Okay, something a bit different now that we’re into the month of October. It’s a time of year that’s always associated with spookiness.
Regular readers of this column will probably think: “So what’s different there?
Everything you talk about on here is spooky or scary or dark or disturbing.”
Well, yes … that’s true. But rather than blathering on throughout
October about books, films or whatever I happen to be writing at the time, and
doing my level best to persuade you that it’s the scariest thing since His Satanic Majesty’s escape from Hell, I thought I’d take a more visual approach this month – and hit
you where it frightens the most, showcasing artwork rather than verbiage.
I’ll also this month, in my review section – again, because it’s
October – be looking exclusively at horror novels or anthologies, starting
today with John Farris’s legendary ALL HEADS TURN WHEN THE HUNT GOES BY.
Now, if the John Farris piece is all you’re here for, no problem. As is
usually the case, you can scoot on down to the lower end of today’s blog, where
you’ll find the review and discussion in the ‘Thrillers, Chillers’ section.
However, if you’re interested in seeing what else I’ve got to offer first, then
stick around and check out some …
Dark Arts
Not many people know this, but I’m actually a lover of fine
art. I adorn my home with paintings (whenever I can afford them), and I’m never
more relaxed than when I’m wandering around an art gallery with plenty of time
to absorb and enjoy the treats on offer there. (I don’t go as much for sculpture; sadly, that wouldn’t be possible in our house, as we have two whirlwind springer spaniels
with a lifelong mission to demolish every ornament in their path).
When I say I’m a lover of the arts, you may assume that, because
I’m also a scare-meister when it comes to my writing and reading, that this means I’m
mainly interested in artists who specialise in the grim and ghoulish. Well …
that’s not true. I love quality paintings, whatever the mood they evoke. That
said, for our purposes this month – October, remember, that spookiest time of
the year! – I’m going to be focussing on those artists who’ve dabbled in the
darkness.
I’ll thus be hitting you each Thursday this month with a gallery
of 20 painters or illustrators, offering several samples in each case of their
more twisted imaginings, the whole thing culminating on Halloween itself.
Now, before we get going, I should point out that, even
featuring 20 a week – which overall this month gives us a nice round 100 – I’ll barely be
scratching the surface of this subject. So many visual creators have thrown
nightmares onto canvas, and not just those of a recent vintage.
Check out
the image at the top of this column: a close detail from Fall of the Rebel
Angels by Luca Giordano, created in 1666. Have you ever seen such a depiction of
horror and terror? No less disturbing, you’ll also see in this opening section (in descending order) Death and the Miser by Hieronymus Bosch (1494), Saturn Devouring His Son by Peter Paul Rubens (1636) and Flaying of Marysas by Titian (1570).
I won’t wax lyrical on the subject of
these old masters. Firstly, because I’m not qualified to do so – I'm an art
buff, not an expert. Secondly, because they largely speak for themselves.
That’s also the approach I’ll be taking with the weekly
galleries I’ll be presenting to you. In nearly all cases I’ve done my research
but haven’t learned anything like enough about the painters themselves to
discuss them. In some cases, I don’t even know the names and dates of the
pictures themselves; that’s the problem with the Internet – you find this great
stuff floating around online but finding credits and background information is
much harder.
However, in each case I’ve created a link, which will take
you through to that particular artist’s page or site, from where you can hopefully
learn all you need to know, and maybe even buy some prints. (You’ll notice that most of these artists are current, so it may even be
possible to acquire some originals).
So, without further ado, I’ll stop gabbling and get on
with our …
GALLERIES OF DARKNESS – Week One
As I say, don’t be looking for detailed info on here; I simply
haven’t got it – just follow the links and with luck that will be sufficient. (And here’s a quick, last-minute WARNING: though I’ve consciously
tried to avoid anything that is simply revolting, I’ve gone all out for the
disturbing and terrifying. So, be aware, these artists do NOT hold back).
1. ELIRAN KANTOR
3. BORIS GROH
4. DAVE KENDALL
6. PAUL CAMPION
8. SETH SIRO
9. LES EDWARDS
9. SAFIR RIFAS
10. VIRGIL FINLAY
11. BUDDY McCUE
12. AERON ALFREY
14. JUNJI ITO
15. PAULA REGO
16. SANTIAGO CARUSO
17. WAYNE BARLOWE
18. KARL PERSSON
19. MARK RYDEN
20. PIOTR JABLONSKI
Part II follows next Thursday ...
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.
Outline
In
1942, officer and gentleman, Charles ‘Champ’ Bradwin, takes leave from his unit
and heads home to Arkansas to attend his younger brother, cadet officer
Clipper’s wedding. It is a grand occasion. Everyone who is anyone is present;
most members of the aristocratic Bradwin family, including demagogic patriarch,
Boss, though not oldest brother, Beau, who left the district many years
earlier. But it still ends in disaster, because when the church bell
inexplicably tolls of its own accord, Clipper goes mad, attacking the
congregation with his dress sabre, slaughtering, among others, his wife-to-be
and his father, before killing himself.
Stunned
and helpless, the family retreat to Dasheroons, their vast rural estate, but
there is no solace to be found there. Both Champ and Nhora, Boss’s young and
beautiful French wife (his third, in fact), are lost for an explanation, while
Champ’s wife, Nancy – whom Clipper particularly tried to slay, but who survived
– is left almost comatose by the experience. The staff on the estate, Boss’s
loyal, longstanding man-servant, Hackaliah, and his educated but surly son,
Tyrone, are equally horrified and bemused. Detailed examination of Clipper’s
background reveals a hitherto concealed lifestyle of predatory sexual
behaviour, but there is no indication of the homicidal personality that
revealed itself during the wedding.
With
no option, but shell-shocked before he even gets to the battlefield, Champ must
now return to his unit and fight the war, while Nhora takes charge of the
palatial estate despite a strange undercurrent of hostility towards her.
Needless
to say, the terror and the misery go on. Champ is dispatched to the Pacific,
where his company is decimated in heavy fighting with the Japanese, and he
himself suffers an horrific throat-wound (though this happens in weird,
dreamlike circumstances, during which his assailant looks remarkably like a
decayed version of his dead brother, Clipper). When Champ finally returns home,
a shadow of the man he was, he is in the company of a doctor the Bradwin family
have never met before, an Englishman called Jackson Holley, whose credentials
are very good, at least on paper – but who in actual fact has a fabricated
pedigree because he never completed his medical training and is now on the run
from his own peculiar demons.
But
this is actually a big event, because with the arrival of Holley, two cursed
families have finally come together.
It
seems that the wedding butchery is only one tragedy in the history of the
Bradwin family; there have been others in the past, dating back to an even more
savage occasion when Boss, not exactly a white supremacist but still an icon of
southern gentry entitlement, led violent retaliation against a protest by local
black farmers, which turned into a massacre (as one character comments, Dasheroons
“is built on the bodies and blood of Africans”) – but the Holleys too have
stumbled from one misfortune to the next.
Jackson
Holley is lucky to be alive, as his youth, spent at a Congo mission hospital where his father was a voluntary medic, brought him face to face with all kinds
of hardships and horrors: heat, illness, bizarre apparitions, and a
cannibalistic tribe so in thrall to the aggressive snake goddess, Ai-da Wedo,
that they were prepared to sew the seeds of their own eventual destruction by
following her warlike path rather than living in peace with the ever-more
covetous colonial powers.
A
major coincidence now occurs in the story (at least, it seems that way at
first, though all will be revealed in due course). Because beautiful
widow, Nhora, also spent her youth in that steamy jungle realm – at the time
classified as French Equatorial Africa – where she was kidnapped as a child by
the same ferocious tribesmen. Perhaps inevitably, she and Holley hit it off
when they meet – in fact, it is virtually love (and lust!) at first sight – but
even though the Englishman has brought the family’s last surviving son safe
home again, he doesn’t feel entirely safe; there are many menacing mysteries on
the great southern estate.
What happened
to Beau Bradwin?; did he really leave because he fell out with his father over
the brutal methods Boss displayed in his younger days? And if so, where did he
leave to? Is it possible that Tyrone, who clearly does not get on with his own
father, Hackaliah, might actually have been sired by Boss, and in which case
does he have his own agenda? Why is a grizzled outlaw known only as Early Boy
hanging around on the plantation’s fringes? What dark power keeps so many of
the family’s black servants in such a state of fear? Could the secret of all
this evil lie in the apparent voodoo temple that Holley and Nhora discover in a
nearby bayou?
The
answers to all these questions, and others, will only be provided if Holley
hangs around for once, and tries to work his way through the layers of mystery.
Nhora may help him, or she may hinder him. But one thing is certain, when the
truth finally emerges it will neither be palatable nor edifying. If we thought
there was horror in the Bradwins’ and Holleys’ lives previously, we ain’t seen
anything yet …
Review
There
are all kinds of questions surrounding the epic supernatural saga that is All
Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By. First of all, the most obvious one is where
the book’s ultra-oblique title came from. There has been much debate about
this, with theories ranging from the eclectic to the fantastical, the author
himself adding nothing to the mix by never explaining it and making nothing
obvious in the narrative.
The
other big mystery is why this classic horror novel and its author are not
better known.
Back
in the 1970s, John Farris was writing alongside such future luminaries of the
genre as Stephen King, Peter Straub and Dean R. Koontz, all of whom would go on
to become household names while he remained obscure. It can’t just be the case
that Farris’s writing wasn’t as good as that of his contemporaries, because All
Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By is excellently penned, comprising beautiful
prose, multi-layered characters, and richly evoked atmospheres, be they the
disciplined world of the US military, as embodied by Champ, the dreamy,
semi-aristocratic lifestyle found on the southern plantations, as personified
by the Dasheroons estate, or the hellish environment of an isolated
jungle-mission deep in the African rain forest, where superstition abounds and
almost everything there can kill you. So deeply felt are these sequences that
you’d swear you were actually there. You can visualise the scenery and smell
the plant-life, you can feel the heat on your skin.
The
same applies to Farris’s characters, who are vastly more complex than anything
you will usually encounter in supernatural fiction. In some ways, he almost
overdoes this, always avoiding info dump but describing them through a
procession of chapters in such minute detail – physically, mentally,
spiritually – noting their every movement, their every adjustment of posture,
their every change of tone, mood, expression, that it leaves nothing to the
reader’s imagination. It’s very fulsome, overly so to be frank, but that’s
typical of its era; it’s hardly a chore to read it because it’s so well-done,
but it won’t be popular across the board with modern readers.
In
terms of these same characters, there is no question that we are dealing with
living, breathing people, and each one, in his/her own way is fascinating, in
addition to being realistically flawed.
Leading
man, Jackson Holley, is basically a conman – polite and well-bred admittedly,
but he should not be telling people that he’s a doctor and he most certainly
should not be practising medicine. An unreliable sort, he flits here and there,
breaking hearts, skipping his responsibilities and occasionally lowering
himself to deal with criminals like Early Boy. But as the book’s hero, he
works. He hardly had the best start in life, but managed to rise above it, he’s
usually well-intentioned, he’s undoubtedly brave and you get the strong feeling
that he’s owed a better life, even if that doesn’t necessarily justify his
attempts to embezzle one: a typical charming rogue from the end-days of the
British Empire.
Meanwhile,
the Bradwin brothers are also products of their time and place: American
power-elite as opposed to British. The long-departed Beau was the square-jawed
guy with the conscience, and a liberal-minded friend to the local black
farmers, who though the days of slavery were behind them, had still to taste
the fruits of Civil Rights, which put him at odds with everything his
family had come from, and soon saw him relegated to the lowest rung of Depression-era
society. Champ, on the other hand, is the good soldier, the unquestioning hero
who answered his country’s call, the one in whom all hope is invested for the
future. Meanwhile, Clipper is the youngest and most spoiled, the one who’s been
able to do whatever he wants because his declining father never saw anything
more harmful in him than youthful exuberance (and maybe even recognised his
gross appetites as a direct inheritance). Lastly, there is Tyrone, the
mixed-race half-brother, the one who had to fight for everything, and as is such
the most cynical, the most cunning and by far the most dangerous.
Then,
of course, we have Nhora, the French-born widow whose apparent innocence of the
world (not to mention her own overwhelming allure) may conceal a calculating
schemer, because after all, more so even than Holley, Nhora is a stranger in a
strange land here, and once Boss is dead, scheming may be the only way she is
going to survive.
But it
isn’t just the leads that this degree of detail applies to. There are many
characters in All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By, an entire support-cast of
secondaries and walk-ons, almost all of whom have crucial roles to play and as
such are drawn in unforgettable detail.
And
yet this depth of writing doesn’t just extend to characterisation. The entire
narrative unravels in a cascade of steady and vivid exposition, which at the
same time is wry, humorous, sensual, every scene exquisitely written and
presented – the undercurrents as much as the surface stuff – every page (even
when nothing important is happening) shimmering with tension and atmosphere.
John Farris’s ‘Southern Gothic’ background shines through repeatedly and
intoxicatingly.
The
only real trade-off with regard to this – but it is a trade-off – is the loss
of pace.
Without
any doubt, this novel is a slow burn. That’s not always a bad thing. I have no
concerns about an author who takes his time to set the tone, to evoke mood,
time and place, to build the world in which his story will explode. But I do
worry that in this particular case it may go a little too far. It doesn’t help
that various characters, including those of lesser importance, don’t just
commence their journeys on separate continents but in different time-zones,
chapter after chapter rolling by as they follow their individual paths and
still none of them meeting up, but that was very much the style of the ‘holiday
horror novels’ so popular in the days when this book was written, with huge
amounts of what might now be seen as extraneous detail cheerfully shovelled in.
But no matter how picturesque the prose, it may be a little bit too much for
most modern tastes.
But at
the end of the day, I’d argue that this is still a great book and a valid horror
read, especially as quality supernatural fiction – particularly in that
traditional demonic / voodoo / mythological vein – is so thin on the ground in
the 21st century.
The
other big plus with All Heads Turn When the Hunts Goes By is that it’s meaningful.
This
is no lightweight gore-and-sex fest, as specialised in by certain horror
authors of the 1970s. I mean, it’s dark and disturbing stuff (because, trust
me, literally everyone suffers in this book), but that’s only because Farris
doesn’t stint on exploring his numerous mature themes in the most visceral and
unforgiving way: class, caste, race, heroes and villains, historical guilt,
sexual politics, cultural imperialism, the repercussions of revenge, obsession,
desire, lust and so on. But it’s not a lecture either. Everything is woven
into the run of events so that, in the fashion of true high-quality fiction,
you absorb it subliminally as you read.
For
all these reasons, this book is a forgotten classic. Anyone who enjoys an
uncompromisingly dark and intriguing read and is willing to exercise a little
bit of patience, you need to rediscover it right now.
As
always, I’m now going to cast what I think would be an ideal TV horror series
in this age of no-holds-barred adult television, were anyone (HBO?) to take a
chance on it. Only a bit of fun, of course (no casting director has ever
listened to me with my own stuff, so why would they start here?), but anyway,
here are my picks for the leads in All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By, the TV
show:
Jackson
Holley – Henry Cavill
Nhora
Bradwin – Audrey Tautou
Charles
‘Champ’ Bradwin – Misha Collins
Hackaliah
– Danny Glover
Tyrone
– Michael Ealy
Nancy
Bradwin – Katheryn Winnick
Early
Boy – Anson Mount
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