Three Fine Horror Writers - King, Simmons and Holland

Salem's Lot (1975) 

The Stand (1990 Revision of 1978 Edition)

Night Shift (2008 collection of stories from the 1970s)

Stephen King  

 

Song of Kali (1985)

Carrion Comfort (1989)

Dan Simmons 

 

Supping with Panthers (1996)

Deliver Us From Evil (1997)

Tom Holland

Salem's Lot was Stephen King's second novel. It has the feel of a man who wants to make his mark with a best seller. What he does is to take Bram Stoker's 'Dracula', rethink it from top to bottom and position it within contemporary (1975) American culture. In the edition I have (2006) this is made clear in a useful short Afterword where King (still in his twenties when he wrote the book) also refers back to his childhood reading of EC comics. The book is replete with references to the horror canon from Poe-like cellars to graveyard whippoorwills.

He seems to have two alter agos in the book which recur throughout his career in a sort of dialectic: Ben Mears, the writer, and Mark Petrie, a young boy. It is not a spoiler (since he tells us who survives in a preamble) that both survive. King survives, you might say, his own dark fantasy. All the markers are there for the King view of existence - the precariousness of small town life in the presence of evil, the very real existence of evil as a presence beyond humanity, death and putrefaction and an inherent pessimism about human weakness in the face of that evil.

His heroes are heroes because they go into battle against evil with very poor odds on their side and most of them do not survive. Those that do are marked for life by loss, memory and an awareness that evil is never finally vanquished. Evil recurs in King's world. It is remorseless. My edition has a long 'deleted scenes' section which mostly tells you that he was right to delete what he did delete as self-indulgent, poorly drafted and almost private in places but they are still worth reading because they open up his preoccupations to more intimate view.

In these 'deleted scenes' King has more visceral material. He will return to the visceral later in his career when he has more freedom from publishing constraints but this is a book that feels like a 'working out' of past anxieties and horrors that clearly had a very visceral aspect to them. The parallels with 'Dracula' will be obvious enough but what is more interesting perhaps is the sociology of the book, written during a particularly gloomy period for the American middle classes. Vietnam is referenced more than once as cause of personal trauma but the rot goes deeper.

The small town is pictured in very 'bourgeois' terms. The vampire hunters are not accidentally led by a writer supported by a doctor, a teacher and a troubled priest. It is not accidental that the local policeman scuttles or that the businessman is a corrupt agent of evil. Here, the creative, spiritual and professional middle class heroes are the ones trying to defend an unknowing population rarely presented in flattering terms. There are some decent families but equally we have a picture of an unpleasant under class.

Indeed, King has a pessimistic and conservative world view with some of the ideology expressed by a depressed 'whisky priest' yearning for a traditionalist church with an awareness of good and evil rather than the social liberalism of evil emerging out of poor social conditions. Evil is inherent. 'Ordinary' people are without agency in the story whether as victims or as vampires. The elimination of the love interest (she shows exceptional stupidity) ensures that we are not bothered with a feminist element (a lack unthinkable today in popular culture).

We are offered a form of analogical thinking in which the state of America is a state of evil that can only be fought by the educated and professional middle classes in order to protect an unwitting world of vulnerable communities abandoned by traditional state and church authority. Nearly fifty years on, this mind-set has returned amongst the East Coast intelligentsia faced with Trump, a political Vlad the Impaler. Perhaps we can say that King got their first and that he is authentically old school East Coast liberal American with a visceral terror of social collapse.

So is this book liberal or conservative? Well, both. Deeply conservative of hegemonic liberal values, the book is an exercise in both personal psychological and social exorcism with teacher and priest giving us short painless lectures on re-engaging with even deeper core conservative values. As to the book as enjoyment, I can broadly recommend it even if it is necessarily a little dated. No one can deny King's skills as a story-teller even if there are the necessary implausibilities. However, the characterisation of the imagined alter ego Mark Petrie (the boy) lacks all realism.

We also have to assume that small towns in Maine (King's own origin point) in the 1970s really were so isolated that effective take-over by vampires would pass the higher authorities by (even Innsmouth got taken out eventually) and that hungry vampires would not travel for food. The characterisation is one of well-drawn stock characters but King is a master of dialogue and narrative flow. What he wrote was (in its time) new and fresh - and clearly influential on popular culture (especially cinema) as much as it was influenced by popular culture.

My 2006 edition has an informative introduction by King (in addition to the Afterword) but also two additional stories set in Jerusalem's Lot, the setting of the novel (shortened to Salem's Lot), as well as some atmospheric photographic illustrations. The first story (One for the Road) is a fine and sensitive piece of contemporary horror well worth reading but the second (Jerusalem's Lot) is a piece of over-the-top Lovecraftian pastiche with dashes of Poe that gives us an irrelevant back story that we do not really need.

As a book, I see this as quite a significant event not so much in literature as in popular culture. There is no doubt that a full appreciation requires one to understand not only its writing context but comics, film and even merchandising (in the reference to the Aurora models) It is still, after all these years, a good story with plenty for horror fans to get their teeth into as a transitional book in vampire lore between one era (the references to Hammer horror are self-evident) and the next (more cinematic still) where King himself has helped to rewrite the rules.

The Stand was also originally written in the late 1970s with a lot of pessimism in the air. The revised and rather massive 'original' version published in 1990 might meet the mood of the collapsing post-COVID polycrisis just as well. This book is why King will never be 'great' but will always be read - like Conan Doyle. This particular book has all the King themes except for the clowns although the theme of the rictus grin on the face of the bad guy and the trickster element suggests that this archetype is central to the King world view.

It is also peculiarly American - not just the small town values and the contrast of decent Boulder and indecent Las Vegas but the Baptist biblical mythology that merges with Southern Gothic ravens that say 'nevermore' and New England Lovecraftian themes. This is cosmic horror and grim, very grim indeed. The paradox of this book is that many Europeans will see it confirming a view that God is not worth the time of day for the suffering he puts people through (just as bad as the other guy) whereas many Americans will see it as a pessimistic acceptance and even affirmation of old time faith. Mother Abigail, however, personally creeps me out as much as Randall Flagg.

The author is cleverly ambiguous - not allowing bursts of rage against God to set the agenda and noting Job as exemplar. Not what most of us in the UK might find naturally comprehensible but this book will be a more useful guide to America than reading Henry James. It is, in fact, too big a book in themes and words to give justice to in a brief review. If it is not to be classed as a masterpiece it is because, while King can tell a story, the inner lives of his heroes and heroines often seem stereotypical, what you would expect from the writers of HBO movies rather than writers of great literature. But at least he tries to give them an inner life which is more than most of his predecessors as popular fiction writers ever did. As with all good popular writers, I was hooked within a few pages.

  

The Night Shift collection represents around twenty of Stephen King's stories from the 1970s. They are variable in quality and style so that the collection is really one for completists of King's work (who generally needs a much larger canvas than the short story) or of twentieth century American horror fiction. There are clues to other works as ideas are tested out - Jerusalem's Lot is the Lovecraftian prequel to 'Salem's Lot' which we have already noted above as we have done One for the Road, both incidents from the Salem's Lot universe but there is also the grimly pessimistic Night Surf, an incident from the universe of The Stand with a reference to the lethal 'swine flu' of that novel, Captain Trips. In that last story, you even get a clue to King's greatest contribution to the contemporary psyche, the turning of the clown from the modern harlequin, a figure of melancholy and laughter, into a figure of sheer boogeyman horror. In Night Surf, he refers to a 'fun house with a big clown face on the front and you walked in through the mouth' from the narrator's childhood. The reference is to the screaming mouth of an hysterical woman - 'nuff said.

Some of the stories are potboilers that would have served for Weird Tales or even as scripts for Tales from the Crypt (which is referenced in one story) or The Twilight Zone. I tend to think that stories with twists in the tale are a fairly weak form of horror - the Alfred Hitchcock School of jumping to a 'boo' or getting a slightly nasty taste in the mouth. The Ledge could be a study of cruelty by Roald Dahl. King is better than that and we assume that he did these for the money. Other stories contain interesting psychological studies - perhaps practice runs in characterisation for the novels. Two stories have little to do with horror as we conventionally understand the genre. The Last Rung on the Ladder is a genuinely moving account of how unintended neglect and small incidents can, if not destroy lives, fail to save them. The Woman in the Room is about euthanasia and moral choice with no demon or dark force in sight. 

 

These latter two are both minor triumphs that makes one wonder what King might have written if he had only produced 10% of his eventual output and had concentrated his genius on literature as The New Yorker might understand the term. But he made the right choice because, whether potboilers or minor works of genius, so many of his stories have been filmed that you can see that he taps into popular demand for solid narrative even if the idea is not always up to the execution. The short TV version of Battleground was a slick and highly entertaining short episode in a series but the story itself is just silly. On the other hand, Children of the Corn (also the source of a major film franchise) is genuinely disturbing, a fine adaptation of the urban fear of the isolated village community but set in the wastes (as an urban reader might see it) of Nebraska. This should enter anthologies of American literature as a representative of the fears of the mid-twentieth century literary mind as much as Call of Cthulhu that of the early twentieth century and Teatro Grottesco that of its fin de siecle.

Some stories are well written, others less so - the influence of Lovecraft can be seen in more than one story but there is a distinctive King voice. Where Lovecraft sees great and sinister forces impinging on our lives at the margins yet existentially, King sees evil as less heroic but more vicious and more immediate in its use of our own technology against us - trucks, industrial machinery, the forgotten parts of our buildings (the latter better explored by Thomas Ligotti). The problem is not one of cosmic indifference or the use of us as pawns in some greater game but a truly nasty desire to do us positive harm and to do so remorselessly, without pity and perhaps for the pleasure of it.

There are some stories other than Children of the Corn, Last Rung on the Ladder or The Woman in the Room to mark out. These have in common an ability to convey the inner fear of persons faced by horror and of necessity having to deal with it: Grey Matter where a father turns into a slug of sorts, Sometimes They Come Back where a teacher faces zombie hoodlums in his class and I Know What You Need in which a young woman is stalked by magic. These stories show a sensitivity and sympathy for the victims of unnatural acts that is also found in the larger works of this flawed genius. This is definitely one for the compleat horror library but I wonder what civilians will get out of it. These six stories are very much worth reading at a level slightly above mere entertainment. The others you could probably take or leave.

Dan Simmons' Song of Kali is an exceptional book within the horror genre - a true masterpiece and extremely hard to put down. The problem with reviewing it is that it is hard to comment without 'spoiling'. To appreciate it you have to cast your mind back to the period when, and the places where, it was formed in the mind of Dan Simmons as a young American liberal and literary intellectual - in the India and the US of the late 1970s and the early 1980s. The former looked like an intractable social problem of never-ending poverty and consequent cruelty and the latter was still in or emerging (just) from a recession similar to the one that we are now entering.

The book could not be written now. The South Asia of that period of hopelessness has been replaced by a vibrant, expansive India (though let us see what the future brings) and the despair has shifted to a declining West. The book is filled with a vision of the teeming filthy hordes of Calcutta that would be regarded as insulting, almost racist today. In that sense, this book is oddly much closer to the imperial adventure tales of the thuggees of the Raj than it is to our 'modern' world only 35 years on. There is also an undercurrent of despair at the Holocaust and nuclear destruction that somehow has also become attenuated despite events in Ukraine - Rwanda and Srebenica have not normalised the horrors of the 1940s but, as the survivors of older horrors die of natural causes, modern small genocides seem les existential and nuclear devastation still gets averted through high level chats between American and Russian militarymen. Massacres are no longer placed in that category of all-encompassing global existential evil that excites hopelessness - like Calcutta does to Simmons' narrator - but are facets of the black diamond that is the polycrisis, a death of the optimism by a thousand cuts.

Similarly, the war on terror may have appeared scary but our opponents are political gangsters whose effects are exaggerated rather than the corporatised mass murdering bureaucrats of competing ideologies from whom there is no escape. Gangsters, despite Simmons' hero's experience, are very bad but not capable (or are they?) of destroying the world. Maybe that is the one doubt that nags at us thirty or so years on - that maybe gangsters, terrorists and insurgents can bring the Kali Yuga to pass. And this is the point of the book - it is not pure psychological horror nor is it the horror of monsters and demons but it is something different again, a novel of cultural horror of its own time and place with elements of both. I do not recall the phrase Kali Yuga being used but that is what it is about - a deeply conservative sense that the Age of Kali was upon us.

It is also beautifully and clearly written with scarcely a wasted word. Initially my heart sank in the first few pages because I thought I might be lumbered with that great American literary vice, the egoistic first person story that slows down the story with precise and self-indulgent description of place and sentiment. but I was very wrong. The prose, after that point, is, well, perfect. Simmons takes the standard literary model and subverts it into a narrative that works precisely because we can see a highly cultured but often weak and often dim 'one-of-us' being out-manouevred and out-classed by a cunning underclass of consummate brutality. It is a novel about crime and criminality as much as it a novel of horror - and the horror is visceral because it is real, the filth, the mortuary, the decay of the human body, the disease, the fear of the dark, of monsters ... and the last chapters will shred you if you know anything of love. There is even a skilled irony as the 'hero' notes the difference between his position and would happen in a movie about his position.

Song of Kali is a masterpiece that might be read as a companion piece to Ligotti or The Stand.  It does offer some small hope in a way that Ligotti does not (I cannot say more without spoiling the tale) and it is much better than The Stand (written only a decade before), if only because it is more 'real', but all three writers are explore the dark side of the condition of humanity from a uniquely American perspective.  The sense of decay and of impending evil that was felt by some in the 1970s and earluy1980s may be coming around again. These books may also be read to show that fears are reasonable but also may be exaggerated and that, unless one's philosophical back is broken like Ligotti's, the dark may, again, be replaced by the light. Perhaps we are not, in fact in the Kali Yuga but only in a simulacrum of it that will pass in its due time.

The twentieth century Anniversary Edition of Simmons' Carrion Comfort is the one to get because it has a remarkable 20-page or so introduction that lays bare the publishing history and the intellectual and personal origins of what was to be Simmons' second published novel. Any aspiring genre writer should read this introduction because of its insights into what it means to be a writer in a recession. It gives interesting clues to the personality of an author whose psychodynamics embrace the hope of education and deep pessimism about the human condition. This is not as good as Song of Kali though not by much. The fault may lie in its origin. The traumatic process of getting it published seems to have resulted in a stubborn determination to make it 'perfect' rather than just 'good enough' for publication.

The result is that it is almost too 'perfect' - a truly innovative vampiric plot line, excellent characterisation and a detail of descriptive execution that is quite staggering sometimes. But that is where the problem lies. It is 767 pages long. A good editor might have suggested some restraint in the action thriller scenes that go through every detail of a car chase or fire fight. It is like watching a movie except that movies are not novels and novels are not movies. The effect is sometimes a little tiresome. Maybe 100-150 pages could have been lost and the reader allowed more imagination for themselves. And perhaps a little more 'spelling it out' at other key points because the writer was throwing so much data at us that the trees sometimes obscured the wood. But praise is still due if only because he takes up the holocaust meme and does not make it trite and sentimental. It is of its time (1979) when the Shoah was perhaps rawer than it is now to a student of human evil (for that is what Simmons clearly is).

Today it might be harder to write this story and not have it look hackneyed or ludicrous but his account of Jewish revenge and ultimately unintended consequences - and of moral anbiguity - still rings true, unaffected by what has happened since to the Holocaust meme in popular literature. Mossad too is not caricatured - though definitely heroes, their heroism is contextualised and Simmons is not afraid to note when Israelis behave as badly as their past oppressors. He writes of Jews without being either patronising or overly stereotypical. The story itself is of vampires as powerful atavistic genetic sports - few in number but deeply murderous by nature. He plays this out like the chess games that are so central to the world view of his Oberst character.

Of course, the brilliant plotting relies far too much on luck - or is it ineluctable fate - so that it reads too much like a recent Tom Cruise movie to be wholly credible. But credibility is not the point of the book in any case. We are in the realm of existential metaphor. His mind vampires are just an exaggeration of the human condition. Even Hitler is hinted to be as (in the Bunker) a victim of a vampire rather than being one (as more trite writers would offer us). The vampires are an opportunity to examine our animal roots and find them wanting. Simmons is also a liberal in the American sense. The story is one of diversity heroes and rebels (this is 1979 so we are talking race and gender though not sexual orientation) countering variants of white supremacism, religious manipulation and monied power yet handled with a light touch.

The political elite is seen as part-creature of the vampires. The facilitation of evil requires the participation of so-called Neutrals who choose to serve evil without question of which the type is the cold introvert Maria Chen who we can see is clearly existentially desperate for love. In other words, the hold of vampires is partly one of direct mind control of 'victims' but it is equally one of collaboration from those humans without moral compass. Read physical force for mind control and this is the story of the holocaust.  The strange ambiguous love story of Harod and Chen, two psychopaths, is an allegory of life at the borderline where the instinct for survival competes with the last lingerings of some forgotten need for love and wins out. These two have a history that is all-too-human somewhere there.  Each is just on the other side of the border line between human and vampire from the other and makes one wonder whether either could have been saved by a different origin, a childhood that was not abused or unlucky. This is Simmonds trying to find the point where evil begins and ends.

Chen's final sacrifice, whether cold despair or something approaching selfless love, is compared implicitly with Harod's revenge for her sacrifice, yet another act of brutal violence even if it helps our heroes. And perhaps this is the border line between human and vampire - redemption.  There is also violence of social situation (exemplified by a violent black street gang who become allies of the heroes) set against innate genetic evil, animalistic and original (as in original sin).  This is the classic liberal (and socialist) problem that all the progressive education in the world cannot deal with the true sociopath. There is a hint of this awareness in Simmons' introduction where he tells us something of his teaching background which clearly meant a great deal to him. Tony Harod may interest twenty-first readers in particular - the weakest of the mind vampires, a film producer who can only use his skills on women and uses it for psychopathic sexual gratification. He is also the only mind vampire whose evil may have emerged situationally.

Harod exists to show a continuum from normal psychopathy to the pure evil of the three main evil protagonists who have a Brady-Hindley cohesion of sorts, with an evil televangelist and an evil billionaire as half way houses. Harod even gains brief sympathy at times as a loser out of his depth. Simmons is intent, it would seem, on seeing evil as a gradient with Harod, who exemplifies the problem that was to launch the #metoo novement, being the link between psychopathic ordinary humanity and the genetic sports whose extreme element is genocidal.  Abusing women, murdering for gain or manipulating for wealth, causing pain or killing for entertainment and pleasure, genocide - these all happen to people in a tale that is actually about the real source of evil which is that of differential power relations amongst morally unequal people.

This gradient continues to the final surviving vampire. The story is always one of brutal competition for power between the players as much as its use against 'us' so that the final insane survivor must ineluctably be the one capable of the most heinous crime from a human point of view. The ordinary humans suffer, survive or die around this tiny group of creatures in this long metaphor of the nature of power in society. A fine if flawed novel which I can understand Stephen King accepting as a worthy offering within his own tradition of dense narratives about evil.

And a final brief note onTom Holland whose abandonment of fiction for non-fiction may have improved his bank balance but is a serious loss to the world of Gothic horror. Holland was once a master of literate historical horror with Supping With Panthers as a wonderful romp through the dark side of late nineteenth century Imperial India.This is top-notch stuff with a nice balance between a love of history and effective writing. Deliver Us From Evil is set in the seventeenth century world of European witchcraft and black magic. Holland tells a great story. His tales are a continuing riff on the tropes of Gothic fiction and the horror tradition.  Both books are highly recommended if you like solid story-telling and don't mind an occasional bit of visceral unpleasantness.