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    Weird Horror #6
    Weird Horror #6
    Weird Horror #6
    Ebook163 pages2 hours

    Weird Horror #6

    By Michael Kelly

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    About this ebook

    New weird and uncanny fiction from Barbara A. Barnett, Eliane Boey, Tim Cooke, Esmée de Heer, Stephanie Feldman, Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas, Alexander Glass, Spencer Harrington, Alexander James, E.M. Linden, Steve Rasnic Tem, Rory Say, and Neil Williamson.

    Plus opinion, reviews, and commentary from Simon Strantzas, Orrin Grey, and Lysette Stevenson.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUndertow Publications
    Release dateMar 14, 2023
    ISBN9798215774380
    Weird Horror #6
    Author

    Michael Kelly

    Michael Kelly is the former Series Editor for the Year's Best Weird Fiction. He's a Shirley Jackson Award and British Fantasy Award-winner, and a World Fantasy Award nominee. His fiction has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Black Static, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 21 & 24, Postscripts, Weird Fiction Review, and has been previously collected in Scratching the Surface, Undertow & Other Laments, and All the Things We Never See. He is Editor-in-Chief of Undertow Publications.

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      Book preview

      Weird Horror #6 - Michael Kelly

      Weird Horror Magazine

      WEIRD HORROR MAGAZINE

      SPRING 2023

      ISSUE 6

      EDITED BY

      MICHAEL KELLY

      Undertow Publications

      WEIRD HORROR 6

      Spring 2023

      PUBLISHER

      Undertow Publications

      Pickering, Canada

      EDITOR/LAYOUT

      Michael Kelly

      PROOFREADER

      Carolyn Macdonell

      OPINION

      Simon Strantzas

      COMMENTARY

      Orrin Grey

      BOOKS

      Lysette Stevenson

      COVER ART

      Asya Yordanova

      COVER DESIGN

      Vince Haig

      INTERIOR ART

      Simut Roy

      https://www.weirdhorrormagazine.com

      CONTENTS

      On Horror

      Simon Strantzas

      Grey’s Grotesqueries

      Orrin Grey

      Farrow

      Rory Say

      One Syllable, Rhymes With Sin

      E.M. Linden

      The Healers

      Alexander Glass

      Dead Maiden Chic

      Barbara A. Barnett

      Subsidence

      Steve Rasnic Tem

      An Antique Puzzle Chest of Unknown Provenance

      Neil Williamson

      Hunger

      Eliane Boey

      Repetitions

      Tim Cooke

      Lullaby for the Unseen

      Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas

      The Tumour Room

      Alexander James

      The Ritual of the Labyrinth

      Esmée de Heer

      The Getaway

      Stephanie Feldman

      Flesh Burns Sweetly

      Spencer Harrington

      The Macabre Reader

      Lysette Stevenson

      Contributors

      ON HORROR

      SIMON STRANTZAS

      HORROR’S MOUNT RUSHMORE

      The three most important Horror writers are Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Thomas Ligotti.

      The first question you’re going to ask is what do I mean by important. In this case, I mean these three writers were important in shaping the Horror genre. More specifically, the American Horror genre.

      There are really two Horror genres: the American genre and the British genre. All writers who write Horror (by which I mean work explicitly marketed as Horror) are working within the outlook of one of these two distinct genres. If the writing does not adhere to one of these the work is not Horror. It may be horror (i.e., stories of the malignant unexpected invading the expected) but it is not Horror as we understand it. Japan, for example, has a long history of ghosts and demons, but stories written about these myths don’t necessary adhere to the rules of Horror. Horror, as it stands now, is a decidedly Western phenomenon. One forged by the American and British traditions.

      What makes American Horror different from British Horror? Oversimply: in Britain, Horror is an established tradition that is part of Britain’s history. Paganism, witchcraft, religious wars. Christmas ghosts. These things are not part of the New World, whether it’s because America was too recently settled or because its settlers developed it as a puritanical state, and that puritanism is baked into American values. Horror, as a result, has not been welcomed into the fabric of American art in the way it has in Britain. In America, Horror is wholly ghettoized.

      There’s a second cultural reason: America’s primary mythology is one of cowboy exploration. Of heading west to meet the challenges of the New World. Contrast this with the weight of Britain’s established history. The people of the former applaud heroism, the latter perseverance. The former are self-assured, the latter are self-doubting. These fundamentally different perspectives created parallel genres of Horror.

      To summarize it another way: had the Horror Boom not happened, I suspect there would be no significant market today for Horror in America; in Britain things might very well be as they are currently.

      Back to those important American writers...

      I start with Stephen King because, arguably, there was never a Horror Boom—there was Stephen King and then a litany of writers unsuccessfully sold by their publishers as his equal and successor. A whole genre built on an attempt to duplicate one writer’s success. King may not have been the Primary Mover of American Horror literature, but he was and is its biggest and only star. There were no stars before him and it’s doubtful there will be any after him. He is sui generis, and inarguably important.

      So much of what we think of as American Horror comes from King’s work. The small towns, the folksy people with secrets, the faint air of camp. King learned a lot of this from the California circle of writers who preceded him—the Bradburys and Mathesons and Ellisons—writers who wrote stories and books but also wrote television and film scripts. Even the Horror Boom began with the publication of three novels written by screenwriters and/or actors. The cinematic structure of Horror evokes an arguably simplified view of how it functions, and set the rules for everything that followed. Of all these writers, though, King was the one to really perfect it, and only after interjecting it with the sort of grotesque morality found in places like old EC Comics stories.

      The genre worked on mining King’s work—namely, the quaint small-town terrors that typified American Horror—for a good decade before something unexpected happened: a British writer decided to make the jump into the explosively popular Horror market and bring to it something contradictory. Something perverse. Clive Barker brought the taboo and transgressive to Horror on a wide scale. He brought sex. But not vanilla sex. Weird sex. Discomforting sex (at least, discomforting if you were used to the puritanical kind). During the 80s neon and leather and androgyny hit the zeitgeist and Barker was able to infuse Horror with this implied perversity and force the field to reconsider what Horror was capable of. Barker’s work was an inflection point for the genre. Once Barker appeared, nothing could be the same.

      The last of the important American Horror writers is Thomas Ligotti. Ligotti’s European and philosophical influences set him apart from nearly every writer in the field at the time. Unlike King and Barker, though, Ligotti’s importance isn’t illustrated by his commercial success or by the genre’s immediate reaction to him. Instead, his importance lies in the effect he had on writers that followed him nearly a decade later. I’d argue that all post-millennium Horror writers (i.e., who we sometimes call Weird Fiction writers) are working in conversation to Ligotti, whether in concert with his work or at odds with it. Every weird writer is either running to or running away from the ideas he introduced into the field. Without his work, we might still be living in a world where Horror was relegated to diminishing cycles of vampire and zombie retreads.

      Those three writers remain the most important, most influential, even now. Were there other important writers? Of course. I’d point to the late Peter Straub as a prime example. Straub bridged the gap between the schlocky Horrors that followed King and the experimental literary fiction being written by folks that wouldn’t be caught dead reading Horror stories. Straub showed us that you could still be narratively and structurally exciting while telling a genre story. Yet despite his importance, I’d argue he didn’t have the same transformative effect on American Horror that King, Barker, and Ligotti had.

      Who will be the next important Horror writer? We probably won’t know until many years after they begin their career, but considering how the internet has deconstructed every monoculture we once had and has freed the individual from their gatekeepers, I suspect there won’t ever be another writer as important as these three were—no one else will be allowed the opportunity to be as transformative. At least, not as an individual. I believe the future instead lies not with particular authors but with groups of authors. The rising minorities that were until now excluded but who, using new opportunities like the increasing popularity of micropublishing, will finally get their chance to rewrite the genre in their image.

      GREY’S GROTESQUERIES

      ORRIN GREY

      INTELLIGENCE WHERE NONE SHOULD BE: THE HORROR OF INANIMATE OBJECTS

      That was his idea of nightmare: the knowledge of sly intelligence where none should be. In Brian Lumley’s novel Necroscope, this is the end of a several-paragraph meditation on the things that terrified the book’s villain during his boyhood, culminating in an account of a cricket leprous grey from the sightlessness of its habitation that jumped on him in his father’s wine cellar.

      To him there was fear in a creaking tread on a dark landing; there was terror in the tapping of a twig on his bedroom window, when all the house was asleep; there was horror in the sudden squirm or hop of a toad, or the startled freezing of a cockroach when the light is switched on, and especially in its scurrying when it knows it is discovered.

      These things scare him, it says, because he is still a child, he does not understand words like bestial, sadistic, diabolic. But they scare us all, don’t they? At least a bit. If not specifically the cockroach or the toad, that idea of intelligence where none should be. Who amongst us hasn’t had the thought, before we crushed a spider or stepped on a bug, that its kin would know what we had done, and would come for us?

      We can talk all day long about the uncanny valley and the like but this, ultimately, is at least a part of the fear at the heart of the trope of the sinister doll. A doll looks like something intelligent, but it should not be. It should be inert, just wood or plastic. The same goes for a corpse. We know that at one time it was a person, but now it is just rotting meat—and yet, we fear that it will move once again, that it thinks still.

      For me, at least, few things work better than when a horror story can successfully show us fear in a handful of dust—can truly imbue the inanimate with threat, with malice, with that intelligence where none should be. In many ways, the killer doll like Chucky from Child’s Play or the walking dead of a zombie movie are the clumsiest form of this, and the one that perhaps speaks least to that primal fear.

      Which is not to say that they aren’t frightening, necessarily, but that their horror is more firmly rooted in other fears. The fear of the knife, the fear of contagion—fear for our own safety and bodily autonomy. For an inanimate object to strike that truly primal fear, it must remain inanimate, or nearly so. Perhaps moving only when it is unobserved, as with the Annabelle doll from the popular Conjuring series of films.

      But the object need not be animate at all for that sense of a malign, implacable will to be conveyed. Look at the corpse in the Drop of Water segment of Mario Bava’s classic anthology film Black Sunday, the old man’s staring eye in Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, the red ball bouncing down the stairs in The Changeling, even the puzzle-box at the heart of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser franchise.

      One of the oddest examples I can think of allows the object to move while still remaining inanimate, imbuing it with a sinister impression of will without actually giving it intelligence. The Monolith Monsters is an unlikely 1957 take on the standard big bug movie of the ‘50s. Only, instead of atomically irradiated ants or alien invaders, the film’s antagonists are rocks.

      These rocks fall from space and lie inert on the desert floor unless and until they get wet. When that happens, they quickly grow into towering pillars of crystal that eventually

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