A Couple of Weird Tales...

Ann and Jeff Vandermeer's 'The Weird' is far too big to tackle in a single sitting, or write about in a single review for that matter. Other bloggers have come up with ingenious ways of cutting the book down into bite size chunks, leaving me to either come up with something even more ingenious or to just dedicate a post every now and then to a couple of 'Weird' tales. Me being me, it was far less hassle to go for the latter option :o)

One of the things I really love about 'The Weird' is that its sheer size means a quick skim through the contents page always throws up a few suprises. Like Neil Gaiman for instance, I had no idea he had a story in 'The Weird' (and the book has been sat on my shelf for months now) until I just happened to see his name the other day. I had to have a read and it turned out that I'd actually read 'Feeders and Eaters' a long time ago, in Gaiman's 'Smoke and Mirrors' collection I think (please someone correct me if I'm wrong). Gaiman's always worth a re-read though and 'Feeders and Eaters' delivers second time round with an unsettling tale of what you might just find going on in the big city, if you're very unlucky...

What I liked about 'Feeders and Eaters', straight away, is how deliberately vague and nebulous Gaiman keeps things. You don't know who the narrator is, although I like to imagine that it's Gaiman himself recounting this tale, and he makes a point of saying, 'I won't tell you which city' it all goes down in. Just that one sentence has the reader thinking that this kind of thing might just be happening where they live. Kind of makes you glance nervously over your shoulder doesn't it?
Gaiman's deliberate approach of keeping things vague really brings the weirdness into sharp focus when we finally get round to it. And it is weird, quite horrifyingly weird in fact as it is presented in such a matter of fact way.

'I'm an old woman, she says, I need my meat.'

Gaiman keeps things simple and it really pays off as there's no build up to the 'Weird' of this tale, it just hits you bang in the face before you even realise what you've just read. What happened to the cat and the strange fate of Eddie Barrow are conveyed with imagery that will stay in your head for a long time to come.

I'm not so sure about the ending though...

'On the milk train back to the big city I sat opposite a woman carrying a baby. It was floating in formaldehyde, on a heavy glass container. She needed to sell it, rather urgently...'
Gaiman might have been using the story of Eddie Barrow to open up a whole world of weirdness for our narrator but it came across as 'over egging the cake' when there was no need. 'Feeders and Eaters' worked just fine as it was...

The other story I read goes to show that there's a whole lot more to 'Weird' than tentacles in the dark and little old ladies who are far more than they seem. Augusto Montetroso's 'Mister Taylor' takes a seemingly innocuous situation (a traveller sending a souvenir home) down a path so absurd that it can't help but feel a little weird as you read it and see just what humanity will do to make a quick dollar. Again, it's the serious (almost matter of fact) way that Montetroso presents his tale that brings the weirdness to the fore although I'd say that it's more of a humorous piece than Weird. It made me chuckle anyway with lines like

'to possess 17 heads came to be considered bad taste, but it was distinguished to have 11'

'Mister Taylor' came across to me as a satirical piece then where Montetroso lets us know just what he thinks of the waves of consumerism coming from America. If this is the case then the final lines take on a whole new note of warning... I'm not saying what they are by the way, I think you really need to read this one yourself to get the full effect.

'Mister Taylor', as it appears in 'The Weird', is a work of translation and one that flowed very smoothly; if the tale hadn't been highlighted as a translation then I might not even have guessed. I'm afraid I only speak English so couldn't even begin to compare this work to the original. What I would say though is that I came away with the impression that the translation didn't get in the way of what Montetroso wanted to say and you can't ask for a lot more than that really.

So that's three tales, from 'The Weird', down now and they've all been good ones so far. I hope this continues next time I pick the book up... :o)

‘The Colour Out Of Space’ – H.P. Lovecraft

You are going to be seeing an awful lot of short stories on the blog this year… I hope you don’t mind although there’s not an awful lot I can do about it if you do! Things being as they are at the moment (you know, the whole job hunting thing and so on…) reading time is at a real premium so shorter reads are inevitable. I also thought that focusing on a few short stories, here and there, would be a nice little way to give a little nod to all those anthologies that end up on my shelves and never seem to be picked up. Collections like ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ for instance.

The plan was to run a much larger post that talked about the book as a whole but as I was reading through I couldn’t help but feel that Lovecraft was basically telling the same story over and over again. You boil things down and each story is essentially saying that man isn’t physically or mentally capable of handling the fact that the world is a lot larger than he ever realised. It’s a cruel and uncaring world beyond the limits of what is familiar… I think that’s fair enough to a degree, writing to a formula is pretty much a must if you’ve discovered a way to sell your stories to the pulp magazines. Saying the same thing about each story though… Well, that wouldn’t make for a particularly interesting review really so I thought I’d pick one story out of the book and write about that instead. I will continue to read ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ but probably along those same lines; I think it’s a book that needs to be tackled in bite sized chunks rather than read in one sitting.

Anyway, the story I chose was (of course) ‘The Colour Out Of Space’; purely for the sense of intriguing weirdness that nestles within the title. A Colour from Out Of Space? What’s that all about…? There’s only one way to find out and I found it all too easy to get reading. ‘The Colour Out Of Space’ is a slow-burner but ultimately proves to be worth the initial effort required.

The narrator has been sent to the area west of Arkham to carry out survey work for a new reservoir that is to be built. The stories he hears though makes him glad that the area will soon be underwater and also makes him promise himself that he will never drink that water. There something lurking in the countryside that is not of this world…

I’m not going to lie, Lovecraft almost lost me here before the tale even got going and precisely because the tale takes its own sweet time getting going. What’s odd here is Lovecraft takes very little time in painting a dark and sinister picture of countryside tainted by… something. It’s a great hook that had me wanting to find out more straight away but Lovecraft went wrong (as far as I was concerned) was in telling the reader exactly what was going on and in no small detail. These pages drag and told me more than I wanted to know about scientific experiments on the meteorite etc. The weirdness is dispelled (albeit temporarily) by the cold light of science which lays things bare a little too well. What’s even more odd is that Lovecraft manages to cram all that unwanted detail into about three pages, three incredibly stodgy and dry pages that did their level best to put me off reading any further. Nice work there Mr Lovecraft…

I kept reading though and am glad I did. Lovecraft shows the reader that there is a lot more weirdness to this downed meteorite than at first meets the eye. ‘The Colour Out Of Space’ soon becomes a tale of inexorable doom being visited on a farmer and his family, drawn out with lots of little (and not so little) hints that things are horribly wrong.

For a writer who sought to redefine horror by moving his tales away from the realm of ghosts and witches, Lovecraft seems quite happy to dress ‘The Colour Out Of Space’ in the clothes that made those tales so scary in the first place. We’re talking unexplained lights and trees moving when they shouldn’t; we’re also talking about of the gradual descent into insanity for the family that this is all visited on.
Having said that though, Lovecraft does add his own touch of weirdness as well and the overall affect makes for a deeply unsettling yet compelling read. I couldn’t get enough of it anyway, rooting for the poor family of Nahum Gardner but knowing that their fate was already sealed.

Lovecraft ekes things out gradually and the gradual release of detail proves to be a great way of making the reader want to stay around to get the full picture. And what a picture it proves to be, a family and an entire region blighted by an alien presence that seems to be barely aware of anything else other than itself, except when it’s hungry. That lack of motivation (or acknowledgement of its surroundings) makes the ‘Colour’ somehow seem even worse than your regular vampire, or whatever, that has some dreams of power at least. The ‘Colour’ just exists to, well… exist really. It’s the repercussions for this existence that are horrifying.

Lovecraft leaves us with the knowledge that we are less than a thought to the other life forms of the universe that pass by our planet. The passing of such life forms will always leave a mark though and the repercussions of this will echo long after the ‘Colour’ gets to wherever it was going in the first place.
‘The Colour Out Of Space’ hasn’t left me wanting to avoid drinking the water from my local reservoir but is an unsettling read nonetheless. If it had got into gear a little quicker then maybe I’d be thinking twice about turning the tap on.

Eight and a Half out of Ten

‘How Nuth Would Have Practiced His Art Upon The Gnoles’ – Lord Dunsany

I don’t know if I’m looking in all the wrong places (probably) but I can’t seem to find anything by Lord Dunsany on the shelves at the moment; this is all the more annoying as I’ve never read any of his works up until now. I’d really love to get hold of a copy of ‘The King of Elfland’s Daughter’…
Luckily for me then, I found ‘How Nuth Would Have Practiced His Art Upon The Gnoles’ hidden within the depths of Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s ‘The Weird’, an anthology so large that I will never be able to review it all in one go. The plan is then to take bite sized chunks out of the book and feature them here every now and again. ‘How Nuth Would Have Practiced His Art Upon The Gnoles’ is the first such chunk…

‘Despite the advertisements of rival firms, it is probable that every tradesman knows that nobody in business at the present time has a position equal to Mr. Nuth.’

Mr. Nuth is… well, a master burglar with no rivals that even come close to his prowess. If you want something then Nuth is the man to get it for you even though there may be a price to pay later on; that price is worth it though. The story is only three pages long and at least a third of it is telling the reader how great Nuth is at his trade.

So far so… well, not really that weird at all. We’ve basically been shown a portrait of a man who is very good at his trade although the moment where he surprises visitors is a little unsettling…

‘For a long while they waited, and then there was a smell of pipe tobacco, and there was Nuth standing quite close to them.’

The weirdness is still to come and there is no doubt that Dunsany delivers on this score. Nuth and his young apprentice set out to steal emeralds from the Gnoles and Dunsay uses the plot to show us just how far outside human understanding the realm of Faerie is as well as how dangerous it can be.

‘The nearest village was some miles away with the backs of all it’s houses turned to the wood, and without one window at all facing in that direction.’

‘They saw the skeleton of some early Georgian poacher nailed to a door in an oak tree; sometimes they saw a fairy scuttle away from them…’

Dunsany shows us very clearly (but not too clearly as that would defeat the point) that there is a world just outside or view that operates on rules that we would be mad to try and understand. It is weird and we are right to be a little nervous and afraid as we follow Nuth and his apprentice into the wood.

In a setting like this, the only possible outcome to the job is the one that Dunsany gives us and he makes it all the more frightening by refusing to divulge the fate of the apprentice. Nuth escapes though and this reader was left wondering if Nuth had a little Faerie blood in him…
An excellent tale and I will put a lot more effort into searching out Lord Dunsany’s works on the strength of it. 'Weird' is definitely the word to describe it.