Horror Express 2023:All Aboard!

“It would be logical to suppose that troubled art is born out of troubled times. But it would be wrong to be that systematic about it, for what period of history has sailed in, pre-ordained and self-acknowledged a golden age?

Edgar Allan Poe existed in a momentary by-way of relative peace and security in a new country still full of hope, yet his work is limned by the same dark phantoms that haunt E.T.A. Hoffman’s, a writer who lived when Europe was an open field trampled by the Napoleonic Wars. The landscape of the mind does not always correspond to external circumstance. Rather, there seems to be inside us a constant, ever-present yearning for the fantastic, for the darkly mysterious, for the choked terror of the dark.”

[…]

“The superficial moralists who deplore the tendencies of certain movies to alarm them and in the same breath pretend that film is art would do better to realise that always alongside the art that pleases, ‘the Art of seduction’, springs the art of terror. Often we find pleasure in non-pleasurable forms. Next to smiling terracotta couples reclining on top of their Etruscan tombs, to whispering angels with gold-leaf wings, to ‘The Rape of the Lock’ and ‘The Marriage of Figaro’, there have always arisen hair-blanching depictions of the damned, of Saturn devouring his children, the temptations of St Anthony, ‘Wozzeck’, and Man the Wastrel lost to gorgons, dragons, destiny, and death.

Moreover, art works that stir the dregs of human experience have a steady unvarying coherence in their emblems and embodiments, while the style of patterns of perfect, healthy, happy beauty fluctuate as rapidly as fashion itself and contradict one another’s ideal forms according to period and culture. Satan is immutable, it would seem, whether ancestral dark angel or devil in the flesh. Those who imagine him today are not the doctors of demonology but the psychiatrist, the anthropologist, the sociologist. To them, horror movies might be seen as a historical imperative, if not an aesthetic necessity.”

[…]

“Still, we are expected to be terrified by the horror film, and fear, no matter how diluted or sublimated, is a very intense reaction to an experience, aesthetic of otherwise, and, failing Art, one not to be enjoyed with an easy conscience. Rather than sheer perversity, horror films require of the audience a certain sophistication, a recognition of their mystical core, a fascination of the psyche. […] What seemed to put the reviewers off horror films, what prevents them (even now) from surrendering their critical resistance, is their frequent - usually necessary - depiction of the fantastic.

This would be as superficial and absurd as dismissing Fra Angelico or Max Ernst because we don’t, or simply won’t, believe in angels and sphinxes. And yet the movies were progressing from the Manichaean simplicity of the Western - a genre that was more readily acceptable - to the Promethean ambiguity of the horror story, from start back-and-white to the nuances of the dark, from the wide open spaces to the psychic hinterland.”

- Carlos Clarens, from his foreword to ‘Horror Movies: An Illustrated Survey’ (Panther, 1971)

Any questions? No? Good.

I’m aware that updates to this blog have, once again, been rather piecemeal so far this year, but rest assured - I’ve been looking forward to my October horror marathon like a storm-tossed sailor longing for shore leave, and, come hell or high water, I’m going to be offering some choice words on assorted examples of the horror genre in this space across the next 31 days.

It’s unlikely any of it will prove quite as lyrical or well turned out as Mr Clarens’ mellifluous prose above (vocab: “limned”, best phrase: “..the choked terror of the dark”), but I’ll do the best that a couple of tired sessions across the Witching Hour will allow. As always, expect insensible first draft blather, typos and weird grammar all over the joint, but I hope they won’t spoil the fun too much.

Comments and feedback, as ever, warmly received.

Penguin Time/Psyched Out Sci-fi: The Squares of the City by John Brunner (1969)

Only marginally qualifying as science fiction, John Brunner’s 1965 novel is really more of a high concept socio-political thriller, taking place in Ciudad de Vados, the purpose-built capital city of the fictional South American nation of Aguazal.

Presumably modelled on President Juscelino Kubitschek’s construction of Brasilia in the early 1960s, the city is the crowning achievement of the charismatic President Vados, and we arrive in its environs in the company of one Boyd Hakluyt, an Australian expert in urban planning who has been engaged by the city’s municipal authorities in an initially rather vague consultancy role.

Upon arrival, Hakluyt soon discovers that  his expertise in the fields of traffic management, industrial rezoning on so on will primarily be put to use in solving the problem presented by the masses of impoverished, disenfranchised rural peasants who are now migrating to the new metropolis, settling in a series of sprawling shantytowns and slums beneath the gleaming overpasses, and rather undermining El Presidente’s vision of a shining beacon of civilised modernity in the process.

Less than enthralled by this task, and unnerved by the evidence of creeping authoritarianism and violent political disorder he sees broiling away beneath the city’s tranquil surface, Hakluyt becomes drawn into a complex web of subterfuge and treachery, crossing paths with bureaucrats and politicians, dissidents and revolutionaries, union leaders, industrialists, media personalities, generals, journalists, gangsters and so on, all engaged in an exhaustingly complicated wrangling for influence and power which seems to eerily mirror the Aguazalian nation’s all-consuming obsession with the game of chess.

And beyond that, I will keep quiet, as ‘The Squares of the City’ is a novel which is very easy to “spoil”. 

Suffice to say that, like much of Brunner’s work, it takes a bit of patience to get into - his prose initially seems quite dry, and his plotting needlessly convoluted - but it ultimately proves a very rewarding read. It is certainly a unique entry within its supposed genre, that’s for sure, and if the above synopsis has piqued your interest, I’d recommend giving it a go.

As to Franco Grignani’s cover illustration meanwhile - well, it’s not one of my favourite examples of his work for Penguin to be honest, but it certainly conveys the novel’s idea of an urban eco-system collapsing into entropic chaos fairly effectively.

Those little white dots on my scan of the cover, by the way, are not stars or any other part of the design - I’m afraid they’re just remnants of damp, of concrete dust, or something, which have become stuck to my copy of the book, suggesting it might have spent some time sitting atop a pile of paperbacks in an attic or similarly insalubrious environment.

As you may have gathered, these Grignani Penguins often ain’t cheap, and my insistence on picking them up for pennies does not lend itself to acquiring them in primo condition - but at least this one was readable.

Penguin Time/Psyched Out Sci-fi: The Traps of Time edited by Michael Moorcock (1970)

 

Remarkably, I don’t think I’ve ever actually featured any of the extraordinary covers produced by Franco Grignani for Penguin’s science fiction line in 1969-70 on this weblog before.

So, having picked up a few of them recently, now seems as good a time as any to rectify that.

According to the invaluable The Art of Penguin Science Fiction website, Grignani, “..was a leading figure in the field of experimental photography, with a career stretching back some forty years to his early work with photograms. From this he progressed to a range of techniques based on standard photography which he then projected and distorted using lenses, shards of glass, pieces of broken mirror, or liquids such as oil and water.”

All of which, needless to say, made him very much the man of the hour when it came to finding a way to combine the precise / modernist Penguin design aesthetic with the mind-bending chaos of the op-art / psychedelic light show era.

Spilling over, as was often the case, onto the back cover (though not, disappointingly, across the spine), ‘The Traps of Time’ showcases one of Grignani’s more menacing and abstract efforts - equally as far out as the era’s most attention-grabbing Penguin Crime covers.

I particularly like the hands on the back cover - suggestive of some technologically enhanced séance which has gone horribly wrong. (Shades of The Devil Commands / ‘The Edge of Running Water’, perhaps?)

As to the book itself meanwhile… well unfortunately, I’ll have to forego the opportunity to bask in the light of Michael Moorcock’s no doubt exemplary anthologising skills for the time being, as the binding on my copy is knackered to point of imminent collapse.

Nonetheless though, you’ve got to appreciate the none-more-new-wave audacity of shoving Aldiss and Zelazny in right next to Borges and Alfred Jarry, of all people.

In fact, the inclusion here of Jarry’s idiosyncratic 1899 text ‘How to Construct a Time Machine’ helps lends ‘The Traps of Time’ a certain level of underground historical significance, as again pointed out by the compilers of The Art of Penguin Science Fiction [see link above].

In view of Moorcock’s connections to the band, it was in all likelihood between these pages that Hawkwind’s resident poet/ideas man/maniac Robert Calvert first encountered Jarry’s essay, which - upon realising that the ‘time machine’ described by Jarry is in fact merely a bicycle - inspired him to compose the lyrics for what became Silver Machine, a work recognised by most right-thinking people as one of the towering achievements of human civilisation. Nice!