The Dark Descent (1987)

"The Reach," by Stephen King (1981): 7
- The editor intro here says this story is a “virtuoso performance in which the horror is distanced but underpins the whole.” I can't tell if he read the same story, or if he just imagines horror to be something I do not, something simply winking at or reminiscent of death in any way whatsoever, but the “horror” element here is largely non-existent to me, and the story of an old woman's gradual coming to terms with her death through a drawing nearer to the dead of her family and relations was told so belabored and lukewarm that it was hard to make out the theme from the conceit.

"Evening Primrose," by John Collier (1940): 7
- A lot to parse in this actually quite toss-offy little dark fantasy diddle (STORY: the undead denizens of NYC dept. stores live spookily, until our narrator betrays a girl, getting her undead mummified by some police of the underworld.) There's the half-elliptical, half amateurish dream-world poesie of the prose, which sort of works as a way to render the murkiness of the liminal occupants of this consumer purgatory, although it also shields too much, and there's a level where we just need some more concrete info on the hows and whats of this world. I'm more taken with, however, the nice shibboleth of haunted consumption cathedrals, i.e. department stores haunted by “gone” people. Less in that it is “critiquing” this, than in that it just seems to take for granted that they'd end up here, with no need seen to establish actual connections between the characters and the capitalist places; we just assume, yes, of course they'd go here. As for the “horror” element, there's not much here. I'd have a hard time imagining the person actually “frightened” by any of this stuff, and so, as a non-horror reader, maybe I'm actually completely off the mark regarding what this audience actually expects and gets out of this kind of fiction. More likely, an ambiance of dread or off-ness? Something akin to the “sense of wonder” spoken by SF fans, in that of course it needn't be real wonder, but hot the literary feints acquainted with that feeling enough to qualify.

"The Ash-Tree," by M.R. James (1904): 7.5
- Like many Victorian/Edwardian ghost stories, this examines the longue-duree haunting of a place and the brutal patrimonial legacy of revenge built into that place through a particular act. Namely, a C17 proprietor of a grand English house testifies against a witch, sees to her death, dies mysteriously, and his family subsequently suffers the same fate. What is interesting here, however, are some of the smaller details: 1) the ambiguity of the initial 'act,' i.e. the fact that, unlike many others, the first proprietor did not do anything 'wrong,' such as murder or exploit the innocent or lower classes -- he simply saw a witch and told on the witch, who happened to be a witch ~ this therefore shrouds the story in less a brutal revenge / just desserts narrative, which might comfort us in viewing the savagery, and more in a realization of viewing purer, more unadulterated evil; 2) the straightforward depiction of the 'horror' itself at the climax, meaning James doesn't obscure the monstrosity or act itself. Instead, interestingly, he explicitly disambiguates -- we see the manner and means of the final death, as well as the full figures of the evil death bringers [giant spiders hidden inside a giant ash-tree, given apparent instruction by the desiccated corpse of the witch, propped up hauntingly inside the base of the tree for centuries]. The story itself, on the other hand, did little to win me over, James' resonance and reputation might, I think, rest today on the continued reliance upon these two factors in modern horror, as we've turned away from the curtain-closing off-screen-ness of James' contemporaries.

A decent collection of mostly (apart from Le Fanu) twentieth-century dark fiction. My favorites by far were "Sticks" by Karl Edward Wagner, about a fisherman who stumbles upon an ancient ritual site festooned with unsettling stick figures; and "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs," which suggests a modern god of urban violence and the madness of the crowded, and which many years ago was my introduction to the work of Harlan Ellison. ( )

This is quite a collection! A veritable "murder's row" of great horror authors! And, as a big fan of Stephen King, three from him, including the Lovecraftian "Crouch End", which is not one of my faves. But, beware! Not only is this a scary group of tales, it's one heck of a heavy volume to boot! Read and workout at the same time! ( )

The Reach [Do the Dead Sing?] - Stephen King
Evening Primrose - John Collier
The Ash-Tree - M. R. James
The New Mother - Lucy Lane Clifford
There's a Long Long Trail A-Winding - Russell Kirk
The Call of Cthulhu [short story] - H. P. Lovecraft
The Summer People - Shirley Jackson
The Whimper of Whipped Dogs - Harlan Ellison
Young Goodman Brown - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Mr. Justice Harbottle - Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
The Crowd - Ray Bradbury
The Autopsy - Michael Shea
John Charrington's Wedding - Edith Nesbit
Sticks - Karl Edward Wagner
Larger Than Oneself - Robert Aickman
Belsen Express - Fritz Leiber
Yours Truly Jack the Ripper - Robert Bloch
If Damon Comes - Charles L. Grant
Vandy Vandy - Manly Wade Wellman

contains SK's "The Reach", "The Monkey", and "Crouch End"