Unclean! Unclean!

Those are Mina Harker's words when she comes out of her stupor at the hands of Count Dracula who has just been found in her bedchamber forcing her to suck on his tit where he has cut himself and is bleeding.

It is pretty much the best scene in the whole book and is positively messy with sex. The scene is described in such a way as to bring to mind - to our 21st century minds anyway - a forced fellatio. There is this description of the act where one of the men who bursts in upon the scene says it looks like nothing so much as a man forcing the nose of a kitten into a saucer of milk.

Fantastic.

One wonders, of course, how much Bram Stoker could have had such a thing in mind (or, indeed, even been aware of such a thing) in those pre-Freudian days, but throughout the novel the vampires are blatantly associated with sexual activity. The Brides of Dracula, who come to seduce Jonathan Harker during his stay in Castle Dracula, are practically soft core porn characters, both in their behavior and description. The thrusting of a stake into a female vampire and her subsequent baring of teeth and thrashing of extremities taking on a decidedly carnal - if gruesome - cast, with the hero plunging his stake into the creature again and again while she moans and screams. It seems impossible Stoker was not aware of himself.

Even before Dracula, of course, vampires had begun to take on the lascivious characteristics that were always under the thin veneer of Victoriana. Camilla, the most popular vampire novel prior to Dracula, was, after all, about a lesbian vampire seducing a young girl. But this very excitement which is evident in Stoker's book (the reader can sense his scribbling hand rapidly increasing the pace with which words are laid onto paper whenever the undead get a scene) is, in a way, part of the problem with Dracula.

Thing is - the book is really terribly conventional for its day. There must be twelve chapters in which the protagonists hold hands and pray together and resolve to love one another always. The men are, to a one, flat as the paper they are written out upon and Mina, clearly the most dynamic and interesting character, is constantly passing up action to moon over the men. One senses that Stoker either didn't know what he had in Mina Harker or was conflicted about a "new woman" protagonist and couldn't bear to let her loose upon the plot where she could have torn through literature for real.

Still worse, Dracula is hardly in the damned book. He gets several short chapters in the very beginning and then disappears almost entirely until the aforementioned "rape" of Mina Harker. Hell, he doesn't even get a final scene. The protagonists spend the last third of the book rushing all over eastern Europe to catch Dracula before he can return to his castle and regain his strength while Dracula outwits them in a hundred different (and boring) ways, but when they finally reach Castle Dracula, just before the sunset, the are successful in killing the fiend in his coffin before he can rise for the fight.

Its the most stunning anticlimax I have come across in ages.

Save for Sherlock Holmes, no character in fiction has been adapted for the screen as many times as Count Dracula. If one was to add all of the other media - books, comics, art, music, video games, toys and games - I would lay money that no character PERIOD has even been treated with so much as Count Dracula. And though, naturally, Stoker could not have known this would come to pass, to give such a creation no final speech, no fight to the death, no death scene, even? Criminal.

Look, I had always heard/read/been told that Dracula was boring and not worth the time it would take to read. I can say definitively that this was not the case. It isn't by any means a perfect novel and it is nearly buried on occasion underneath tedium and Victorian bloviating, but it reads faster than I would have expected it to and it is so impossibly classic that it feels perhaps more rewarding than it really is.

But Fear Itself

Just finished reading The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen. It was really good.

As I've been reading these classic horror novels and short stories I've gradually begun to piece together some thematic elements common to all of them. I can't say what it might have been about the last decade of the 19th century, but there was a sudden glut of terror tales going around and they, all of them, had something rather striking in common; they hide the ball.

The Great God Pan is an epistolary novel (mostly) and, as such, by its very nature, obscures events between the letters which make up the narrative and conceals events not known by the writers of those letters. So, right from the start the reader is fumbling a bit in the dark. Add to this a kind of late Victorian insistence on discretion and you have the makings of a gripping story glimpsed through a glass but darkly.

But all that is by way of explaining the particular reticence of The Great God Pan and does very little to describe what I think is so consistent between all of the stories I've read recently that were written at more or less the same moment in history. What I mean when I say that these tales "hide the ball" is that they resist the temptation to tell the reader what he or she is really meant to be afraid of. The whole story is absolutely chock-full of intimations of horror and rumors of unspeakable events, none of which are ever actually narrated.

This has a two-fold effect; it draws the reader in because he or she is hoping so desperately for even one fleeting look at the nightmare, and it preserves the nightmare. It preserves the trick that all good storytellers work. Because one never really does get explanations or descriptions of the central horrors, one is free to imagine them in all their id-fueled glory without ever having to make them solid and mundane - bound to one shape only to be addressed and overcome.

In other, less windy, words, the terror of all of these classics tales of terror is, quite simply, terror - the emotion itself; the sense that something is stalking you that you cannot escape. The death instinct, perhaps.

Go out and pick up a copy of The Great God Pan. It's all about an experiment gone awry and the progeny of a union between, you guessed it, the Great God Pan, and a mortal woman - a union that has dire consequences for all involved, natch. I felt almost bad for the hit job done on good ole Pan, but I certainly am not clamoring for an audience with goatpants hornhead after reading this one through.

A Kind of Lovecraftian Deliverance

What is it about traveling down a river with a friend that lends itself to all things horrific? I feel like I've been on river trips and the worse thing that happened to me is that we capsized and I lost the Spiderman figure I had glued to the prow of the canoe.

Anyway, as part of my sudden binge on classic horror stories, I just read a collection of them by Algernon Blackwood. (Seriously, did his parents expect him to be anything other than an Edwardian horror writer?)

The best story of the bunch was called "The Willows" and it was H.P. Lovecraft's personal favorite story. I am hardly surprised.

Its about two guys on a trip down the Danube in a canoe who camp overnight on a mysterious island overrun with, no duh, willows. But that's not all - the island is full of strange goings on and genuinely creepy stuff. There is a strong suggestion that the island is some kind of a gateway between this world and something else and that the things in the other world don't like the things from our world very much. I dunno. You should read it. I'll post the link to it below.

It was written in 1907, but it still has real punch. I was honestly creeped out by it and found the narrative suspenseful enough to read it through in one go. It has a light touch where it ought to and never gives away the nature of the particular horrors the characters are up against. That kind of restraint serves it well, and left me satisfied in ways that Lovecraft himself often does not.

In any case, if you have a thing for classic horror stories, you can see for yourself whether this hundred year old short story has the juice:

The Willows by Algernon Blackwood

The Motif of Harmul Sensation

An always delightful literary device, the motif of harmful sensation is present in what are some of my favorite stories. The basic idea is that an object can have an effect on a person simply by virtue of being seen or heard or touched. Usually that effect is one you'd rather not have had.

Some examples:

The Zahir by Jorge Luis Borges

Medusa, in the Myth of Perseus

'The Funniest Joke in the World' sketch by Monty Python

Folk tales are full of these sorts of things: the evil eye, the danger of looking directly at a god, the once popular idea that anyone who read all of The Thousand and One Nights would go mad.

One of the great exemplars of this small but charming genre is The King in Yellow, by Robert Chambers, which I have just finished reading. It is a book of loosely connected short stories all featuring (either in passing or in the forefront of the narrative) a fictional book called, surprisingly enough, The King in Yellow. Anyone who happens to read this insidious book either goes slowly mad or dies soon after.

The stories were all written in the late 1890s and one can tell. They have a kind of Victorian quaintness and perhaps even stiffness about them that is a dead giveaway. Chambers wrote scores of sappy romance stories when he wasn't penning horror tales and that influence is also keenly felt. Still, they go down easy, are creepy enough, and were terribly influential on H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen and guys like that, so they have plenty to recommend them.

I haven't put much thought into a review of the book, but it is easy to at least say the following two things about it:

Anyone who is a fan of classic horror stories would get a kick out of these.

The King in Yellow isn't high literature, but it made for a really pleasant snack of a read and I don't regret the afternoon spent on it.

The Supermarket of Cthulhu

Hunting all over town yesterday for a poinsettia (Chiara needed it for a table display) and ended up back in my neighborhood, checking the grocery stores.

Basically there are two. There is the Smith's, which is really rather nice; smallish and yuppified, and with a liquor store and a dry cleaner's underneath. And there is the Albertson's, which gives off so palpable an aura of dread for me that I've never even gone inside.

But Chiara needed a poinsettia. And Smith's did not have one to sell.

So I'm in the parking lot of the Albertson's and it is nearly deserted.

In a handicapped spot is a junker with a toddler-sized severed doll head hanging from the rear view mirror. There are two spots very near the entrance specifically marked only for police parking. Off in the far corner of the lot, under a sputtering halogen light, is a windowless van in idle.

Inside is a circus show.

The aisles are strewn with bags of food toppled from their shelves, puddles of snowmelt have to be jumped at nearly every checkout stand, the bakery is dark but its wares are still out, under their sneeze guards, going stale.

The clientele give the impression that the store's manager may have accidentally booked a roadie convention for the store and, on the same day, a 1973 class reunion for an all transsexual high school.

A scarecrow man with stringy, wet hair sang to himself as he passed by me on his way to the exit. In his shopping bag he had lightbulbs and a box of matches.

As I searched frantically for the floral department, a married couple dressed in leather argued forcefully over a package of waffle cones.

A solitary old woman slowly pushed a cart so squeeky one might have been forgiven for thinking it was haunted by the ghost of a child who died in pain. The old woman seemed not to hear it, but shuffled on, looking lost and afraid.

The florist's counter was like something out of the Omega Man, not sinister or rundown per se, but so completely abandoned and stocked so entirely with dead and dying plants as to give the impression that the florist had left weeks ago to hunt for fuel or firewood and had never returned.

I quickly selected the least plague ridden poinsettia from the dismal pile and made for the checkstands.

I took one look at the snaggle-toothed man working the express lane and the corpulent zombie packing the bags of groceries and made for the self-checkout.

In the end, I made it home without incident. Chiara came home some three hours later and I was still washing and washing my hands.

She didn't even use the plant in her table display. She said there was just something wrong about it.

I called her a snob.