Horror: The 100 Best Books (28 page)

In 1942, Clipper Bradwin, a promising young army officer from a wealthy family, plans to marry a socially prominent heiress. The lavish ceremony, which takes place at an exclusive Southern Military Academy, is disrupted by the mysterious ringing of a silent bell, an apparent earthquake, and the bridegroom's sudden attack of sabre-wielding homicidal mania. Although Clipper, his bride, and his demagogue father are killed, his brother Champ and young mother-in-law Nhora survive. Two years later, Champ returns shattered from the War in the Pacific to Dasharoons, the huge family plantation, accompanied by Jackson Holley, a mysterious English doctor. The tragic events that follow are traced back to unpleasant experiences Jackson and Nhora had while younger at the hands of an obscure African tribe, and a race riot-cum-massacre in which Champ's father was dishonourably involved. Farris weaves a powerful and complicated story, and delivers the best modern treatment of the lamia and voodoo themes in horror literature. The novel reflects the author's interests in Africa, the military, social history and America's power elite, as also examined in his
Catacombs
(1982),
Son of the Endless Night
(1985) and
Wildwood
(1987).

***

No frills:
All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By
is a unique horror novel; the strongest single work yet produced by the field's most powerful individual voice. The title countermands the phony melodramatics of drippy gerunds or the exhausted syllabary of horror's titular cliches:
dark
or
blood
or
night
this or that. [It was published in Britain as
Bad Blood
(ed.)] "This house was built on the bodies and blood of Africans," notes the half-breed prophet of the resurgent goddess Ai-da Wedo -- "a ravishing serpent woman who waxed and grew powerful as a consequence of -- sexual desire."
This house
is Dasharoons, wellspring of three generations of Bradwins, a sprawling Southern estate still going strong at the close of America's age of slavery. Farris' strongest theme is cultural collision, represented in the collaboration of pedigree that is Little Judge -- half Bradwin, half high priest of ancient African sorcery. Farris' juxtaposition of a partially sunken Mississippi riverboat with a voodoo temple (secreted in the swamplands that are slowly swallowing the vessel) is the fulcrum image of this complex saga of deadly erotic obsession and racial karma debt repaid. Far from "feel good" horror that restores order to the world by the final chapter, Farris prefers to concentrate on the evils people wreak upon themselves. The restoration of balance is not always a good or pretty thing, and the ultimately poisonous mingling of disparate cultures in
All Heads Turn
offers not even temporary respite -- regardless of allegiance, all the characters are doomed. Apart from being a rare
racial
horror novel, the fatal magnetism of the Ai-da Wedo and of Nhora Bradwin for Jackson Holley and the cursed Bradwin clan make
All Heads Turn
the finest modern sexual horror novel yet written. Most fiction employing Haitian or African magic boils down to elementary vengeance-via-voodoo, or a procedural "how to" story about little more than its own occult research. The novel's plot is a finely tangled viper's nest of incident into which Farris has not only deftly braided the voodoo, but dovetailed two fascinating bloodlines united by a common past. The horror elements and character narrative are inextricably interdependent (a similar structure, minus the supernatural, is seen in
Shatter
[1981]). The succinct prose artfully forms instantaneous brain pictures for the reader. Clipper's aborted wedding turns hallucinogenic as the stuffy formalities skew into a surgically dispassionate slaughter. Farris never wallows in artificially inflated detail or masturbatory excess, yet his writing is always unflinching, specific, precise. He is not terrified of good sex between adults, or confused by it, as most of his contemporaries seem to be. The veracity of his erotic passages serves well this book's unusual story, which redefines love and shows us a compelling aberrancy as pure as a genetic mutation. The closing scenes, symmetrically recapitulating the wedding which opens the book, are surreal and hypnotic. The web pulls taut and knots tight. The end is unforgettable, the blackest of fade-outs, a conclusion whose potency does not pale with repeated reading. Farris claims that he "hated every page" of
All Heads Turn
while it was in-work, and that "up until the last night [of writing], I had no idea how it was going to end". That night, ironically, preceded his marriage to his second wife, and today he notes the book as his personal favorite among his own novels. "There's nothing that I've seen or heard about that's remotely like it," he says. Likewise, when John Farris is on high-burn, no one can match the skill with which he puts words together.
All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By
is conclusive proof. Period. -- DAVID J. SCHOW

Jack Torrance, a would-be writer, takes a job as winter caretaker at the Overlook Hotel, a vast resort -- snowbound from October till April -- in Colorado. Alone with him in the place, which has a history of violence and evil, are his wife Wendy and his slightly psychic son, Danny. Jack tries to get to work, but falls increasingly under the malign influence of the Overlook, while Danny starts seeing the ghosts of the hotel's previous victims. Finally, Jack becomes completely absorbed in the Overlook and attempts to repeat the crime of an early caretaker who murdered his wife and children in the place. Only Danny's psychic link with Dick Hallorann, a black cook who works in the hotel in the summer, can help him and his mother escape from the transformed Jack. The Shining works many of King's favourite themes -- the child with paranormal powers, the pressures that turn a basically decent man bad, a horror that threatens to destroy an average American family, the extremely haunted house. The novel was controversially filmed by Stanley Kubrick in 1980, and in 1997 it became an overlong mini-series, directed by Mick Garris (from a teleplay by King). It is Kubrick's Jack, however, who reappears as a character in David Thomson's mosaic novel
Suspects
(1985).

***

I'm not sure that
The Shining
has ever been properly understood or appreciated -- it has been imitated (even its
title
has been imitated), filmed, and analyzed, all badly; by now it is an early element in a large and varied body of work, the merits of which tend to be taken for granted; its extraordinary special merits, not quite taken in at the time of its publication except perhaps by other writers, have become less visible as its author followed it with novel after novel and became not only a fixture on the best-seller list but also something like a personification of the best-seller list. The reasons why that should have happened to Stephen King are all present in full strength in
The Shining
, but at the time conventional wisdom declared that he was (only!) a phenomenal paperback success, read by young audiences -- his subject matter inspired a certain degree of condescension among people who should have known better. The fact is that
The Shining
is a masterwork, a bold product of an original vision, a novel of astonishing passion, urgency, tenderness, understanding, and invention. I think its most significant characteristic is its rich and generous inclusiveness, which is the inclusiveness of a powerful talent discovering its full capacities.
The Shining's
themes encompass alcoholism, child abuse, imagination, madness, responsibility and loyalty, historical crime -- a very Jamesian history -- art, and giftedness, and the novel effortlessly locates all this material within a narrative frame that glides with great assurance towards its many, carefully nuanced, expertly judged and
placed
climaxes. The first time I read it I was moved by the beauty of its ornamentation which was as florid and precise as the pattern in a Persian carpet: Jack Torrance's childhood is as fully ornamented as the Overlook Hotel: for it was that sort of instinctive detailing that made the terror
ache
throughout the book and in which the lyric terror accumulated. I remember also being stunned by the book's style. This was not exactly literary, but much better than a conventional literary style, being a fresh freewheeling unrestrained representation of the way his characters' minds actually moved. It was quick and lively, as responsive to mood as music. This way of writing became more familiar as Steve adapted it to the requirements of books that followed
The Shining
, but it was never done better than here. The first time I finished reading
The Shining
, I turned right back to the beginning of the book and started it again. I can't think of another book in the field of horror that affected me as strongly, and of only very few outside it. In its uniting of an almost bruising literary power, a deep sensitivity to individual experience, and its operatic convictions, it is a very significant work of art. -- PETER STRAUB

New York, 1959. Harry Angel, a Chandleresque private eye, is engaged by the mysterious Louis Cyphre to track down Johnny Favorite, formerly a successful crooner, who is believed to have been institutionalized since the Second World War. Angel soon learns that some kind of switch has been made and that Johnny has dropped completely out of sight. He also finds out that the various witnesses he visits have a tendency to turn up gruesomely murdered soon after. The police also make the connection, and Angel finds himself suspected of mass murder. He also learns about a voodoo cult who meet in an abandoned cavern beneath the New York subway, and begins an affair with Epiphany Proudfoot, their high priestess and Johnny's daughter. Angel realises that Cyphre is Lucifer himself and that he is after Johnny because the singer has been trying to welch on a deal involving his soul. It seems that Johnny has cheated the Devil by taking on another identity through a magic ritual, but Angel finally deduces -- unhappily for all concerned -- who his quarry really is. A crackling combination of hard-boiled detective story and Faustian horror novel,
Falling Angel
borrows a plot element or two from the film
Black Angel
for its slightly guessable twist ending. It was filmed in 1987 by Alan Parker as
Angel Heart
, starring Mickey Rourke and Robert de Niro.

***

In 1978 I was browsing a Los Angeles bookstore when a particular title caught my eye, a Harcourt Brace Jovanovich hardcover. The dust jacket was arresting: a winged angel, gun in hand, prowling above the multiple towers of Manhattan, pursued by an evil-smiling, horned Satan, knife in hand, cloven hoof extending between skyscrapers. All this under a gold-foil sky. I read the inside flap copy. Here were the likes of Stephen King, Robin Moore, and Thomas McGuane showering the novel with all-out raves: "brilliant . . .", "compelling . . .", "terrific . . .", "breathless . . .", "spellbinding . . .". And when I found out that the plot involved a tough private detective named Harry Angel versus the occult world of voodoo and witchcraft in New York I was hooked. I paid $8.95, plus tax, and
Falling Angel
was mine. I read the book that same evening -- with the hair standing up on the back of my neck. This week, a full decade later, I read it again. My opinion has not changed: it's one of the top horror novels of the century. It is also one of the century's finest examples of hard-boiled detective fiction, a novel fully deserving to be shelved next to Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. What Raymond Chandler did for Los Angeles in the 1940s William Hjortsberg does for New York in the late 1950s. He paints a grim and poetic portrait of New York's mean streets in 1959, bringing the Big Apple to raw life. There's a haunting sense of desolation in his sequence at Coney Island in the off-season, and his portrayal of life inside the plush, high finance office suites of Manhattan is equally convincing. Harry Angel, in dangerous and desperate pursuit of an elusive shadow-self, is a man fated to lose -- the ultimate, cynical, hard-headed private eye forced into a nightmarish descent into the netherworld of evil. As he tells his story in classic first-person style, we are with Angel in his doomed quest, graphically experiencing a voodoo ceremony in late night Central Park, then a murder in which the victim's heart has been ripped from her body, and finally a truly chilling Black Mass conducted in an abandoned subway station during which a squalling baby is sacrificed to Satan. A brutal fight to the death on the underground subway tracks between Angel and a member of the cult is Hammett-tough:

I left the shipping millionaire lying on the tracks to be dismembered by the next train through. The rats would feast tonight.

The book's prime figure of evil, Louis Cyphre, is drawn in brimstone and Black Magic, a character who bedevils the dreams of Harry Angel and whose power is absolute. Hjortsberg's heroine bears a name worthy of a James Bond thriller, Epiphany Proudfoot, an expert practitioner of voodoo and erotic sex. But even this strong woman cannot save Harry Angel from his self-created fall. A superb
tour de force
,
Falling Angel
achieves the impact of a .45 slug to the chest. You'll keep your lights on at night after reading this one. -- WILLIAM F. NOLAN

Brooklyn homicide cops George Wilson and Becky Neff investigate the gruesome murder of two patrolmen, and discover the existence of a pack of wolflike superintelligent urban animals. The Wolfen, who have survived down the centuries preying on the unwanted and outcast, realize that they have been exposed and set out to silence Wilson and Neff. Strieber's first novel gives the werewolf myth a radical rethink, much as his later books would, less successfully, reinterpret the vampirism (
The Hunger
, 1981) and black magic (
The Night Church
, 1984) themes.
The Wolfen
remains his best-written best-plotted solo novel. It was filmed with the "The" dropped from the title in 1981 by Mike Wadleigh, with Albert Finney as an unlikely New York cop, but Wadleigh's issue-heavy two-and-a-half hour cut had to be trimmed and rearranged by an uncredited John Hancock into a slick thriller only
tinged
with pretension.