Studies in Modern Horror: A Scholarly Journal For The Study Of Contemporary Weird Fiction
Edited by NGChristakos
Paperback, 32-40 pages, $7.00, Seele Brennt Publications
*
reviewed by Jonathan McCalmont
Once as integral a part of the genre landscape as Fantasy or Science Fiction, Horror has, in recent years, become something of a poor relative; its notable works frequently overlooked, its awards failing to generate much discussion, its masters under-appreciated and its trends largely unreported. Meanwhile, its tropes are hoovered up and deployed on behalf of other genres as the mixing pot of genre multiculturalism attracts everything towards the commercially viable middle ground. However, with the on-rush of death comes not only fear but also a sense of release, and from that spark was born NGChristakos’ Studies in Modern Horror - A Scholarly Journal for the Study of Contemporary Weird Fiction.
First appearing in 2003 and boasting a quarterly schedule (though it seems never to have quite got there), Studies in Modern Horror (SIMH) has an editorial that speaks of defiance, energy and independence not only from the horror discussion that had come before but also from the fandom and critical institutions that have turned their back on the horror genre:
This sense of optimism is as infectious as it is harrowing. This is not the optimism of a genre in robust health and supported by a vast infrastructure of fan, professional and academic discussion. This is the optimism that comes after the fall, after rock bottom has been crashed into. This is the optimism that is as unfettered by the demands of the past as it is energised about building something new; new critical languages, new movements, new ideas. This is the optimism of the Open Plain. Issue One sets out boldly on that path and chooses (rather fittingly) to focus upon the works of Jack Ketchum.
A winner of numerous Bram Stoker awards and with a successfully adapted film version of one of his books, Ketchum is largely ignored by genre critics despite his work being ripe with social and psychological commentary. There are two possible reasons for this omission. The first is that Ketchum writes nasty books. Not books that are a bit violent or transgressive, books that are Nasty and Brutal. Ketchum’s first book Off Season (1980), a tale of a feral family attacking a middle class couple, was butchered by his publishers and denounced by the liberal Village Voice but it still managed to sell out its first print run, purely by word of mouth. A second reason is that Ketchum’s works tend to not include traditional genre tropes.
Indeed, this is the subject of the issue’s first article “Monsters Among Us” by Larry Roberts. Given Christakos’ stated aims, the article is a perfect choice. Roberts is passionate, enthusiastic and knowledgeable as he starts carving out not only the case for Ketchum’s fiction but also the vision of a postlapsarian form of horror, stripped of its roots in anti-catholic superstitious Gothic literature and reborn on a more humanistic footing. Samuel Delany once wrote about the artifice of science fiction; its use of figurative language and concrete metaphors (‘her world exploded’ etc), but Roberts paints modern Horror as a genre devoid of artifice where the horrors of humanity are confronted head on.
The second piece is by Christakos and, while it echoes the humanistic reading of Ketchum, it does acknowledge the presence of the supernatural in his work. But still the onus is on the difference between horror and fantasy, this is why the piece is entitled “The Ordinary and the Otherworldly”. Christakos uses this argument to suggest that Ketchum is nonchalant about the supernatural; it features in his work but is never central to it either as a metaphorical or a narrative device. “This isn’t a fairy tale kingdom; this is the world the reader is familiar with”(19) Christakos intones solemnly. The idea is that where Fantasy uses fantastical elements as a means of promising escape to its readers, Horror features supernatural elements as a means of highlighting quite how surreal and hideous our world can be. Because if you’re going to live your life in denial about what humanity is capable of, you might as well believe in elves and vampires; the surreal cruelties that are within the reach of all of us are just as unbelievable to the secluded mind.
This perfectly sets up Valarie Thorpes’ final piece “Hanging Out in the Weird West with Jack Ketchum”. The article looks at Ketchum’s western The Crossings (2004) and tries to anchor his work (and indeed his now-de-plume) in the western genre. It is a fine piece and its caps off what can only be described as a fantastic publication.
Every word in every article of Issue One fizzes with the kind of wild-eyed optimism that simply cannot be faked. This is not just optimism about a project, this is optimism about a movement.
Unfortunately, as we move into the second and third issues of SIMH, Christakos’ editorial vision and Open Plain optimism becomes side-tracked; retreating into discussions of Horror greats such as Lovecraft and shelving the outward looking but broadly drawn politico-critical statements in favour of the more even tone and close tectual analysis common to academic criticism.
Indeed, Issue Two begins with a symposium devoted to influential figures in the history of Horror. The entries are short, pithy and feature some notable writers such as Ramsay Campbell and Jeffrey Thomas but it is only Steve Gulach who sets aside Poe, Lovecraft and King in favour of Richard Laymon, a modern horror writer very much in the Ketchum post-fantasy mould championed in Issue One.
Two of the other articles in Issue Two are also problematic as Christakos decides to write about the similarities between Lovecraft in Mieville in his article “China Mieville’s The Scar: Pulp Weird Fiction Revisited”. This, along with its second part appearing in Issue Three, is a well-written and researched piece of Horror scholarship that earnestly tries to substantiate the intuitive sense that Mieville is influenced by Lovecraft. The problem is that the article is effectively comparing a contemporary fantasy author with a horror writer from the first third of the 20th Century. If Issue One was all about the desolate existential freedom of the Open Plain, this change in emphasis feels a lot more like hurrying to get back to town before it gets dark.
The same subject-creep affects Steffen Hantke’s “The Best of Horror”, a dry piece about the construction of a horror canon. The problem here is that the construction of a canon is a necessarily backwards-looking enterprise. It is also a project that is all about tying together discrete critical communities through the creation of a shared frame of reference and the teaching of the next generation of scholars. This is not an activity for bold critical pioneers, it is for people looking to consolidate intellectual infrastructures. What is worse is that Hantke's piece contains little engagement with actual Horror, the article is almost entirely devoted to comparing different books that profess to include Horror canons. In effect, this is a piece about critical politics.
The drift away from the themes and direction of issue one is confirmed in Issue Three with the second part of Christakos’ Mieville piece and an article about Lovecraft and Fritz Leiber entitled “Our Lady of Darkness: Lovecraft the Compound Ghost”. Firstly, the writer is listed as ‘Dr. Robert Waugh’ while no other academic contributor mentions his qualifications. This instantly makes him sound like a radio psychiatrist or one of those presentable and yet oleaginous young doctors they wheel onto breakfast TV in order to discuss ‘women’s problems’. Secondly, the piece compares the styles of two pulp fiction writers and as such is not what you would call ‘Modern Horror’ by any stretch of the imagination. Having said that, it is well-written and interesting, which is something that cannot be said for Drew Williams’ “The Trials of Masculinity”. While this piece is more apposite to the journal’s stated aims in that it deals with the work of Clive Barker, its modus operandi is rather dull in that it essentially examines a Barker novel through the lens of Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces.
The final piece does not quite save the issue but it is one of the more intriguing ideas that I have seen since taking an interest in genre criticism. In effect, NGChristakos reprints a short story by John Pelan entitled “The Mystery of the Worm”. The story is a Lovecraft/Sherloch Holmes mash-up taken from a collection of such things. It is a decent enough story that deals better with Holmes than it does with Lovecraft but the wonderful thing about it is that Christakos has effectively gone through it adding critical footnotes. By and large these footnotes are not particularly interesting (Yes, I know who Sherlock Holmes is. Yes, I know what cocaine is) but as a means of critically engaging with a text, it strikes me as a lovely and ingenious way of putting a short text under close scrutiny.
Aside from the sense that SIMH’s second and third issues compromise themselves in an attempt to fit in with existing Horror criticism, there is also a growing feeling that NGChristakos is losing interest in the project. Christakos' piece in Issue One is interesting and challenging but it bears little resemblance to the piece that is spread out over the next two issues. I have no problem with editors publishing themselves in their own journal (*ahem*) but when the pieces they self-publish actually drag the project off course then it is problematic.
The decline of Christakos’ input continues with Issue Four, where he simply includes an introduction to a novella by Ray Garton entitled Eye of the Guardian (2004), which he interprets as a take on Puss in Boots. The contrast with Issue One could not be more stark; not only has Christakos given up on writing criticism specifically for the journal but the introduction he includes is of a novella he directly compares to a fairy tale. What happened to “This isn’t a fairy tale kingdom; this is the world the reader is familiar with”?
Issue Four also includes another recycled introduction, this time taken from Jeffrey Thomas’ short story collection Terror Incognita (2000). Having not read the short fiction and not having a copy of Terror Incognita to hand, I struggled to maintain interest in a series of paragraph-long introductions to short stories. Even Thomas writing about his own fiction would have been preferable.
The story of Studies in Modern Horror is one of brilliant beginnings followed by gradual decline. As the issues slip by, the editorial criteria begin to slacken along with Christakos’ interest and it comes as no surprise to note that it has been nearly two and a half years since the last issue. But there are upward blips in that downward trajectory.
For example, in Issue Two Nick Curtis’ “Notes on Time Displacement and Memory Loss in Crampton” looks at the much under-rated Horror author Thomas Ligotti’s piece Crampton (an expansion of what was originally a screenplay written for The X-files).
Ligotti, a reclusive and idiosyncratic author, is exactly the type of author that SIMH should focus on. Initially, many thought that Ligotti was a pseudonym for a collection of authors but over time his short story collections have pieced together a vision of the world that is not only close to nihilistic but also at odds with the more blood-splattered nightmares favoured by many modern horror writers. (an approach that has won his work many awards, but this has not kept his work in print). SIMH includes a full bibliography of Ligotti’s work (a piece of research that had considerably more value before Wikipedia made such things easy to find) and the bulk of Issue Four is made up of a long article about his work.
Entitled “The Nemesis of Mimesis: Thomas Ligotti, Worlds Elsewhere, and the Darkness Ten Times Black”, Stephen Tompkins’ piece sets out to prove that a) Ligotti’s fiction is fundamentally hostile to the real world and that b) this places Ligotti in the grand tradition of American Fiction. Tompkins weapons are the quotation and he wields them all throughout the article, devoting as much time to the words of others as he does to his own. While the piece is well argued and generally interesting, its biggest selling point is Tompkins’ highly eccentric style. Consider:
or
or
This transcends mere criticism and becomes akin to a literary scherzo; a mad gyrating dance in which Ligotti’s words are flung at quotations from the great and the good of American fiction in the hope that something will stick. Tompkins piece is perfectly in step with the Open Plain sentiment of Issue One and his hectic style taps into the same well of inspiration and optimism that makes Issue One such a wonderful publication.
Ultimately, Studies in Modern Horror is a journal that burns brightly but unevenly. When Christakos gets it right, the results are infectious and joyous and, as a result, when Christakos gets it wrong, the shadows seem particularly dark and cold because of their proximity to the light. Clearly, if you are going to put together a journal with a strong editorial voice then you need to either be sure to have a load of writers who “get” your vision or you need the will to write most of the articles yourself. The erratic and frustrating decline of SIMH suggests that in the end NGChristakos had neither.
Jonathan McCalmont is a recovering academic whose work has appeared in Strange Horizons, NYRSF, The Escapist and Videovista. Up until recently he blogged at SFDiplomat but he is now considering other options. He also edits Fruitless Recursion.
First appearing in 2003 and boasting a quarterly schedule (though it seems never to have quite got there), Studies in Modern Horror (SIMH) has an editorial that speaks of defiance, energy and independence not only from the horror discussion that had come before but also from the fandom and critical institutions that have turned their back on the horror genre:
“We are looking out at a vast and empty plain, an uncharted territory. There are no right and wrong turns here” [page 4]
This sense of optimism is as infectious as it is harrowing. This is not the optimism of a genre in robust health and supported by a vast infrastructure of fan, professional and academic discussion. This is the optimism that comes after the fall, after rock bottom has been crashed into. This is the optimism that is as unfettered by the demands of the past as it is energised about building something new; new critical languages, new movements, new ideas. This is the optimism of the Open Plain. Issue One sets out boldly on that path and chooses (rather fittingly) to focus upon the works of Jack Ketchum.
A winner of numerous Bram Stoker awards and with a successfully adapted film version of one of his books, Ketchum is largely ignored by genre critics despite his work being ripe with social and psychological commentary. There are two possible reasons for this omission. The first is that Ketchum writes nasty books. Not books that are a bit violent or transgressive, books that are Nasty and Brutal. Ketchum’s first book Off Season (1980), a tale of a feral family attacking a middle class couple, was butchered by his publishers and denounced by the liberal Village Voice but it still managed to sell out its first print run, purely by word of mouth. A second reason is that Ketchum’s works tend to not include traditional genre tropes.
Indeed, this is the subject of the issue’s first article “Monsters Among Us” by Larry Roberts. Given Christakos’ stated aims, the article is a perfect choice. Roberts is passionate, enthusiastic and knowledgeable as he starts carving out not only the case for Ketchum’s fiction but also the vision of a postlapsarian form of horror, stripped of its roots in anti-catholic superstitious Gothic literature and reborn on a more humanistic footing. Samuel Delany once wrote about the artifice of science fiction; its use of figurative language and concrete metaphors (‘her world exploded’ etc), but Roberts paints modern Horror as a genre devoid of artifice where the horrors of humanity are confronted head on.
“Ketchum, with each story he writes, hands the reader a magnifying glass that allows them to look into the abyss and see the monsters that walk among us. We then begin to examine these monsters more closely; we plot and surmise ways to defeat them, to save ourselves as well as our loved ones from them. And in so doing we find that the magnifying glass is squarely and quite clearly pointed right at us.” [Page 13]
The second piece is by Christakos and, while it echoes the humanistic reading of Ketchum, it does acknowledge the presence of the supernatural in his work. But still the onus is on the difference between horror and fantasy, this is why the piece is entitled “The Ordinary and the Otherworldly”. Christakos uses this argument to suggest that Ketchum is nonchalant about the supernatural; it features in his work but is never central to it either as a metaphorical or a narrative device. “This isn’t a fairy tale kingdom; this is the world the reader is familiar with”(19) Christakos intones solemnly. The idea is that where Fantasy uses fantastical elements as a means of promising escape to its readers, Horror features supernatural elements as a means of highlighting quite how surreal and hideous our world can be. Because if you’re going to live your life in denial about what humanity is capable of, you might as well believe in elves and vampires; the surreal cruelties that are within the reach of all of us are just as unbelievable to the secluded mind.
This perfectly sets up Valarie Thorpes’ final piece “Hanging Out in the Weird West with Jack Ketchum”. The article looks at Ketchum’s western The Crossings (2004) and tries to anchor his work (and indeed his now-de-plume) in the western genre. It is a fine piece and its caps off what can only be described as a fantastic publication.
Every word in every article of Issue One fizzes with the kind of wild-eyed optimism that simply cannot be faked. This is not just optimism about a project, this is optimism about a movement.
Unfortunately, as we move into the second and third issues of SIMH, Christakos’ editorial vision and Open Plain optimism becomes side-tracked; retreating into discussions of Horror greats such as Lovecraft and shelving the outward looking but broadly drawn politico-critical statements in favour of the more even tone and close tectual analysis common to academic criticism.
Indeed, Issue Two begins with a symposium devoted to influential figures in the history of Horror. The entries are short, pithy and feature some notable writers such as Ramsay Campbell and Jeffrey Thomas but it is only Steve Gulach who sets aside Poe, Lovecraft and King in favour of Richard Laymon, a modern horror writer very much in the Ketchum post-fantasy mould championed in Issue One.
Two of the other articles in Issue Two are also problematic as Christakos decides to write about the similarities between Lovecraft in Mieville in his article “China Mieville’s The Scar: Pulp Weird Fiction Revisited”. This, along with its second part appearing in Issue Three, is a well-written and researched piece of Horror scholarship that earnestly tries to substantiate the intuitive sense that Mieville is influenced by Lovecraft. The problem is that the article is effectively comparing a contemporary fantasy author with a horror writer from the first third of the 20th Century. If Issue One was all about the desolate existential freedom of the Open Plain, this change in emphasis feels a lot more like hurrying to get back to town before it gets dark.
The same subject-creep affects Steffen Hantke’s “The Best of Horror”, a dry piece about the construction of a horror canon. The problem here is that the construction of a canon is a necessarily backwards-looking enterprise. It is also a project that is all about tying together discrete critical communities through the creation of a shared frame of reference and the teaching of the next generation of scholars. This is not an activity for bold critical pioneers, it is for people looking to consolidate intellectual infrastructures. What is worse is that Hantke's piece contains little engagement with actual Horror, the article is almost entirely devoted to comparing different books that profess to include Horror canons. In effect, this is a piece about critical politics.
The drift away from the themes and direction of issue one is confirmed in Issue Three with the second part of Christakos’ Mieville piece and an article about Lovecraft and Fritz Leiber entitled “Our Lady of Darkness: Lovecraft the Compound Ghost”. Firstly, the writer is listed as ‘Dr. Robert Waugh’ while no other academic contributor mentions his qualifications. This instantly makes him sound like a radio psychiatrist or one of those presentable and yet oleaginous young doctors they wheel onto breakfast TV in order to discuss ‘women’s problems’. Secondly, the piece compares the styles of two pulp fiction writers and as such is not what you would call ‘Modern Horror’ by any stretch of the imagination. Having said that, it is well-written and interesting, which is something that cannot be said for Drew Williams’ “The Trials of Masculinity”. While this piece is more apposite to the journal’s stated aims in that it deals with the work of Clive Barker, its modus operandi is rather dull in that it essentially examines a Barker novel through the lens of Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces.
The final piece does not quite save the issue but it is one of the more intriguing ideas that I have seen since taking an interest in genre criticism. In effect, NGChristakos reprints a short story by John Pelan entitled “The Mystery of the Worm”. The story is a Lovecraft/Sherloch Holmes mash-up taken from a collection of such things. It is a decent enough story that deals better with Holmes than it does with Lovecraft but the wonderful thing about it is that Christakos has effectively gone through it adding critical footnotes. By and large these footnotes are not particularly interesting (Yes, I know who Sherlock Holmes is. Yes, I know what cocaine is) but as a means of critically engaging with a text, it strikes me as a lovely and ingenious way of putting a short text under close scrutiny.
Aside from the sense that SIMH’s second and third issues compromise themselves in an attempt to fit in with existing Horror criticism, there is also a growing feeling that NGChristakos is losing interest in the project. Christakos' piece in Issue One is interesting and challenging but it bears little resemblance to the piece that is spread out over the next two issues. I have no problem with editors publishing themselves in their own journal (*ahem*) but when the pieces they self-publish actually drag the project off course then it is problematic.
The decline of Christakos’ input continues with Issue Four, where he simply includes an introduction to a novella by Ray Garton entitled Eye of the Guardian (2004), which he interprets as a take on Puss in Boots. The contrast with Issue One could not be more stark; not only has Christakos given up on writing criticism specifically for the journal but the introduction he includes is of a novella he directly compares to a fairy tale. What happened to “This isn’t a fairy tale kingdom; this is the world the reader is familiar with”?
Issue Four also includes another recycled introduction, this time taken from Jeffrey Thomas’ short story collection Terror Incognita (2000). Having not read the short fiction and not having a copy of Terror Incognita to hand, I struggled to maintain interest in a series of paragraph-long introductions to short stories. Even Thomas writing about his own fiction would have been preferable.
The story of Studies in Modern Horror is one of brilliant beginnings followed by gradual decline. As the issues slip by, the editorial criteria begin to slacken along with Christakos’ interest and it comes as no surprise to note that it has been nearly two and a half years since the last issue. But there are upward blips in that downward trajectory.
For example, in Issue Two Nick Curtis’ “Notes on Time Displacement and Memory Loss in Crampton” looks at the much under-rated Horror author Thomas Ligotti’s piece Crampton (an expansion of what was originally a screenplay written for The X-files).
Ligotti, a reclusive and idiosyncratic author, is exactly the type of author that SIMH should focus on. Initially, many thought that Ligotti was a pseudonym for a collection of authors but over time his short story collections have pieced together a vision of the world that is not only close to nihilistic but also at odds with the more blood-splattered nightmares favoured by many modern horror writers. (an approach that has won his work many awards, but this has not kept his work in print). SIMH includes a full bibliography of Ligotti’s work (a piece of research that had considerably more value before Wikipedia made such things easy to find) and the bulk of Issue Four is made up of a long article about his work.
Entitled “The Nemesis of Mimesis: Thomas Ligotti, Worlds Elsewhere, and the Darkness Ten Times Black”, Stephen Tompkins’ piece sets out to prove that a) Ligotti’s fiction is fundamentally hostile to the real world and that b) this places Ligotti in the grand tradition of American Fiction. Tompkins weapons are the quotation and he wields them all throughout the article, devoting as much time to the words of others as he does to his own. While the piece is well argued and generally interesting, its biggest selling point is Tompkins’ highly eccentric style. Consider:
“At first glance. Ligotti’s output offers more dread, blight, and grue than red, white, and blue” [page 2]
or
“to light out for the territories […] or dive deep through the Innsmouthian waters to dwell amidst wonder and glory forever is not just an American impulse; it is an American imperative” [page 12]
or
“Is it fanciful to discern in such imagery a preoccupation with space, which Americans so often seek to master, and waste, which so often seems to master Americans?” [page 17]
This transcends mere criticism and becomes akin to a literary scherzo; a mad gyrating dance in which Ligotti’s words are flung at quotations from the great and the good of American fiction in the hope that something will stick. Tompkins piece is perfectly in step with the Open Plain sentiment of Issue One and his hectic style taps into the same well of inspiration and optimism that makes Issue One such a wonderful publication.
Ultimately, Studies in Modern Horror is a journal that burns brightly but unevenly. When Christakos gets it right, the results are infectious and joyous and, as a result, when Christakos gets it wrong, the shadows seem particularly dark and cold because of their proximity to the light. Clearly, if you are going to put together a journal with a strong editorial voice then you need to either be sure to have a load of writers who “get” your vision or you need the will to write most of the articles yourself. The erratic and frustrating decline of SIMH suggests that in the end NGChristakos had neither.
____________________
Jonathan McCalmont is a recovering academic whose work has appeared in Strange Horizons, NYRSF, The Escapist and Videovista. Up until recently he blogged at SFDiplomat but he is now considering other options. He also edits Fruitless Recursion.
If I am not mistaken, Edgar Allan Poe is considered as one of the founders of detectives and horror stories, his books are still being read! That's really good, I think, because our young generation is taught on "right" books - http://file.sh/Edgar+Allan+Poe+torrent.html
Posted by: helga | April 27, 2009 at 12:52 PM