The Cormorant, by Stephen Gregory

9781912681693

Parthian Books, 2021

originally published 1986

160 pp

paperback (my e-copy sent by the publisher, to whom I owe my many and grateful  thanks)

Recently reissued by Welsh publisher  Parthian Books just last month, Stephen Gregory's The Cormorant (1986) is exactly the sort of dark fiction I look forward to reading, in which the weird makes its way into regular life making it difficult to decide whether there is something supernatural at play here or if it's something else altogether.  I first read this book seven years ago when it was published by Valancourt,  and that was the question I was left with at the time;  after finishing this time around, the ambiguity remains.  Added to the uncertainty is the fact that we have only the narrator's word to rely on for what happens here.  My kind of book indeed.  

Winter in Northern Wales provides the natural backdrop to this story that begins when a man is bequeathed a cottage in a Welsh village "nestled under the cloud-covered summit of Snowdon, on the road between Caernafon and Beddgelert."  He  and his wife Ann were able to quit their teaching jobs in the Midlands, affording him the opportunity to devote time to the history textbook he is writing. She has a job at a local pub and he tends to their eleven-month old child Harry while she works.   The cottage had belonged to his Uncle Ian whom the (unnamed) narrator had not known very well, and it comes with the "binding condition" that the cottage was theirs as long as they took care of the cormorant Uncle Ian had rescued some time earlier.   To the narrator, the bequest is a "thunderbolt of good fortune,"  and he wasn't too worried about taking care of the cormorant, but when the bird arrives and its crate is opened, the "some kind of placid, domestic fowl" they'd been expecting turned out to be anything but.   In the middle of a quiet, lovely, warm domestic sort of perfection, as he notes, 

"it came from its box as ugly and as poisonous as a vampire bat" 

spewing feces and urine everywhere and causing destruction to their otherwise cozy environs.  

Ann, who "shuddered at the sight of the cormorant's demonic arrogance," sees the bird (which the narrator calls Archie)  as menacing, while baby Harry seems to be enthralled with the thing.  The narrator works to exert dominance and control over the bird, mentioning more than once Archie's dependence on him for its survival; at the same time it's obvious that while he's completely obsessed with it,  he has a sort of love-hate relationship with this cormorant,  referring to it once as a "Heathcliff, a Rasputin, a Dracula."  In the meantime, Ann becomes further unsettled because of her husband's increasingly strange behavior and Harry's growing fascination with Archie.  Then there's the matter of the narrator's brief (hallucinatory?) encounters with someone who leaves behind cigar smoke -- is this some sort of haunting, some sort of possession, or is there more to it,  perhaps grounded in more earthly concerns?  

The flaws in the characters begin to appear early on, but then again, we're watching this story unravel from the point of view of the narrator, whose choices throughout the narrative are just mind boggling.  One of the highlights of this novel is Gregory's purposeful, highly-controlled and taut writing style which allows for him to  adeptly turn  up the volume little by little on the slow-building horror that fills this book,   and in my case at least, setting forth an eerie atmosphere from the moment the bird's crate is opened in the cozy living room, offering its entrance as a harbinger of dread and doom. 

I won't deny that there are some extremely disturbing scenes in this book (including one especially beyond-squirmworthy event that takes place in a bathtub which is mentioned in pretty much everyone's review of this novel and got a serious and out-loud WTF from me as well), but in a sick way they accord with the narrator's increasingly-disturbed state of mind, which is in my opinion is at the heart of this novel. 

I cannot for the life of me say why, but as disturbing and horrific as this book is, I absolutely loved it. I found, as the author says in the introduction to this novel, that  

"Like the bird, the book is beautiful and ugly, intriguing and upsetting, appealing and appalling, in its different, changing moods."

 The Cormorant is not only effective as a horror story, but as literary fiction with a weird bent as well. The ambiguity here left me thinking about it long after I'd finished, going through evidence in my head for both the psychological and supernatural.  Writing it down now, I'm still thinking about it.  I cannot recommend this novel highly enough, although on many levels it is a difficult read, so beware.  

Once again my many thanks to the very good people at Parthian.  

Thus Were Their Faces, by Silvina Ocampo

9781590177679
NYRB, 2015
stories originally published between 1937 and 1988
translated by Daniel Balderston
354 pp

paperback

"The people we hate the most are the ones we have entrusted with all of our secrets. When we are in their presence we can't change our soul. They are always there to remind us what we were like."
    
                   -- from "Cornelia Before the Mirror,"  342

Just after the introduction to this book by author Helen Oyeyemi, the editors of this volume have  included a brief preface by Jorge Luis Borges in which he reveals that Silvina Ocampo had a "strange taste for a certain kind of innocent and oblique cruelty."  He also says that she has the "virtue" of "clairvoyance," and that she "sees us as if we were made of glass, sees and forgives us"  and perhaps that is a part of why I found this book to be so unsettling, but I think that one of the creepiest things about this book is that quite often, we find ourselves looking at the world from a child's point of view which is surprisingly not quite as innocent as one would think.

Thus Were Their Faces is a compilation of short stories taken from seven of Ocampo's books  published between 1937 and 1988.  It doesn't take long at all to realize that you have landed in a different territory, beginning with my favorite story of this collection, "The Impostor."  While it has a certain gothic flavor, this story of a young student sent for a few weeks to live with a family friend completely draws the reader deeper and deeper into a much darker zone -- that of the human psyche. In truth, a sort of very quiet hum of madness runs through many of these stories, one that isn't quite apparent on the outside but which  slowly makes itself heard the more into each tale you wander.   I'm not going to go into any sort of in-depth descriptions about any of these stories, but in this book, anything can and does happen.  She doesn't spare the cruelty:  murder and death abound in many different and bizarre forms, long-term resentments turn into breaking points that materialize in different guises, and the stories that focus on memory, prophecy, and dreams are not without their deeper, darker edges.  Most are set among venues that in and of themselves are rather mundane and harmless; the challenge presented here is for the reader to occupy the minds of the people who inhabit those spaces, since in the long run, what we see from our outsider-looking-in perspective is completely different from what they see. While we may view what's happening with these characters as strange and bizarre, they want and need us to believe otherwise.  It takes a while to come to this realization, and once you're there, it becomes a rather disorienting reading experience that in my case left me with the feeling of being off kilter during most of my time spent between the covers of this book.

Reading strictly for plot is kind of beyond the point here, so readers who have to have every single thing explained are probably going to be lost and will probably not like this book.  It is yet another work that is a mind-stretching experience for people who want to move beyond the norm and who are looking for something that demands quite a bit more out of themselves as readers -- challenging, yes, but the payoff comes from immersing yourself in some of the best writing ever.  On the back cover of my book there's a brief statement from Borges in which he says that "Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature," and he's absolutely correct. While he was referring to writers from Latin America, I think what he says about her stories having "no equal" is absolutely spot on.  It is a beautifully-written collection that will linger on in my mind for a very, very long time.

Night Things, by Michael Talbot

9781941147610
Valancourt Books, 2015
218 pp

paperback

"They say Lake House draws evil like a magnet." 

I just can't help myself -- I can't resist a good haunted house story. I have no clue why, it just is what it is.  Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is at the top of my list, followed by  Nazareth Hill by Ramsey Campbell, these books, and many, many more. It's all about the atmosphere and the surprises that people discover inside, both of which are part and parcel of Night Things, with the added bonus of an eerie mystery at its very core.

The action begins when Lauren Montgomery, her young 11 year-old son Garrett, and Lauren's new rock star husband Stephen Ransom rent a house in the Adirondacks for the summer. It's not just any house, either -- Lake House was built in the 1890s by Sarah Balfram, who, as the story goes, lived there in complete isolation after being jilted by her fiancé. With 160 rooms, it sits on two hundred acres of land, complete with lake -- very much cut off from everything and everyone for miles.  As Stephen tells Lauren as soon as they enter the place for the first time, it's not a "normal house"; evidently Sarah was a wee bit eccentric and  had

"strange things built into the house -- stairways that go nowhere, hallways that end at blank walls,"

reminiscent of California's Winchester Mystery House.  This place, though, is no  tourist destination -- it's been the scene of several violent murders in the past, something Lauren doesn't know at the time of their arrival, but will soon discover.  Garrett, a naturally-curious child with a fascination for science combined with

Winchester Mystery House, CA (thanks to prairieghosts.com)

a belief in UFOs, ETs, and all things strange, is fascinated about the "unknown vastnesses and further architectural oddities" the house may be hiding, "so evocative of old horror movies that he fancied just about anything might be hidden in its innumerable closets and passageways."  While exploring the place on his own, he discovers that "the layout of the house had a curious rhyme and reason" -- evidently it had been "designed to prevent anyone from venturing too deeply into its inner recesses." This starts him wondering why Sarah Balfram may have had the house built this way, as he sees it, meant to "control and influence the route a person took through her house. " He also begins to question what would happen if somehow he could "travel deeper into its interior."  As Garrett and Lauren soon discover, the house itself is, as the back-cover blurb notes, a "labyrinthine puzzle," complete with rooms that are filled with strange oddities, but also  cause disorientation and dizziness.  The two take their own tour through the place, and after a while Lauren comes to believe that the stronger the effects caused by the rooms, the closer she was getting to "whatever it was that Sarah Balfram had gone to such great lengths to conceal."

The mystery is slowly revealed around the story of the dynamic of a strained family relationship, as Lauren finds herself caught in the middle between her new husband and her son.  It's a good book and it had me going right up until the last section when this family tension causes Stephen to take off,  leaving Lauren and Garrett behind.  With no car and the two stuck in the middle of nowhere, Talbot had a great opportunity here but in my opinion sort of missed it with how he ends the novel, which I won't disclose. Let's just say that I get it and the mystery of the house is solved to my great satisfaction,  but  I felt that rather than making the final reveal a bit more in keeping with the creepy atmosphere and the ratcheting suspense up to this point, Talbot's  final section was more of a standard '80s horror fare ending.  And before you say "well duh - it was written in the '80s," what I'm trying to say here  is that having read his Delicate Dependency,  I think Talbot was capable of much more than he gave me here.  Still, I can't complain,  since in any book it's all about the journey for me, and it was a really good one all along the way and I had a LOT of fun with it.   I'd certainly recommend it to other fans of haunted house stories and to people who enjoy their horror on the tamer side.

Cast a Cold Eye, by Alan Ryan

9781943910410
Valancourt Books, 2016
originally published 1984
243 pp

paperback


"There's no denying the blood, Jack. No denying the blood." 

--125

Someone should yell at the Kirkus reviewer of this novel who said it's  "A sluggish, unevocative ghost-chaser involving sanguinary rites in old Ireland...with lots of pleasant Irish ambience -- but the story doesn't add up."  Boo hiss!!  So wrong on so many levels.  Then again, a couple of weeks ago I read a Publishers' Weekly review of another book that got the details completely wrong (even calling a narrator "unnamed" when her name was everywhere throughout the book), so my faith in these mega-reviewing websites is quickly starting to decline.

Looking around online to find info about the author, Alan Ryan, I was taken with just how many fans this guy has.  The favorite among so many people seems to be his Dead White, which Grady Hendrix at Tor's website said in a 2014 post was "about Killer Clowns on a Circus Train of Death attacking a snowbound community."  Frankly, that's enough of a description to make me never want to read that book, but it is certainly the most mentioned when someone's talking about this author.

Thankfully no clowns at all make an appearance in Cast a Cold Eye, which is set in the small village of Doolin, Ireland, about one and a half hours south of Galway on the coast. It is an area steeped in history; as is the entire country. As the author tells us:

"Here, in a land as ancient as Ireland, history was only yesterday, and the distant past breathed fresh and sharp and painful in living memory." 

There are two stories at work here that will, given time and above all circumstance, ultimately converge.  The novel begins with a scene that launches the first of these, as four men are waiting in a shabeen trying to keep warm while awaiting a funeral procession before going on to an ancient graveyard to perform some strange rites. As good writers will, Ryan gives us no explanations, so the question of what's going on here and why is planted in the reader's head from the outset and stays in the back of the mind throughout the novel until all is revealed.  Great way to start a horror novel, if you ask me.  The second storyline belongs to Jack Quinlan, who has come to Ireland, home of his ancestors,  to do some research on a novel he's writing about the Famine. More specifically, his book is about

"a family and its struggles to survive through the Famine of 1846 and 1847, and about the horrible thing ... that happened to three members of his family in particular."

Jack takes a house in the rather isolated village of Doolin, planning to stay for three months, and it isn't too long before he sets up a nice routine of research, writing, and sometimes hanging out at the local pubs, where traditional music is played of an evening.  He's met a girl, Grainne, to whom he's very much attracted, and all seems to be well with him right up until the moment when he starts to see and hear some very disturbing things which seem to follow him whenever he's out and about. And then one night, while he's out, he witnesses something he knows is real, but has no explanation for.  The only person he can talk to about it is the local priest Father Henning, the local seanachie who loves telling eerie stories, yet is reluctant at best to talk with Jack about his experiences. The question becomes whether or not Jack's actually experiencing these horrific things -- is the research he's doing getting to him, or is it the remoteness and isolation of the place that's affecting him?  And if it is true that Jack is not going off his rocker but is really seeing what he thinks he's seeing, why him?

In this novel, the central imagery is blood. Blood here implies one's heritage, the Eucharistic rites, and above all, the suffering of the people caught up in the horrific Famine years.  As Thomas Gallagher in his wonderful book Paddy's Lament, Ireland 1846-1847: Prelude to Hatred tells it, perhaps the most horrific thing is that

"during the first winter of famine, 1846-47, as perhaps 400,000 Irish peasants starved, landlords exported 17 million pounds sterling worth of grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs, and poultry -- food that could have prevented those deaths." 

And, as the back cover blurb states, as Jack continues to look for answers, he comes to discover that

"the ghosts of the past linger on into the present, and they cry out for blood..."

and this is definitely true, but perhaps not at all in the way that one would expect from a 1980s horror story.

Two more insight-type things and I'll call it a day. First, careful reading will reveal that the author was very much aware of Irish history, and little bits tend to crop up here and there that signal his sympathies. Second, I'm in awe of how the rugged Irish landscape becomes so deftly interwoven into this tale, reminding me in a remote way of the work of Le Fanu, whose work also included the landscape in his stories so that history, landscape and story all mingle together as one inseparable unit. The same is true here as well.

Reading Cast a Cold Eye is to find yourself in the middle of an eerie mystery that grows darker and creepier along the way, one that is not solved up until the last minute.  A lot of readers have noted, like the Kirkus reviewer, that the story "doesn't add up," that there are too many loose ends, yada yada yada, but it all made perfectly good sense to me.  I won't say why, since I'm sure many people will want to read this novel, but the answers really are all there. My regular habit is to finish a novel and then go back and reread the first chapter, and in this case, it's a hugely eye-opening moment, stunningly circular in nature. It may not scare the bejeebies out of modern horror readers, but for those of us who aren't looking for chainsaw-wielding killer clowns or the like, it's a delightful tale of ghostly horrors that will stay in your head for a long time after turning that last page.

hb #7 -- The Delicate Dependency: A Novel of the Vampire Life, by Michael Talbot

9781941147245
Valancourt Books, 2016
originally published 1982
373 pp

paperback

Oh, what wonderful things this author would probably have accomplished had he not unfortunately died so early. This guy was only 29 -- 29,  mind you!  -- when he wrote this book, and his death followed only ten years later.  The Delicate Dependency is my first venture into Michael Talbot's work, although not too far in I decided he was worth reading again, so I bought a copy of his Night Things.  Now I'm looking at his very short bibliography and  I see I will need to also pick up his The Bog, both of which, like The Delicate Dependency, are fortunately available through Valancourt Books.

There are just some books that make me feel like I've been wrapped up in a cocoon of perfect happiness while reading them, and this novel is one of those.  Not only is it a fun story with a number of unexpected twists and turns,  it also has that Victorian-style pulpy aesthetic that I love so much.  Once I started reading it, I was beyond happy that it turned out not to be your average vampire novel, but something that moved well beyond the same old same old and into the realm of just pure reading pleasure.

The story actually begins in 1856 when our narrator, John Gladstone, who is only seven years old at the time, sees what he believes is an angel.  Thinking about why the face is familiar to him,  he realizes that the young man looked exactly like the angel in the Madonna of the Rocks, da Vinci's famous painting that John had seen recently at the National Gallery.  It was a face that Gladstone never wanted to forget.

Flashing forward to Gladstone's adult years when this story really begins, he finishes medical school, marries, becomes a doctor to the socially prominent, and has two daughters, Ursula and Camille.  His wife, Camille had meant everything to him before her untimely death, and when he begins to specialize in research as a virologist, he studies the influenza virus that had killed her, Haemophilus influenzae.   He has even named a certain strain of the virus after her, Camillus influenzae, and has written a number of papers which have "caused quite a stir in the medical world." In short, he's an up and comer who is quite focused on his work.  One night in April, his carriage driver hits someone on the street who had "just stepped out of the shadows" and as Gladstone goes to check out the poor guy, he has a major shock -- the man who's just been knocked down happens to be none other than his childhood angel.

In the hospital, the patient, whose name is Niccolo Calavanti,  makes everyone else uneasy and because of his particular quirks like never eating,  a rival of Gladstone's decides to take over the case.  Gladstone decides to take the patient home where he learns that Niccolo is in reality, a vampire, and where he also learns a bit about Niccolo's history.  When Gladstone's daughters return from being away, Ursula becomes fascinated with Niccolo,  but it's little Camille who draws his real attention -- she is an idiot savant who has the ability to hear a piece of music once, and reproduce it perfectly on the piano no matter the complexity.  But it isn't long before Niccolo leaves the Gladstone residence, taking little Camille with him, vanishing off the face of the earth, so it seems, without a trace.  Enter Lady Hespeth Dunaway, with an eerily similar story about the disappearance of her son, also an idiot savant, after Lady Dunaway had made Niccolo's acquaintance.  They decide to team up when they get a lead that Niccolo just might be in Paris, and thus begins the adventure of a lifetime.  In and around the main thrust of the story, other things are happening that have a lot of bearing on their quest, but those I'll leave other readers to discover, and even giving away the subtexts running throughout the story will give away the show, so I'll leave those as well.

What's lovely about this novel is that there are so many twists and turns here that as soon as I thought I had it figured out, everything changes, and then once I thought I had it sorted "this time", I was happily and completely wrong.  And as I said earlier, the novel has that amazing Victorian ambience combined with pulpy aesthetic that I just love -- an old dark house with lots of secrets,  a very well-sequenced set of pursuit-and-evade scenes that I think I held my breath through, and much, much more, all leading to a stunning conclusion.

While other readers may be busy reading modern vampire novels like these, which are what's current in the market, I was happy as a little clam curling up with my succession of chai lattes and The Delicate Dependency,  which is so very different and actually more satisfying than any other vampire novel I've read in a very long time.  Readers who are looking for the sinking of fangs into the neck may not find this one to their particular tastes, nor will readers looking for yet another vampire romance likely find satisfaction here.  It is a very intelligent book, but most of all, it's just plain fun. Caution: do NOT, I repeat, do NOT read the introduction first, and above all, do NOT read any review that gives away anything else. The fun is definitely in the unfolding here.

I know I tend to get overly enthusiastic about these old books, a feeling I know is not shared by everyone and I apologize about babbling so, but seriously, I can't help it.  I know when I've got my hands on something good, and well, this one definitely is among the cream of the crop.