A Carnival of Robert Bloch Stories

I recently spent some time reading or re-reading some Robert Bloch stories because some friends and I were chatting about his work.

I have a number of his anthologies tucked away, and I'm gradually picking up the new releases from Valancourt. 

I guess I'd failed to notice how many carnival stories Bloch produced, and if we stretch it to amusement parks, there's an interesting cycle. 

Reading now brought back a few memories and generated a few Bloch chills as well. 

The parish fair when I was a kid still included remnants of the side shows of earlier years. My parents skewed me toward the rides, and we bought Cokes from the Shriners booth and avoiding the more salacious attractions. I suspect even then the Wild Man of Borneo was watered down from the geek shows of  prior decades. I have a very vague recollection of a peripheral glimpse of the "wild man" huddled in small cage as we passed an attraction. I believe he was draped in hair and just growling.

I recall some of the carnival art as well, and a few snippets of a barker over a PA, but that's about all I can summon to the surface. 

I think I recalled that first after reading and gaining more understanding from Harlan Ellison's essay "The Gopher in the Gilly" in Stalking the Nightmare about his being left behind in jail by a carnival with a true geek who sweated pure alcohol. It's a pretty chilling true tale.

Bloch's "Double Whammy" incorporates the grotesque exploitation of a carnival geek into its mix. It's like a variant on Nightmare Alley but finds a new fate for it's protagonist/cad in EC Comics/karmic destiny fashion. 

Despite some familiar strokes, it delivers a Bloch twist that fits while making the skin crawl. It first appeared in Fantastic Stories in February 1970. The cover on that doesn't hint at the style of horror in store.

The Animal Fair's maybe the best of the carnival tales, that one a recent re-read for me and even more chilling than when I was a kid.

It's Manson Family inspired and captures some of the same dark chills of "Double Whammy" from a little different character perspective. The final chill  

"Freak Show" from 1979 presents almost a walk-through of a sideshow attractions, the freak show as it was known in the day, with a little different turning of the tables as the story progresses. Bloch could aways find a new spint.

 "The Girl From Mars,"  is also a carnival story despite that sci-fi sounding title. It visits similar territory, serves up another cad, also deserving of karma's wry justice. It's original magazine appearance in Fantastic Adventures with art by Rod Ruth. 

Amid the Lovecraftian tales, his realistic crime thrillers and other Bloch brilliance, Bloch's carnival stories serve a grotesque little subset worth seeking out. 

Favorite Short Stories - The Judges of Hades by Edward D. Hoch

I first turned to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine in the late '70s. They were in the mix and progression of interesting and eclectic things to which I was drawn once the comic books were taken away by the Eckerd Drugs powers that were of the day. 

I met Micahel Morbius on those magazine racks and Doc Savage on the nearby paperback display, so those old Eckerd bean counters nudged my reading tastes, I suppose.

I was unaware of Simon Ark's legacy in that moment. I just started to notice the contributions of Edward D. Hoch in every issue of EQMM and frequently in AHMM. I came to like police detective Captain Leopold and thief-of-obscure-and-worthless-objects Nick Velvet among Hoch's wide mix of characters. 

When Ark came to the pages of EQMM and AHMM a while after, I started reading of him as well. An introduction noted Hoch had written of him for some time, but I just picked up with the newly arriving tales. 

I sadly never ran across the 1971 paperback edition in my used book store dives. I would have snatched it up, of course. Paperbacks sold for half their cover price back then, not collector's prices. I would have snatched up a 1973 re-introduced Weird Tales too that included an Ark story too. It never made it to Eckerd's that I noticed. 

Ark might almost have fit in the original Weird Tales alongside Seabury Quinn's Jules de Grandin, I suppose. As explained by Ark's nameless Watsonesque first-person narrator from the publishing industry,  Ark was a Coptic priest, thousands of years old. But his mysteries, while hinting at the bizarre or the mystical, were of the "fantastic uncanny" school. Like The Hound of the Baskervilles or Scooby Doo, while things might seem ghostly or otherwise supernatural, the explanation was rational.

I enjoyed the Ark stories. My old man, who'd take a turn toward less fantastic tastes later in life, read them as well along with other Hoch stories. "Anything by Edward Hoch is good," he declared. 

 SEE ALSO: Favorite Short Stories: The Hospice by Robert Aickman

He liked the clever twists and turns of Hoch's plots, frequently locked rooms with Dr. Sam Hawthorne and more violent crimes with Leopold.  Often, they'd hinge on technology of some sort. I decided Hoch must read a lot about new developments as well as the inner workings of older devices. He was no stranger to minute details in other realms such as myth and folklore either. 

That hint of the arcane in Ark stories probably appealed to me more as my interest in Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft grew. The delight when Hoch revealed how a man trapped in a revolving door all alone could perish at another's hand grabbed both my dad and me, however.

Things weren't as accessible in those days as they are now. I had to wait for ebooks to bring back early Ark tales including Hoch's first published story, I believe, "Village of the Dead." In that one an entire village plunges lemming-like over a cliff. 

SEE ALSO: Ray Bradbury's October Game

"The Judges of Hades," probably novelette length, is in the Mysterious Press/Open Road ebook of The Quests of Simon Ark as well. It's nice to backtrack a bit now that so much is at our fingertips.

According to this handy list, the story first appeared in the February 1957 Crack Detective and Mystery. It's fun to have a sense at least of a tale's original trappings. 

The story takes Ark's publishing-industry friend plus wife Shelly back to his hometown, Maple Shades, Indiana. Kids are wont to strip Maple S from local welcome signs, but it seems to be one of those quiet picket-fences places, though the narrator's much happier in the canyons of New York. 

The friend's father, Richard, and sister Stella, have died in a head-on collision, each alone in a separate car. 

The narrator's strict father was a strict local judge as well. He and his brother, Uncle Phillip, also a judge, had been dubbed judges of hades by the local press, inspired by vase depicting the mythological Greek guardians of the underworld.

What made either the Stella or the Richard decide to ram the other? Dad had ruled against the sister's husband, but would that have triggered a dark impulse on her part?  

The narrator persuades Ark to look into the matter and his interest is piqued by the mythological reference. Was supernatural evil to blame? And what's up with the fact that there were three mythological judges of Hades?

Ark's interest grows as the potentially spookier side of things becomes evident.

The solution's wrapped up in fifties small town repression and more character texture than usual. All is revealed as the narrator contemplates choices and contrasts between life in Maple Shades with the glitzy life of the city. 

Are there a couple of stretches? Perhaps, but it's all clever enough and anticipates what's ahead for Ark who's a tall and heavy-set man not yet showing some of the signs of age mentioned in later tales. So is he really who he claims to be?

It should be enjoyable to fans for the likes of Carnacki, though he might have found a ghost or a logical explanation.

And, if we'd have run across it while he was alive, I'm pretty sure my old man would have liked it and held to his Hoch contention. We had our tiffs, but we got along better than Ark's narrator and his dad Richard. 

Friday for Writers: A Character Description Lesson From Stanley Ellin

If not a household name, Stanley Ellin's still a not-inconsequential figure in the history of mystery and suspense fiction.

A new article about his unique private investigator novels popped up on the excellent Crime Reads website the other day.

That took me back to days when I was a kid and discovered Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine on the drug store magazine rack.

I found after reading numerous issues that Stanley Ellin's stories were among those I usually liked. 

His picture appeared on the cover during a period when the mag did a run of author portraits. Eventually EQMM released an edition of Ellin short fiction, Kindly Dig Your Grave and other Wicked Stories.

The Crime Reads article prompted me to pluck an anthology off my shelf, Ellery Queen's Grand Slam (1970). That included an Ellin story I hadn't read, "Coin of the Realm." It's a great collection that also included Joe Gores' Edgar-winning "Goodbye, Pops."

"Coin" is an interesting "all is not what it seems" piece from Ellin. 

I was struck enough by the way he slipped in the physical description of the POV character that I decided to share the passage with some writing students, and it seems worth a look for all writers making decisions about how to slip physical description in seamlessly. 

"You look like a million," he said, soberly nodding his approval.

Her own expression, as she eyed him from head to foot, was anything but approving."

"I wish I could say the same for you. Is that how you expect to go out? That ridiculous Hawaiian shirt and not even a jacket?"

"It's too hot for a jacket. And we're only going to Flea Market, for Pete's sake, not the opera."

"Even so. And that camera and that great big camera bag slung around your neck. And that awful cigar shoved into your mouth. Do you know what you look like?"

"What?"

"An American tourist, that's what. A real corny American tourist."

Walt glanced at the beefy, red-faced, bald-headed image of himself in the full-length mirror...

The things he's carrying are ultimately significant in the story though it meshes perfectly with his wife's dissatisfaction that fuels the tale's opening exchange.

The guy does eventually look in the mirror--as many fictional characters are wont to--to study his appearance, but I thought the way Ellin built to that made it a natural move, and a great way to provide the reader needed information in an organic way.

If you haven't discovered Ellin as a reader and/or a writer, dig up his work and check him out. 

Ellin, Stanley. "Coin of the Realm." Ellery Queen's Grand Slam. Ed. Ellery Queen. New York: Popular Library, 1970. 29-43. Print.

 

Cat Ladies of the Apocalypse and Tales From My Dark Side

For a while yesterday (April 18, 2020, in the time of quarantine), Cat Ladies of the Apocalypse edited by Lyn Worthen, which includes my story "Witch of Washington Park," had the Hollywood Squares spot right below Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, and we were on a diagonal from collected stories of Theodore Sturgeon, all in the Science Fiction Anthologies category. Or maybe it was the Zoom spot right below them. Or the Alice below Carol and Marcia.

I know, I know, new things climb into the Top 100 and stay a while, like the fog in a Carl Sandburg poem, and then move on, but it was still a thrill for me anyway. In good ways. Bradbury and Sturgeon are deservedly perennials in those slots. BUT STILL!!!! "...once there was a spot/ For one brief shining moment...Camelot..."

READ ALSO: My Interview with Ray Bradbury

And sorta there's bad in me related to this...
Or a dark side, and the placement soothes an old contusion, I'll confess... When I was a kid in junior high I gave a buck-twenty-five copy of The Martian Chronicles as a Christmas gift at school. It was the cool orange one with the sketch of Bradbury on the cover. You drew a name, you had to buy for a $1 or so in those days. It was a while back.

When my present went to the guy, who was actually happy to get it, a look of disgust crossed this other kid's face. "You always give books," he muttered, spitting the word "books" with about as much contempt of a word as is humanly possible.

READ ALSO: Ray Bradbury - The October Game - Major Spoiler 

Yeah, I gave books, and I still do...
...some of them direct from my brain to yours if you choose. Probably says more about me that I recall that dis, that utterance of contempt. But, uh, I guess I hold grudges sometimes. You know, for, uh, decades. Several decades. So that little thumbnail was fun!

Favorite Short Stories: The April Witch by Ray Bradbury

Long before paranormal romance had been named, Ray Bradbury imagined his Elliott family, a clan of supernatural beings that rings a little like the Addams Family with a deeper tinge of melancholy. The tales are collected in the fix-up novel From the Dust Returned. 

I read a while back--all right it was a year ago, time flies--that a movie might be developed from the stories.

That might be fun.

The tales are filled with Bradbury's special magic, which can be at its best when sadness is acknowledged as a part of all things.

In "Homecoming," a core piece in the cycle, there's sense that once frequent reunions are becoming sporadic for the Eliotts, and bits of decorative black crepe paper flutter through subsequent stories, suggesting remnants of grander days as we learn more about the winged Uncle Einar and about the magical Cecy.

She's often pivotal to the tales but never more so than in "The April Witch." Told that the family can't marry humans without a loss of magic, the teen Cecy is devastated. She wants more than anything to be in love.

Since her abilities allow her to inhabit humans and things, she decides she'll experience love second hand.

As a leaf, she flutters into the world of Ann, a young woman in a farming community. Then, leaping into Ann, she forces a rekindling of interest with a young man named Tom.

Ann's resistant, to any romance, even to an outing, but with effort Cecy is able to override some decisions. That means a dance and enough proximity to Tom for Cecy to fall in love,  if it doesn't work for Ann.

The longing impels the story toward a culmination as poignant as Bradbury's other small masterpiece "The Foghorn."

It's fantastical, odd, eerie, offbeat and wonderful, a contemplation like no other of a "what might have been."

Favorite Short Stories - The Emissary by Ray Bradbury

In an essay from J.N. Williamson's How to Write Tales of Horror, Fantasy and Science Fiction,"  Ray Bradbury discussed the writing of many of his chilling stories collected in Dark Carnival from Arkham House, his first book. Many would later go into The October Country (1955).

In that piece, "Run Fast, Stand Still, Or The Thing at the Top of the Stairs, or New Ghosts from Old Minds,"  Bradbury wrote that he developed a list of nouns in his early writing life and set out to pen a story for each of those. "The Dwarf," "The Crowd," "The Jar" and many others followed.

One of my favorite of his noun tales is "The Emissary," a touching and beautifully written story that chills.

It's tells of a young boy with an illness that keeps him in bed, and the emissary of the title is his dog. Since he can't get out, he sends his the pet on missions, to bring back scents and signs and occasional friends from the outside world.

Of course, being a Bradbury story, it features the crisp and vivid sense display of autumn.

 Lying there, Martin found autumn as in the old days before sickness bleached him white on his bed. Here was his contact, his carry-all, the quick-moving part of himself he sent with a yell to run and return, circle and scent, collect and deliver the time and texture of worlds in town, country, by creek, river, lake, down-cellar, up-attic, in closet or coal-bin. Ten dozen times a day he was gifted with sunflower seed, cinder-path, milkweed, horse-chestnut, or full flame-smell of pumpkin. Through the loomings of the universe Dog shuttled; the design was hid in his pelt. Put out your hand, it was there…

It's a tale with touching moments, and it creates well the feeling isolation and illness in a past era.

Things go well until Dog fails to come home. There's worry, of course, and much more before the brief tale concludes. To say anything beyond would be to give away too much, but it is perfect reading for Halloween and for the fall and for the late night when the mind is open to suggestions of things not otherwise accepted.

It's a story to be read not with jaded, nothing-scares-me rigidity, but with a sense of dark wonder and willingness.

Check it out. It's a must in the original prose form, but it can be found in many adaptations. It was a Ray Bradbury Theater episode, was read by Tom Baker as a Late Night Story on British television and is a part of many other collections including The Stories of Ray Bradbury. Go on, give it a look, and come back and tell me what you think.

Bradbury's essay also appears in his Zen in the Art of Writing. 

And in News of the Weird

Today is the anniversary of the rescue of the Donnor Party, according to The History Channel's This Day in History. (Put 2/19 in the upper left corner of their site if you're viewing this after Feb. 19.)

The Donnor ordeal is a tale of true-life horror that's inspired many re-tellings and spin-offs including the chilling "A Child of the Golden West" from Dennis Etchison. Read that story and you'll never look at a bottle of Mountain Dew in the same way again.

Addendum

A great tool for terror writers can be found at How Stuff Works - How Voodoo Works

Favorite Short Stories: The Ship That Saw A Ghost by Frank Norris

When I used to hang out at conventions more than I do now, horror writers were always arguing about quiet horror vs. I, don't know, noisy horror. That's horror achieved with a whisper vs. horror achived with a chainsaw.

I ran across a piece of quiet horror last summer, penned by an author not particularly noted for his ghost stories. The Ship That Saw a Ghost sails from the pen of Frank Norris, best known to me at least for McTeague, a novel my friend's class had to read in college. I didn't have to read it. I went to a different college.

On the good ship Glarus
The short story tells the tale of men aboard a tramp steamer named Glarus on a secret and nefarious mission off the coast of South America in 1902. A visit to a lost and dangerous island promises to make the crewmates rich.

Fate has other plans, however, and to give much away would spoil the story which is available free at the link above.

I suppose the relationships of the sailors including the key mates known as the Black Crows as well as the reports of their San Francisco port of call all mesh with other Norris work.

The sense of sea life and of sailors at home is captured, but the core premise and the chills provided the imaginative reader make it a great late night read.

Put on a candle, imagine the creak and moan of a ship topping constant waves, far away from anything, then imagine being stuck in the middle of nowhere in a dead calm.

It's quite horror but its chilling.

Tags: Horror, Ghosts , Literarture, Frank Norris, Sea Tales