Strauba dab hand at scary stories himself, notablyin the novel aptly titled Ghost Storyprovidesa helpful and instructive introduction to each volume. Each is different, ofcourse, but in both he finds a great number of stories haunted by the theme ofthe loss of individual human will.
In the first volume, “From Poe to the Pulps,” Straubsubscribes to critic John Clute’s theory holding that tales like these emergedfrom a sense of grief and terror following the breakdown of the Enlightenment’sorderly and rational worldview. A gothic sensibility took hold, delivering themessage that the natural world “deludes, tempts, misleads,wishes to devour careless human beings”; its most high-profile representativesare Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, but it can be found in many others,including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville.
In the second, “From the 1940s to Now,” he notes aparticular concern with time and perceives “the fantastic [as] a way ofseeing.” The object of the lenses, such as the occupation of Paris in Jane Rice’s 1943 “The Refugee,”changes as the decades and their anxieties do.
One matter Straub does not discuss is literaryquality. That may be a slippery notionone resented by fans of genre literaturein particularand comparisons may be invidious, but one thing that becomesclear after reading 86 stories is that some are more enjoyable and satisfyingandscarybecause their concepts rise above the clichéd and hackneyed throughfresh, original writing.
John Collier’s “Evening Primrose” (1940), forinstance, is a pedestrian tale of a poet who turns his back on an uncaringworld to go live in a department store, where he discovers an underworld ofghostly creatures. What any of them is up to is difficult to ascertain; it hasnot even the virtue of ambiguity.
Thomas Tessier’s “Nocturne” (2000) has ambiguity tospare, but the reader has no reason to care whether the inexplicable act at itscenter is a suicide or performance art. “The Cloak”(1939) by Robert Blochthe author of Psycho,who grew up in Milwaukeeis an unimaginatively conceived story of an occultshop that comes to a predictable end.
How happily, then, we come upon a piece like JohnCheever’s “Torch Song” (1947), a vampire story in which the lives of a man andwoman intersect several times over the years. Perhaps it is a psychologicalvampirism, for we cannot tell whether the woman“the lewd and searching shapeof death”has really fed on the decline and death of several men or has beeninvoluntarily and sympathetically attracted to desperate men. The effect iscreepy and the ambiguity worth pondering.
Poe’s terrific “Berenice” (1835) is gothic with avengeance, its central theme lying in the question that the main character,Egaeus, asks himself: “How is it that from beauty I have derived a type ofunloveliness?” Good question, for Berenice begins to deteriorate from somedisease until only her teeth remain healthy. Egaeus obsesses over the teeth,even after Berenice’s death, in a trancelike state that leads to a gruesome act that may raise the hairs onthe back of your neck.
In Ellen Glasgow’s “The Shadowy Third” (1916), agirl has been murdered by her stepfather, who stands to inherit the mother’smoney once he has her committed to an asylum. But he has not reckoned with thegirl’s ghostnot perceivable by himand a length of rope lying coiled on thestairs. The ending should satisfy anyone’s sense of justice.
No name stands higher in contemporary horrorliterature than that of Richard Matheson. “Prey” (1969), with its tension andsure pacing, shows why. A woman, badgered by her guilt-mongering mother, buys afetish doll that comes murderously to life. Make no assumption about theidentity of the prey until the delicious twist at the end.
Regarding F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case ofBenjamin Button” (1922): All I can say is that, for me, it is among the leastnoteworthy of Fitzgerald’s stories and as fantasy it is lame, but you may wantto read it simply to see how totally it differs from the recent movie (whichactually may have been better).
