THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #40: A review of "Evening Primrose" by John Collier

Here we have an odd story. At first, it seems like it’s about one thing, but it does a complete one-eighty and turns into something else by the end, kind of like the movie, FROM DUSK ‘TIL DAWN.



Snell is a poet who has had it with “the bourgeois world that hates a poet.” In protest, he retreats into a department store, where he intends to live out the rest of his days. His plan is to live off the land, as it were. Sleep during the day. Forage among the goods at night. Continue to write his poetry without worrying about making enough money to survive. All he has to do is avoid the night watchman.


His very first night in, he has a run-in with the watchman, so he throws on a wrap and pretends to be a mannequin. The trick works, but as soon as the watchman has moved on, Snell looks at another mannequin and notices very human eyes looking back at him. It seems he’s not the only one to think of this idea. The department store is full of other people who live here, trying to hide from the real world. And it’s not just this store; it’s in every store. They even communicate from store to store, as if they were adjacent towns.


Pretty crazy, no? There’s a good comedy in this. And to top it all off, Snell quickly develops a love interest in Ella, one of the people he now lives with. But it takes a strange and savage turn near the end.


During the performance of a play that one of the department store dwellers has written (for people from a neighboring store), Snell suffers hiccoughs and flees the audience. He runs into Ella, and the two of them start hanging out more and more until he confesses his love to her. She says she’s in love with another. In fact, she loves the night watchman because he can go out of the store in the daytime, which is what she wants to do. (She grew up in the store because her mom accidentally lost her there when she was a kid.)


She tells Snell about the Dark Men. Apparently, they’re people who live in mortuaries instead of department stores. What goods do they survive on? Well, what do you think? Since the department store dwellers want to keep living in their secret world, they can’t let anyone know about them. Those who find out are detained, and the Dark Men are set loose on them. When they’re done, the offending person has been replaced with a mannequin. Snell, horrified, thinks people would notice, considering these new mannequins would be heavier. Her response: “No. They’re not heavier. I think there’s a lot of them—gone.” Talk about shudder-inducing!


SPOILER ALERT: Ella decides that she’s going to let the night watchman see her so he can take her out of there once and for all. This fucks Snell up, because if she stayed, at least he could still spend time with her. If she’s gone . . . well, he doesn’t know how to deal with that. He confesses everything to a friend he thought he could trust, and the next thing he knows, Ella’s gone, and the Dark Men have been called. Turns out, they might not be people after all, but something more beastly. And now, Snell plans to confess to the night watchman in order to save Ella and escape the store.


But . . . there’s the problem with this tale. There’s no ending. Snell, who narrates this piece in first person, says that he’s leaving this journal in case they don’t succeed. He hopes someone will find it and avenge their deaths. It seems like they might have lost that fight, but there’s nothing to really suggest which way it really went.


Also, he didn’t spend enough time with the Dark Men. The scene in which they arrive is almost a throwaway moment. END OF SPOILERS.


At first, you may wonder what this story is doing in this anthology, but by the end, you’ll know that, for all its flaws, it earned its place here.

[This story first appeared in PRESENTING MOONSHINE and cannot be read online at this time.  However, it's been adapted a bunch of times, even once as a musical.]

THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #39: A review of "Far Below" by Robert Barbour Johnson

Here we have yet another solidly American story, but whereas Howard gave us the backcountry version, Johnson gives us the urban one. Heavily influenced by Lovecraft, he gives us a peek at the dark underbelly of Manhattan Island, deep in the guts of the subway system.



In a weird way, this one is a bit of an SF tale, since it takes place in Johnson’s near future. The subways have recently been built, just as America joins World War II (keep in mind, this story was written in 1939, so Johnson made a pretty good guess that we’d join in the fray). Yet, a problem emerges . . . .


This does, indeed, have a frame, where an unnamed narrator is talking about his equally unnamed friend and his job down “far below,” in which they must keep passengers safe from a strange danger. It is his friend who relates the meat of the story, about how once upon a time, he was the director of the Natural History Museum. One day, the government brings in a strange, gorilla-like creature, dead, which they’d found in the subways. Apparently, a group of them attacked a train and slaughtered a bunch of people, and this was the only one that got left behind. (The government covered it up, naturally; one guy, who had his arm chewed off by a beast, had the ragged stump removed before he came to and was simply told he’d lost it in a train wreck.)


The friend discovers that the monster isn’t a gorilla, and though it has a lot in common with humans, it is not one of us, either. It’s simply something new. He then gets hired on to help with an elite group of guards, keeping humanity safe from the beasts that live below the city. Some of the guards go crazy, and in one case, a guard started changing into one of the beasts. They had to gun that fellow down, he’d gone so mad.


However, it has gotten to the point where the monsters no longer take the offensive. Human beings have been so savage to them that when they sense one of us near them, they try to retreat into the depths of the earth.


For someone so heavily influenced by Lovecraft, that’s an odd thing to bring up. Yet, as with 90% of Lovecraft’s other imitators, Johnson flubs when it comes to the core philosophy of HPL’s writing. The cosmic terror simply doesn’t come through, traded instead for horrible monsters wreaking havoc. Had Lovecraft written this one, he would have had the beasts win, hands down. Human beings are too small in his universe; they ultimately don’t matter. Yet here, Johnson has them beating back the things that crawl in the dark.


SPOILER ALERT: One thing must be said for Johnson’s tale: it pays off. Near the end, when the friend and the narrator get an alert in their office that the ghouls are out, and that guards are down there, scaring the shit out of the creatures before slaughtering them, the friend loses it. He starts ranting and raving about killing everyone like he was a Joseph Conrad character, screaming, “Exterminate the brutes!” Only then does the narrator see that his friend is starting to change, that he’s starting to take on the attributes of the beasts. So the taint is on anyone who works in the subways for such a long time, and if the narrator does the same, well . . . it’s a nice touch. So yeah.  Maybe Johnson paid a bit more attention to Lovecraft after all.  END OF SPOILERS.


It’s not much of a tale. It’s good, not great. Is it worth your time? Probably. It is kind of neat, but don’t expect too much.

[This story first appeared in WEIRD TALES, and it cannot be read online at this time.]

THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #38: A review of "The Pigeons from Hell" by Robert E. Howard

Here we have another member of the Lovecraft circle, but unlike just about every other story in this book so far, there is something unique about this one. It’s the first purely American story in this volume. Not only that, but it’s a far cry from polite horror. In fact, Howard’s sensibilities would be right at home in our modern times.



Griswell and Branner are two New Englanders on a trip across America (their goal is never explained), and they find themselves somewhere in the South (it’s never explained where, although considering Howard’s love for his home state, it’s probably Texas). It’s night, and they’re looking for a place to camp out when they find an old deserted house. As they approach, they see a flock of pigeons taking to the sky.


In the middle of the night, they hear a whistling sound coming from upstairs. Branner goes up to investigate, and he shortly comes back down . . . a walking dead man. There is a huge cleft in his bloodied head, and he’s gripping the hatchet that undoubtedly did the job.


Griswell panics and flees, only to hear some kind of beast chasing after him. Luckily, he runs into Sheriff Buckner, on his way back from bringing a prisoner to trial, who takes a few shots at the beast and sends it into a retreat. Griswell explains what has happened, and Buckner, skeptical, goes to investigate. They find Branner facedown on the floor with the hatchet buried into the blanket where Griswell’s head would have been.


After Buckner checks a few things out, he decides that Griswell probably didn’t kill his partner. Judging by a few strange things he noticed, he decides the murder could stand a more thorough investigation. He mentions that pigeons are not ever found around here, but a few of the superstitious locals have claimed to have seen them. This makes him ponder the issue further.


He looks into the history of the Blassenville family, who used to live here. It’s an ugly past, and it’s enough to make him think that there’s something seriously wrong with the house. He goes to Jacob, a local voodoo man who would know exactly what possessed the house. However, the old man refuses to tell him because he fears the old gods to whom he has sworn fealty. He lets slip about something called a zuvembie. Howard feels it necessary to let his readers know that this is NOT a zombie, but a zuvembie, a woman who has drunk a potion in order to become immortal with the ability to control the dead. He also suggests that it can be killed with certain materials. However, before he can go any further, he croaks on the spot.


Armed with this knowledge, Buckner and Griswell return to the house in order to do battle with the monster that lives there.


The thing that Howard does so well here is the Blassenville family history. He is the first writer in this anthology to bring up the Civil War and how badly it had decimated the South and destroyed families. It is the starting point for all the horror that comes to pass in this tale. Not only that, but he also incorporates Griswell’s ideas of witchcraft, meaning a New England perspective. Mainly, in regards to Salem. Most of the other stories in this book could, technically, happen anywhere, but one gets the definite feeling that they take place across the pond.  This one is inescapably American.


This story also marks the return of the dreaded n-word. Buckner very clearly does not have a high opinion of black people. Each and every time he refers to them as “niggers.” In fact, he uses the word like punctuation. He barely has a page of dialogue without uttering the word. The slaves who used to work at the Blassenville house? “Niggers.” Old man Jacob? “Nigger.” The superstitious folk who saw the pigeons and knew about strange happenings at the house? “Niggers.” Oddly, though, he respects their knowledge of the supernatural. “We’re up against something that takes more than white man’s sense. The black people know more than we do about some things.” It’s kind of backhanded, but it’s a compliment, nonetheless.


SPOILER ALERT: The creepiest moment comes when Buckner and Griswell set their trap. They pretend to sleep in the same place Griswell and Branner had been in, waiting. Then, in the middle of the night, Griswell hears the whistling again, and he fancies he bolts from the room and flees down the road for miles. However, this is a trick his mind plays on him, for he finds himself walking up the same stairs Branner did, and before long, he finds himself facing off against the zuvembie, who is holding a hatchet and waiting. He begs his body to run away, and he even tries to knock himself over the balustrade, but his body just won’t obey him despite the grim knowledge of his impeding death. Pretty nasty, when you think about it.


Buckner saves his ass by drilling the zuvembie, thus ending the curse. They also make one final surprise, but you should read about that one for yourself. END OF SPOILERS.


With his down and dirty style, with no shame whatsoever, Howard ditches the traditional polite horror and goes with something a bit more vulgar. As a result, this classic stands out from the rest.

[This story first appeared in WEIRD TALES, and it cannot be read online at this time.  Joe R. Lansdale recently did a pretty good adatption of this story in comic book form.  It reads more like a sequel than an adaptation, though.  Check it out here.]

THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #37: A review of "The Eerie Mr. Murphy" by Howard Wandrei

Even though we were robbed of a husband/wife team in this anthology, there are a couple of brothers featured here. We already encountered Donald Wandrei’s “The Red Brain.” Here, we have a tale from his brother, Howard.



Sadly, he doesn’t match the power of his sibling. Despite the Twilight Zone-ish title, it packs very little punch.


It concerns Timothy Murphy, a small and oddly shaped man, who appears one day out of nowhere and starts out by stopping people’s clocks. Then their cars. And by the time he stalls out an airplane’s engine, killing everyone on board, he knows something is wrong with him. He turns himself in to the cops, who at first are skeptical, but when he magically causes the bullets in a gun to disappear and reappear in the cop’s pocket, they know he’s a menace that has to be dealt with.


Here’s the problem, though: even if Murphy popped into existence the very second the story begins, he acts like he has a past. So . . . has he always been doing these things? Does he have a long history of that kind of thing? If so, then why is he just now trying to figure out what’s going on?


He comes to the conclusion that he knows when something is about to happen, not that he causes these things to happen. Yet if that were true, then there are a lot of coincidences in this story, more than you could find in a dozen Charles Dickens novels.


SPOILER ALERT: When he turns himself in to the authorities, they shove him in a box, hoping that’ll get him to stop messing up the world. They hear him say, from inside the box, that he’s gone, and sure enough, when they open it up, he’s nowhere to be seen. The head cop then worries that anyone who dies in the future as a result of Murphy’s odd power would be on his own head. END OF SPOILERS.


That’s right. There are no answers to glaring problems in the story. Is it a fanciful tale? Sure, but it’s not worth bothering with.


[This story first appeared in ESQUIRE (yeah, that ESQUIRE!) and cannot be read online at this time.  Sorry about the small picture up there, but it was the only one of him I could find.]

THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #36: A review of "The Crawling Horror" by Thorp McClusky

At first, it seems like a crime that Pelan thought ANY story other than Henry Kuttner’s “The Graveyard Rats” should have been the choice for 1936. It is one of the most well-known horror stories in history, not to mention that it would have been nice to have at least one husband-and-wife team represented in this volume (he was married to C.L. Moore).



Here’s the thing, though: “The Crawling Horror” is really fucking good. Amazingly good. McClusky comes at his reader with guns blazing, all hands on deck. Check it out.


This story is narrated by Dr. Kurt, a country doctor who has an odd patient in farmer Hans Brubaker. One day, Hans comes to him with a story about how something has been killing first his rats, then his cats, and finally his dogs. Well, he doesn’t say they’re being killed, but he implies it. From his perspective, they’re just disappearing, and just before they do, they are visited by a very strange member of their species. But the creepiest of these incidents is when he falls asleep while smoking a pipe, his dog at his feet. He wakes up and decides to pet his dog without looking down. Instead of the expected fur, his hand encounters something very, very slimy, and he knows right away that he’s not touching his dog.


When he looks, he sees a blob covering his dog like a blanket. He attacks the creature, and it retreats, but his dog just . . . isn’t right anymore. When his other dog comes home, it very obviously fears the first dog. Yet it attacks its companion with the intent of killing it, as if it knows this task is necessary, maybe even merciful.


Hans takes his dog out in the yard and shoots it. However, the next day when he’s going to bury the dog, its body is gone. Later, a dog he knows is dead comes for a visit, looking for its surviving companion.


Notice a pattern? Oh yeah. Still later, a strange child wanders by Hans’s farm . . . .


Creepy, no? That’s just McClusky warming up. Hans needs the doctor’s help, so Dr. Kurt decides to investigate a little himself. Just after Hans marries Dr. Kurt’s nurse, Hilda, the doctor himself comes for a visit only to find that Hans has been so desperately afraid that he hasn’t slept in days. Hilda has not encountered anything, so she kind of thinks he’s a kook, but Hans explains that he’s learned a few things about the blob. First of all, when it attacks its prey, its prey becomes a part of it to the point that it can imitate the dead creature. Also, it can get into any room, even through the tiniest crack. Lastly, it only comes when you’re asleep, or if you invite it while awake.


The doctor is still skeptical, but he offers to keep watch while Hans catches some shut-eye. Hans hermetically seals the room he’s in with wax and then takes the doctor up on his offer. And here’s where McClusky really shines: he describes the doctor’s ordeal in such a bone-chilling way. The isolation of the farm is perfectly depicted as snow starts drifting down, and the reader realizes that just about anything can happen out here in the middle of nowhere. Unlike someone like, say, Blackwood, McClusky knows exactly when to stop, when maximum creepiness has been achieved. Any reader whose blood doesn’t run cold after spending some time out at Hans’s farm may have a blob of their own on their back.


Long story short, Dr. Kurt sees the blob running down the window, and when he goes outside to investigate further, he sees a very clear trail through the snow, as if a large ball had been rolled through there, which suddenly turns into very human tracks . . . . Now that he believes his patient, they come up with a plan to defeat the creature.


SPOILER ALERT: While Hilda sleeps in her room, and Hans sleeps elsewhere, Dr. Kurt stands vigil over the house. He hears a knock on the door and sees a neighbor who has been missing for a few days. She begs to spend the night with them because she’s very much afraid of something back home. Dr. Kurt thinks he knows what she’s afraid of, so he lets her in. While he’s fetching her coffee, he comes back to see that she’s crawled into bed with Hilda. When he turns on the light, he sees that she’s turned into the blob and has attached herself to Hilda’s back.


Horrified, he attacks the blob, but it doesn’t retreat. He changes his tactics and pulls Hilda away from her attacker. Remember the ‘Eighties remake of THE BLOB? There was a scene in which the titular monster drops down on a character, covering his entire body except for his arm. He’s reaching out for help, and his girlfriend tries to pull him out of the mess. Instead, his arm comes off in a rather gory fashion.


So . . . guess what happens to Hilda. Oh yeah. In a very gruesome scene, only half of her body comes away. Her spine and ribs are laid bare, and her skull is open in the back.

The blob moves down to finish off its meal, and Dr.Kurt decides to try to hermetically seal it in this room, hoping that if it’s trapped long enough, it will starve and die. Hans has other ideas. Instead, he offers it himself, thinking that if he’s strong enough to dominate it, it will die (seeing as how it only goes after sleeping prey, it’s a pretty sound idea). Sure enough, he defeats it, but he feels it inside of himself, lurking. He decides to run away, hoping that he never weakens enough to let it out. END OF SPOILERS.


Remember a while ago when Pelan called “The Willows” the perfect horror story? Nope, so far in this book, “The Crawling Horror” deserves that title. As powerful and awesome as Kutter’s “The Graveyard Rats” is, McClusky kicks the shit out of him with this one. Easily the best in the anthology so far.

[This story first appeared in WEIRD TALES (check out that steaming hot cover above!), but sadly, it cannot be read online at this time.  That's a fucking crime.]

THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #35: A review of "The Dark Eidolon" by Clark Ashton Smith

Here we have one of the bigger members of the Lovecraft Circle with a story that, at first, seems like it doesn’t belong in the book. It’s from his Zothique cycle, which is firmly set in the realm of fantasy. And sure enough, we have a lot of swords (okay, one sword) and sorcery, but there are plenty of horror elements to justify Pelan’s choice.



Once upon a time (or rather, sometime in the far, far, far distant future), on Zothique (“the last continent of Earth”) illuminated by a dying sun, there was a young beggar boy named Narthos. While approaching the kingdom’s prince, a bastard by the name of Zotulla, in order to beg for alms, the boy is very purposely trampled by the prince’s horse. Narthos lives, but he’s stuck with a limp the rest of his life. Eventually tired of this place, he wanders off and becomes an apprentice to a great sorcerer. In turn, Narthos becomes a great sorcerer, and he changes his name to Namirrha. In the meantime, Zotulla is sick of waiting to inherit the throne. He tosses an asp in his father’s bed, and when the king subsequently dies, Zotulla is crowned.


Getting trampled by a snotty prince kind of stuck in Namirrha’s craw, and he’s had a lot of time to plot his revenge. He sneaks back to his hometown while everyone is stark raving drunk at a party thrown by Zotulla, and Namirrha takes up residence as Zotulla’s neighbor. Zotulla is infuriated by this, so he sends soldiers out to learn who this asshole is and have him executed forthwith. However, when they return with information that his new neighbor is a widely feared sorcerer, he thinks twice about starting anything he might not be able to finish. Zotulla then tries to ignore the guy.


Namirrha sets in motion his revenge by sending spirits to haunt Zotulla’s palace with the loud, overwhelming sound of the tramping of charging horses. Plagued by these noises, he asks the resident sorcerer for advice; Namirrha suggests the haunting is a direct result of a wrong the king has no recollection of committing (and surely enough, Zotulla doesn’t recognize the wizard). He invites Zotulla to a party.


Zotulla shows up with his favorite woman, and here’s where the true horrors come in. Not since the Crowley story earlier in this volume have such intimidating, vile imagery paraded on these pages. Namirrha summons the mummies of once-great kings as their table servants . . . and one of them turns out to be the king’s recently deceased father. Lamias and satyrs and skeletons and hairy-shanked she-ghouls are their singing and dancing entertainers, the servants all have worms writhing in their empty eye sockets, and their meal is the “well-minced leavings of [torturers’] wheels and racks; and moreover, my cooks have spiced it with the powerful balsams of the tomb, and have farced it with the hearts of adders and the tongues of black cobras.” The musicians play on lyres made from bones and stringed with sinews taken from cannibals, they play hautboys made from the leg bones of young witches, and they play bagpipes made from the tit-skin of “Negro queens.” Holy shit, that is a fucking party.


At the height of the festivities, Namirrha summons the spirits of giant horses, and they trample the entirety of Zotulla’s kingdom until nothing is left but the giant shards of buildings. The sorcerer then reveals his true identity just before he forces the king out of his body, possesses it, and transforms his legs to those of a horse, which he then uses to trample Zotulla’s favorite woman.


SPOILER ALERT: Namirrha has a problem, because he betrayed a very powerful god in order to get all of this to happen. That god, Thasaidon, comes to Zotulla after he’s been imprisoned in a statue and forced to watch as his woman is trampled. The god explains what’s going on, and then he gives Zotulla the power to fight the sorcerer. As they do battle, and as the woman, still alive, is driven to mad laughter by the sight of this, the giant horses return and trample Namirrha’s house, thereby killing EVERYONE.


Wow. That’s kind of a downer ending. It’s also kind of odd considering how, even though we are meant to feel sympathy for Namirrha and to root him on (even though it takes a pretty big son of a bitch to do what Namirrha does to Zotulla), that Smith turns the tables and makes a kinda-sorta hero out of an asshole like Zotulla. All of this could have been avoided if Zotulla had done what most of us do when a bum asks us for change: we keep walking without ever acknowledging the fellow. But still, it’s a nice statement on the typical revenge story: none of it matters in the end. END OF SPOILERS.


There are some flaws. For example, it’s one of those stories where alien terminology is just thrown at you, and a lot of it is unnecessary information and therefore is hard to retain. The story also suffers because of the tell-don’t-show style. It sounds like a fantasy story with very stiff language, kind of like the way Hollywood thinks all Native Americans sound like when they’re speaking English. As a result, the going is hard, at first. Stick it out. This story is definitely worth it.

[This story first appeared in WEIRD TALES and can be read here.]

THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #34: A review of "The Tower of Moab" by L.A. Lewis

Here we have another misstep from Pelan. By the time a reader gets to the end of this story, one can’t help but wonder . . . what the hell was the point of that?!



An unnamed narrator, a salesman, is making his rounds and being absolutely destroyed by rejection. He then stumbles upon a gigantic building which the locals call the Tower of Moab. Some cultists decided, about a hundred years ago, to make the Tower of Babel a reality, and so they built this thing in their attempt to break through the sky and into Heaven. They also put murals on the sides depicting popular scenes from the Bible, in particular the Book of Revelation.


The narrator becomes obsessed with the Tower. He gives up selling and takes up drinking while staring out the window of the pub at this thing. He then quits his job and takes up residence at the inn above him so he can contemplate this thing while getting completely smashed on bottle after bottle of whiskey. This guy puts it away like Jim Thompson, who had a habit of polishing off six pints of the stuff every day.


Before long, he starts noticing a light within this building, and he sees ghosts floating around it at night. He comes to the conclusion that the builders succeeded, and that the top of this building resides in Heaven. These spirits are actually angels.


SPOILER ALERT: Well, this isn’t really a spoiler alert because NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS IN THIS STORY. There is no action, just some lousy drunk observing a really tall tower. In the end, he gets dragged away to the loony bin, and . . . that’s it.


Every piece of fiction must have a point. Otherwise, why write it? What exactly was Lewis’s purpose in publishing this tale? There doesn’t seem to be one. If you really want to stretch it, maybe he’s making a statement on how soul-crushing a sales job is, that it turns people into hallucinating drunkards. Not a bad thought, but still. Come on, now. END OF KINDA-SORTA SPOILERS.


Not only is there very little reward in reading this one, but there is also a lot of loose writing. This story would be best served streamlined, with a lot of the useless information cut out. The beginning, for example, is such an awful slog that most readers would give up on it right off the bat.


Not that the story is without merits. A lot of the useless parts are pretty funny, and it’s interesting to witness his ever-increasing whiskey habit. Aside from that, this story is kind of on the useless side. Pass.

[This story first appeared in TALES OF THE GROTESQUE, THE WEIRD, AND HORRIBLE, and it cannot be read online at this time.]