his is a fast and scatter shot review of a number of popular horror writers, intended mostly as a primer of limited scope on the genre.  I will probably expand this over time, but this grew from a short essay I was doing for my writing influences, until it seemed large enough to merit its own page.

Authors listed in no particular order, with recent additions on the bottom. Click the names, or just scroll down the page.

 • Dean R. Koontz
 • Anne Rice
 • Stephen King
 • H. P. Lovecraft
 • Clive Barker
 • Brian Lumley
 • William Johnstone
 • Ramsey Campbell
 • John Saul

Horror has a reputation for being junk.  That reputation is far from undeserved, as most horror is pretty schlocky, with standard characters and hastily-written tales.  It also often uses sex and/or violence to shock or titillate, and serious book critics look down their noses at that sort of thing.  Of course the books serious critics like are generally ignored by the general public, the same as movies, TV shows, etc, so most writers would prefer to be popular and live in a mansion than to be critically loved and teach high school English to pay the rent.

The fans of horror don't help this situation at all, as name recognition is just about all-important, and authors who do nothing interesting for 8 or 10 books in a row still are guaranteed best sellers.

Dean Koontz

I read probably 15 novels of his in the late 80's and early 90's, when I was first getting into horror.  I've not read any for the last 8 or 10 years, and from reviews I've seen I'm not really missing anything.  He is a great story teller, and the first 2/3 or so of all of his books are generally brilliant.  The problem is he tells the same story every time, with the exact same characters.

There's always a man with a troubled past, always a women he meets who is in danger and needs him to save her, and through their slowly-budding love, he'll be able to overcome his troubled past.  The enemies are always part of a huge conspiracy of some sort, seemingly too powerful to defeat, and there's almost always a sweeping, world-altering ending.  Along for the ride is usually a super smart and loveable child/animal, who has some sort of psychic powers or was made by government scientists with bionic abilities, etc.

This formula was followed rigidly in every novel of his I read, and it eventually burned me out on him, since it made everything too predictable.  I didn't notice the sameness of them all for several books, other than the "out of the blue" miraculously happy endings, but the formula for all of the stock characters became clear shortly after that, and I read a few more of his novels in pain, as I tried to ignore the obvious recycling of characters, before finally giving up on him.  Strangers I remember as being his best work, but don't quote me on that, it's been nearly a decade.

• More on Dean R. Koontz from a blog entry about him and my amnesiac history of reading his books.

Anne Rice

Anne Rice sells a ton, but I think she's just awful as a writer, and I don't think that's really open to debate.  Whether or not the stories/worlds she creates are interesting enough to get you through her plodding and rambling prose is the main issue.  I read all of one book of hers, The Witching Hour, and though it broke every rule of how a novel should be written, and impressed/influenced me with how much explicit sex there could be in a commercial novel, it wasn't bad, until the ending, which I hated since it seemed a total sell out of the characters, designed solely to confound reader expectations, and set up a sequel.  Which she of course wrote some years later.  I've not read it.

Her other work I've read parts of, but been unable to get through a full book.  She has a definite style, but it's so baroque and flowery and filled with diversions and indirections that it's just maddening to me, I keep wanting it to move on, move faster, stop with all of the meandering conversation and pointless moping.  Some years ago on a snowboarding vacation to Blackcomb in British Columbia I was out of reading material and got the first two novels in the Interview with a Vampire series, and read about 1/3 of the first novel, skipping ahead 5 or 10 pages every time it got too slow, but couldn't get through more than that.  So I've not read nearly enough of her stuff to have a real objective opinion on it, but that's because I can't stand to read more of it to form one. I do recommend her porn, written as A.N. Roquelaure.  It's downright subversive, with all sorts of fetishism, mostly about discipline and bondage and beatings and denial of orgasm.  Not really "jerk off" porn though; it's too weird and literary for that. It's more like, "read a chapter a night with your partner and see where it leads you" material, and while you can find similar stuff on every Internet erotic fiction site for free, you might want it in hardcover.

October 4, 2004

As for Anne Rice, whom I mentioned a moment ago, I hadn't given her work any thought in years (I'm not much of a fan) but in the last Entertainment Weekly there was a note in the books section about some controversy. Apparently her last book, Blood Canticle, was a huge disappointment to most of her fans, and they've been free with their opinions on the Amazon.com reader reviews. That's nothing out of the ordinary, but what made this instance worth national media mention is that Anne somehow stumbled across the reviews, got pissed, and wrote a long rebuttal which she concluded by offering a refund to anyone who wanted one, and including her home address and email. Hey, you might think she's a dreadful writer, but at least she's not afraid to put her money where her mouth is. Or fingers were, as the case may be.

I'm not going to recap the whole debate, mostly since I only got through one of her books (The Witching Hour) and that was over a decade ago, so I have no opinion on the quality of this new novel. To summarize the argument though, many fans hate the new book, hate the way her hero vampire Lestat narrates it and talks in slang and acts like a big kid, and especially hate that Rice has said this book is the last in two of her ongoing series, the Mayfair Witches and the Vampire Chronicles. Apparently lots of the characters from both series are in this book, the main female from the Witch series falls in love with Lestat, and everyone is going to live happily ever after.  Unfortunately for the fans, this represents a huge change for both characters, and dozens of other long time characters are hardly in this last book or aren't mentioned at all, and none of the other major plot lines wrap up at all. Or at least not to the satisfaction of most of her long time readers.

Here's a quote from one of the most agreed-with reviews:

I thought BLOOD CANTICLE was not only extremely disappointing as the swan-song episode of Rice's two-decade homage to the macabre, but also whiny, affected, uninspired, and poorly written. I could have written a better final installment myself ... even if I'd never read the rest of her series. For her diehard fans, Rice provides absolutely no closure. Her heroes, antiheroes, villains, vampires, witches, monsters, ghosts, and saints act and react entirely out of character with the personalities Rice established in previous editions. And most of her major protagonists are left dangling, or worse, absent completely. Clearly, what started out with a bang, has ended with a barely audible hiss ...

So what did Anne say about it? You can see her rebuttal here, and if the link doesn't work for you just sort the reader reviews by "most popular" and hers will come up first. It's got 321/692 recommendations now and will always be on top, since even though most readers don't recommend her remarks, the Amazon.com sorting simply counts the total recommend votes in sorting them. However, if you scroll down past the author's own 5/5 star, defensive and completely-nonobjective retort, you'll see that the majority of other recommended reviews are pretty poor.  In order, by number of recommends, the next 9 reviews give the book 3, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 3, 2 stars.  The overall average is just 3/5, which is very low for a best seller by anyone.

I'd quote Rice's entire commentary, but since it's 1216 words (I pasted it into Word just to count them.) with no paragraph breaks at all, it's huge and difficult to read. It also addresses issues I can't comment on, since I haven't read the book in question. I did like this one bit she included, defending her practice of flying without an editor.

And no, I have no intention of allowing any editor ever to distort, cut, or otherwise mutilate sentences that I have edited and re-edited, and organized and polished myself. I fought a great battle to achieve a status where I did not have to put up with editors making demands on me, and I will never relinquish that status. For me, novel writing is a virtuoso performance. It is not a collaborative art.

The problem here, is that editors aren't so much interested in nibbling around with every sentence in a book. In fact with Rice's work they probably wouldn't try that at all, since her writing style is so dense and florid that you've just got to let her ramble on; if you started cleaning up her prose you'd have to rewrite the entire novel.  No, where an editor would come in handy for her, and for other writers (Jean Auel, for instance) who refuse to use them while desperately-needing them, is in keeping a book on track, cutting extraneous sections, pointing out things that need to make more sense, need more explanation, etc. I couldn't get through more than a few chapters of Interview with a Vampire because it was so poorly-written, in terms of the prose, but that's not what anyone (that I saw) is objecting to about Blood Canticle. The Amazon reviews Rice so dislikes aren't bitching about her word arrangement or grammar; they're upset that she's changed the characters so radically, failed to wrap up the plot threads or character arcs adequately, etc. And that's the sort of thing an editor is very good at pointing out, since as I know from my own writing experience, it can get very hard to see the forest for the trees when you're rewriting and editing your own work. You get too close to it, too caught up in the small changes, and I'll often reread something months or years later and see huge plot holes or large sections of exposition I could have improved that were invisible to me at the time.

Rice does address a lot of the more-specific criticisms of her novel further down her rebuttal, but since I haven't (and I'm not going to) read the book, I'm not quoting or commenting on those. I did find her defensiveness somewhat disappointing though, since it demonstrates a lack of objectivity that any good writer must possess.  Just the fact that she gave her own book a 5 star rating throws me off, since I can't imagine ever liking anything I write that much. There are always things I could have done better, could have improved, and I'm not unhappy with my work, but it seems impossibly immodest to give one of my own stories a perfect rating.

If you want more of Rice's thoughts, she's added a post on her official website about the issue. It's borderline-insufferable, as she talks about how 95% of the emails she's gotten re: her amazon review have been from huge fans who told her to ignore those meanies, how she never thought her post on Amazon would be noticed or elicit any comment, how she's just a big Internet noob who doesn't know anything about a "flame war" and so on.  It makes her sound impossibly smug and caught up in her own little world, where anyone who doesn't like her work can't possibly have anything to base their opinion on and should safely be ignored.  And so she does, and continues on her merry editor-less way, much to the detriment of her novel quality, it would seem.

Lastly, I would like to say that personally, I really have no opinion of Anne Rice. I read one of her novels and sort of enjoyed it until the very end, when I thought it went to shit, and I couldn't get through her most famous novel since the prose was just so impossibly florid and the pace so glacial, but I know a lot of people who love her work, and clearly she's influential in the horror fiction genre.  I've never read an interview with her, I don't follow her book sales, and I don't read any forums about her or dislike her just because lots of wanna-be goth white kids identify much too strongly with her particular take on vampires. Other than seeing some press about her being carried down Mardi Gras in a huge glass coffin some years ago, and vaguely knowing that her house is a big gothic shrine along the style of her vampire characters, I really know nothing about her, and had no idea her long-time husband had recently died until I saw some mention of it in the Amazon reviews.  So really, while I've seen enough to not want to spend any more of my life reading any of her work, I don't mind that other people enjoy it, or that she's popular. I'd certainly love to have a career half as successful.  She doesn't inspire the disgust I feel towards really hack-tastic authors, like R. A. Salvatore or John Saul, for instance.

Stephen King

Stephen King was my first real horror influence.  Firestarter was the first horror fiction I read, and I loved everything he did up until around the mid 90's, when he changed a lot, got more into psychological horror, and seemed to run out of the big ideas he'd been writing up to that point.  Gerald's Game was the first novel of his I read that was really disappointing, and most of Dark Tower 4 was pretty dire, with the endless young love flashback.  His last novel, DreamCatcher, was sort of a less-inventive, less-believable, and much smaller scale retelling of Tommyknockers.  It felt like a low-budget horror version of Men in Black, but it wasn't awful.  Just nothing special.

I do look forward to the remaining Dark Tower novels, even though Dark Tower IV was mostly crap.  His recent Black House, with Peter Straub, had some fascinating imagery and scenes, though it was somewhat unsatisfying over all. He's not all the way to being a " big bang" writer (see the Fantasy Review page for the definition of this term) now, but he's never been all that great a writer; he's much more of the fantasy style, with great characters and events, but not so good in the actual prose.  Readers with less-active imaginations find his inventions awesome, since they are weird and evil, but grounded enough in the real world to not require too much mental heavy lifting.

I have thus far reviewed three of his novels, Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah, Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower, and From a Buick 8, and will add more reviews over time. I would definitely like to reread and review some of his earlier work, the novels that first got me turned on to horror fiction, and I really need to greatly expand this quick entry into a full page of commentary on him. But, as with everything else, the hard part is finding the time.

October 20, 2003

Reader mail, from Cindithe.

Many years ago, I met Stephen King at our Antique Shop in Lambertville, NJ. We closed the shop for the evening, lit some candles, drank some wine, and discussed horror fiction. I asked him how much of an influence Lovecraft had on some of his stories, and he kind of pooh-pooh it, saying Lovecraft was "too archaic." I listened to what he had to say, however, there are too many references to Lovecraftian ideas in a lot of his writings to believe he wasn't all that influenced. Just an afterthough as I was thinking about what you said about your own book. 

I love that second mail.  I've pretty well fallen out of love/like with King's work, other than looking forward to the last three Dark Tower novels, but I would give quite a bit to sit with him and drink wine and talk about fiction.  Plus it sounds like Cindi got to do so back in the old days, when he was still turning out really good work (in my critic's critical opinion, anyway).  I also agree with her(?) appraisal of King's influences.  He's not especially gothic or vast in his imaginings.  After all, he basically invented, or at least massively popularized the whole "weird things happening in everyday life to normal people" which was why he became the best selling author alive, for quite some time.  Not everyone can identify with weird characters doing weird things in weird locations, or magic, or fantasy, or other story topics that require a lot of imagination and suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader to go along with the story.  But most everyone can get into a story about normal, ordinary people who are suddenly brought face to face with horrible and bizarre events with a touch of magic to them, and that's basically what most of King's most successful stories entail.

So while King doesn't have that many direct and obvious Lovecraftian influences, as opposed to someone like Brian Lumley, who is basically writing comic-book'y modern versions of Lovecraft tales, I think King has some major Lovecraft in his plotting, most obviously in the whole Dark Tower series, and the other books tied into it.  I'm sure that Lovecraft wasn't the first to postulate or invent an entire alternate world of dark gods and mighty powers existing beside or behind our mortal world, but he did it very famously, and King's entire mythos of the Dark Tower is quite similar to that, in many ways.  Nothing is directly inspired (or ripped off, ala Lumley) but the evil demi-gods and ultimate power of the Dark Tower influencing and threatening all of the world, while a few select individuals know about this and battle for the good while the vast majority of people know nothing about it is quite similar to the stories of the Cthulhu Mythos that Lovecraft invented and popularized.

November 18, 2003

The other email for today is a My First Time mail that came in last night.  I'll quote the whole thing on that page at some point (he's very nice and complimentary) but here I'm just going to quote the Stephen King-related stuff, and then segue into some comments about Wolves of the Calla, which I just finished last night.

My first hit on your site came about as a result of having just read from a Buick 8 and wondering if anyone else shared my view that King has had his day.

Just as a matter of interest why does everybody refer to IT as being one of Kings better books? I thought it was utter drivel, and not in any way compatible with The Shining, Salem's Lot, The Dead Zone or indeed any of his earlier works.

King's gift as a writer in his early works was to take a ludicrous assertion (vampires, psychics, demonic cars etc.) and make you believe in the possibility of their existence whereas his recent works do not even bother to try this trick but rather just leave you with the impression that it's all too much trouble for him to try to find a beginning , middle and end to his stories.

--Nick

My review of From a Buick 8 can be seen here.

Malaya read his email when she got in this afternoon, and she thought it was odd, since she's a big King fan, and has read everything he's written, and like me has found most of his recent stuff to be his worst work.  However she saw this list of favorite King books by Nick, and said that The Shining, Salem's Lot, and The Dead Zone were three of her least favorite of his.  On the other hand, she's read The Stand and It probably half a dozen times each.

I'm not entirely with her on that.  I think It and The Stand are probably the best two things King's ever written, both in terms of quality and reading enjoyability, as least if you don't count all five (so far) Dark Tower books as one huge story.  But I also liked all of King's early stuff, and Salem's Lot is one of my favorites.  I didn't think The Shining or The Dead Zone were as good, and I'd probably put The Dead Zone in the lower third, mostly since the story was so small.  It's a guy, he gets psychic/foretelling powers, and and he doesn't do a whole lot with them until the somewhat hurried conclusion where he realizes that a rising politician is going to start WWIII.  It's not a bad story, and the guy's reactions to his new superpowers are pretty interesting and believable, but compare it to a somewhat similar story like Firestarter, that took a similar premise and did a ton with it, and I think the difference is clear.

Anyway, I suppose every fan of an author has a different take on what's their best and worst work.  Most people like King's current stuff a lot less than his earlier stuff, and it's got to suck for King since he realizes he's losing it.  His writing talent is as good or better than ever, but he's just not coming up with the fresh, original, interesting ideas anymore.  He must feel like he's already done practically everything he thinks of, as he said about Buick 8, when he admitted that it could easily be compared to Christine.  I didn't think he was entirely fair to himself, but I admire him for saying it.

He's aware that he's not as compelling as he once was, despite being a better writer, and that's got to hurt.  I compare him to other popular horror writers like Anne Rice or Dean Koontz, writers who have been churning out essentially identical material for 20 or 30 years.  Koontz is the most obvious, since every novel he writes has basically the same plot and the same characters with different names.  All of them are pretty good, all of them are page turners, and most readers never notice any problems at all.  Readers who analyze a bit more deeply (intentionally or not) start to notice after about half a dozen books that he's basically doing the same thing, and after 10 or 12 books are growing bored, since they know what's going to happen in the end, since the same thing always happens in the end.

King's never grown as predictable as that, but he's not content just being a great writer with mediocre stories, and it seems like he'll stop writing, or publishing, if he gets to the point that he feels like he's just rooting through his own leavings, 20 years later.

I wonder if he might consider changing genres, going to fantasy or scifi or something, since he's doing a very good job with the Dark Tower series and it's mostly fantasy, of an Old West sort.  He might have exhausted every possible plot line or character complication in the weird version of the real world that he sets his stories in, but perhaps he'd think of more interesting things to do if he stuck of fantasy; something set in the world of Eyes of the Dragon, perhaps.

November 20, 2003

Lastly, about King's writing, I am sure you do not need another person saying how his writing has fallen off in recent years, so I won't...um...nevermind. I haven't read much of his in a while and I don't read fiction very often (hard to find stories I am interested in enough to read). 

Black House was the last one I started and just couldn't get into it...probably didn't read enough. With all of the talk of the Dark Tower series, I bought The Gunslinger (in paperback: $8.99; hardcover: $24.99...had to buy paperback) on a Friday and ate the book over the weekend, needing to buy The Drawing of the Three on Monday. Haven't read much except the opening scene on the beach; weekends I have more time. 

So, I wanted to thank you for the reviews and nonspoilers you have provided about the series...I am looking forward to reading the other 6 especially since I have heard The Wastlands and The Wolves of the Calla talked about in higher esteem.

I would recommend Black House, and I'm pretty sure I blogged about it at some point, though I can't now find mention of it anywhere other than briefly on the dreadfully-inadequate Horror Novelist Review page.  I don't recall how it started or how long it took to get good, but it's an excellent and rather creepy/gory story on its own, with the whole tie in to the Dark Tower mythos adding to the fun. You can appreciate Black House without knowing Dark Tower, however.

As for Dark Tower, I never loved the first book, but didn't mind it so much.  However a lot of King readers did, not liking the much slower and more poetic tone he took in it.  Malaya for example, who needed several tries over about a decade to get past the first chapter of desert wandering.  I've not checked out the revisited Dark Tower #1 book that King published recently, in which he redid and added substantial portions to the original book, tinkered with the wording and pace throughout.  

The second book is a lot more like traditional modern-era King and has interesting action and more characters and more of the back and forth between our world and Roland's fantasy world, and so it goes from there.  Books 3 and 4 take place almost entirely in the fantasy world, with virtually no cross over to our world, and I liked that; I didn't think the world jumping (ALA the Talisman/Black House) was a strong part of the stories.  However there is a lot of world-hopping in Book 5, Wolves of the Calla, and I thought it was well done and interesting, so I've gotta give King props for pulling off what I didn't think he could pull. 

Howard Phillip Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft is hard to get into, but if you like the real gothic style of writing, he's the one to know.  I first read him many years ago, with The Rats in the Walls, and The Call of the Cthulhu in some short story anthologies I read, and was amazed by his work.  I've read everything of his now, (there's unfortunately little) and he's very much a fantasy/horror cross, with some straight fantasy, ala The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, but with numerous horror elements in it. His writing was intentionally antiquarian, even for the 1920's and 30's when he was in his prime, so it's positively pre-diluvian now, but I still read some of his stories on a regular basis.  The otherworldly elements he creates are amazing, as is the scope of his imagination.

Beyond the Mountains of Madness I think of all the time, and The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward has some incredibly good stuff.  The main problem with Lovecraft is the distance the narrative/narrator almost always takes from the events.  There are some money shots, for example Cthulhu clawing his way out of his tomb, but most often the writing cheats the reader of the big events, such as by taking the perspective of the one group of privateers who don't go into battle in the The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward, or having the key events take place off screen, or relayed to us by a narrator long afterwards, who doesn't remember all of the details, or who blacked out for the crucial moments of the encounter.

One interesting detail is that my main plot device for my first finished novel, Miss Pretty Lies, was an ancient witch who could project her consciousness and take over the body of a person for years at a time, living through them, controlling them, often doing horrible things and then leaving them to take the consequences.  The person would return to their body not knowing anything had occurred, and perhaps find themselves thousands of miles away, or standing over a corpse, or in prison for a murder they knew nothing of.  After writing that novel I read a Lovecraft story that had an almost identical event, that of an alien mind taking over the main character for several years, and him eventually returning with no memory of the missing time.  I was greatly dismayed by this at the time, thinking my novel was ruined, but I've come since then to appreciate how little fiction has any real original ideas in it, and that even though hardly anyone who has read the Lovecraft will believe that I didn't steal the idea when they read my novel, it won't really matter for my work's commercial prospects (of which it has basically none, at this point), and so few people (have the patience to) read Lovecraft anyway.

October 20, 2003

A reader comments:

Hi. I just read your review of HP Lovecraft, and I enjoyed what you have written. I don't agree, however, that very few people have the patience to read Lovecraft....he was not meant for everyone to read. And, from my experience going back to 1970 when I first read "Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath," there are many of us in this world who can read his stories and get lost in them for their true horror and fantasy. I, for one, have been a Lovecraft fan for 33 years, have read about all he has written, and go back and re-read his stories every once in a while because, as strange as this sounds, I find a weird "comfort" in returning to his stories. There is so much craziness going on in the world today, escaping to the stories of HPL is almost a vacation.

By the way, you are right, no story is truly unique, so what if you wrote a story similar to a Lovecraft one, as you said, few people have the patience to read Lovecraft, so what does it matter? I used to write love letters to my boyfriend at the time (1970, University of Miami) using Lovecraftian themes, and he would write the same to me. We didn't plagerize, but we did learn where our imaginations could go by using Lovecraft as a guide.

I should also probably modify my "hardly anyone reads Lovecraft anyway" (paraphrasing myself) comment, since his work is growing in popularity all the time. Lovecraft is a lot like Tolkien in a way; their work is very hard to read if you are only used to modern writing, but if you acquire the taste you'll enjoy not just their stories and ideas, but the actual writing itself.  I like Lovecraft and Tolkien and the writing of some other old-fashioned authors; Algernon Blackwood, for instance, to throw in a horror/ghost-story writer of some note.

Yet while I like it, or at least can stand to take the time to get through it, lots of people can't.  Malaya, for instance, has tried to read LotR several times, and never gotten through the first 50 pages.  She likes The Hobbit since that one moves along so much more quickly, but she can't force herself to trudge through Fellowship.  Interestingly, she felt the same way about King's Dark Tower I, since book one in that series starts off very slowly and boringly, with Roland trekking across a desert for quite a few pages.

Finally, just a couple of months ago, partially due to my encouragement, she got past the first deadly slow part, found that she liked it, and has since read the whole series, and has joined me in eagerly-awaiting the Wolves of Callah, which is due out around the same time as Matrix 3, in early November.  Whether or not the same thing will happen for her with LotR or Lovecraft is unknown, and I'm not pushing them on her, I just think they are work well worth reading, for a reader who can take the time to get into them.

Clive Barker

In my opinion, Clive Barker is the best writer working in horror, and the author of the best few horror novels ever written (though Stephen King in his prime was exceptional as well, as a storyteller, though never the quality of writer as Barker).  I'd have to rank Barker's Imajica as the best novel I've ever read, and if I put together a top 25 horror short stories list, Barker would probably have 15 or 20 of those slots.  His short stories and novels are so vast, so imaginative, and filled with such gloriously arranged prose that I really don't have anyone to compare him to.  At his best he leaves all the rest in the dust.

A few first sentences from some of his short stories in the Books of Blood, The Inhuman Condition, and In the Flesh (sometimes published as 5 Books of Blood).

Son of Celluloid: Barbario felt fine, despite the bullet.

Rawhead Rex: Of all the conquering armies that had tramped the streets of Zeal down the centuries, it was finally the mild tread of the Sunday tripper that brought the village to its knees.  It has suffered Roman legions, and the Norman conquest, it had survived the agonies of Civil War, all without losing its identity to the occupying forces.  But after centuries of boot and blade it was to be the tourists -- the new barbarians -- that bested Zeal, their weapons courtesy and hard cash.

Human Remains: Some trades are best practiced by daylight, some by night. Gavin was a professional in the latter category.  In midwinter, in midsummer, leaning against a wall, or poised in a doorway, a firefly cigarette hovering at his lips, he sold what sweated in his jeans to all comers.

Dread: There is no delight the equal of dread.  If it were possible to sit, invisible, between two people on any train, in any waiting room or office, the conversation overheard would time and again circle on that subject. Certainly the debate might appear to be about something entirely different; the state of the nation, idle chat about death on the roads, the rising price of dental care; but strip away the metaphor, the innuendo, and there, nestled at the heart of the discourse, is dread.  While the nature of God, and the possibility of eternal life go undiscussed, we happily chew over the minutiae of misery.

The Forbidden: Like a flawless tragedy, the elegance of which structure is lost upon those suffering in it, the perfect geometry of the Spector Street Estate was visible only from the air.

The Yattering and Jack: Why the powers (long may they hold court; long may they shit light on the head of the damned) had sent it out from Hell to stalk Jack Polo, the Yattering couldn't discover.

These are the best short stories I've ever read, and I've read thousands of horror short stories, in various anthologies and collections.  Others in that run don't have the opening lines to add here, but are just as good or better overall.  In the Hills, the Cities, found in Book One of the Books of Blood, is the best short story I've ever read, both for execution and and especially for the concept, which is literally mind-boggling in its invention.

Unfortunately Barker's writing quantity has fallen well off in the last 5 years, and the quality as well, which is more distressing. His last two novels, Galilee and Coldheart Canyon, are clearly his least interesting, and Sacrament before them signaled the beginning of the decline, with a lot of very slow and boring stuff in the beginning and middle, but such amazingly good writing that it carried the heavy load along well enough.  All still have moments and concepts of brilliance, but overall they can't compare to his earlier stuff. He's doing so many other projects, painting, children's books, screenplays and theatre, that it obviously eats into his horror novel writing time.

Brian Lumley

This summary was written after reading several of his books. The entries below are blog posts made while in the process of reading them.

Lumley is best known for his series of Necroscope novels, which are vampire novels in a comic book style of superhero action. As for the man himself, Lumley is another popular novelist who has no real literary background.  (Further proof that juicy ideas infinitely triumph actual writing talent, when it comes to selling books.) He was in the British army for years, and his novels have nothing literary in them.  They aren't awful, but they are most analogous to comic books.  The characters are all larger than life and one-dimensional; their physical appearance is always described in great detail, and that's all there is to them. Their personalities are always exactly what you see at first glance, and there are never any real surprises in terms of how they react to situations.  Like most mediocre but popular writers, Lumley is very good at creating interesting settings and plots and action, but the dialogue and character dynamics are lacking. His plots are really most like TV sci fi, with horror elements; there are time-traveling characters who appear in multiple books in different timelines, alternate universe sub plots, dimensional holes, and so on. It's all well-designed too; you can tell he thought it all out in advance, rather than making up new stuff in book 5 and trying to rewrite history to fit the new ideas in.

Lumley's biggest weakness is writing dialogue. The conversations in the book are never in any way realistic, and honestly they aren't even conversations. The only ones that seem real are very short exchanges, with one or two words exchanged. The longer "conversations" are just paragraphs of exposition with quotations around them. His characters don't actually converse, they take turns giving soliloquies, usually incorporating huge chunks of exposition into them. Someone will meet another character they've been looking for, and then each will take a turn giving a two page speech that covers their entire background history, recent events, motivation and plot designs, immediate objectives, etc.  It makes things easy for the reader to follow, but it's hardly realistic. If you notice such things and consider if any real person would ever actually say what the characters are saying, you'll be bothered by it.  Most readers don't notice, so aren't bothered.

Another issue with the dialogue is that no one has a unique voice.  They all talk in contemporary voices and all sound alike.  If there aren't dialogue tags, like "he said," on every line, you will lose track of who is saying what since all the characters speak with the same voice.  It's often unintentionally amusing when some 800 year old vampire who has been a ghostly spirit confined to a deserted castle for the last four centuries is reanimated and stalks forth to ravage the world, saying things like, "ok" and "gotcha".

There are a lot of convenient things. The characters can do anything they need to do to move the plot along.  If someone needs to read someone's mind to catch one key thought they'll always do so, and if they need to miss reading a thought to keep some bit of suspense going, they'll miss it.  There aren't any real checks or balances either, on the magic or special powers. Some characters have miraculous powers that don't seem to tax them in any way to use.  It seems too easy. I like systems of magic in book worlds to have some "reality" to them.  I.E. doing X requires Y.  I like casting a huge spell to be a great effort, or physically taxing, or the character must consider the effect this will have on the balance of power in their land. You won't get anything like this in Lumley's Necroscope.  When characters can just do their magical tricks constantly with no difficulty it's not real suspenseful.  It's more like a video game.

You can read him very quickly; whether you think this is good or bad is up to you.  The sentence structure is very basic, there aren't any higher-vocabulary words, and there's almost no need to pay close attention to catch foreshadowing or subtle hints about something or other. If you want a real comparison, read some Dickens.  You often have to read his paragraphs twice or thrice to grasp what he's saying and often once you do you are amazed at how cleverly he's worded something, with puns, plays on words, double meanings, etc. A scene with a character eating a slice of bread with a lot of butter from Great Expectations gets a more engaging description than the whole final battle in Deadspeak.

There's one other annoying horror movie tactic, in that the good guys, who are often slow and clumsy humans, are nevertheless able to slaughter the supposedly faster, stronger, supernaturally-powerful vampires, in hand to hand combat, nearly every time.  It's really video game-esque in places, as the people walk up, the vampires run out like idiots and promptly get blown away.  You wonder how they live to be 500 years old when the first time they ever face anyone hostile they walk right into a hail of bullets or get blasted by a spear gun/decapitated thirty seconds after the fight begins.

April 19, 2002

I finally got to the library yesterday and picked up several of the Brian Lumley Necroscope novels, which were recommended to me over a month ago by a reader email from Chris.

I just read your writing background/thoughts on fantasy/horror. I have not read any Barker, but I will try him out knowing he is so highly praised. How does he compare with Brian Lumley and/or what do you think of Lumley's writing?

I had yet to read any of them, but had posted another note about it when this email came in just recently from Jim:

Was going through your mail bag and saw a dude suggest Brian Lumley. I'd say save yourself the wasted time myself. The stories are OK I guess and have some neat ideas, but the guy kinda suffers from the Koontz syndrome where he tends to repeat the same plot line again and again. It's more annoying though because he's got the same main character and a few repeating secondary characters. Basically it goes: guy has powers, gets in trouble because of powers, discovers new and even more ridiculous way to use said powers and saves the day. Now of course the big variety is how he gets into trouble; sometimes he's recruited into it, sometimes it's a chance encounter, etc. 

So anyway, last night and today I read the 3rd book in his Necroscope series, Deadspeak.  It's about 300 pages, of which the first 25 or so are recaps of the first two books in the series.  Which is convenient, since the library didn't have either of the first two books, and I didn't care enough to wait and hunt them down elsewhere.

It wasn't bad, but it wasn't real good either.  Lumley's not a great writer by any stretch of the imagination.  He's tolerable, but he has no real gift for prose, and the character dialogue was often laughably bad.  No one really has a conversation; they sort of take turns making soliloquies.  There is no tone to it as of real people talking.  One basic writing technique is to read your dialogue out loud, either as you write it or in proofreading.  It's hard to get a feel for realistic-sounding speech on the page, but if you read it out loud it's much easier to judge.  The dialogue by Lumley has no rhythm to it, and he mostly uses it for exposition; one character explaining something, often paragraphs at a time, even in crisis situations. Obviously no one would speak in long, complete sentences when they are running for their lives.  He also has 500 year old vampires saying, "ok" or "gotcha", or other modern slang.  Everyone talks the same too, there's no individual voice to the characters.  The vampire from 800 years ago talks just like the 22 y/o Asian government agent.  It's a small thing, but I noticed it repeatedly.

Lumley does seem to have a very good imagination for his whole world.  There are tons of long, involved historical events, parallel worlds, space and time travel, magic, etc.  I don't get the feeling it's all really well-planned out; like characters can just sort of do whatever they need to do to move the plot along.  If someone needs to read a given mind thought, they'll do it, and if they need to miss it to keep some bit of suspense going, they'll miss it.  There aren't any real checks of balances either, some characters have miraculous powers that don't seem to tax them in any way to use. I like systems of magic in book worlds to have some "reality" to them.  I.E. doing X requires Y, effort or learning or it's mentally taxing, or something.  When characters can just do their magical tricks constantly with no difficulty it's not real suspenseful.  It's more like a video game.

Anyway, I've got the 4th book also, so I guess I'll give it a look tonight.  His writing is very sparse and not of a very advanced vocabulary level, so I can read it very quickly.  Not that big words slow me down, it's not like I'm getting up and checking them in a dictionary, but generally writers that have more advanced vocabularies create more advanced sentence structure and more detailed descriptions, and have some ulterior motives or foreshadowing in the details, so you want to not miss a word or you'll miss something good.  Simpler writing you can just skim, since getting the gist is all there is to get. I read the last 200 pages of Deadspeak today in about 90 minutes in the tub, for example.

If you want a real comparison, read some Dickens.  You often have to read paragraphs 2 or 3x to really see what he's saying, and often it's very funny.  Virtually anything becomes interesting when it's well written.  A scene with a character eating a slice of bread with a lot of butter from Great Expectations is a more engaging description than the whole final battle in Deadspeak.  Dickens is and old-style of writing, but even modern writers can put a lot more description and interest into their prose, rather than just sparse physical descriptions.

The other weakness in Lumley's writing, at least from the one book I've read, is that the characters are so static.  They don't have any layers, what you see in the first description is what you get.  The bad guys are bad, robotic in behavior.  The good guys are good, equally robotic.  No one ever does anything that seems out of character or surprising, and no one changed at all in the course of the novel, in their attitudes or philosophies.  In fact they really don't have such things, for the action is almost entirely plot-driven.  There's no real contemplation of why or what or who, it's just point A to point B.

That being said, it's not a bad read.  There wasn't really that much sex/violence of interest.  Some sex, but mostly conventional, and lots of violence, with dozens of vampires getting their heads chopped off, but it seems very mechanical.  The other thing that annoyed me was that like most action movies, the good guys who might be slow and clumsy humans are nevertheless able to slaughter the supposedly faster, stronger, supernaturally powerful vampires, in hand to hand combat, nearly every time.  It's really video game-esque in places, as the people walk up, the vampires run out like idiots and get shot.  You wonder how they live to be 500 years old when the first time they ever face anyone hostile they walk right into their spear gun and get decapitated in two minutes.

The writer it reminded me most of is William Johnstone, who is utter pulp, really just slasher porn, in his Devil's Heart series.  I don't know how many books he's done in it to this point, but I read the first 5 or so, the last of them in probably 1992 or thereabouts, before getting sick of it.  Pulp bin stuff, certainly none published in hardcover.

Johnstone's was sort of Christian series, in that the books are always a battle between God and Satan, but entirely carried out by humans.  Every book is the same thing; some huge coven of Satan worshipers appears in some small town, Satan sort of walls off the town from outsiders, the Satanic people orgy and crucify a bunch of weak-faithed Christians, before the main character, Sam Balon, who is all righteous and a holy warrior guy, goes Rambo and kills almost all of them by himself, with the help of a few locals of stronger faith.  There is always a ton of sex, porn style, with Satanic higher-ups seducing or raping the Christians, who eventually shake it off and kill them, as well as lots of sex as the Satanic forces take new converts, rape their enemies, etc.  Various demonic monsters pop up from time to time, there are "Beasts", sort of God's mistake creatures that live in stinking holes in the ground and eat people, etc.  It's all very formulaic and silly, but if you want really pure horror crap, that's what you want.  The amount of sex and violence leaves Lumley miles in the dust, though the writing quality is even less advanced.

I'll read another book or two by Lumley and add something on him to the horror fiction overview page, and throw in some Johnstone also, I suppose.  I was just going to cover famous authors, or authors I really liked myself, but I should probably do every author I've read enough of to have a valid opinion on, as a sort of reader service, as well as excuse for me to go on and on about writing.  Which is a gift of mine you might.  *cough*

April 20, 2002

A couple of corrections on the Brian Lumley notes from yesterday: Deadspeak was the 4th book, not the 3rd.  It had two 10 page recaps at the start of it, which I assumed were of the first two books.  They were instead of the first three, (I guess) and just broken into two evenly-sized segments.  I also don't have the next one, I have the 6th one, and it's not real interesting the first 100 pages or so.  He's hitting the next generation problem that a lot of fantasy series get.

No, nothing to do with Star Trek, the "next generation" problem is what happens often when the first 3 or 4 or 5 books in a series are of the original interesting characters and world, and then rather than calling it a series and moving on to something different, or writing prequels, or further adventures of, the author continues in the same world, but moves on to the kids of the characters.  Who are almost invariably less interesting than their parents were, at the same age, 3 or 4 books earlier. The world they are in isn't new and fresh to the reader either, so the fun of discovery is mostly gone, and it's just dumb kids with variants of their parent's powers, doing more or less the same things that happened 20 or 25 years previously. Piers Anthony is notorious for this, as he ruined two long series (that I know of) in this fashion, with Xanth, which Jumped the Shark after about the 6th book, and certainly by the 8th or 9th when he was into the next-next generation, and also his Apprentice Adept series, which did a frickin' triple gainer over the shark after the initial trilogy, when there weren't just children, there were robot children.

So Book 5 in Lumley's Necroscope series appears to be all about the main male character's teenaged sons fighting it out, and that continues in book 6, which is what I'm reading now.  Maybe.

William Johnstone

This guy is an extremely-prolific pulp writer.  Check out his Amazon.com listing, he's got over 150 novels for sale.  You can't write that many novels in your entire life unless you are just churning them out, and that precludes any real attention to detail or hand-crafting. (Either that or you've got delusional acolytes writing them after you die and claiming you wrote about twenty novels in the last year of your life while dying from cancer.) Johnstone is not dead yet, so it must be the former. Expect shoddy pulp, and don't be disappointed when you get it.

The horror novels of his that I've read are the The Devil's series (Heart, Touch, Cat, etc), which are sort of X-rated Christian fiction.  Every story is basically the same, with a noble Christian guy, Sam Balon, battling some entire town of evil Satanic types, and triumphing.  The horror aspect is that there is extensive gore and violence and sex.  There are numerous lingering scenes of rape, seduction, every sort of sex, murder, bestiality, etc. Those who serve Satan may be defeated in the end, but they certainly have a lot of fun before then.

Basically, it's Left Behind on a small scale, with a lot of sex and gore, which of course was what kept it from being a huge hit with the indiscriminate but prudish evangelical Christians who keep that apocalyptic dreck on the best seller list.

Johnstone isn't a bad writer, but these are very formulaic stories that appeal more to the immature reader.  If you can't get enough gore and sex and don't mind sporadic proselytizing, (there is always some stupid atheist scientist who gets his comeuppance at the hands of a horde of demons) you'll probably enjoy these.  I wouldn't recommend paying money for them, unless you can find them at a swap meat for about a quarter.

I first got one at random from a paperback display while on vacation and desperate for something to read, when I was about 13. I loved it, devoured it, read the whole book about three times in the next week, wanking furiously to several of the longer sex scenes.  Today, as a semi-adult I can't read 10 pages of any of the books without beginning to gag on the cheesiness of it all. Use my example to gauge your likely interest in it.

John Saul

My entire John Saul experience is currently derived from reading the first half dozen pages of one of his novels. I'll try to find the time/interest to check out something by him and update my comments once they're coming from a more informed POV.

August 9, 2004

First off, John Saul's Hellfire. I've long heard of Saul as a horror writer along the lines of Peter Straub. Less action/realism than Stephen King; more atmosphere and ambience and lurking menace. Since I enjoyed much of both Talisman novels that Straub wrote with King, but couldn't get through more than 50 pages of Straub's best-known work, Ghost Story, I wasn't exactly chomping at the bit to get into Saul's work. But while killing time in a used bookstore earlier this week, and trying not to claw my ears out as the bored owner endlessly explained to an utterly clueless guy why his 1960 reprint of The Wizard of Oz was worth $10, rather than the $900 collectors were willing to pay for an illustrated first edition one, a row of Saul's work appeared before my eyes, and I selected one at random.

I can't cast a fair judgment on the man's body of work, since he's written over 30 novels and I've read the prologue of one of them... but the 5 pages of Hellfire that I got through were some of the worst horror I have ever seen. And I've read a lot of bad, pulpy horror.  There are only 10 Amazon reviews for Hellfire, they're largely-positive, and since none of them mention anything about the portion or character I read about, I take it the introductory horror scene I skimmed through is just that, a quick introduction that has very little to do with the rest of the plot.

Perhaps the rest of the book is really quite good, I don't know. I do know that the introduction read like something I would have written when I was about 14, and just falling in love with horror and the concepts of cool stalking monsters in the darkness.  There's a boy who lives outside of town. He walks across a railroad track towards town, sees the old boarded up building he's always mysteriously dreaded, some other boys seem him and laugh, that spurs him to finally dare enter the building after snapping off a conveniently-rusted out lock, and once inside he's immediately run down by some unknown, unseen demon and messily-devoured.

What made the book especially weak was how cheesily the demon stuff was written. Unfortunately there's no "take a look inside" option for this book on the Amazon page, so I can't quote from or point you to the offending pages. The book is blurbed on Saul's official site, but it doesn't tell you much:

Hellfire

Bantam, 1986

Pity the dead.

For one hundred years the old mill has stood silent, its dread secrets locked away and barred from view. Still, the people of Westover, Massachusetts, remember—remember and whisper of that fateful day when horrifying flames claimed eleven innocent lives. The day the mill's iron doors slammed shut—forever.

Pray for the living.

Now, Westover is a sleepy town tucked away beyond the Interstate, all but forgotten. Now, the last of the once-powerful Sturgess family dreams of reopening the mill. Now Philip Sturgess is about to unlock the doors to the past...and unleash an elemental fury. For beyond those doors, padlocked for so many years, deep within the dark, abandoned building, a terrible vengeance waits.

A vengeance conceived in...Hellfire.

Yes, that's hyperbolic and cheesy, but so are 99% of the summaries on the backs of paperbacks. And I'm sure Saul didn't write that himself. What he did write, in the introduction to Hellfire, is much, much worse.  It's short paragraph after short paragraph of painfully "aren't monsters cool!" turgid juvenile prose. I can't even recreate it, but it was along the lines of:

The demon force hungered. Hunted! It would have prey!

The boy was lost. He felt afraid, but there was nowhere to run!

He ran, screaming, but no one could hear him in the empty mill! As he ran, lost, terrified, he felt something watching him.

Stalking him!

He turned a last corner, and there, before him, was horror to stop his heart! He screamed, but no one could hear him, or the splash of his hot blood across the rusted metal doorway.

Just to be clear, I'm not quoting, except from memory. I only got through five pages of that hunt/kill scene by skimming down it, all the while wondering how the hell this dreck got published by a best selling author, and why the hell I'm not driving a Porsche yet, if this is the sort of material horror readers are making due with while I screw around playing games that involve whacking penguins with inverted flamingos and writing overlong reviews of books I've not actually read.

October 4, 2004

Speaking of Mr. Saul, here's a quote from a recent email from Donnie.

I have recently started to read the latest John Saul novel, not that I neccesarily want to, but when a friend sends you a personalized, autographed copy of it for your birthday there is a bit of an obligation.

I read the first ten chapters of that book while I was sitting on the toilet today...Not that it is a real page-turner or anything of that sort, no, it is just that chapter 11 starts on page 62. I will give Saul at least a little bit of credit for the type being small, but come on. So, ten chapters in 61 pages (not sure if they counted the 'prologue' in that number). That is a bit weak.

One of the entire 'chapters' in this novel (the sixth one, I think) would have only been two pages were it not for the fact that half the first and last page were blank. That is just horrible, especially for someone who is getting paid a hell of a lot of money to turn out the damn story in the first place.

What is far, far worse is the fact that I really believe that I have read the 'prologue' from the most recent story pretty much verbatim in at least two of his other novels. Sure it might be cancer that kills one guy, while it is a freak accident with another, but the story remains the same.

It has been a lot of years since I read my last Saul novel, but I am those 60 pages (and 10 chapters) into it, and I already know pretty much how it is going to end. I don't know which person he is going to make the killer, but I know how it is going to end - much like those little 9 piece jigsaw puzzles that you were given as a child - You know that the picture will appear once all 9 pieces are in place, but what will it be a picture of?

Could the fact that you can predict the ending of every John Saul novel just based on the prologue factor in here? Hmmm... I really don't know...

My entire John Saul reading experience is related on the above-linked Horror Novelist's Overview page, and just to quote myself briefly:

My entire John Saul experience is currently derived from reading the first half dozen pages of one of his novels. I'll try to find the time/interest to check out something by him and update my comments once they're coming from a more informed POV.

That time has yet to come.

In Saul's defense, Donnie said that some of his other novels aren't that bad, and since Donnie's read at least 20 of them he's got to be doing something right. As for the chapter length though, that seems ridiculous. Maybe Saul has progressed to a nearly god-like level of brevity and concise wording, but it seems ridiculous to me to format a novel so it's a sort of Cliffs' Notes version of itself. I mean really, 6 pages per chapter? Or more like 5 pages per, since there's got to be at least one blank page with the chapter heading on it.

Saul's most recent novel is Black Creek Crossing, (March 2004) so I'll assume this is what Donnie is stuck reading. The Amazon reviews are mixed so far; 3.5/5 average from 30 reviews, while most everything by a popular author is guaranteed a 4/5 or better. If you want more information you're out of luck, since there's no novel excerpt there, or on Saul's own site. However, when I did a quick Google search I found a link to this bit of chapter one. It's dreadful; possibly the most melodramatic crap you'll ever see outside of a soap opera script, and based on what Donnie said, this isn't a short excerpt from Chapter One... this is chapter one! Go read it, or the following discussion won't make much sense. Just go, it won't take long; it's shorter than this blog. 

I could spend a whole blog discussing the problems with just that brief excerpt, but it would cause me great pain. Just going on the reality of the chapter; the events Angel remembers happened on Halloween when she was three, and yet she remembers them as an adult would, with perfect clarity and recall, including word for word memories of the age-inappropriate conversation she had with Granny that day.  My comments, if I were editing this from some aspiring writer (since I can't imagine a professional would write this poorly) would be things like, "Too long an off topic flashback in the middle of the chapter. A three-year old would never remember this level of detail; make some things vaguer. Tinge this with more emotion; you're all 'telling' and not enough 'showing'."

And that's not even going into how impossibly-melodramatic it is, or how poorly the words are arranged.  Check out these two sentences from the end of chapter one:

Now they were wrapped in tissue paper and packed away in an old hat box she'd found in the basement of the house they lived in when she was nine, and even though her mother thought they should be thrown away, Angel knew they never would be. They were all she had to remind her of Grammy, who died a little while after that wonderful Halloween when she'd worn the angel costume, and Grammy held her hand and led her up to the porches decorated with jack-o-lanterns.

I'm not even sure what you call the grammatical catastrophe in the first sentence; it's a run-on, but the whole bit about the basement when she was 9 and her mother thought should be thrown away is a train wreck. As for the second one, there's a verb tense error (It should be "who had died"), and I'm pretty sure Granny wasn't wearing the angel costume for Halloween, despite the dangling participle doing all it can to make it sound like she was. I'm also pretty sure Granny died after taking little Angel trick or treating, though the sentence's word arrangement makes even that unsure.

I took Rice's word that she didn't need an editor for her prose, but perhaps she could recommend one to Saul?

Elsewhere I found an excerpt of the prologue of Saul's novel, and it's literally unreadable. A breathless quote:

The nightgown was gone! She was naked!

And she was no longer alone . . .

Somewhere in the darkness, somewhere just beyond the limits of her vision, there was something.

Something that was hunting.

Hunting for her.

It's exactly like the prologue of Hellfire, which I so gleefully-ridiculed on the John Saul page linked to above. I don't know if the action-heavy prologues bring out the worst in Saul or what, but if I were running an internet fiction site and someone submitted a story that began with this, I would thank them for their submission but return it immediately. If they asked why, I'd say that they'd have to try harder to write something that wasn't such a godawful stereotyped cliché of bad horror fiction. (I might not word my mail quite so honestly/harshly, mind you.)

This sort of thing is why my genre of choice ("horror," regardless of the fact that my first published novel(s) will almost certainly be classified as fantasy) is so disrespected and mocked by "serious" writers and most book reviewers. The more I look at genre fiction (fantasy and horror mostly) the more I realize how lucky I was in my early reading. The first horror I ever read was Stephen King, and after reading Firestarter and loving it I read everything else he'd written up to that time, and then I found Clive Barker and liked his work even better. I've read lots of other horror since then, but those first two authors, who I think are head and shoulders better than any other authors in their field, shaped my opinions and ideas about what horror fiction should be. If I'd first hit upon Saul, or Lumley, or Koontz, or others of much lower literary pedigree, I have no idea if I'd even have stuck with horror long enough to consider wanting to be a writer myself.

But that is, most certainly, a topic for another day.

Ramsey Campbell

August 9, 2004

"He is literate in a field that has attracted too many comic book intellects, cool in a field that tends toward panting melodrama by virtue of its subject matter, fluid in a field where many of the best practitioners fall prey to cant."

I can't argue with that, but it doesn't make his stories any good. He's like a really good non-fiction writer who keeps plugging away with his technically-clever but emotionally lifeless fiction and wondering why all the critics like him and the fans keep reading repetitive swill by Koontz, Saul, and Rice. A question I often ask myself, come to think of it.

Anyway, I checked out The Darkest Part of the Woods since it got a good review in Entertainment Weekly some weeks ago, and since I thought it was a new collection of Campbell's short stories. Obviously I didn't read the review very closely, perhaps because I was distracted by the book's amazingly-cool cover art, which was reprinted in the short EW review. (They gave it something like a B+, but since 95% of their published book reviews fall between B- and A-, that's not real unusual.)

I didn't look at the Amazon.com reviews, of which there are only 6, but having read some of the book, I can't argue with ones that say things like:

This book was awful. Hard to read, nothing happens. Characters are dull and the story moves soooooo slow. You keep thinking that something must happen on the next page, but it never does. Story is unbelievable and stupid. Adjectives, adjectives, adjectives, adjectives. Woods, woods, woods. It's like plowing through quicksand. "Alice in Wonderland" had more suspense and horror.

And no, I don't generally go through books counting the number of words in sentences. Not even my own fiction. But the writing flow in this book by Campbell was so repeatedly awkward and that I couldn't help but look closer and try to figure out why. Especially once I'd lost all interest in reading any more of it. Stay away from this one unless you already know for sure that you enjoy Campbell's work. If you don't know and you still want a taste, check out some of his short story collections, since you're almost sure to find something you like, while you can skip the ones you don't and get on with your day quickly enough. 

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