Have You Read This? Sing Your Sadness Deep by Laura Mauro

Fantasy that begins in the real world often has a gateway. One goes into a wardrobe to enter Narnia. Platform 9¾  is how many students find the train that takes them to Hogwart’s. Simply reading The Neverending Story is one’s gateway into Fantasia. These realms of fantasy are often places where one escapes the mundane and various real-world issues, there are some worlds that have their own problems, and sometimes they are worse. Laura Mauro’s short story collection Sing Your Sadness Deep isn’t a gateway into one world, but several little entryways into sinister worlds of magical realism, its characters sometimes pulled in unaware or against their will.

The people in Mauro’s tales aren’t your typical protagonists in fantasy stories. They don’t have the fantastic come to them through a magical wish upon a star, but one could argue they’d be deserving of one. They are immigrants struggling to get by in London, they are souls tormented by unrequited love, and children destined to fall through the cracks of a stressed-to-the-breaking-point education system.  The fantastic isn’t really an escape, however, but another issue that they must contend with. A little girl in the tale “Obsidian” must deal with something beneath a lake that wants her sister while also dealing with her sister’s special needs and a mother working too much to be available. “Letters from Elodie” is about a woman trying to make sense of her friend Elodie’s suicide, not just wondering what had happened to her but who she really was. “Sun Dogs” shows a doomsday prepper’s life turned upside down by something that she isn’t prepared for: loving a very mysterious woman. These stories aren’t about happily ever after, or even necessarily discovering something about yourself. These stories seem to show that life, even when the fantastic decided to intervene, is cruel, sometimes it is doubly cruel when something out of the ordinary comes along but still leaves the protagonist of these stories with the same or even worse issues.

However, these stories aren’t cynical parodies of fairy tales, but rather beautifully told tales with less-than-happy endings. The title is a reference to one of the stories in the collection, but it could also apply to how the language of these stories sing a beautifully haunting melody that still plucks and even tears at the heartstrings. Mauro’s gift of language evokes a musical pull that lets you follow these characters off the path of the mundane, no matter how dark the path to the fantastic gets. It evokes magical realism but focuses heavily on the soul-crushing reality.

New Arrival: One by One by D. W. Gillespie

In Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House,” she says Hill House is not only an “unkind house” but that the house “watches every move [Eleanor and company] make.” Eleanor even says that she herself is “like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster” when in Hill House. In Jackson’s novel and in many haunted house movies since, the house, the building, in question is given anthropomorphic qualities, becoming not just a character but the villain, the monster that swallows up whoever enters its doors. Jackson’s point seems to be that houses like Hill House seem to spring up from the earth corrupted, while others, like the house in D. W. Gillespie’s One By One, become evil due to what happens within their walls.  

The formula for this story should be very familiar to most: family buys a house that’s too good to be true but soon discover the horrible events that led to such a great deal. There are some unusual circumstances that gradually become more disturbing and more dangerous until even the hardcore skeptic must face the fact that their house is the monster that has swallowed them up. Frank Easton is excited about the chance to fix up the family’s new house, even if the other family members have their own trepidations. Mom Debra fears this is another of Frank’s pie-in-the-sky dreams. Teenage son Dean, alternating between surly and sweet throughout the novel, just wants to get back to his friends. It is young Alice, the POV character, who suspects something is wrong in this house. She discovers a childish painting of a family where each member eventually will have a crude X marked through them. She has terrifying nightmares. She hears strange noises. She also finds out about the family that lived here before, ultimately unraveling the mystery of the house before whatever lurks in its hallways decided to digest her family and spit them out.

The story doesn’t exactly break new ground in the haunted house genre, but One By One is still a fun read. Alice, at times, seems too smart for ten years old, but she also does well as a sympathetic character, especially when she’s the only one who seems aware of the danger they’re in. Oddly enough, another interesting character that Mary learns about is the daughter of the family that lived there before. Mary is revealed through pages in a diary, but Alice’s imagination is what truly brings her to life. Rather than torment Alice, Mary becomes Alice’s best friend and emotional support system despite both girls existing years apart from each other. There’s a mystery in One By One that I don’t want to spoil because unraveling the mystery with Alice is part of the fun, but be warned: those expecting a breezy haunted house tale may be struck with some of the story’s themes of physical and emotional trauma. One By One doesn’t shy away from the fact that even those who may escape the belly of a haunted house might still feel like they’re trapped long after they’ve escaped its walls.  

Fearsome Five: Five Action Movie Horror Reads

Gunfights! Judo throws! Dogs! John Wick is not only what many cite as a rediscovery of Keanu Reeves (a Keanussance, if you will), but it also represents a reinvigoration of the action genre. By leaning into the video-game like gunplay and outlandishly badass characterization, the John Wick series has created a franchise that can be both a satire and a love letter to the action genre. John Wick 3: Parabellum continues the trend with a bounty on John Wick’s head, meaning those trying to collect that bounty will only collect . . . DEATH!

Some people prefer their horror quiet, with creaking doors and evil whispers, while others like their horror big and loud, a cacophony of explosions and keening screams. For those that like their horror as loud as the shootout in Scarface, here are some horror stories that aren’t afraid to crank the volume all the way up to . . . DEATH!

5) Vampire$ by John Steakley. Fans of the movie might remember James Woods famously asking a priest if he’s “getting a little mahogany,” but the book the movie was based on is a fun, hard-boiled exploration of the lives of vampire hunters for hire. These vampire hunters aren’t in the mold of Van Helsing, even Hugh Jackman’s turn as Van Helsing seems quaint compared to the hard-drinking, motorcycle-riding, Church-sanctioned vampire hunters of Steakley’s novel. Rather than go in at night, nervously clutching crucifixes, these hunters barrel into vampire nests in broad daylight when the monsters are at their most vulnerable and most combustible. Leader Jack Crow and his team are very good at their job until an ambush leaves the team’s ranks decimated. That leaves Jack, with a new team, looking for revenge and the vampires still out for blood.

4) Little Heaven by Nick Cutter: This 80’s movie in book form begins with a trio of mercenaries being hired to rescue a woman’s nephew from the religious settlement called Little Heaven. Things happen, people and not-so-much-people die, and the mercenaries go their separate ways trying to forget what they’ve seen in Little Heaven. However, what they failed to kill in Little Heaven still wants to make their lives a living hell, and these mercenaries must get back together and finish one last job. No movie of this, but I could see this easily starring a young Arnold Schwarzenegger featuring a script by Robert Rodruigez. Finally, Clive Barker comes in to do a little script doctoring, adding a few CC’s of nightmare fuel to this tale of cosmic horror and good, old-fashioned revenge.

3) Fury from the Tomb by S. A. Sidor: If this were a movie, it would be what would have happened if John Carpenter got a hold of the Indiana Jones script. If that had actually happened, Indy would never have survived a nuclear explosion in a refrigerator because he would have left the franchise screaming before Crystal Skull was even conceived. The year is 1888 and young Egyptologist Rom is the only survivor of an expedition that has uncovered a collection of mummies. One mummy in particular is of particular interest to this expedition’s benefactor, so Rom must transport his cursed cargo by train, which is then hijacked. Joining with sidekicks ranging from a dead-eyed Wild West marksman to an orphan Chinese boy, Rom encounters flesh-eating ghouls, evil monks, and hopping vampires. And then there’s what’s really in those sarcophagi.

This book is part of the Institute of Singular Antiquities series, the next book being The Beast of Nightfall Lodge.

2) The Running Man by Richard Bachman: Sure, the movie had Schwarzenegger but it also had Hunters that looked straight out of a Toys R’ Us action figure aisle. The book by Stephen King’s angrier alter ego is a much more boiled-down bit of dystopia, featuring Ben Richards, a man at the end of his financial rope who submits to be part of The Running Man series, where he is hunted while a studio audience and viewers at home are watching. The movie amps up the game show feel, particularly with Family Feud’s Richard Dawson as showrunner Killian, the host, but the book is a more pointed commentary on social inequality and how the human race is more likely to allow suffering if that suffering is entertaining. Think of the last time you watched a video of skateboarding kids wiping out on the hard concrete or people “Ghost Riding the Whip,” only to have the cars they were supposed to be driving go out of control, and you can see that the themes in this story are still all too relevant.

1) Throttle by Joe Hill and Stephen King: I discovered this homage to the novella “Duel” in He Is Legend, an anthology of stories honoring one of the pioneers of fantastic fiction Richard Matheson. Regardless of your feelings about remakes and remakes of remakes, Hill and King capture what made Matheson’s “Duel” such a classic of slow-building tension that soon feels like it’s careening downhill to an explosive conclusion. Sure, this father-and-son homage involves bikers, and there’s also a father-son dynamic between Vince, leader of the motorcycle club The Tribe, and his upstart son Race.  But what’s kept at the piston-pumping heart of this tale is the relentless semi-truck that barrels down on the bikers like an avalanche of Detroit steel and the dynamic battle of wits and of wills between Vince and the trucker, the singular mind in charge of an 18-wheeled weapon. Be on the lookout for this one in Joe Hill’s upcoming collection Full Throttle.  

Screen to Scream: The Many Faces and Facets of IT

Well, I’ve finally seen It: Chapter Two, thus completing the circle that began with Chapter One and discovering not all remakes are bad idea. True, the movie had some major faults (its overindulgent run time, the reserved performances of some characters compared to others, the video-game-like side quests that must occur before actually confronting Pennywise, etc.), but it was still an enjoyable movie and one that actually adds new dimensions to the Pennywise mythos. The movie actually improves upon an aspect of the book, and I’m not referring to that one troubling impromptu sex scene in the sewers (the less said about that scene, the better). Between Stephen King’s book, the first It miniseries, and the new two-part movie series, they each focus on different aspects of the story that makes it one of King’s most ambitious and most well-loved stories. BEWARE: POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD!

The kids cast for Chapter One were pitch perfect for their roles, capturing what made each character unique and what made them losers. The adults, on the other hand, didn’t always have the chemistry. Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy did serviceably, with McAvoy in particular hinting at the survivor’s guilt he feels after the death of his brother. However, compared to such superstar talents like Bill Hader and James Ransome, who nail the friendly banter their child counterparts had in Chapter One, the rest of the adult casts’ performances seem wooden by comparison. Mike Hanlon’s characterization, and how it differs from the book, also feels a little off. In the book, Mike was the record keeper, a level head that offered his insight on how Pennywise’s roots run deep in Derry. In the movie, he comes across more as an obsessive, spirit talker trope, the character in the story who understands the supernatural even if it affects their ability to function in the real world. I mean, the Mike Hanlon in the book was the town’s librarian who owned a house. In the movie, he’s living in the library, and the movie doesn’t make it clear if he is a librarian or if he’s just a few crazy theories away from conspiracy theorist complete with tinfoil hat.

As for Pennywise, there’s no doubt that Bill Skarsgård has forever left his stamp on the character. Sadly, that means Tim Curry’s more reserved portrayal might be left by the wayside, even though both actors contribute something to the portrayal of what’s eating Derry. Curry plays his Pennywise like a clown that been a clown for so long that it hates kids. Sure, the clown can turn on the charm, tell jokes, give funny voices, but Curry can flip a switch, the smile disappears, and it’s only a matter of time before teeth and/or claw come out, the time where Pennywise becomes IT, or closer to its true ravenous, murderous self. Skarsgård, on the other hand, portrays Pennywise as something that can barely contain its impulses. Pennywise is more the child that loves to pull the wings from flies, except that this child will gladly stroke the wing with the tweezers. Even when Pennywise pretends to be disarmingly charming or emotionally vulnerable, the smile still stays stuck to his face. He, or It, thoroughly enjoys the game of “salting the meat” as King writes, but he also enjoys the chase, even as he’s maintaining a gradually slipping grip on his self-control. When Pennywise finally does strike, all teeth and appetite, it almost seems like a relief to both the monster and the audience.

The movie gave us a new and fascinating portrayal of ultimate evil, but it also allowed for an improvement on King’s ending for the book. There is a running gag throughout the film as to how novelist Bill Denbrough has trouble with endings, and there may be some poking fun at King here since movies based on his stories are hit or miss at best, but the ending of It delivers one important change from the book that actually improves the story. In the book, after defeating the monster, the Losers all start to forget their encounter with IT, even Mike, whose whole existence was devoted to chronicling Its evil deeds. In the movie, the Losers lose the scars that bind them to their blood oath but not their memories. They remember their battle, they remember losing Eddie, and they remember each other, and that is a much better message. Apart from the story issues Eddie’s death and subsequent mind wiping causes, such as his wife or even his friends being completely unaware of the sacrifice he made, there’s also a significant chunk of memories still lost. The book and the movie, particular the recent remake, shows that the Losers shared some fond experiences and the movie did a good job at the end of revealing the strength of those bonds. To have them wiped away, as King’s book does, is a crime. It is, at its heart, a tale about childhood trauma and learning to overcome it. The trauma shouldn’t necessarily be just purged from one’s mind, either. The movie even goes out of its way, in Mike’s voiceover, to explain how both good and bad memories make up a person. Those bad memories don’t necessarily need to weight a character down, but the potential lessons they provide shouldn’t be stripped away either, especially at the expense of memories where one learned the true power of friendship.

Fearsome Five: Five Scary Monsters from the Scary Stories movie.

The crunch of leaves and the hint of pumpkin spice in the air signal that fall is coming.  It may bring less pleasant things like school and Ugg boots, but it also brings with it a crop of scary movies.  Seeing that I wrote about a children’s book last week that was just scary enough for adults, I’m continuing the trend by talking about the new adaptation of many a child’s gateway into horror, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

Those that have seen the movie may notice the visual stylings of producer Guillermo Del Toro all over this thing, particularly with the monsters that strike from their story book. And these monsters that might have been born by a campfire or gestated in a dark imagination lead to different monsters residing in books that frequent the adult section. This is largely because they hit on some basic human terrors that show up in a lot of stories. As we discuss these stories, THERE WILL BE SPOILERS! Hopefully, you already knew that.

1) Harold the Scarecrow: The coming of fall makes beginning with our resident sinister, straw-stuffed shadow dweller particularly apropos. Scarecrows are made to scare birds, animals not always known for their intelligence, but there’s also something disquieting about the way Harold is depicted in the film. It gets particularly disturbing watching him dispatch a particularly rotten kid who went out of his way to abuse him with a baseball bat when he was just a thing stuffed with straw.

Scarecrows and the general dark side of agriculture come up again and again in folk horror, which deals with not only a dark connection to the land but traditions that can be bloody. Nosetouch Press recently came out with an anthology of folk horror called The Fiend in the Furrows and are already working on part 2. For something more clearly scarecrow-related, Norman Partridge’s Dark Harvest deals with a town’s Halloween tradition of sending out its young men to hunt a scarecrow stuffed with candy and evil magic. However, as they hunt this scarecrow, the scarecrow may be hunting them as well. The tale also has a coming-of-age message for one young man and a message for all of us about following traditions blindly.

2) The Toe: It’s a ghost that wants its toe back. What use does an angry spirit have for a decayed toe? Who cares? It’s her toe. The idea of the vengeful ghost is one that shows up in classics like Hamlet (even if the titular character is the instrument of the ghost’s revenge) as well as more modern tales like The Lovely Bones (not horror, per se, but a haunting meditation on the afterlife, particularly for a life that ended violently). The trope of spirits with unfinished business can be portrayed as a goal for a paranormal protagonist, but that unfinished business can also lead to some very angry spirits.

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill has a spirit who will not rest until her story is told. Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box features a spirit sicced on an aging rocker who simply wanted a dead man’s suit for his collection. Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, though, is almost horror metafiction, looking at the ghost not just as a spirit refusing to die but as a recurring theme in our folklore, as is the short story “The Forbidden” in Clive Barker’s Books of Blood. For a real out-of-the-box entry, Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s  Hex has a very original premise about a ghost known as the Black Rock Witch, who has weaved herself into the lives of the small town she has cursed and a high-tech surveillance team makes sure the town stays quarantined. Until that quarantine is broken and then the Black Rock Witch really gets her revenge.

3) The Red Spot: The tale starts with the titular red spot that grows more and more inflamed until it becomes apparent that it is much more than a mere skin blemish. In fact, arachnophobics might want to steer clear of this story. But body horror such as this has been the subject of many stories. Clive Barker’s Cenobites from The Hellbound Heart is a more extreme example of body modification but Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis isn’t about someone filled with bugs as discovering that they have become a bug. Body horror can be about things living in your body, like Nick Cutter’s excellent Lord of the Flies riff called The Troop. It can also be about realizing that your own body is no longer yours.

One of the greatest cinematic examples of this, which owes a lot to Kafka, is The Fly, where Jeff Goldblum comments about “an insect who dreamed he was a man” still bring chills. Zombies will always be a big subgenre of body horror (just look at how much The Walking Dead has saturated all forms of media) and it will continue to be big as long as people fear the notion of death and what will happen once their bodies move underground and their new insectile tenants move in. Werewolves also undergo a frightening metamorphosis, but they have been mostly starring in paranormal romances featuring sparkling vampires. The Last Werewolf features a werewolf ruminating on his early days as a lycanthrope while Max Booth’s Carnivorous Lunar Activities focuses on a slightly more reluctant werewolf.

4) The Dream (The Pale Lady): The story involves a dire prediction that ends up coming true. Even as far back as Cassandra in Greek myth, ill omens are a great source of horror, particularly when the protagonist tries their best to change events only to realize that they cannot. Loss of control of one’s body is frightening, but so is a loss of control of one’s circumstances, where even if you try to change your destiny, your destiny barrels down on you like a semi-truck with its brake lines cut.

Stephen King gave us two very distinct novels that talk about fate as something to fear. The first is The Dead Zone, where a man discovers that he can see the future, but he can’t always control what he sees, and it still doesn’t do him too much good in the end. There is also The Shining. Young Danny Torrance can see the future thanks to his Shining, but that doesn’t mean he can change it. It doesn’t help that he is only five years old, and his parents see his visions as a neurological issue, or a curiosity, or the desires of a frightened boy to leave the very haunted hotel that they’ve found themselves stranded in for the winter. Danny being too young to be listened to, to take any action that could save him or his family, is what makes the fact that Redrum is coming all the more frightening.

5) The Jangly Man (original creation inspired by different stories): The Jangly Man’s refrain of “Me Tie Dough-ty Walker” links it to the eponymous story found in the collection and Del Toro has admitted to being inspired by “Aaron Kelly’s Bones,” a story about a dancing corpse, for its design. It’s also safe to say that Del Toro’s own work inspired it, particularly his penchant for using things that appear human but move in unsettling, inhuman ways.

Look through the man’s film catalog, from the Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth to the ghosts in Crimson Peak, and you’ll see beings whose proportions lend them a truly alien quality. This is in part to some genius hiring, such as Doug Jones, famous for bringing characters like Abe Sapien to life on the big screen, and Javier Botet. Diagnosed with Marfan Syndrome, a genetic condition that gives Botet long, fine fingers as well as a uniquely tall, thin body shape, he has played his share of aliens and ghosts. Jangly Man, however, is played by newcomer and contortionist Troy James, who makes the movements of the Jangly Man, as well as Baba Yaga in the new Hellboy remake, unnerving to see.

Though this is particularly disturbing visually, literature has made use of this as well. Those who watched IT: Chapter One no doubt remember Pennywise the Dancing Clown, emerging from an old refrigerator, his body and limbs unwinding, complete with the popping of joints being snapped back into place, until he stands at his full clown height and there are many instances in the book where he “flows” into sewers and drains. D. W. Gillespie’s The Toy Thief also has a very elongated body structure which it uses to sneak around and steal much more than toys. Another trait that these monsters share is their proclivity to darkness, whether it’s closets, sewers, or chimneys. And let’s not forget the darkest place they hang out: the human imagination. The seeds of these terrors were already planted by Scary Stories and those stories like them.