Jeff’s latest book review (The Golem by Edward Lee) is available online at Horror World.
[News] July 2009
Jeff’s latest book review (Windwalker’s Mate by Margaret L. Carter) is available online at Innsmouth Free Press.
[News] June 2009
Jeff has received a galley proof of his story for the forthcoming anthology Tales Out of Miskatonic University.
[Review] As Timeless As Infinity: Vol 2
As Timeless As Infinity: Vol 2
Tony Albarella, editor
(Gauntlet Press)
Gauntlet Press continues its ambitious undertaking to present the complete Twilight Zone scripts of Rod Serling in As Timeless As Infinity: Vol 2. In addition to teleplays from all five seasons, the book contains tributes, photographs, music cue sheets, and insightful commentaries from editor Tony Albarella.
Rod Serling once said, “My major hang-up is nostalgia,” and that yearning to return to a simpler world is evident within the collection. Exhausted by the demands of producing a weekly television show and plagued by disagreements with sponsors and the network, Serling must have identified completely with Martin Sloan, the tense advertising executive who retreats to his hometown in “Walking Distance.” Sloan is delighted to find that everything is exactly the way he left it a quarter-century before, until he realizes that you truly “can’t go home again.” A heartless industrialist named William Feathersmith takes a far darker trip in “Of Late I Think of Cliffordville.” Feathersmith – a “predatory, grasping, covetous, acquisitive animal of a man” – has reached a career pinnacle, and he’s bored. But when he strikes a Faustian bargain to go back fifty years and start all over again, things don’t turn out the way he had planned.
Not all of Serling’s characters want to relive the past: Some want to prolong their future. In “The Trade-Ins,” an elderly couple visits a corporation that promises a second chance at life via new, artificial bodies. But the husband and wife – both in their seventies – face a difficult decision after discovering that they can only afford one new body. In “A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain,” a man in a troubled May-December marriage injects himself with an experimental youth serum to please his younger wife, and the results are unexpected.
The “unexpected” quickly became stock-in-trade for The Twilight Zone, and Serling rightfully earned a reputation for his twist endings. In “The Silence,” an exasperated member of a gentlemen’s club wagers that a fast-talking boor can’t keep quiet for an entire year, and each man takes drastic steps to win the bet. In “Judgment Night,” a ship inches through a “phantom-like” fog while one of its passengers is lost in a fog of his own: Struggling with partial amnesia, the man is gripped with an impending sense of doom and the fear that he has done all of this before. Here, Serling remakes the myth of the Flying Dutchman into a wartime story pitting a German submarine against a British freighter, just as H.P. Lovecraft did decades earlier in “The Temple.”
A character in “Walking Distance” offers this piece of advice: “You’ve been looking behind you…Try looking ahead.” But Gauntlet Press understands the importance of preserving and celebrating past achievements in speculative fiction: Each script in the book has been painstakingly reproduced, complete with handwritten notes, from Serling’s personal collection. As Timeless As Infinity: Vol 2 is like a time capsule for Twilight Zone fans, transporting them back to the halcyon days of Rod Serling’s remarkable television series.
—Review by Jeff Edwards
[Originally published in Dark Wisdom, May 2006 / Reprinted online at SFReader, November 2006]
[Review] The Twilight Zone Scripts of Charles Beaumont: Vol 1
The Twilight Zone Scripts of Charles Beaumont: Vol 1
Roger Anker, editor
(Gauntlet Press)
The Twilight Zone Scripts of Charles Beaumont: Vol 1 opens with an apt quote from Beaumont himself – “All the fantasy writers I know have a way of dwelling on their own fears and phobias. A writer spends his life being his own psychiatrist.” These words echo quietly throughout the collection.
Writers – and others with strong imaginations – often terrify themselves with demons of their own design. Beaumont takes this idea and amplifies it: His trademark scenario is a claustrophobic, nightmarish situation from which his characters cannot escape. In “Perchance to Dream,” Edward Hall stays awake for eighty-seven hours, convinced that his dreams will kill him. “The mind is everything,” he says. Edward is certain that if he dies in a dream, his heart won’t withstand the shock in real life. In “The Jungle,” Alan Richards and his wife are terrorized by a curse laid upon them by angry African shamans. Alan has seen voodoo work – has seen healthy people sicken and die – because the victims believed in the dark magic, “and their belief made it real.”
In his own life, Beaumont fell victim to the typical Hollywood syndrome: “The more money he made, the more he spent,” says a friend. Too much was never enough. Beaumont’s scripts reflect the same type of excess. In “A Nice Place to Visit,” a small-time criminal dies and goes to heaven (he thinks) where everything he wants is just a wish away. In “The Prime Mover,” Ace Larsen is ecstatic to learn that a friend possesses the power of telekinesis, and that this talent can be exploited for profit in the casinos of Las Vegas. Despite winning enough money to last a lifetime, Ace continues to gamble with bigger and bigger stakes, his behavior turning uglier with every dollar he wins.
In addition to tales of greed and overactive imagination, Beaumont (whose real name was Nutt until he had it legally changed) often wrote about losing one’s identity. In “Person or Persons Unknown,” David Gurney is puzzled – then horrified – when no one seems to recognize him. His wife and co-workers all regard him as a stranger, as though David’s existence has been wiped out. At the start of “In His Image,” Alan Talbot finds himself in a similar situation: When he returns to his hometown after only a few days’ absence, Alan discovers someone else living in his house. His neighbors are gone, the town has changed, and even the buildings are different: “Either I’ve got the worst memory in the world…or…” Sadly, Beaumont would soon struggle with his own memory: He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease at the age of thirty-five. He died just a few years later.
Beaumont’s premature death at the age of thirty-eight was tragic, but he left behind a body of work that continues to inspire writers and filmmakers. The Twilight Zone Scripts of Charles Beaumont: Vol 1 does a superb job of preserving that legacy for a new generation of readers to discover.
—Review by Jeff Edwards
[Originally published online at SFReader, April 2005]
[Review] Twilight Zone: The Movie
Twilight Zone: The Movie
Robert Bloch
(Warner Books)
Robert Bloch lends his name to the impressive roster of creative forces behind Twilight Zone: The Movie. Perhaps acknowledging that genre giants don’t normally write motion picture novelizations, the publisher euphemistically describes the book as “a four-part fantasy novel.” With such impressive pedigree – the author of Psycho adapting stories by the likes of Richard Matheson from a concept created by Rod Serling – Twilight Zone: The Movie ought to be a treasure trove for speculative fiction fans. And yet, most of the book feels oddly flat and empty. The main shortcoming is that only half of the four stories offer anything resembling character development.
The first two tales are one-note from beginning to end. It’s not Bloch’s fault; in fact, a tragic accident during the movie’s production forced a dramatic change to the first segment: What was intended to be a story of redemption instead takes the darkest turn possible at its conclusion. In that story, “Bill,” an intensely prejudiced man gets to experience what it’s like to be on the receiving end of such hatred. And in “Valentine,” an airplane passenger with an overwhelming fear of flying watches in horror as a creature destroys his plane’s engines mid-flight. Here, Bloch effectively adds brush strokes to a psychological portrait, creating far more ambiguity in print than existed onscreen: When Valentine tries to photograph the monster through the plane’s window, it turns out that he has “taken a photo of his own reflection.”
The final two stories barely seem original now – a child with god-like powers, and a group of elderly people magically transformed into children – but Bloch includes character arcs to compensate for the clichés. In “Helen,” a disillusioned schoolteacher finds herself energized by the prospect of helping a young boy understand his “terrible, wonderful gift.” At the beginning of the story, Helen thinks, “What was the sense of trying to teach when nobody listened?” But by the end, she is ready to start over: “The thought of teaching again filled her with joyful anticipation.” And in “Bloom,” a new arrival at the Sunneyvale Retirement Home brings a breath of fresh air and the promise of a second childhood. When he first checks in, Mr. Bloom finds a roomful of people who have given up on life: some bitter, some merely resigned to their fate. But Bloom teaches them the importance of staying young at heart: “The day we stopped playing is the day we started getting old.”
Twilight Zone: The Movie is hardly ground-breaking – three of the four segments are nothing more than remakes of early 1960s episodes from the iconic television series. Having Robert Bloch write the novelization was an inspired move, but it would have been more refreshing to go back to the original source material: the work of Jerome Bixby, George Clayton Johnson, and Richard Matheson.
—Review by Jeff Edwards
[Originally published online at Lost in the Dark, April 2005 / Reprinted online at SFReader, July 2005]
[Review] The Shining
The Shining
Stephen King
(Pocket Books)
Jack Torrance “had failed as a teacher, a writer, a husband, and a father. He had even failed as a drunk.” Desperate to redeem himself, Jack lines up a job as winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, then drags his wife and son along to the isolated property in a last-ditch effort to finish writing a play and patch up his marriage. But the Overlook, with its dark history of violence and murder, has plans of its own: It wants Jack, Wendy, and especially Danny to stay forever, and ever, and ever.
First published in 1977, The Shining is more than a simple haunted house tale: It’s the story of a man plagued by alcoholism, troubled by memories of an abusive father, and doomed to repeat the same pattern with his own son. Stephen King works hard to construct a complex psychological underpinning to his novel, but the result is sometimes heavy-handed. Although Jack’s ruminations on his drunken days seem to ring true, the scenes with his father are clumsy (“Now. Now by Christ. I guess you’ll take your medicine now. Goddamn puppy. Whelp. Come and take your medicine”). The running theme of wasps’ nests (Jack’s memory of his father burning a nest; Jack finding a nest under the Overlook’s roof; old papers in the basement catching fire “like burning autumn leaves below a wasps’ nest”) feels redundant and forced.
Throughout the book, King shows his admiration for Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. When King writes, “The Overlook faced [the snow] as it had for nearly three quarters of a century, its darkened windows…indifferent to the fact that it was now cut off from the world,” it sounds just like a passage from Jackson’s book: “Hill House…stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.” King doesn’t try to hide the source of his inspiration: At one point, his character Jack Torrance even thinks, “They could end up flitting through the Overlook’s halls like insubstantial shades in a Shirley Jackson novel, whatever walked in Hill House walked alone.”
King also pays homage to Poe, much as Richard Matheson’s Hell House evoked the spirit of “The Fall of the House of Usher.” King opens The Shining with a passage from “The Masque of the Red Death,” and weaves bits of Poe’s story into his novel; guests from the Masked Ball of August 1945 dance eternally at the Overlook, and a wind-up clock under glass in the Overlook’s ballroom oozes symbolism.
Within The Shining, a character’s thoughts echo “down a long and silent corridor in his mind, a corridor lined with mirrors where people seldom looked.” Once more, Stephen King unmasks his role as a writer: forcing readers to recognize their own buried impulses in the reflections of fictional characters.
—Review by Jeff Edwards
[Originally published online at Lost in the Dark, January 2005]
[Review] Hell House
Hell House
Richard Matheson
(Tor Books)
The old Belasco place in Maine – Hell House – is regarded as the Mount Everest of haunted mansions. Two previous expeditions into the empty house, one in 1931 and another in 1940, ended in tragedy. Thirty years later, Dr. Lionel Barrett is hired by a dying multimillionaire to definitively prove or disprove life after death. Barrett and his wife, along with Florence Tanner (“an over-emotive Spiritualist medium”) and Ben Fischer (“the lone survivor of the 1940 debacle”), cross the threshold into Hell House to risk their lives – and their souls.
On the surface, Richard Matheson’s Hell House bears more than a passing resemblance to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, but where Jackson was subtle, Matheson is graphic. The Haunting of Hill House featured odors, chills, and thumping noises; so does Hell House – before it launches into episodes of violence, sexual depravity, and spiritual possession. Hell House’s former occupants wallowed in all manner of debauchery (“They were at the bottom by 1928, delving into mutilation, murder, necrophilia, cannibalism”) and not even death will stand in the way of their grisly games.
Just as Matheson applied science and psychology to the vampire myth in his earlier novel I Am Legend, here he does the same to haunted houses: “The psychic emanation which all living beings discharge is a field of electromagnetic radiation…In extremes of emotion, the field grows stronger, impressing itself on its environment with more force…Hell House is, in essence, a giant battery, the toxic power of which must, inevitably, be tapped by those who enter it.”
Along with his modern sensibilities, however, Matheson enjoys channeling Edgar Allan Poe. Hell House boasts it own tarn (“A miasma of decay hovered above it”), and this fetid body of water is surely meant to remind readers of “The Fall of the House of Usher”: When Poe’s narrator first arrives at the “mansion of gloom,” he is overwhelmed by “an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees…and the silent tarn.” Later in Hell House, Fischer’s heightened senses (“Every sound was heard exaggeratedly…The smell of the house became intense. The texture of his clothes felt rough against his skin”) mirror Roderick Usher’s condition (“he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odors of all flowers were oppressive…and there were but peculiar sounds…which did not inspire him with horror”). If there were any doubt about Matheson’s inspiration, he lets us in on the homage by having two characters discover the mummified remains of a man behind a wall of brick and mortar; Dr. Barrett even murmurs, “Shades of Poe.”
Matheson intertwines sex and death in his claustrophobic tale of horror, and the early works of Clive Barker – his Books of Blood and The Hellbound Heart – seem to be the bastard offspring. Often frightening and always unpleasant, Hell House is described aptly by Stephen King as “the scariest haunted house novel ever written. It looms over the rest the way the mountains loom over the foothills.”
—Review by Jeff Edwards
[Originally published online at The Harrow, March 2004 / Reprinted online at SFReader, July 2004]
[Review] The Haunting of Hill House
The Haunting of Hill House
Shirley Jackson
(Penguin Classics)
Dr. John Montague had been “looking for an honestly haunted house all his life,” and he finds it in Hill House. Montague rents the place for three months and invites a small group to join him, to observe and record whatever they may encounter. Montague’s guests include Luke Sanderson, the mansion’s future heir; Theodora, a young woman with some extrasensory perception abilities; and Eleanor Vance, a young woman with repressed telekinetic powers. Like Montague, Eleanor had been waiting for Hill House “ever since her first memory.” The house seems equally attracted to Ms. Vance; soon, messages appear on its walls, written first in chalk, then in blood: “HELP ELEANOR COME HOME ELEANOR.”
If The Haunting of Hill House can be classified as horror, then it is a subtle horror indeed. The ghostly manifestations take the form of odors, cold spots, and thumping noises. Jackson creates effective scenes of terror; things go bump in the night, literally, at Hill House: “The iron crash came against their door…and the sickening, degrading cold came in waves from whatever was outside…Eleanor and Theodora saw the wood of the door tremble and shake, and the door move against its hinges.” A few nights later, Eleanor listens to the “rising mad sound” of a “little gurgling laugh” while holding Theodora’s hand in the dark, but then realizes with revulsion that the hand does not belong to Theodora: “God God – whose hand was I holding?”
Such moments of terror are interspersed between episodes of boredom and meandering conversations: Luke and the doctor play chess in the evenings while the women sit by the fireplace and talk. Eleanor often wanders within her own imagination, losing herself in reveries; one of the unanswered questions of the novel is how much of the haunting Eleanor may have imagined, and how much she may have caused.
Stephen King has made it clear that he admires Shirley Jackson’s writing, and King’s novels demonstrate Jackson’s influence. In The Haunting of Hill House, Jackson describes a shower of stones that once fell on Eleanor’s house for days, and how Eleanor and her sister Carrie each thought the other had caused it; King opens his first novel, Carrie, with a newspaper report about a similar rain of stones. And at the start of his second novel, Salem’s Lot, King quotes the opening paragraph from The Haunting of Hill House.
About halfway through Jackson’s book, Eleanor is embarrassed at being afraid; she muses, “Perhaps she was to be allowed to speak occasionally for all of them so that, quieting her, they quieted themselves and could leave the subject behind them; perhaps, vehicle for every kind of fear, she contained enough for all.” Shirley Jackson plays a similar role as novelist, offering catharsis to her readers: The fictional dread she manufactures possesses us “in the night, in the dark” but can be exorcised at dawn.
—Review by Jeff Edwards
[Originally published online at The Harrow, March 2004]
[News] January 2009
Jeff has received his contract for the forthcoming anthology Tales Out of Miskatonic University.
