Cemetery Dance #58

Cemetery Dance is 58 issues old, but this was this reviewer’s first experience with the publication. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting.

Magazine-sized with a glossy cover stapled around a low quality pulp paper, the physical magazine is most reminiscent of the comics published by British Marvel in the 1970s. The overall design is straightforward and workmanlike rather than attractive, with occasional use of black-and-white art of variable quality. The cover illustration, featuring two boys leaping into water unaware of a curiously drawn monstrous octopus rising from the deep is, frankly, ludicrous and more comic than horrific.

Inside, despite featuring a healthy eight stories (plus one novel excerpt) the fiction is heavily outweighed by nonfiction. This issue features an extensive series of tributes to the late Charles L. Grant—a writer and editor of obvious influence—but even allowing for that, nonfiction dominates the magazine’s contents.

There are four lengthy interviews (with T.E.D. Klein, Stephen Graham Jones, David Morell, and Robert Masello) and hefty book and media review columns, regular pieces on collecting horror books, and a “where are they now” column—not to mention what appears to be a regular six (yes that’s right, six) page column solely devoted to the activities of Stephen King.

Only thirty-six pages of a total of 124 are devoted to fiction.

The first story is a reprint. Given the eulogies that precede the republication of “This Old Man,” Charles L Grant’s short, rather slight story (first published in Night Cry in 1987) was carrying an impossible burden, especially if—as was the case for this reviewer—it was first contact with the author’s work.

The old man of the title is Anthony. Anthony’s wife is dead, his dog is dead, and now he’s stuck with his useless son, Robert, his horrible daughter-in-law, Rosemary, and objectionable grandchild, Ricky, who have installed themselves in his home. Anthony longs to be rid of them, and from that longing, and the never-ending devotion of man’s best friend, misfortune, or something more sinister, begins to even the odds in favour of Anthony and his friend, Mel.

“This Old Man” is a straightforward story and it has clearly got a supernatural element, but the effectiveness of the story is somewhat undermined by the fact that Anthony’s complaints against his family are so petty. Yes, they’ve moved into his home, but the old man invited them in. His son, who lost is job and needed help from his father, is back at work and seems guilty only of taking his time moving out of the house. The grandson, Ricky, seems to be only as noisy, awkward, and energetic as any ten-year-old, while Rosemary, while treated as a harpy, does nothing noticeably unpleasant until after the death of her son. It’s true that Anthony’s friend, Mel, suffers injustices at the hands of his children, but Anthony’s discontent, his actions, the suffering he inflicts, and the old man’s lack of remorse seem utterly out of proportion to any ill he may have endured.

Perhaps this is Grant’s point—perhaps we’re supposed to see Anthony as nothing but a mean old man—but that’s not the sense conveyed while reading the story.

Karen Heuler’s “The Inner City” is a nice take on the hell bureaucrats afflict on ordinary people. It starts with Lena being questioned by her downstairs neighbour, who believes that his apartment is shrinking. Lena has been having a hard time—she’s lost her boyfriend, her job as a programmer, and there’s a smell in kitchen that she just can’t track down—and all around her, New York seems to be crumbling into chaos. Then she finds sheaf of papers in the street, the business mail of a Mr. Biskabit, which includes a confidential memo on the firing of a programmer. Could this be the job opportunity that turns Lena’s life around?.

The address for Biskabit’s firm appears strangely disguised—as first a newsstand and then a coffee shop. But Lena is desperate and determined, and she tricks her way into what she assumes to be a secret government building. Once inside, she meets Bossephalus, who offers to take her to her “interview” with Biskabit, showing her around the building, revealing the nefarious work of these devilish bureaucrats as they contribute to making New Yorkers’ lives miserable. Yes, rooms are shrinking. Yes, parking really is impossible. And, yes, someone really is working out ways to make you suffer.

The idea of a bureaucratic hell is hardly new, but Heuler’s story is nicely told with a good mix of humour. The ending is slightly melodramatic, and perhaps that tone doesn’t quite fit with the material that has gone before, but this remains an enjoyable story.

Of all the stories in this issue of Cemetery Dance, only Ian Rogers’s “Inheritor” made me stop and shiver. It is surely a sign of an effective horror story that, even when read on a crowded commuter train on a bright summer’s day, the final paragraphs can leave a reader dread cold.

Daniel Ramis is estranged from his family, so on the death of his father, he is surprised to discover that he has been left his childhood home, which Daniel had assumed sold years before. Dragged back there against his better judgment, Daniel also discovers that he has been left some unfinished family business.

Rogers does a very fine job of building a sense of anticipation and dread as Ian is drawn from his safe city life back to small town America and the long-abandoned farmhouse. The ending is handled with a compelling economy that allows for chills but no histrionics. It is clever writing and effective storytelling.

“Bones” by JG Faherty is another story where horror lies in the American countryside. “Bones” features two inbred backwoods cousins/lovers who each possess a supernatural gift—Elise knows the truth when people speak, and Kip can sense things from bones. Their carefully constructed life together is disrupted when Kip’s dog begins dragging home human bones, and Kip senses the existence of a monster with a taste for human flesh.

“Bones” has a number of flaws. The central characters, two harmless but inbred yokels, are too flat, and Faherty’s attempt to endow them with a tragic backstory is both clumsy and transparent. The monster is too distant—there’s no sense of threat—Kip has to go looking for the thing to provoke the final confrontation, and even then, the struggle is resolved in distinctly deus ex machina fashion with the sudden and unheralded arrival of the previously unseen townsfolk. The Yoda like spoutings of Kip and Elise’s long dead grandmother are both slightly ridiculous and a mistake. Grandma’s insights might be a narrative convenience for the author in moving the plot along, but they remove from Kip any opportunity to demonstrate that he is capable of doing anything that would hold the readers attention. In essence, for the majority of this story, Kip is sitting around waiting for someone to tell him what to do, and that does not make for a compelling story.

But the biggest failing of “Bones” is in the ending. With the monster defeated, Kip takes a sudden, and frankly inexplicable, attack of moral queasiness. To absolve his protagonist, Faherty has Kip’s powers dramatically reshape themselves to allow his protagonist to clearly experience thoughts and emotions—whereas before, to serve the plot, he’s had only fragmentary flashes of sensation. This allows Kip to discover that the monster was suffering guilt at what it had done, that the monster’s world was full of pain, and that it welcomed the release of death—neatly, Faherty seems to think, letting Kip off the hook.

But rather than absolving Kip, it seems to me, this simply transforms his act from that of killing a monster to the murder of a sentient being. Killing a creature capable of telling right from wrong and feeling remorse is surely a more troubling act than the slaughter of an unthinking beast—isn’t it?

Small town America is where the evil lurks again in “Hell on the Homefront Too.” Set in the aftermath of World War II, Stephen Graham Jones’s tale has Letch return from battling Germans a wounded hero. Seventeen German bullets couldn’t kill Letch, to the disappointment of Sandy, his abused wife. The local police weren’t any protection from Letch’s violence before he went to war, and she knows things are going to be even worse now that he is a war hero.

And worse they certainly are. Letch is an irredeemable scumbag who only hits his wife in the face because broken arms or broken ribs would prevent her cooking and cleaning. But Letch gets an infection; a fragment of Sandy’s cheekbone lodges in his hand after a brutal beating, and blood poisoning sets in. Letch starts to rot, but he refuses to just lie down and die, so Sandy has to take action.

Jones’s very short story has an inexplicably horrible person doing vile things to a incontrovertibly nice person—that’s as deep as the characterisation gets, and while there’s a little thrill in seeing Letch get his comeuppance, any emotional content or sense of connection with the people at hand is pretty shallow.

The excerpt from Scavenger by David Morrell was enough to convince me that I won’t be picking up the novel. The writing is robust enough, but even in this short space, the world-weary, haunted investigator and the X-Files-style mystery feel drably familiar, and this short taster does little to suggest that there might be enough in the plotting to hold the attention over a whole novel.

While Morrell’s piece fails to grab the attention, that’s not a criticism that could be levelled at Dena M. Martin’s “Cut.” This is another story of the horrors of backwoods America—with horrible people doing horrible things simply because they are horrible. This time, the story is told from the point of view of Jacob, a young boy terrorized by his brutal, mentally deficient father and his hopeless mother.

Martin creates some truly disturbing imagery in this story—young Jacob and his mother start to find mutual pleasure and escape from the cruelty of Jacob Senior when the boy begins to cut his mother in scenes that mix graphic goriness with unpleasant sexual overtones.

The question is, what is the point of this imagery?

The cruelty of Jacob Senior is apparently without motivation—he’s just another poor, badly educated, evil man—a stereotype with which this issue of Cemetery Dance seems fully stocked. His wife is hardly more deserving of our sympathy, a drunk who connives with her husband’s maltreatment of her son to spare herself and who encourages her son to unspeakable acts for her own pleasure. And then there is young Jacob who, even allowing for the environment of his upbringing, is hardly given the opportunity to display any redeeming features.

So why should we care about horrible thing these people do to each other? Or, rather, why should we care about the unspeakable acts Dena M. Martin imagines these characters committing upon each other? There’s precious little to be learned from this story, and there’s no sense that Martin knows anything about the real lives of the kind of people she’s writing about. Their motivations and characteristics are all stock devices lifted from the handy shelf of horror clichés.

With shallow characters, little in the way of plot, and nothing to say about how these people came to be how they are, “Cuts” only really offers voyeuristic thrills to the type of reader who enjoy watching the grim and entirely unpleasant lives of poor, dumb hicks. It is clear from the evidence here that Martin can write effective and memorable scenes; the question is whether she can do it in stories that offer more substance than this.

“Darkness, as a Bride” is an interesting allegory by Sarah Monette. The townsfolk force an inventor to create a mechanical virgin that they might sacrifice to the sea monster that threatens their town in place of their own children. There’s some lovely, sharp writing in this very brief story:

He taught her to walk, to speak, to eat and excrete. He taught her to listen, taught her to dance. He taught her she was a monster by the way he did not answer certain questions, by the way he did not ask certain others. By, the way, when she touched him, he always withdrew and always apologised for it, fumblingly, uncomfortably.

The virgin meets her monster, who rejects her as a sacrifice but does make a deal with the mechanical girl—accepting the sacrifice of her love for her creator to bring destruction upon those who conceived and birthed her—and the two monsters find comfort in each other. Monette’s writing is nicely nuanced. This sort of parable can frequently make the mistake of confusing archetypes and stereotypes, but Monette avoids potential pitfalls. There are limitations. The brevity prevents any serious attempt to define characters beyond their labels, and there’s little in the way of scene-setting or description, and yet Monette seems to make this work in her favour, giving the story a timeless feel and adding to its mythic quality.

Monette’s work, though brief, is—in terms of writerly craft and intelligence—a cut above the other stories in this magazine.

The final story in this issue of Cemetery Dance, Gerard Houarner’s “In the Faith of Our Fathers,” is a curious one. It’s another tale featuring domestic abuse and hateful parents, but this time, the child has grown to be an adult and is now seeking to face the demons that have pursued him throughout his life.

Houarner’s story has Simon, whose childhood horrors have turned him into a perpetual drifter, finding love and seeking to come to terms with his history before he can settle down. But Simon is, literally, going to have to battle with the memories wrapped up in his old home before he can be free.

Houarner’s story is not well served by being placed last in this issue—having waded through so many broken childhoods and inexplicably evil fathers to get this far it was, perhaps, difficult to take another battered innocence as seriously as it probably deserved. Houarner’s writing is crisp enough, and the struggle between Simon’s past and the new start he wants to make is cleverly enough worked through. If anything grates, it’s the episodes where Jenny, Simon’s lover, dispenses her daytime television psychology, encouraging him to pursue “closure” with his childhood so he can move on in their relationship.

Simon escapes battered and bruised from the burning house, relieved of his burden:

Outside, the air was clean and fresh and tasted good, and the cries of alarm and concern from my neighbours running to his aid was all he’d ever wanted to hear, the sweet music of rescue had come, at last, in answer to his cry.

There are moments, even in this passage, when “In the Faith of our Fathers” feels as though it is drawing a little too heavily from the pages of self-help manuals and pop-psychology books, and the story is weaker for it. The impetus that drives Simon to this confrontation could have been something grand (like love) or petty (like jealousy), but to have him driven to this final struggle by “Dr. Phil” style blathering cuts away at the significance the story might have had.

In this issue of Cemetery Dance, only Heuler’s “In The City” doesn’t feature some sort of severely dysfunctional family. “This Old Man” has a grandfather killing his grandson and maiming his daughter-in-law; “Inheritor” has a monstrous sister left behind by a weak father for his son to deal with; “Bones” features inbred married cousins; “Hell on the Homefront Too” has vicious wife-beating; “Cut”, as we’ve discussed, features all sorts of freaky mother-son shenanigans; and “Darkness, as a Bride” has the mechanical virgin’s “father” creating her as a sacrifice to a monster and making a mess of her upbringing. If Cemetery Dance had a motto, it might well be Philip Larkin’s “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.”

Is this concern typical of other issues of Cemetery Dance? Having ploughed through the familial misery liberally spread throughout this issue, I am left wondering whether this is typical of the magazine and of American horror in general. Moreover, is America’s relationship with its parents really as messed up as this magazine suggests?

Add the recurring theme of small-town, rural America as the keeper of freakish secrets and home to a bewildering array of threats, and it doesn’t take a psychologist to wonder whether there might be evidence of a nation not quite comfortable with its roots.

Overall, this issue Cemetery Dance was a little too grimly one-toned, repetitive, and insular for me. Only one story (Ian Rogers “Inheritor”) contained enough genuine thrills to fulfil what I expect from a horror story, and only one other (Sarah Monette’s “Darkness, As a Bride”) contained strong enough writing to really satisfy as a story. Heuler’s “The Inner City” gets an honourable mention for its clever reworking of a familiar trope, but the other fiction left me cold, at best.