Halloween is finally here, so today I’m pleased to present my fifth and last GALLERY OF OCTOBER DARKNESS. You’ll find it further down the blog. In addition, I’ll be talking some more about SEASON OF MIST, which was my main autumn publication. Again, you’ll find that further down too.
I’ll also be reviewing and discussing in my usual forensic detail - and this is a very timely one, I think you’ll agree - THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF HALLOWEEN STORIES, as edited by the indefatigable Stephen Jones.
If you’re only here for Mr Jones’ latest epic anthology, shoot straight down to the lower end of this column. As always, you’ll find it in the THRILLERS, CHILLERS section.
However, if you’ve got a bit more time, just hang around here a little longer, and we’ll talk a bit about SEASON OF MIST.
Starry nights,
misty woods
I relaunched this novella last September specifically so that it would coincide with the autumn. And now I need to elaborate on that a little, because you could be forgiven for thinking that this book is all about Halloween, and that as we’ve now reached October 31, there isn’t much point reading it (assuming you haven’t done so already).
I must refute that. While Neil Williams’ wonderful cover-art is entirely appropriate for SEASON OF MIST because there is a dramatic high-point in it that occurs on Halloween Night, there are similar dramatic events on Bonfire Night and later on, in December, when an autumn of red leaves and mist (just think Sleepy Hollow and you won’t be far wrong) gives way to a winter of snow, ice and hard, glinting frost.
So, please don’t make the mistake of assuming that, now Halloween is over, that’s it, SEASON OF MIST is done. Trust me, it really isn’t. And if you haven’t already taken a chance on it, now is as good a time as any.
Next meanwhile, something that actually is ending ...
The final gallery
All through this last month, you’ll hopefully have noticed that I’ve been posting what I refer to as GALLERIES OF DARKNESS, each week focussing on 20 different artists - painters, concept guys, book illustrators, game designers and the like - who have occasionally dipped their brushes, nibs, whatever into the darkest inks. We’ve seen some wonderfully scary stuff drawn from some truly fiendish imaginations and realised on canvas, paper, screen etc in the most handsome and evocative ways.
Here, now that October is over, are my final 20.
You can see from the painting at the top of this column - Death as General Rides a Horse, by Edgar Bundy (1911) - that classical artworks, and even modern art done in the classical style, has often dealt with ghoulish subject matter. So, it’s not something new. That notwithstanding, I’ve mostly tried to select only contemporary artists for this series simply because it might help introduce you chaps to a few wonderful talents whom you might not yet have encountered.
Again, I give my customary warning that, though I have never selected anything for these galleries that is simply revolting or obscene, always opting instead for the terrifying and macabre, none of these artists hold back. There is some pretty eerie and twisted stuff on here. So, you have been warned.
Enjoy ...
1. ANDREW FEREZ
4. CHRIS MARS
11. STEPHEN GAMMELL
12. CHAPMAN BROTHERS
14. BEN BALDWIN
15. DANIELE SERRA
16. RUSSELL MARKS
17. FREDERICK COOPER
18. ALEXANDER REISFAR
19. SVETLIN VELINOV
20. DHOLL
THRILLERS, CHILLERS, SHOCKERS AND KILLERS …
An ongoing series of reviews of dark fiction (crime,
thriller, horror and sci-fi) – both old and new – that I have recently read and
enjoyed. I’ll endeavour to keep the SPOILERS to a minimum; there will certainly
be no given-away denouements or exposed twists-in-the-tail, but by the definition
of the word ‘review’, I’m going to be talking about these books in more than
just thumbnail detail, extolling the aspects that I particularly enjoyed … so I
guess if you’d rather not know anything at all about these pieces of work in
advance of reading them yourself, then these particular posts will not be your
thing.
As the title makes clear, a themed Halloween horror
anthology, originally published in time for October 31 last year, though in
truth it contains enough spooky tales and timeless treats to be readable at the
misty, murky tail-end of any year.
Rather than simply hit you with a succession of brief short
story outlines, I’ll first let the publishers give you their own official blurb,
which neatly lays out the autumnal chills lying ahead:
Treat yourself to some very tricky stories! Halloween … All
Hallows’ Eve … Samhain … Día de los Muertos … the Day the Dead Come Back … When
the barriers between the worlds are at their weakest – when ghosts, goblins,
and grisly things can cross over into our dimension – then for a single night
each year the natural becomes the supernatural, the normal becomes the
paranormal, and nobody is safe from their most intimate and terrifying fears.
The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories brings you a dark
feast of frightening fiction by some of the most successful and respected
horror writers working today, including Ramsey Campbell, Neil Gaiman, Joe R.
Lansdale, Helen Marshall, Richard Christian Matheson, Robert Shearman, Robert
Silverberg, Angela Slatter, Steve Rasnic Tem, and many more, along with a very
special contribution by award-winning poet Jane Yolen.
Here you will encounter witches, ghosts, monsters, psychos,
demonic nuns, and even Death himself in this spooky selection of stories set on
the night when evil walks the Earth …
Come the waning of the year, Halloween horror anthologies,
much like Halloween horror movies, become a fixture on our ‘want lists’. Given
that October 31, with its ghost stories and ghoulish pageantry, is easily the
scariest night of the year in the western tradition, but also, for many, and
for exactly the same reason, the most fun night too, it’s surely no surprise
that writers and editors have visited it time and time again. Almost inevitably
of course, those working at the darker end of the literary spectrum have
colonised it most. But as a Brit, I’ve long had a beef with Halloween fiction,
and this centres around the fact that it’s almost invariably hogged by
Americans.
Now, don’t get me wrong – the US has produced some of the
world’s greatest horror writers, not to mention novels, stories and film
scripts, and I have absolutely no complaints about that. But it’s peeved me
many times in the past to pick up a collection of new Halloween fiction and
find that, almost without exception, every story relates to the American
experience. And whenever I’ve expressed these sentiments to fellow Brits, I’ve
been told: “Well, that’s because in the US it’s an old festival, while in the
UK it’s fairly new.”
Come on, guys!
In the UK Halloween is NOT new. It’s one of our most ancient
celebrations; it’s just that it hasn’t been quite as big a party in recent
times because the highlight of our autumn, as imposed upon us by royal decree,
Bonfire Night, occurs only five days later.
But now, thankfully, we have an anthology that puts all this
right … perhaps understandably so, given that Stephen Jones, one of the world’s
most respected and hardest working anthologists, is British. Not that he
focusses purely on the UK in The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories; far from
it. He certainly includes a number of front-running British horror authors –
Neil Gaiman, Storm Constantine, Ramsey Campbell, Michael Marshall Smith et al –
but there are plenty of Americans in here as well – Richard Christian Matheson,
Lisa Morton, Joe R Lansdale and Thana Niveau, among others, not to mention a couple
of Aussies in Robert Hood and Angela Slatter, and a Canadian in Nancy
Kilpatrick, while at least two of the stories, Memories of Día de los Muertos
by the aforementioned Kilpatrick, and the spine-chilling Not Our Brother by the
legendary Robert Silverberg, take us to Mexico, where Día de Muertos is not
just a holiday but a revered religious fête.
So, rest assured, a wide range of voices and perspectives
are on offer in this one, which, as I say, makes a refreshing change, and
enables Steve Jones to tackle the many different aspects of this complex,
multi-layered festival, and the varied customs wrapped up in it (not all of
which, I have to say, are purposely terrifying – the editor himself prewarns us
about this in his intro).
But ultimately, of course, for all these different takes,
there is a common thread. Halloween is the night on which the realms of the
living and the dead are closest to each other, when spirits and other entities,
both benign and malignant, can cross over into our world and commune with us.
And the late autumn atmosphere of darkness, mist and swirling leaves only adds
to this eeriness, and thus provides a backdrop that runs throughout.
It’s all become rather ‘on the nose’ in real life, of
course. An interesting essay at the beginning of the book, When Graveyards
Yawn, penned by Jones himself, explains how the iconic imagery of Halloween –
witches on broomsticks, black cats, jack-o-lanterns – was first popularised in
the late Victorian era via the publication in America of spooky postcards.
There is little of that to be found in the actual fiction here. Jones is far
too astute and eclectic an editor to select anything so obvious (and where it
does appear, it is often turned on its head: Lantern Jack by Christopher
Fowler, for example, or The Halloween Monster by Alison Littlewood). But the
essence of the traditional Halloween remains. In Neil Gaiman’s October in the
Chair, for example, a tale redolent of cold, dark autumn nights, the
personifications of the months gather at a woodland bonfire to hear October
tell the sad story of a lonely boy who runs away from home, befriends a ghost
and decides that he never wants to leave its side … ever. While Adrian Cole’s
Queen of the Hunt sees a rural cop investigating what looks like an animal-attack
fatality but worried by the rapid approach of Halloween, because he knows the
weird rituals with which it is celebrated in these parts and fears that the
two may be connected. Equally traditional is Marie O’Regan’s Before the Parade
Passes By, wherein a recently-made widow and her young daughter move to a new
town, the community of which appears to embrace them … except that Halloween is
almost upon them, and the child is increasingly scared by the prospect of the
mysterious ‘parade’. Perhaps most atmospheric of all, though, is Storm
Constantine’s Bone Fire, which takes us into a pre-industrial age British
village, where Halloween is lavishly celebrated, and all kinds of strange and
interesting guests are anticipated (more about this story later).
Of course, the real test of any horror anthology is whether
it’s frightening or not. The stories it contains can be superbly written and
clever as Hell – and all these things are to be found in this tome – but if it
doesn’t put a few chills up the reader’s spine, then it hasn’t done its job.
Well, I’m glad to say that The Mammoth Book of Halloween
Stories ticked this box too. Particularly memorable in this regard is Her Face
by Ramsey Campbell, in which a young boy regularly buys cigarettes for his
single mum in the corner shop across the road, but as Halloween approaches,
becomes increasingly afraid of the horror masks it is stocking. We also have
Robert Silverberg’s previously mentioned Not Our Brother, an intensely
frightening Samhain epic, which sees an American collector of Mexican
memorabilia head south of the border to spend the Day of the Dead in a remote
village, where he aims to persuade the locals to sell him some valuable tribal
masks, unaware of the level of resistance he’ll encounter. And The Folding Man
by Joe R Lansdale, a classic pursuit horror in which a unstoppable monster is
unleashed on a bunch of irreverent teens (again, more about this story later).
These are chilling tales all, showing scare-meister authors
at the top of their game, and they’re not the only ones. Angela Slatter’s The
October Widow will also creep you out, as will Cate Gardner’s Dust Upon a Paper
Eye and Lisa Morton’s The Ultimate Halloween Party App, to name but a few (yet
again, more about the first two of that trio later).
All this said, it isn’t just about being frightened. The
Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories also contains some serious and
thought-provoking fiction. Michael Marshall Smith’ s The Scariest Thing in the
World and Alison Littlewood’s The Halloween Monster are both excellent and
beautifully written tales, which remind us that man’s deadliest foe, whatever
night of the year it is, is man himself. While other contributions, if not
exactly head-trips, go way beyond the others in terms of dark, surreal fantasy.
A good example is the ever-reliable Steve Rasnic Tem’s strangely affecting
Reflections in Black, in which an embittered man travels across the States,
looking to hook up with an old girlfriend, and encountering all kinds of
Halloween weirdness en route, while Robert Shearman’s Pumpkin Kids is so
strange and disturbing that it defies a thumbnail outline – you’ve just got to
read it.
And that’s the message for the whole of this book, really.
Buy it and read it. It’s not the first Halloween anthology, and it certainly
won’t be the last, but I suspect it’ll never have many rivals that can boast
such a broad range of story types and Halloween subject-matter.
It was published for Halloween last year, but it’ll work
just as well for Halloween this year. So, waste no further time …
And now …
THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF HALLOWEEN STORIES – the movie.
Just a bit of fun, this part. No film maker has optioned
this book yet (as far as I’m aware), but here are my thoughts on how they
should proceed, if they do.
Note: these four stories are NOT the ones I necessarily
consider to be the best in the book, but these are the four I perceive as most
filmic and most right for adaptation in a compendium horror. Of course, no such
horror film can happen without a central thread, and this is where you guys,
the audience, come in.
It could be that we opt for Neil Gaiman’s concept of
October occupying a woodland chair while a bonfire blazes nearby, regaling us
with chilling stories of the season; or maybe we just fall back on that old
chestnut (see what I did there?), with four strangers thrown together in
unusual Halloween circumstances, which require them to relate spooky stories …
perhaps a late-October party at The Monster Club, hosted by Erasmus the
vampire. But basically, it’s up to you.
Without further messing about, here are the stories and the
casts I would choose:
The October Widow (by Angela Slatter): Hedgewitch Mirabel
travels from one town to the next each Halloween, seducing and sacrificing
handsome young men, both to replenish the land and her own youth – as she has
been doing for decades. She thinks she is doing good, but ageing Cecil, who
can’t forget the loss of his son, has other ideas …
Mirabel – Miranda Richardson
Henry – Asa Butterfield
Cecil – Nick Brimble
Dust Upon a Paper Eye (by Cate Gardner): A semi-derelict
inner-city theatre is the venue for a strange Halloween Night show, the
eccentric oddball, Herr Smithson, having promised to entertain a private
audience with lifesize, dancing dolls. But when former homeless girl,
Henrietta, is brought in to prepare the dolls’ makeup, she notices something
rather peculiar about them …
Henrietta – Florence Pugh
Herr Smithson – Phil Davies
Bone Fire (by Storm Constantine): In a pre-industrial age
English village, two lasses seek excitement and love as the annual All Hallows
celebration approaches. But neither of them are really ready for the mysterious
lads they will meet in the Bone Fire smoke …
Emilie – Anya Taylor-Joy
Jenna – Mia Goth
The Folding Man (by Joe R Lansdale): It’s Halloween Night,
and Jim and his friends, out for a party, make the mistake of mooning a car
full of nuns. But this is no ordinary party night, and these are no ordinary
nuns, and when they chase the boys and unleash the terrifying ‘folding man’ on
them, Jim realises that this will be a Halloween like no other …
Jim – Freddie Highmore