off with occult garnish, and some arcane Western fiction, Texan Joe R. Lansdale has written two semiparodistic novels that read like short stories. Their dimwit humor misses more often than not, but Lansdale nonetheless possesses a keen trash sensibility. The Drive-In (subtitled "A B-Movie With Blood and Popcorn, Made in Texas") and The Drive-In 2 (subtitled "Not Just One of Them Sequals") are tongue-in-cheek hoots unabashidly beholden to fake drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs's syndicated shtick.
Sick, grotesque, and heaps of fun, The Drive-In explores the possibilities of a world reduced to its largest drive-in theater (a 4000-car, multiscreen affair) by the "All-Night Horror Show God." The resultant cannibalism, necrophilia, and fascistie power struggles are recounted with gleeful specifiicity by a high school kid overdosed on the contemporary filmic equivalent fo the Grand Guignol. When two of his friends fuse into a vomit-spewing monstrosity called the Popcorn King, "the content of the vomit looked to be cola and popcorn," but "with a sort of scabby look between the creases, along with thread-thin veins that pulsed and in its center was an eye."
Rendered in Sickening deteail for the sheer sake of same, Lansdale's Drive-Ins turn the horror spectacle upon itself. In the sequel, the Popcorn King is replaced by Papalong Cassidy, a loser who transcends the boundaries of the theater and is transformed into a living TV screen flickering endless reruns for his congregation of half-dead worshippers. Lansdale knows that cultural junk food is no less addictive and potent that the edible thing, and he exploits the physical nausea that can make even the hardest fo us balk after too many episodes of Married...With Children
The line betwen art and life is blurred even further in Silver Scream, a collection of film-oriented horror stories edited by David Schow. In addition to the obvious variations on cutting a movie (or something), the anthology puts interesting twists on scopophilia, snuff films, and very special effects. My personal favorite is Mark Arnold's "Pilgrims to the Cathedral," about a drive-in theater's ill-fated reconstruction as a low-culture utopia of sex, drugs, and B movies.
Trash cinema as splatterpunk fodder reaches its nadir with Book of the Dead, an omnibus of short stories set in George Romero's Night of the Living Dead universe. With a volume as collectively demented as it is engrossing (pun sadly intended), popular third-rate novelists and front-line s-punk ideologues John Skipp adn Craig Spector prove themselves wunderking anthologists. Reportedly hot for Hollywood, S & S realize that splatterpunk goes down best in bits-sized chunks. In their introduction to Book of the Dead ("On Going Too Far of Flesh-Eating Fiction: New Hope for the Future"), Skipp & Spector express self-satisfied surprise at the unadulterated overtness of the contributions. Damn, they seem to crow,ain't we the ones to push this shit over the brink!
Smartly organized, Book of the Dead is bracketed by two vastly different love stories. In McConnell's "Blossom," two worldly swingers are enjoying some mild s&m when the woman accidentally suffocates behind her leather mask. As her date recalls some "big Apple ratshit" about "dead people...reviving and eating love people," she bites his nose off through the mask and chews it up.
"Blossom's counterpar, Robert R. McCammon's delicious "Eat Me," takes place when zombiehood is the status quo. Here two shy, painfully sensitive, and desperately hungry deadheads meet and mate: "She leaned forword, her lips almost brushing his, her eyes almost pleading,'Eat me,' she whispered."
With overtness as a given, Dead's 16 contributors evince a surprisingly subtle spectrum of carnography.
Parodies rarely pack so revealing a load as Douglas E. Winter's, Less Than Zombie," which inducts Bret Easton Ellis and his ild into the back door.
By the end of the anthology, it's clear that in our baset animal motivations we're all graceless, hungrey meat heaps lurking about the automatic pilot.
It's hardly funnier of more pathetic to see zombies in
But Clive Barker, quoted in the introduction, is only partly right to suggest that "zombies are the liberal nightmare," referring to the left's supposed "fear of mass activity, of mindlessness on a national scale." Zombiehood is more domocratic than that, transcending class distinctions. During his own journey to the end of the night, Celine wrote in Les Beaux Draps, "The downtrodden of the earth on the one side, the bourgeois on the other, they have basically only one idea, to become rich of to stay rich.
It's all guts, incorporated. Everything for the belly."
It has been said that the modern horror phenomenon is rooted in the West's continuing effort to work through the Holocaust. In his hefty terror tome Carrion Comfort, Dan Simmons splices zombiethink into the fascist mentality, contrasting the elegant, cultured panache of vampires with the clumsy, slave oriented mentality of their victims. The vampires here, however, are of the mental variety, a charismatic assortment of businessmen, Hollywood types, a televangelist, and femmes fatales, who manipulate others as a form fo feeding frenzy, and are never so satisfied as when their victimes kill one another off. The novel's protagonist is a Jewish death-camp survivor who first experienced this form of "mental rape" among the Muselmanner, or living dead, of the Chelmno barracks, and has devoted his life to figuring out the arcane powers behind the mass psychology of violence and the collaborator mentality.
Carrion Comfort zips along with the occasionally convuluted yet smoothly padded precision of beach-blanket faves Ludlum, le Carre, and Clancy. Simmons transcends gardern-variety splatterpunk by stagging his vampire-zombie battles in a reverberant historical context. Employing just enough overtness to hook fangs into a reader's attention span, he plays two kinds of horror against each other, the fictional corpses paling beside the truly obscene spectacle of 12 million Holocaust victims. Simmons draws out the connection between the fictional carnival of souls and the real thing. Carrion Comfort succeeds best as an exorcism. And, with a few more gallons of blood and the odd crushed testicle or two, it would probably be a hit.
What's new in serial-murder fiction, you ask? The intelligent and popular Thomas Harris' work (Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs) is like that of a restrained old master compared to the anguished cruelties issued by the likes of Rex Miller and Chet Williamson. With their violence directed most frequently toward women, the usual question of hether this should be considered provocation or catharsis remains.
Science fiction hack Harlan Ellison loves Rex Miller's Slob, comparing it in his jacket blurb to John D. MacDonald, Travis McGree, James M. Cain, Elmore Leonard, Jom Thompson, Alfred Bester, and (that great pulp writer) Ernest Hemingway.
Some years ago, Ellison brandished his feminist principles against Brian de Palma's Body Double.
As I recall, he protested that the film was unfit to be shown to the Writher's Guild in light of passages such as the following, we can only take Ellison's endorsement of Slob as an index of changing times:
for a beat he is inert. Lifeless. Then his other persona emergies, springing like Frankenstein from out of whatever abiogenetu origins spawns living matter from nothingness. A backfist like a shotgun rips through the air slamming into her face with the loud, resounding crack that is unmistakably bone. Her neck snaps from the mighty blow. He continues to twist her hair with his left hand as he begins masturbating into her inert, now lifeless face.
Who could mistake those Hemingway rhythms? Slob is the old untraviolencd reduced to its grossest components. the titular character's killing instincts, we learn through countless fashbacks, were honed in Vietnam. The slob is being pursued by police detective Jack Eichord, a "reformed drunk" (this year's cop model) who specializes is serial killers. After he falls hard for the widow of one of the Slob's vixtims, the trajectory is predictable and the family order the ultimate target. In true slob-lit fashion, the showdown between killer and drunk is terse and anticlimactic following the many grim murders the perp commits on his road to denouement.
Eichord returns in Frenzy. Miller's serial slayer here, Frank Spain, is a divorced father avenging his daughter's gorily embellished murder in a snuff film. The twist is that Dad's a contract killer himself, and his long list of victims includes a host of his former employers. Spain may be nuts, but he's a psycho with a cause. He also has a way with words, greeting his victims like so: "You can make this hard, you know. Very hard. And your life will end for you in a soundless and tongueless scarlet sheet of awful, mind-mangling pain." Oh.
Employing a Spielbergian touch, Chet Williamson adds a disturbed Indian burial ground amid vacationland to the usual combination of obsessed psycho killer and single parents in his almost readable Deaththorp. After escaping confinement, Williamson's killer, a metal-dentured wacko with an acute mother problem, hitchhikes and hotwires his way crosscountry to destroy the woman who sent him to prison for slaughterintg her female lover during a camping trip. The book's overriding impetus is the killer's anxiety over the surviving woman's sexuality.
Unlike any other contrmporary art of transgression, abject fiction challenges propriety without serious fear of reprisal. Think about it: What god-fearing cultural censor would actually invest the necesary hours to read the stuff? Music, film, and television are all comprehensively covered in the media, yet popular fiction occupies an ever more marginal position in our incrasingly nonliterate world. Genre literature is today's outlaw pop art, and the new horror, for better of worse, is its most extreme state.
Almost a secret popular literature, the new horror possess undeniable energy seemingly directed to all the wrong places. I read it as neither prescription nor description, however, but rather as an ugly war being waged on the literary battlefield against an enemy that could be broadly defined as order , systems, or even, ahem, Being itself. Problems of sexual identity, familial order, the law, and the limits of pop lit are squeezed raw by these abjection-fueled imaginations.
The most shocking episodes in the new horror involve violations of the flesh, cuts and penetrations that confuse distinctions between inside and outside. In the same way that funerals often induce surprising and life-affirming sexual stimulations in those present, horror fiction highlights life by magnifying death. You don't want to see it, but you do anyway. And the lingering question is immortal: What can they-or someone-do for and encore?