Tag Archives: horror

Longdogs versus Zombies

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Hey, are you an avid fan of zombie films and TV series? Do you love World War Z, and find yourself glued to The Walking Dead, or anything by George Romero?

I can’t say I do.

In fact, I could probably cope without ever tripping over another zombie for the rest of my life, in any medium you care to mention. Including my life, which is probably classed as a large rather than a medium, given my love of Pateley Bridge pork pies.

(I make one exception – the film Cockneys vs Zombies – because it features the slowest chase scene ever, where a stumbling zombie chases a pensioner with a zimmer frame. That bit is fun, believe me.)

So this entry isn’t about zombies.

It starts there, because of the way my mind works. The other day I finally remembered the title of the first zombie film I saw, White Zombie (1932), starring Bela Lugosi. I didn’t actually see it in 1932, before you ask.

My interest was aroused when I found out that it was based on The Magic Island, by William Seabrook (1884-1945). Seabrook was interested in voudou, and travelled extensively. More interesting to me was that he claimed to have tasted human flesh. Accounts vary. He originally said that he was given human flesh in West Africa, and then that he had to obtain a body from a French morgue. He described it thus:

It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. Jungle Ways

I read this, and thought a lot about mild, good meat. I was brought up in the Church of the Confirmed Carnivore, you see. It was a bit like the Plymouth Brethren, but you could fancy other men if no-one was looking.

My father was a firearms dealer. We didn’t eat any of the neighbours in our tiny village, sadly. Instead, he taught me to hunt. He also taught me how to cast my own bullets and load cartridges, and we went out on the wolds to shoot rabbit and pigeon (mostly).

Out there, in the winds off the North Sea, we scanned the gorse bushes and let loose the wonky, unevenly-powered bullets from Hell. I’m not sure I was very good at the ammunition bit. And we carried home flesh for mother, who usually forced a smile.

The rabbits were paunched in the field, leaving the innards on the grass for other hunters. The pigeons were de-cropped and plucked on the kitchen floor. As the sink was sometimes filled with live crabs, this was a messy business with little hand washing.

I don’t have a gun any more, but when we took on our latest lurchers, we found out that the female had once been used for hunting. Given the hillsides full of rabbits near us, we considered the matter. Were we going to let Chilli hunt, and catch us some free dinners? A Household Meeting (me rattling on while my partner read a book and mumbled uh-huh now and then) came up with three key issues:

– If we started her back on hunting, would that make her even more likely to chase and eat the neighbourhood cats?
– How many farmers did we know who would let us do it (none)?
– What were we going to do with all the hares/rabbits, given that I was the only one who would touch them with a Polish bargee?

I have a family which considers chicken breasts to be a pretty bloody affair, and likes to live off long-dead pasta and humanely-killed salad vegetables.

Well-trained lurchers or longdogs know what to do. They have to. They hunt and take down the species(s) you train them on. You do have to proof them against going after anything that moves, but they can be taught to wander through a flock of sheep, ignore chickens and so forth. So it might be possible to train, or re-train, Chilli to focus on rabbits alone (and perhaps cats with very long ears). I can’t speak on the squirrel issue – every lurcher we’ve had has gone into a frenzy over squirrels, regardless of what we’ve told them.

Cand 8bDjango and Chilli enraged with bloodlust

Was it worth it? Even if we dealt with the first two issues, I would still be left living alone in the garage with lots of rabbit corpses. In the end we decided against the hunting, although Chilli didn’t get a vote. Perhaps that will teach her not to interfere in Labour Party leadership elections.

And today we were up at Pateley Bridge, and I had to walk the poor dog past half a dozen fenced fields full of lively bunnies. It was the Torment of Tantalus, rabbits offered but always out of reach. I was thinking, Mmm, pies; Chilli was thinking, Why wait for pies? My partner, who is a kindly soul when kept off the coffee, was thinking, Oh, they’re cute.

So my only recourse is to write to the Tory Party and ask if they want Chilli and me to hunt down some of these immigrants that are worrying them. Presumably not those who are building our houses, keeping our hospitals running and staffing our care homes. And not the ones who are half-drowned from crossing the Mediterranean.

It’s a complex issue, and I want to know – is it OK to hunt down totally unskilled, clueless immigrants with lurchers, paunch them in the car park and take them home for supper? Would William Seabrook have approved, and would they make good pork pies?

Politics, eh? Give me longdogs any time.

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The Lurking Adjectives of Doom

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Put up your hand if you like adjectives. Good.

Now put up your pale, twisted claw of a hand with its squamous, flaking skin and flesh beneath which seems eldritch, almost fungoid, like some blasphemous mockery of humanity, if you really like adjectives.

Now we’re cooking.

Science fiction literature, one of my early loves, used to be plastered with things which were impregnable, unstoppable, invincible and impenetrable. The adjective ruled. Then, with equal frequency these things were pregnated, stopped, vinced and penetrated to satisfy the plot. Most SF idiots like me remember the joys of E E Doc Smith. Boy, did that man love his work.

Horror fiction, on the other hand, has always fallen back on the good ole’ indescribable.

There are two sound reasons for this. The first is that the author genuinely wants to convey something which has an impact beyond normal sensory perception, or is beyond rational description. The very best authors use subtlety, nuance and the effect on the characters to give you what you need.

And sometimes it is best not to describe. Graphic portrayal can be a risk. It reminds me of the two versions of the film Cat People. In the original 1942 version (unless my memory is shot), the menace came from shadows and suggestion. It was unsettling. The 1982 version showed what was happening quite openly and lost out in the process. But it did have a David Bowie theme song, so you takes your chances…

The second good reason for taking the indescribable route is that the author can’t think of a physical manifestation scary enough, and if they actually describe it, the readers will go “Meh! and throw the story away. I think that’s a great way out. Throw in some hints, write the rest of the story and hope that the readers can imagine things better than you can write. Why should writers do all the work?

There is a third reason, but it’s unkind to mention it. So I will. There are authors who can’t use adjectives (or similes) very well, and think that they have found an escape clause.

The creature was so big, no, enormous, well, really large, like a, what’s the word, you know, those bloody great fish, or maybe an eel but like those congers, not the jellied ones, and it had tendrils as large as, oh bugger…

The creature was indescribable.

My particular bugbear is where something supposedly can’t be put into words and then, in the next paragraph (or fifteen), everything is depicted in graphic detail anyway.

Under the guttering light of our one remaining torch, we finally managed to break open the tomb. I slid the stone lid to one side, my arms aching, and there, inside, we saw the indescribable horror that had once been St John Arthur Masters…

“Oh, wait a minute.” said Sandra, squinting. “I’ll tell you what we’ve got here. It’s a ratty old man with half his skin falling off, wearing a shroud which badly needs a wash. He’s deliquescing a bit, which is icky, and his nails need clipping. I think we should set fire to him and go for a pint.” Sandra’s First Pony by J Linseed Grant

On the other hand, I actually enjoy those stories which astonish by their use of language. By which I mean the ones where an earthquake has released a slumbering thesaurus. There are so many lurid adjectives that you have no idea what the central monster/spectre/alien looks like. It has been stamped to death by the thesaurus, which raises its head at the end and roars in triumph. I love a good B-movie.

I read a fantasy short story (no names) in bed last night, on my bargain-basement tablet. And then I read it out to my partner, and to the dogs. We laughed and wept; we shuddered. The adjective count was so high that we genuinely could not understand what had happened, even on a second reading. There wasn’t any space left for nouns and verbs.

H P Lovecraft, one of my favourite authors, was not exactly immune to the curse of the adjective. Which is to say, he used too many of them. Indescribable, antiquarian and shunned spring to mind. In fact, I had to check with The Arkham Archivist. Apparently hideous is the clear winner, with 260 uses in his complete works.

Dunwich_HorrorA subtle film interpretation of Lovecraft’s writing

Out of curiosity I picked up Lovecraft and Derleth’s The Lurker at the Threshold, which was in a pile by my desk, and looked up some descriptions of monster situations. Adjectives formed 20 – 25% of such passages. And I think you’ll agree that such an exercise demonstrates quite clearly that… I don’t have a life.

Fortunately Lovecraft’s ideas, and the impressions he conveys, far outweigh most quibbles about his writing style. He sought to portray events and beings beyond human comprehension, always a fun way to spend an evening. He also had some awareness of his own approach, as demonstrated in this passage from The Dunwich Horror:

It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe it, but one may properly say that it could not be vividly visualized by anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are too closely bound up with the common life-forms of this planet and of the three known dimensions.

He gets points for that. And I am quite keen on “teratologically fabulous”, also from Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror. You don’t come across combinations like that every day.

Don’t get me wrong. I make my own mistakes when writing. My particular weakness has always been for metaphors, where people have granite faces and spider hands, that sort of thing. It works really well for a golem infested with arachnids, but it can be a tad overused. Mea culpa.

In conclusion, because this entry is already too long, I can only hope that I’ve used the word “indescribable” so much that you can’t stand to hear it or come across it any more. In which case, my work is done.

In an unnameable, tenebrous and decadent sort of way, of course.

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Vodun Child

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My dear readers will already know that, as a writer in these harsh and competitive times, I have a number of ethical rules which guide my literary career:

  • Hide or lie about my sources, especially if I’ve stolen heavily from them,
  • Keep my ideas to myself until the money’s in, and
  • Never point out that all my plots have been better handled by someone else.

These rules have been invaluable to me, and account for why I’m a penniless agoraphobic who relies on discount artisan ale to get him through even the shortest blog entries. Note the artisan bit, though. I have very high standards of moral and physical bankruptcy.

As a lover of the weird and wild, on the other hand, I like sharing everything and to hell with it. So I’m letting the longdogs loose. Instead, I want to mention two authors you may not yet have come across (or across whom you may not yet have come, if you prefer), Henry S Whitehead and E G Swain. The first I discovered only a couple of years ago, but my little Bone to His Bone collection by Swain has been a prized possession for over twenty years.

I would have described both their recurring protagonists as occult or psychic investigators in their own ways. Sadly, one of them, Swain’s Mr Batchel, has already been kicked out of the club by the writer Tim Prasil, who produced the excellent A Chronological Bibliography of Early Occult Detectives (you don’t come across that phrase very often) on his website. Do look him up, and check out his stories, because I always get the hyperlinks wrong.

So this blog entry will introduce the argument for Henry S Whitehead’s occult investigator, Gerald Canevin, a man of leisure living in the Virgin Islands in the first quarter of last century.

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Just for the trivia-lovers, Whitehead (1882–1932) was a minister of the American Episcopal Church and a friend of H P Lovercraft. He had, at times, church responsibilities in the Virgin Islands, and obviously picked up a lot of local lore. His stories are, for the most part, set in the Caribbean, and a large number include Gerald Canevin’s exposure to curses, entities and events which stem from West African beliefs:

“At last it came, the clue; in a childish, piping treble; the clear-cut word, Jumbee. I had it now. The screaming woman believed, and the crowd about her believed, that some evil witchery was afoot. Some enemy had enlisted the services of the dreaded witch-doctor – the papaloi…”
(Black Terror)

Jumbees are usually malevolent, possessing spirits, and papaloi is one name for a male voodoo priest. As opposed to the mamaloi. Don’t make me explain it. Whitehead drew heavily on the fact that before a chunk of the Virgin Islands was bought by the US, it was actually the Danish West Indies, with a history of plantations, slavery and mixed race populations, creole etc. I have to confess that I didn’t even know that there was a Danish West Indies, so that was a discovery in itself.

The argument which others will raise is that Canevin isn’t enough of an investigator. He does get involved and he does seek out answers, but an awful lot of scary things happen whether or not he does anything. Still, an interesting read. My caveat to interested parties is that very occasionally Whitehead seems to become obsessed with lost Atlantis and ancient Mayan races living under the earth. These (thankfully) few excursions don’t work half as well as some of his creepy, atmospheric stories of the West Indies people and their beliefs.

I was going to end there, but thinking about voodoo, related systems of belief and their African sources reminded me of an even more tenuous claim. Sanders of the River. Edgar Wallace was, I guess, a man of his time *cough*. His Sanders stories can be very dubious, but every so often they’re leavened with a peculiar respect for African people and spiritual systems. And I can now remember at least three which involved ghosts/psychic events which he could not disprove.

Sanders, Occult Colonial Administrator – a new series coming soon.

Next time, in Part Two – Nice People: Mr Batchel and a bit of M R James. Maybe.

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