Don't be scared of horror

I don't know what makes good horror fiction good, but understatement must play a big part.

Here how Roger Smith, writing as Max Wilde, opens the second chapter of his new Vile Blood: 

"When the beam of Chief Deputy Sheriff Gene Martindale’s flashlight traced the loop of large intestine dangling like strange fruit from the cottonwood, he understood that he was dealing with something altogether darker than the usual procession of drunken wife beaters, scofflaws and minor drug offenders that filled his days."

I'm pretty sure that any book with intestines dangling from trees is likely to be horror, but crime fans will be at home with that passage.

Another, later passage suggests a kinship with hard-boiled American crime writing of the 1950's and '60s:

 "Back in those days, the late nineties, Holly had been a big boned blonde with the ass of a cheerleader and the tits of a Playboy centerfold. She and Drum had pleasured one another regularly, Tincup too occupied with his harem to care."

So don't be scared of horror, crime fans. If Roger Smith and Jim Thompson* can write it, you can read it. But what about you, dear readers? Any thoughts on crime, horror, and the relationship between the two? Do you read horror as well as crime? How would you compare the appeal of the two genres?

***

Here's Roger Smith on why he wrote Vile Blood under a pseudonym.

* I challenge any crime fan to argue that the last section of The Getaway is not horror.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

The Summer of the Ubume, or crime writing and ghosts

This novel crosses two borders for me, one to Japan, the other to horror.

The publisher, Vertical, calls Natsuhiko Kyogoku's The Summer of the Ubume, mystery/horror. The author loves Japanese folklore, Vertical says, especially that of the paranormal and preturnatural, with special interest in the supernatural entities called yokai . This book, Kyogoku's 1994 debut, "gives birth to a new form of Japanese fiction," according to the publisher. Vertical also calls Kyogoku "the Neil Gaiman of Japanese mystery fiction."

Now, horror is not generally my cup of reading tea, but I do like the wry humor and sense of dislocation in The Summer of the Ubume's opening chapter. The opening perches on the verge of excess without going over:

"At the very top of the hill, where the lackadaisical, interminable slope petered out at last, sat my destination: Kyogokudo."

Want to know what Kyogokudo is? You'll have to wait til the bottom of the page. I've met no yokai yet, as far as I know, but Kyogoku knows how to build suspense from the beginning.

This will be a rare excursion in the world of ghosts for me. How about you? What are your thoughts on ghosts, spirits, and other other-worldly matteres in crime witing?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

The Vampire of Ropraz

I get a special kick out of that authorial magic that updates an old genre while remaining chillingly true to its time-honored form. In Jacques Chessex's The Vampire of Ropraz, nominally a crime novel, since it is published by Bitter Lemon Press, the genre is horror.

Chessex's (and translator W. Donald Wilson's) little feat of alchemy is to be just a bit more explicit – all right, sometimes more than a bit – about hidden horrors and forbidden appetites than, say, Bram Stoker, while preserving the same sense of foreboding and isolation:

"Ropraz in the Haut-Jorat, canton of Vaud, Switzerland, 1903. A land of wolves and neglect in the early twentieth century. ... Dwellings often scattered over wastelands hemmed in by dark trees, cramped villages with squat houses. Ideas have no currency, tradition is a dead weight, and modern hygiene is unknown. ... You have to take care when employing a vagabond for the harvest, or to dig potatoes. He is the outsider, the snoop, the thief. ... In the remote countryside a young girl is a lodestar for lunacy ... Sexual privation, as it will come to be called, is added to skulking fear and evil fancies. ... But I was forgetting the astounding beauty of the place. ... "

During the harsh winter of 1903, three women in the Swiss village of Ropraz are dug up from their graves, sexually assaulted, and horribly mutilated, and the search for suspects, narrated in spare prose, turns up fresh secrets and perversions. A suspect is arrested, released, then jailed again. In prison he receives visits from a mysterious woman in white, who bribes the suspect's jailers and slips in for assignations far more explicit that Victorian horror writing would have allowed. The man may or may not be the dreaded Vampire of Ropraz, but the visits trigger new violence on his part.

His ultimate fate, after he escapes, joins the French Foreign Legion, and dies amid the mud and rain of trench warfare, is a grimly humorous comment on the notion of buried secrets.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008