Book #32 of 2020: Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti

An entertaining collection of horror stories by a modern master--well, actually 2 collections combined. The first half are straight-edged horror with the veneer of mid-twentieth century realism. Many of the stories in the 2nd half of the volume share a Lovecraftian tinge: an ancient evil or some mysterious force intrudes into dreams, or is awakened by someone carelessly plodding around old antique shops or leafing through an incomprehensible grimoire, or a city academic visits a rural area and finds out the locals have ignorantly stumbled upon ancient rites and reinvited some previously expelled or entrapped cosmic entity. In lesser hands, these tropes and plots could be stale, but Ligotti infuses them with a Borgesian sublimity, blending in a hint of Kafka now and again. And there is also a demonic scarecrow.

The Frolic, which opens the collection, is a true banger and absolutely merciless. You know what is going to happen early on and yet the ending is not spoiled because Ligotti masterfully yanks your tension strings to satiety. The Last Feast of Harlequin is an updated "The Lottery" spun through Lovecraft and back again via Umberto Eco. There are a few tales which rely heavily on Poe, where a rather unreliable narrator brings us along as he sets about trapping his next victim a la "The Cask of Amontillado." There's a nice fantasy story set in Renaissance Venice to boot, and an excellent little vampire story.

If you like slasher stuff, or monster tales, or overt supernatural stuff with clear-cut hauntings--these stories are likely not for you. They are typically more elegant and subtle than visceral and shocking. But if you are a student of the genre and like to think while being creeped out, if you value mood and tone as much or perhaps more than plot and character, and if you like a writer who can churn out exceptional sentences--give these tales a try!

Book #24 of 2020: Cold Hand in Mine by Robert Aickman

I enjoyed this second foray into the works of Robert Aickman as much as my first. These half-dozen or so carefully crafted novellas are exquisitely wrought masterpieces. Included herein is perhaps the best vampire story I've read, about a young English girl who goes down for the Count (see what I did there?). Also, there is a murderous Siren mermaid thing with an unsmiling red gash of a mouth filled with teeth. A cheap attic flat in London becomes a prison for a pornographer when a new tenant moves in below and brings a haunting along.

The characters and settings are vivid and drawn with a master's brush. The pristine realism of the stories is only quietly disrupted in the most unsettling and nigh unnoticeable ways.

If you like quiet creepy and cerebral spook stories, try Aickman. You shan't be disappointed!

Any one of these stories would make an excellent creepy film. Perhaps someone will pick these up and script them for Netflix or Amazon, much in the way Amazon made Philip K. Dick stories into the excellent series Electric Dreams.

Banksy

In 1919 Sherwood Anderson wrote Winesburg, Ohio, wherein a collection of related short stories painted a portrait of a small town and its inhabitants. The stories on their surface were simple and ranged in tone from mysterious to quaint to alarming. There was a Biblical simplicity and urgency to that book, an interesting psychological depth, and I revisit it every decade or so.

About three-quarters of a century later, Russell Banks did the same for a Vermont trailer park and its denizens. The stories are realistic in style and often devoted to moral lessons around the activities of the people renting these temporary shelters in a beautiful but often brutal landscape.

I bought my copy used at Rhino Books in Nashville. Someone had scrawled on the frontispiece the words "Realist fiction--like Country and Western music, it's all about the TRUTH." Seems appropriate! At any rate, I had a fine talk with the proprietor of Rhino about the state of bookselling in Bmore and about how much I liked his little venture, and about my own experiences during most of a decade in book retail back in my 20s. Russell Banks might have enjoyed our conversation, and it could fit right into a book like Trailerpark.

I've written about Mr. Banks before.