Hey there, faithful readers. I’m sure you’re wondering why I disappeared in the middle of the Ghost Box II event, and where I’ve been for the many months since. These are fair questions. Simply put, life got in the way.
A lot has happened these last six months. My sister got married. I had surgery. I got a new car. There were numerous other little things that kept me busy that are not worth going into detail here. Regardless, there simply wasn’t time to give the blog the attention it deserved.
There were also mental health issues at play. I have suffered from depression and anxiety for as long as I can remember, and these last three months were difficult. To write an entry for this blog seemed a pointless, Herculean task. But I am back in therapy and I think I’m making progress.
All this to say that I am going to resume writing here shortly. The whole point of scheduling the Ghost Box II event for April was to leave October open to review Ghost Box III, should it be announced – and it has been announced. Therefore, I am going to take the next week or two to wrap up the Ghost Box II event, and then await the arrival of the latest batch of stories from Mr. Oswalt. I’m excited to be back.
This is the fifth entry in a now most-certainly-longer-than-two-week series focusing on a horror anthology edited by Patton Oswalt called Ghost Box II (buy it here). The blog will resume its standard format in May.
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During the writing of Danse Macabre, his 1981 survey of the horror genre, Stephen King invited Harlan Ellison to describe himself and his work. Ellison obliged:
“My work is foursquare for chaos. I spend my life personally, and my work professionally, keeping the soup boiling. Gadfly is what they call you when you are no longer dangerous; I much prefer troublemaker, malcontent, desperado. I see myself as a combination of Zorro and Jiminy Cricket. My stories go out from here and raise hell. From time to time some denigrater or critic with umbrage will say of my work, ‘He only wrote that to shock.’ I smile and nod. Precisely.”
It’s an honest description. Ellison was known for his volatile personality; Ghost Box II editor Patton Oswalt described him as “a man-shaped explosion.” This quality carried over into his writing, which always shone with furious intelligence and refused to be pigeonholed. Perhaps no other single story shows the scope of his range like “From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet.”
“From A to Z…” was written over three days in the window of the Los Angeles bookshop A Change of Hobbit for a fund-raiser. The phrase “the Chocolate Alphabet” has no literal meaning; it was simply a title that Ellison had come up with some time prior to be used for a future story. It was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in October 1976, and later included in Ellison’s 1978 short story collection Strange Wine.
To call “From A to Z…” a story does it a disservice, because it is actually twenty-six stories, one for each letter of the alphabet, ranging from just a few sentences to two or three pages in length. When I first read it, I interpreted it as a riff on Edward Gorey’s classic 1963 children’s book, The Gashlycrumb Tinies. However, doing research, I found it was actually intended as a pastiche of the work of Fredric Brown, who was known for his mastery of the “short short” form.
And what a batch of stories! There is more raw, delirious imagination in “From A to Z…” than you will find in the entirety of some novels, and as always the quality of Ellison’s prose is unimpeachable. The tales herein span a variety of genres – horror, science-fiction, fantasy. One entry, “G Is For Golem,” is flat-out comedy: “Golems are goyim that always wanted to be Jewish. But they never suffered enough guilt.” Many of the stories end with such punchlines; I don’t think Ellison ever got enough credit for how funny he could be.
To be honest, I’ve found it difficult to write about this piece, as the stories vary so much in content and tone, and there is no common character or narrative thread to link them. The first four stories in particular I thought were quite strong, and their brevity works to their advantage. “A Is For Atlantean” relates the lost history of Atlantis; I was awed by Ellison’s descriptions of buildings made of seaweed and chilled by the final reveal. “B Is For Breathdeath,” about a flower found “virtually everywhere but the Earth” that drives the people who look at it insane, is another effective mini-nightmare. I also quite liked “D Is For Dikh,” about a man who lives deep beneath the earth and writes “unsettling” things along the walls.
Later in the piece, the blatant horror of the earlier stories is toned down and Ellison ventures more deeply into fantasy and sci-fi. I particularly liked “S Is For Solifidian The Sorcerer.” In this tale, a man attends a political fundraiser where the entertainment is an honest-to-god magician, performing actual miracles for the delight of the astonished guests. At the end of the tale, Solifidian’s wife barges into the gathering and leads him away, and he goes without protest, after which Ellison muses, “to this day, I’m always amazed at the magic hold some men have over some women…and the magic hold some women have over some men.” It’s an unexpectedly thoughtful, and even poignant, reflection in a piece that until then has mostly been a master storyteller simply flexing his muscles (not that that’s a bad thing when it’s Harlan Ellison).
I will not recap more of my favorites here; I would simply advise you to read it. I will say that Ellison wrote a sequel of sorts, called “From A to Z, in the Sarsaparilla Alphabet,” in 1990. The story sat unpublished for years, but eventually appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in February of 2001.
I would like to take a moment to note that Ellison, who died in 2018, had a personal relationship with Mr. Oswalt. Oswalt’s introduction for Ghost Box II contains a postscript eulogizing his friend: “There’s no way I can set down, now, how I feel about his passing. I’m angry about it. I’m sad he’s gone. But I – and a lot of other creative people, I’m sure – feel like part of the secret fuel for 21st-century imaginative literature has been drained away.”
Harlan Ellison (L) and Patton Oswalt.
As someone who was also hit hard by Ellison’s death, I can’t help but agree. As a writer Ellison was never short of brilliant, and “From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet” is a testament to his singular genius. Oswalt’s postscript ends simply: “I miss you, Harlan.” Me, too.
This is the fourth entry in a two-week series focusing on a horror anthology edited by Patton Oswalt called Ghost Box II (buy it here). The blog will resume its standard format in May.
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Some stories give you all the answers. They dutifully resolve plot holes and carefully explain what motivates their characters. They are perfectly contained worlds. Some stories, though, refuse to give up their larger mysteries. You leave them pondering the implications of what you’ve just read. Tananarive Due’s “The Lake” falls into the latter category, and is stronger for it.
Tananarive Due was born in 1966 in Tallahassee, Florida. The daughter of civil rights activists, she developed a love for horror at a young age. In an essay for Medium, Due elaborates on a singular moment in that development:
“The 1958 version of The Fly famously ends with the troubled scientist stuck in a spider’s web with his tiny fly body and human head, plaintively crying, ‘Help me! Help me!’ The spider advances, and the scientist’s voice is too thin to be heard by human ears. It’s the first time I remember being truly terrified by a film – not by the shambling monsters, but by invisibility and inconsequence. By erasure.”
It’s a telling quote – much of Due’s writing examines the erasure and other horrors faced by people of color through the lens of speculative fiction. Her first novel, The Between, appeared in 1995. My Soul To Keep, the inaugural novel in her excellent African Immortals series, debuted in 1997. Due currently teaches Black Horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA, and served as executive producer on the 2019 documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror (currently available on Shudder).
“The Lake” first appeared in a 2011 anthology called The Monster’s Corner, edited by Christopher Golden. It can also be found in Due’s 2015 short story collection Ghost Summer. The tale follows Abbie LeFleur, a teacher from Boston who takes a job in Gracetown, Florida. She wants a fresh start after a messy divorce, and sees an opportunity here for liberation. She buys a house along the shores of a lake. She’s not typically one for swimming, but she finds the waters therapeutic. She doesn’t know, however, that she’s not supposed to go swimming in the Gracetown lakes in summer. How could she know that her body is about to change, and how could she anticipate that these changes will bring with them dangerous new appetites?
As you may have surmised from my introduction, the larger mysteries of “The Lake” are what make this a truly potent story for me. What exactly is going on in Gracetown? Everyone seems to know the urban legends – you don’t go swimming in natural lakes in Gracetown in the summer. Especially if you’re a child. If you do take the risk, you wear clothes so your body is minimally exposed. But exposed to what? The hidden history of Gracetown, only hinted at by Due, is intriguing.
There are more human – and ultimately more chilling – mysterious to consider, however. Early on, Abbie recruits a boy in her class to help repair her new house. He is sixteen, handsome and well-built, confident. The way Abbie responds to these qualities is utterly unnerving, and more than slightly predatory. She knows there would be a scandal if she invited a boy to her house, and swears him to secrecy. We get the sense – though not the confirmation – that she has invited boys to her house before. Was this a contributing factor to her divorce? Are we witnessing a sexual predator select her next target?
In light of these questions, one wonders if we are meant to take the events of “The Lake” literally. There is a moment where Due refers to the story’s climax as a “scandal,” a seemingly odd choice of word given what we are told occurs. Have we been watching Abbie literally transform into a monster, or has she been one all along, finally able to embrace her true nature in her new home?
As I was reading the story, I found myself with a complaint. Abbie seems much too calm about the frankly alarming changes her body undergoes. You would expect a person to panic – especially if their dreams are undergoing equally strange changes, and they wake up in bed morning after morning wet as if after a swim. That Abbie does not panic, or experiences fear of any kind, really, struck me as the one weak point of the story. Of course, if we’re reading an extended metaphor, then there would be no need for such panic. At the thought, my complaint vanished.
All in all, Ghost Box II started off strong and just keeps getting stronger. Due’s writing is careful and precise, her characterizations natural and assured. I found this a most excellent story, and an easy recommendation.
NEXT TIME: “From A to Z, in the Chocolate Alphabet” by Harlan Ellison!
This is the third entry in a two-week series focusing on a horror anthology edited by Patton Oswalt called Ghost Box II (buy it here). The blog will resume its standard format in May.
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Robert Hugh Benson was born in 1871, son of E. W. Benson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and his wife Mary. He was ordained a priest in the Church of England in 1895, but after his father’s sudden death in 1896 he visited the Middle East, where he began to consider the teachings of Catholicism. By 1903 he was an ordained minister in the Catholic Church; by 1911 he was Chamberlain to Pope Pius X. He died in 1914 at the age of 42.
He was also a prolific author. He wrote many religious works, of course, but he also penned historical fiction, horror, science-fiction, plays, and children’s stories. His 1907 novel Lord of the World is regarded as one of the first modern dystopian novels. “The Watcher” first appeared in his 1903 novel The Light Invisible. Written before his conversion to Catholicism, the book is a collection of short stories linked by a framing device – in this case, an elderly priest telling tales of his life to a young man. The novel was described by Benson biographer Joseph Pierce as “a confession of faith amidst the confusion of doubt.”
“The Watcher” relates an episode in the life of the priest as a teenager. Gifted with a firearm, he quickly grows tired of target practice and decides, knowing full well that it is wrong, that he wants to kill something. He decides to hunt a rabbit, justifying his decision with the excuse that he is hunting food rather than killing for sport. However, he quickly finds he does not have the skill necessary to hunt rabbits.
Angry and frustrated, he instead shoots a thrush – not for food, but simply because it is convenient. As he retrieves the body of the bird, he notices a face watching from a nearby bush. The face does not appear to be human, nor does it appear to notice him. It does, however, appear utterly delighted that an innocent creature has just been murdered. Our narrator is horrified, destroying his gun and giving the bird a proper burial.
In my previous entry, I described Louisa Baldwin’s “How He Left the Hotel” as a campfire story. Gertrude Atherton’s “The Striding Place” aims higher, but ultimately I would describe it the same way. “The Watcher,” however, surpasses both, because it is a story in which fear is generated from within rather than an external force. The face in the bush is unnerving, but what I found most frightening here was Benson’s descriptions of the narrator craving violence and destruction, and of these impulses wrestling with his inner kindness. What human has not struggled so? What human has not worried that, under the right circumstances, they might succumb to their inner darkness? I have struggled so. I have worried so. I recognized myself in the narrator, and this is what frightened me.
Being aware of the larger theme – faith amidst doubt – is helpful in understanding “The Watcher.” What we are reading here is the story of a man who is subtly guided into renouncing violence by higher forces. Is the face in the bush that of Satan? Benson refuses to say, but given the religious context of the story, I’d wager that’s surely the case. God Himself neglects to make an appearance, but as the story winds to its conclusion we get the distinct sense that He engineered events to play out this way.
Apart from its thematic depth, “The Watcher” is also the most beautifully written of the three stories I have read in Ghost Box II thus far. Benson’s description of turning eighteen is memorable (“when blood and fire and death and loud noises seem the only things of interest, and all tender things shrink back and hide from the dreadful noonday of manhood”), but I was most impressed by his description of the thrush and the line that follows, one of the most chilling juxtapositions of light and dark in the story:
“I looked up idly and caught sight of him as the leaves of the beech parted in the breeze, his head lifted and his whole body vibrating with the joy of life and music. As some one has said, his body was one beating heart. The last radiance of the sun over the hill reached him and bathed him in golden warmth. Then the leaves closed again as the breeze dropped but still his song rang out.
Then there came on me a blinding desire to kill him.”
I have read this story several times now and that line has never failed to make me shudder.
If I had one complaint – and it is a minor one – it is that the story suffers on occasion from being separated from its larger context. The story begins, “On the following day we went out,” and I could not help but think, “Following from what?” There are also a couple small references to a story that precedes “The Watcher,” which sows further confusion. Ultimately the story is not derailed by this, but I couldn’t help but think that Benson might have written parts of it differently were it not part of a larger novel.
“The Watcher” has been reprinted many times, including in the anthologies The Mammoth Book of Victorian and Edwardian Ghost Stories, Ghosts In The House, and The Temple of Death: The Ghost Stories of A. C. & R. H. Benson. To fully appreciate it within its proper context, however, I might advise seeking out a copy of The Light Invisible, which has been reprinted as recently as this year by the Echo Library.
To wrap up, this has been my favorite story in Ghost Box II so far. If you find yourself with the opportunity to read it, do so.
This is the second entry in a two-week series focusing on a horror anthology edited by Patton Oswalt called Ghost Box II (buy it here). The blog will resume its standard format in May.
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Louisa Baldwin was born in 1845, one of four daughters to a Wesleyan Methodist minister. She married the industrialist Alfred Baldwin in 1866 in a double wedding with her sister Agnes, and much of her fiction was published under the name of “Mrs. Alfred Baldwin.” She was the mother of Stanley Baldwin, who served as Prime Minister of England on three separate occasions (her sister Alice was the mother of Rudyard Kipling, author of The Jungle Book). “How He Left the Hotel” was written in 1894 and included in her 1895 collection The Shadow On The Blind & Other Ghost Stories (read it here).
The story follows an army veteran who takes a job running the lift in a hotel. It’s an easy job and it pays well. Our narrator has a keen eye for faces and quickly learns the habits and schedules of the people staying there. One night, a man steps onto the elevator at a time that is completely out of character. The narrator is puzzled, but does his job and takes him down to the ground floor…only to learn a horrifying truth minutes later.
“How He Left the Hotel” is a lean and effective ghost story. Baldwin wastes no time with superfluous characters or unnecessary detail. She sets the scene, tells her tale, and bows out within the span of a few pages. This is the sort of story you would tell around a campfire to elicit pleasantly thrilling goosebumps. If the final twist seems routine in retrospect, what sets the tale apart is its execution.
“How He Left the Hotel” is an excellent example of how voice informs character. Dialect is a tricky thing for first-person narration, but when done effectively it teaches you something about the person telling the story. Louisa Baldwin does it effectively. Consider this early paragraph, in which our narrator describes the elevator in the hotel in which he works:
“Ours was a hydraulic lift. None o’ them rickety things swung up like a poll-parrot’s cage in a well staircase, that I shouldn’t care to trust my neck to. It ran as smooth as oil, a child might have worked it, and safe as standing on the ground. Instead of being stuck full of advertisements like a’ omnibus, we’d mirrors in it, and the ladies would look at themselves, and pat their hair, and set their mouths when I was taking ’em downstairs dressed of an evening. It was a little sitting room with red velvet cushions to sit down on, and you’d nothing to do but get into it, and it ‘ud float you up, or float you down, as light as a bird.
Note the numerous little contractions – “o'” and “’em” and “‘ud” and the like. We know from this manner of speaking that our narrator is not a member of the so-called “upper classes.” He is a regular, commonplace sort of man. This style of speaking lends the story an everyday authenticity that more mannered language would not – and is sometimes quite funny, as when the narrator wonders “why the Americans, that can speak English when they choose, and are always finding out ways o’ doing things quicker than other folks, should waste time and breath calling a lift an ‘elevator’.”
Following its initial publication in 1895, “How He Left the Hotel” was not reprinted again for nearly a hundred years. Since 1990, however, it has appeared in several anthologies, such as The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories, The World’s Greatest Ghost Stories, and The Wimbourne Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, Vol. 1. It’s not the most inventive ghost story I’ve ever read, but it does its job admirably. I enjoyed it and would recommend it to fans of Victorian horror.
This is the first entry in a two-week series focusing on a horror anthology edited by Patton Oswalt called Ghost Box II (buy it here). The blog will resume its standard format in May.
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Gertrude Atherton was born in San Francisco, California in 1857. She wrote novels, short stories, and essays, and was noted for fictionalized biographies such as The Conquerer (1902), her account of the life of Alexander Hamilton. Her writing was often compared to that of her contemporary Edith Wharton (Ethan Frome), although Carl Van Vechten once remarked, “Mrs. Wharton, with some difficulty, it would appear, has learned to write; Mrs. Atherton was born with a facility for telling stories.” An early feminist, her novels often feature strong-willed women who fight for their own independence. She died in 1948.
“The Striding Place” was first published under the title of “The Twins” in the June 20, 1896 issue of The Speaker. It reappeared under its new title in the second issue of The Smart Set in July of 1900, and was included in Atherton’s 1905 collection The Bell In The Fog & Other Stories (read it here). The title refers to a real place called the Strid, a series of perilous waterfalls and rapids along a section of the River Wharfe in Yorkshire, England.
The story concerns Weigall, a gentleman who has come to Yorkshire to hunt with his best friend, Wyatt Gifford. Gifford is known for his puckish nature, and disappears one night without a trace. Weigall thinks this is just another of Gifford’s many pranks, but nonetheless feels compelled to go out into the woods to search for him. He eventually comes upon the Strid, where he learns the truth of his friend’s disappearance.
I’ve read “The Striding Place” a few times now. The first time I read it, I honestly found it to be a fairly puzzling piece of work. The ending comes quite abruptly, and though the final line is satisfyingly nasty, it also didn’t really make that much sense to me given what comes before. In subsequent readings, however, it became easier to pick out the clues that Atherton has planted and how they fit together. This is a ghost story that requires you to stop and think, and the implications of its conclusion are horrifying.
What stands out most about the story to me, though, is the intimate relationship between Weigall and Gifford. While it is true that men and women cultivated intense friendships in an era where the genders were largely separated, it is still almost unavoidable for a modern reader to interpret the relationship as anything other than a gay one. Weigall is so worried about his friend that he goes into the woods in the dead of night to look for him, and spends almost the entirety of the search reminiscing on his feelings for the man. “Weigall had loved several woman,” Atherton writes, “but he would have flouted in these moments the thought that he had ever loved any woman as he loved Wyatt Gifford.” This characterization gives the story an interesting and unexpected dimension.
Atherton’s prose seems typical of the time in which she wrote – the language is not overly flowery, but it does maintain a fairly mannered air throughout. I liked her descriptions of the forest through which Weigall searches for Gifford:
“He went down to the river and followed the path through the woods. There was no moon, but the stars sprinkled their cold light upon the pretty belt of water flowing placidly past wood and ruin, between green masses of overhanging rocks or sloping banks tangled with tree and shrub, leaping occasionally over stones with the harsh notes of an angry scold, to recover its equanimity the moment the way was clear again.”
Four decades after its publication, Atherton commented, “It seems to me the best short story I ever wrote.” It has been anthologized many times, including in the Library of America collection American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub. As for me, I found it an initially challenging but ultimately rewarding chiller that serves as a splendid opening to Ghost Box II.
NEXT TIME: “How He Left the Hotel” by Louisa Baldwin!
Last year, I tried my hand at a month-long Halloween event covering the entirety of The Ghost Box, a 2017 horror anthology edited by my favorite living comedian, Patton Oswalt. My original plan was to hold the event this year. The blog had fallen by the wayside more than once over the years, and as I started posting more regularly, I wanted to find a rhythm for new content without overburdening myself. Then Mr. Oswalt made an announcement that caused me to push my plans forward an entire year: a second Ghost Box was on the way. Once I was finished reviewing the first Ghost Box, I started planning a second Halloween event for its sequel.
At this point, you may be wondering, “If this is a Halloween event, why are you holding it in April?” Good question. My reasoning is simple: if a Ghost Box III is announced this fall, I would like to be able to review it freshly published. Consider this a “catch-up event.”
In a Facebook post dated September 25, 2018, Mr. Oswalt explained his intentions for the new collection:
“I was very proud of last year’s but upon reflection it hit me I hadn‘t included enough works by people of color, by women, by queer and trans writers. Given the hellworld we’re inhabiting now, they’d be wired more tightly to the core of terror some of us, blessedly, are at a further remove from. White dudes can imagine, at a distance, monsters and ghosties to stand in for deeper mortal terror. A black woman, trans man or gay Middle Eastern refugee need only turn on the news or refresh Twitter. So, hopefully, this year’s collection is a step towards widening that scope.”
It’s an accurate observation: there wasn’t a single bad story in last year’s Ghost Box, but they were written almost entirely by white men. Oswalt’s goal here is a noble one. I myself have tried to feature female authors regularly on this blog, but could still be doing better in showcasing work by queer writers and writers of color. I am delighted to be discovering the work of so many authors here.
The physical product is much the same as the 2017 edition. It is a box with a magnetic lid, containing individual chapbooks for each of the stories selected by Mr. Oswalt. The color scheme this time is different: the first box was black and orange; this one is black and green. There is still no title printed on the side of the box for bookshelf display, but I expected that. A major improvement in the packaging of Ghost Box II is a ribbon affixed to the box, allowing for easier removal of the chapbooks within (it’s also a handy “boxmark”). As was last year’s Ghost Box, it is a beautiful piece of work.
Now then. With the preamble over with, let’s move on to the main event, shall we?
NEXT TIME: “The Striding Place” by Gertrude Atherton!
This is the eleventh and final entry in a month-long series focusing on a horror anthology edited by Patton Oswalt called The Ghost Box (buy it here). The blog will resume its standard format in November.
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Chelsea Quinn Yarbro was born in Berkeley, California in 1942. She is the author of over seventy novels in a variety of genres, but she is best known for a series of historical horror novels following the adventures of the vampire Count Saint-Germain (there are to date twenty-eight novels in the main series, with several additional spin-off novels). Science-fiction fans may appreciate that Yarbro played a key role in popularizing The Eye of Argon, a legendarily bad fantasy novella that is read aloud at conventions as a game (the goal of the game is not to laugh while reading; if you lose, you stop reading and pass it on to the next person). In 2009, Yarbro was awarded the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement. She is also a cartographer, multi-instrumentalist, and composer.
“Savory, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme” was first published in a 1981 anthology edited by Charles L. Grant called Horrors, which also contains another story in The Ghost Box, “Shadetree” by Michael Reaves (reviewed here). It can also be found in Yarbro’s 1984 short story collection Signs & Portents.
“Savory, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme” is the story of Amy Macklin (making this is the second story in The Ghost Box with a main character named Macklin), a teenage girl who has just fallen in love for the first time. The boy she loves, however, only has eyes for someone else. There is a woman who lives up a nearby mountain, called the Herb Woman. People laugh at her remedies and potions and folk magic, but Amy thinks she might find aid there. She trundles up the mountain in the dead of night to consult with the Herb Woman. She doesn’t get the help she asks for, but she does get the help she needs.
There are similarities between this story and “Shadetree,” though of course they could not have been intentional. Both stories are set in small, conservative Southern towns. Both feature strong-willed, intelligent women as main characters. Both feature elderly people who are repositories of ancient and magical knowledge, and in both stories the main characters are aided by that knowledge to defy society’s expectations of them. If the plot of “Shadetree” is arguably stronger than “SSR&T,” the latter has an advantage in that its writer is a woman.
The men in this story are not intentionally evil, but they are most certainly products of a patriarchal society. Amy’s father polices her body with an almost sinister sort of jealousy, while her crush sees women as little more than sexual conquests. Her teacher, noticing her unusual intelligence, wants to steer her onto the path of academia: a well-meaning plan, to be sure, but he is still deciding what is best for her on his own. This is a story about a girl who, with the aid of other women, learns about men and finds power within herself to fight against the suffocating forces of the patriarchy.
A 1984 review of Signs & Portents in The Washington Post describes the story’s ending as “hasty,” and I must agree. It’s not a bad ending – what must happen does – but it happens in the span of a few pages, while the rest of the story is much more relaxed. It’s hard not to feel that Yarbro was ready to be done and move on to something else. That’s a minor complaint, though. I ultimately wound up finding “SSR&T” to be one of the strongest stories in the collection.
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BONUS MINI-ENTRY: “Hallowe’en In A Suburb” by H. P. Lovecraft
The Ghost Box closes out with a poem by H. P. Lovecraft called “Hallowe’en In A Suburb.” The poem is not printed in a chapbook like the stories; rather, it is printed on the bottom of the inside of the box, only visible once it is empty. The poem first appeared in The National Amateur in March of 1926, and was first collected in a 1943 Arkham House edition of Lovecraft’s work called Beyond the Wall of Sleep. Read it here.
This is a short poem, only seven stanzas long. Each stanza follows a rather unusual ABCBB rhyme scheme. It does not tell a story, but rather attempts to evoke the macabre atmosphere and excitement of Halloween. There is surprisingly little commentary on suburban life, but much talk of vampires, ghouls, witches, and other things that go bump in the night. The tone of the poem is light throughout; Lovecraft does not aim to frighten here. Indeed, the poem seems fueled by childhood nostalgia. Short and sweet, it’s a perfect grace note to wrap up the collection.
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All in all, I’ve greatly enjoyed reading The Ghost Box. Some stories were stronger than others, but that’s to be expected with any short story collection. A few of them, such as “Pumpkin Head” and “The Clock,” made an indelible impression on me and I consider them new favorites. Hingston & Olsen released a second Ghost Box this year, also edited by Mr. Oswalt, and I intend to review that collection in its entirety next April. Why April? Simple: if I know Patton (and I don’t, but bear with me), a Ghost Box III is likely to be released next October, and I want to to be able to review it freshly published.
I hope you all have enjoyed the last month’s reviews. As this month was dedicated to horror stories, the next few months will focus more heavily on science-fiction and fantasy. I hope you’ll join me.
This is the tenth entry in a month-long series focusing on a horror anthology edited by Patton Oswalt called The Ghost Box (buy it here). The blog will resume its standard format in November.
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Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) wrote most of his weird fiction between 1926 and 1935, his stories appearing in such magazines as Weird Tales, Strange Tales, and Stories of Wonder. “The Treader of the Dust” was written at the tail end of this period, first appearing in the August 1935 issue of Weird Tales. It was later included in Smith’s 1944 short story collection Lost Worlds (which also includes “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros,” reviewed here). More recently, it was included in Penguin Classics’ 2014 volume The Dark Eidolon & Other Fantasies. Read it here.
The story opens with a passage from a fictional grimoire, which describes a spirit of destruction called Quachil Uttaus. The spirit is sometimes known as the Treader of the Dust, as it reduces everything it touches to ashes. Then we jump into the story proper. A man named John Sebastian has recently fled from his home. He has made it his life’s work to study the occult, and has a library full of rare books documenting all sorts of supernatural phenomena. A few days before the start of the story, Sebastian reads about Quachil Uttaus and how the spirit can be summoned with a mere thought. Shortly afterward, he begins to notice signs of premature aging in his house: brand new notebooks withering away, ink immediately fading to illegible scribbles, dust appearing on top of freshly cleaned surfaces. Fearing the worst, Sebastian flees. When the story starts, he is returning to his home, sure that his fears are all in his mind. Except when he does return, he can’t seem to find his manservant, only dust…
I consider myself a fan of Clark Ashton Smith, but “The Treader of the Dust” is, in my opinion, the weakest story in The Ghost Box by a significant margin. My primary issue is with its unimaginative plotting. We read about Quachil Uttaus at the beginning of the story and think, “I have no doubt this spirit is real.” Then the story runs its course and we learn – surprise! – that the spirit is real. There have been too many horror stories to count with this exact twist, and it’s hard not to be a little disappointed in how by-the-numbers it feels. I suspect the story felt more vital in 1935.
I don’t wish to seem unfair. This is not a poorly-written story by any means; Clark’s prodigious vocabulary and poetic voice are on full display here. In addition, although I found the plot largely uninteresting, it does have a certain inevitability that works to its advantage. I also rather liked Smith’s description of the spirit itself, without question the story’s most memorable passage.
Ultimately, this is one of Smith’s minor works. I’d recommend it for fans of Smith or of classic weird literature. Fans of the board game Arkham Horror might also find it worth a read, as Quachil Uttaus was integrated into the game for its “Innsmouth Horror” expansion. For casual horror fans, though, I’d say there are more essential works out there to choose from.
NEXT TIME: “Savory, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme” by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro!
This is the ninth entry in a month-long series focusing on a horror anthology edited by Patton Oswalt called The Ghost Box (buy it here). The blog will resume its standard format in November.
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If there’s one thing that has been impressed upon me reading through The Ghost Box, it is that for a horror story to really triumph, it must stick the landing. Don’t get the ending right and the whole story suffers. There are a few tales in The Ghost Box that build the tension expertly, then fumble when they need to soar. “Pumpkin Head,” by Al Sarrantonio, does not fumble. This is a story that exists for its ending, and it is unforgettable. A surreal fantasia of horror, it is absurd and terrifying simultaneously, a nightmare that left me sitting in cold, silent dread.
“My lunch and dinner, my dinner and breakfast.”
Al Sarrantonio was born in New York City in 1952. A prolific writer, he has authored more than fifty-five books and close to a hundred short stories. For his editorial work, he has won the Bram Stoker Award and the Shirley Jackson Award. “Pumpkin Head” was first published in a 1982 anthology edited by Charles L. Grant called Terrors (which also includes one of my favorite Stephen King stories, “Survivor Type”). It was selected for several “best of” horror anthologies the following year, as well as Sarrantonio’s short story collection Toybox. It was also printed in a 1998 anthology called Dangerous Vegetables (I am mildly sad that there was no Again, Dangerous Vegetables).
The plot of “Pumpkin Head” is simple. It’s Halloween, and an elementary school teacher is throwing a party for her students. There’s a new student in the class, Raylee. She’s shy and doesn’t want to participate in group activities. Much to the teacher’s delight, Raylee agrees to tell a story to the class. It’s a horrible, scary story about a boy named Pumpkin Head. The teacher cuts Raylee off before she can finish, but a sympathetic classmate invites her to a Halloween party, where she finishes her story to the sound of screams.
“Pumpkin Head” is a perfect Halloween story. It is a horror story set on Halloween, of course, but this is just the surface. It is a Halloween story in its use of language as well; the story opens with a description of “an orange and black afternoon,” then segues to “a black and orange night” later. It also works as a Halloween story on a thematic level. This story is about costumes: not merely literal ones, but the metaphorical ones we wear in public to protect ourselves, or others, or both. Prying off someone else’s mask can carry a fatal risk; what if there is a monster underneath?
Sarrantonio’s writing is gorgeous. Many horror writers take a page from the playbook of Richard Matheson, writing in sparse, effective prose. Sarrantonio has a more musical ear; his sentences are melodies. He evokes autumn so vividly that you can feel the nip of the cold on your skin and hear the delighted cries of costumed children on the street:
“A black and orange night.
Here came a black cat walking on two legs; there two percale sheet ghosts trailing paper bags with handles; here again a miniature man from outer space. The wind was up: leaves whipped along the serpentine sidewalk like racing cars. There was an apple-crisp smell in the air, an icicle down your spine, here-comes-winter chill. Pumpkins everywhere, and a half-harvest moon playing coyly with wisps of high shadowy clouds. A thousand dull yellow night-lights winked through breezy trees on a thousand festooned porches. A constant ringing of doorbells, the wash of goblin traffic: they traveled in twos, threes, or fours, these monsters, held together by Halloween gravity.”
“Halloween gravity”! What a sublime way to describe how trick-or-treaters huddle together. Every paragraph yields such linguistic treasures, even if they are in service to a story that turns out to be rather ugly (in the introduction to The Ghost Box, Patton Oswalt describes it as “perfectly-calculated gracelessness”).
There’s not much more for me to say here, except that I loved “Pumpkin Head.” On quality of writing alone it surpasses most of the other selections in the anthology, but it is also, for me, the most viscerally terrifying story in the collection thus far. If you are a fan of horror and you haven’t read Al Sarrantonio, you’re missing out.
NEXT TIME: “The Treader of the Dust” by Clark Ashton Smith!
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