Strange Horizons Aug ’01

Apparent also in most stories are the at-odds-with-society characters who feel that killing or maiming is the best and only defense against the forces that lie to them, torment them, and are to blame for their misery and hard luck. Most times these characters make their point, as in the beguiling “Great Expectations” by Kim Antieu, the mojo-tainted “Animal Rites” by Jay A. Bonansigna, the retributive “Five to Get Ready, Two to Go” by Hugh B. Cave, and the exceptional “Shattered Silver” by James Kisner.

Brian Hodge’s “When the Silence Gets Too Loud” is another such story. Like “The Winds Within,” it begins with the thoughts of one of its characters: “In all honesty I can say I don’t hate him. Not yet, at least. Give me another hour, once the cords have cut into me a little deeper, and then we’ll see how I feel.”

“When the Silence Gets Too Loud” addresses fatherhood and the teaching of sons. The most important lesson that the fathers in this clever tale wish to impart to their sons, who are “at the threshold of puberty,” is how not “to find themselves wandering emasculated through the ripening fields of young adulthood.”

In Hodge’s tale, which is analogous to Golding’s Lord of the Flies, eight fathers and eleven sons—”daughters left behind to tend hearth and home”—embark on a “September weekend in the Minnesota woods.” Greg Fischer is the central figure in this band of adult “dominant males” bent on reclaiming their “ancient,” “ageless” selves; his son, Kyle, is the contemplative, nobody’s-fool leader of the “man-children” group.

As Kyle questions his father about their recent deer kill and Greg arrogantly simplifies Kyle’s concerns, Hodge neatly hints that there will be a price to pay for such fatherly self-importance:

Greg smiled. His sense of fatherhood warming over an entirely new fire, too rarely stoked: he, a mentor whose wisdom was sought to make sense of a world where there were but two classes; the victor and the vanquished…. Greg laughed. At Kyle’s age they all had a concept of logic and justice that was so simple.

Wonderful in theory, essentially unworkable in its purity; too bad.

Battle lines are drawn by story’s end, and Hodge leaves readers with a palpable sense of the “victor” versus the “vanquished.”

Yet at other times, the disturbed individual’s plans backfire, and you hang in the balance until the short story’s end, waiting to discover who will face the worst wickedness. Richard Laymon’s “Desert Pickup” and William F. Nolan’s “Fyodor’s Law” are two murder-narratives that adhere to intriguing reversal of misfortune plotlines.

The Best of Cemetery Dance has stuffed between its pages several stories that defy categorization according to scenario or subject. Their link to horror lies in the unique and entertaining terror that they offer. “Weight” by Dominick Cancilla is quasi-science fiction and a story that unsettles, for the danger that Cancilla has plaguing his characters feels by no means far-fetched. Its possibility seems ever so real.

A deadly, incurable epidemic of “transparent” parasitic worms is sweeping across America. First detected in “derelicts and transients,” nobody cares about the disease until it starts wiping out middle-class Americans. Then, hysterical thinking overrides common sense, human contact is avoided, people abandon their homes, businesses shut down, jobs are lost, and suspicion sets in over who is contaminated and who is not.

Weight gain is a sure sign that you’ve become infected—that the eggs have begun to hatch within you or that you’ve picked up a fully grown parasite through direct human contact. Your only option after that is to be put to death.

As the story begins, Alex, a husband and father of two girls, has just shot the family dog, Scraps. She “had gained a pound and a quarter over the last month and could no longer be trusted.” A construction foreman before the epidemic, Alex’s job now is executioner. He’s the one people seek out when the time comes for “unsafe loved ones to be put to rest.” Alex performs his necessary mercy killings—on one occasion he “put away a senile old woman, and on another a five-year-old child”—always keeping bottles of alcohol and vinegar at the ready for self-disinfecting. “Weight” has Alex running around playing savior until its sinister ending.

Another unclassifiable story is the excellent “Pig’s Dinner” by Graham Masterton. It’s one of the collection’s most graphic, hair-raising, and unforgettable tales. Set in Derbyshire, England, “Pig’s Dinner” introduces readers to David and Malcolm, brothers and owners of the Bryce Prime Pork piggery, who learn first-hand just how destructive their huge stainless steel feed grinder is, with its “smooth metallic scissoring sound” and unfailing mincing-action.

Masterton scatters throughout his pseudo-morality tale phrases like “he heard a hideously distorted shriek—a gibbering monkeylike yammering of pain and terror that shocked him into stunned paralysis;” “a bloody chaos of bone and muscle;” and “sheer nerve-tearing pain”—words and images that you won’t soon be able to dislodge from consciousness.

Douglas Clegg’s “The Rendering Man,” Lansdale’s “Drive-In Date,” Gary Raisor’s “The Right Thing,” and Thomas Tessier’s “Mr. God” rank as outstanding contributions as well and are not to be missed for their ability to thrill, scare, and disturb.

The Best of Cemetery Dance is not without its less stellar works of suspense. Darrell Schweitzer’s “The Liar’s Mouth” disappoints because of its obscurity. Adam Corbin Fusco’s “Shell” distracts because of its ambitious stream-of-consciousness. Campbell’s “Wrapped Up” lacks full development of its story line before its abrupt end.

Taken as a whole, Richard Chizmar’s compilation is satisfying reading for anyone on the hunt for highly charged, intelligent modern horror. This is fiction that lingers in the mind and tantalizes the spirit. The stories do not shy away from describing in shocking and unnerving detail human suffering and grief, and the sheer frequency of tales which convey this type of realistic agony makes a definite statement about the modern-day disregard for life. After completing The Best of Cemetery Dance you cannot help but muse on the penchant to wound and murder.

Thankfully though, the perpetrators of these massacred lives are tucked safely within the confines of this grand-scale, thought-provoking collection. However, whenever you want to feel your spine tingle or wish to witness how a short story can reconfigure your cozy notion of reality, crack open The Best of Cemetery Dance … and let the dance begin again.

This review pertains to the hardbound edition. The corresponding paperbound edition is now in print.

Amy O’Loughlin is an award-winning book review columnist and freelance writer. Her work has appeared in Worcester Magazine, The Boston Book Review, Calyx, Moxie, and American History. She is a contributor to the upcoming reference work The Encyclopedia of the World Press and the anthology of women’s writing Women Forged in Fire.

Major-League Entertainment: Moore and O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Reviewed by Bryan A. Hollerbach

8/13/01

In comics, the mainstream has long teemed with “team” titles, heirs apparent to the original supergroup, the Justice Society of America, which made its debut in the Winter 1940 issue of All-American’s legendary All-Star. As aficionados know, that Golden Age gathering ultimately inspired DC’s Justice League of America, a Silver Age update that premiered in the February-March 1960 issue of The Brave and the Bold and soon graduated to its own title. The JLA’s success, as Stan Lee confessed in Origins of Marvel Comics in 1974, directly inspired the creation of Fantastic Four and the Marvel mania of the ’60s.

For “team” titles, though, the modern era dawned with nova brilliance in 1975, with the advent of Giant-Size X-Men. That short-lived quarterly reintroduced and revised a group created in the early ’60s by Lee and the great Jack Kirby, and readers’ fanatical reaction to it inspired an almost mind-numbing profusion of X-books that continues to this day.

Given that profusion, casual readers might be tempted to suspect that a contemporary “team” title could offer nothing new to comics. In that suspicion, they would, of course, err—as demonstrated by The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a handsome $24.95 hardback created by writer Alan Moore and artist Kevin O’Neill and published a few months ago by America’s Best Comics, LLC.

League originally appeared as a six-issue miniseries from ABC, Moore’s “personal” imprint at the WildStorm imprint of DC. The miniseries premiered in January 1999 and, after a few of the unfortunate production delays to which creator-owned comics seem especially susceptible, concluded in July 2000.

From that miniseries, the volume under consideration here re-presents the 144-page main adventure and the novelette “Allan and the Sundered Veil,” an H. Rider Haggard pastiche by Moore with spot illustrations by O’Neill. It also contains the covers from the miniseries, as well as covers from one of the comics industry’s infamous variant editions and from two reprint editions. (The cover to the sixth issue, by the way, bears specific mention: in a bravura stunt, Moore and O’Neill used it to summarize their narrative to that point in a half-dozen cartoonish panels captioned with doggerel.) Finally, there are a few editorial extras, most of them tongue-in-cheek affairs like a paint-by-numbers feature starring Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray.

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