Gil's All Fright Diner: Literary diner stack coming right up!

Gil's All Fright Diner
A. Lee Martinez
Tom Doherty Associates, 2004


Envision a diner stack: hash browned potatoes, hamburger and/or breakfast sausage patties, fried eggs sunny side up, buttermilk biscuits, sausage gravy, and a helping of grease, plus Tabasco. It certainly isn't the most nutritious meal, let alone health food, but there are very few folks I know who don't harbor the occasional craving. Call it satisfying junk food. So it is with Gil's All Fright Diner.

Just like a diner stack, Gil's is chock full of varied (and tasty) ingredients. Its plot conjures unspeakable Lovecraftian elder god cosmic horror type stuff (in pig Latin, no less), while stylistically it evokes the lighthearted New Southern Gothic of Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire Mysteries. The two protagonists' pickup truck breaks down in a tiny town in the Texas panhandle, the diner of which has become the focus for nightly zombie attacks which turn out to be something far worse: the first stages of The End of the World. There is a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-flavor to the mix of teenage sexuality and black magic that is Tammy the teenage necromancer and her perpetually horny boyfriend/assistant, Chad. The town of Rockwood, the setting for the story, is suffused with a surreal atmosphere, sort of like Douglas Adams except Texan. And there's a sweet romance that breaks some taboos: it's between a vampire and a ghost.

The novel is actually more thoughtful than I initially gave it credit for. By having Earl, a vampire, and Duke, a werewolf, as protagonists, but more importantly as regular guys, the novel's very premise calls into questions our normal understanding of what it means to be monstrous.

"Pushing monsters away into childhood fantasies was much harder after you've become one. He'd discovered that most of the terrors that stalked the night weren't really terrors at all. They were mostly like regular folks, just trying to live their lives. As long as they were left alone they were perfectly harmless except for the occasional bite on the neck. Humans were the real terrors, always getting worked up and looking to kill something." (pp. 32-33)

Here's an example of that surreal quality that I mentioned. Zombie cows.

"Damn," Duke swore under his breath. This sort of thing would happen now....

Melinda raised her head and uttered a low, haunting howl. The rest of the herd joined her in a bloodcurdling moan that seemed to bubble up from the sulfurous pit of Hell itself.

"Mo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-oo."

Eyes full of unnatural hunger, loose lips smacking, the herd closed in. The clang of cowbells marked their otherwise silent advance." (p. 53)

I think that was the first time I actually had to catch my breath from laughing so hard. This is funny stuff.

Speaking of funny, there's the aforementioned Tammy, an Asian-American high school hottie who moonlights as Mistress Lilith, Queen of Night, contemporary priestess of the old gods. She's the perfect combination of The Wicker Man and Mallrats:

"[I]t was hard enough to resurrect the old gods without having to deal with curfews, groundings, and math homework. She didn't know what the big deal was. A C-plus was passing. Maybe she wasn't "living up to her potential," as [her dad] so often put it, in geometry, but in the new age geometry would mean little. Denise Calhoun has a straight-A average. It wouldn't save her from the special hell Tammy had in store for pig-faced sluts who thought they were so smart just because they knew all about planes and points and parallel lines and other completely stupid stuff that nobody ever used in real life." (p. 70)

The surreality of the town makes for good laughs too. After coming out as a werewolf to the sheriff, Duke discovers that the tiny town of Rockwood is a little different from most places:

"'Bout seven years back, had an outbreak of vampire turkeys. And four years before that, Charlie Vaughn's daughter got herself possessed. And the Stillman's scarecro took to wandering around at night and scaring the bejeezus out of the kids. Point is, Rockwood has itself an unusual history..." ((p. 85)

Vampire turkeys? And the sheriff's voice is written so clearly that I can hear the deadpan delivery in my head, and so I laugh all the harder.

Martinez describes our heroes' visit to Wacky Willie's Deluxe Goofy Golf, the only attraction in Rockwood:

"Wacky Willie had added the 'Deluxe' when finally ridding the thirteenth hole windmill of a stubborn family of bats after a great and terrible struggle that would forever be known as 'The Fearsome Bat War of Rockwood County' to Willie, but was usually referred to as 'That Time Willie Had To Get Rabies Shots" by everyone else." (p. 94)

"These incidents were a mere sampling of the many inexplicable events at Wacky Willie's. Willie had pamphlets made for the tourists. He'd even sold one which, at an asking price of five bucks, was something of an inexplicable event in itself." (p. 95)

The humor gets downright Monty Python-esque when the vanquished ghouls (or, more properly, the scattered-and-as-yet-still-animated parts of the vanquished ghouls) confront the approaching daylight and with it their collective doom:

Detached arms twisted to cover their squinting yellow eyes. They squealed in the ghoulish tongue.

"Bugger, I hate this part."

"Well, no point in complaining," another ghoul replied.

"True, true," a head agreed somewhere from the center of the pile.

"Moof glu tlak," a jawless head seconded.

"See you gents on the other side."

"Any plans?" the head atop the pile asked.

"Oh, nothing much," the buried ghoul replied. "Just float around in the sullen ether. Wait to be called upon again. Review my performance this go-around."

"I thought you did a marvelous snarl."

...

And then the sun poked its way over the horizon, and the melting began. Green flesh liquified. Eyes oozed from their sockets. Foaming bubbles boiled and burst in loud, popping splatters. The ghouls shrieked their death rattles. Not that any of it was all that painful for things that were already dead, but they were determined to enjoy their last remaining moments of form with a good screeching contest. (pp. 144-5)

"Bugger, I hate this part." " I thought you did a marvelous snarl." "A good screeching contest"! Need I say (or quote) more?

If you are in the mood for a tasty read worth every empty calorie, slide on up to the counter and give it a read.

Creepy, eerily modern masterpieces of short 19th century horror

Can Such Things Be? Tales of Horror and the Supernatural
Ambrose Bierce
Citadel Press, 1990 (Originally published 1893)

[H]e can and will be read with interest in an age which is getting ready to renounce compromise, kindness, and Christianity. (p.9)

This is as much of Clifton Fadiman's introduction as anyone needs to read. After Fadiman (the embodiment of 1940s patrician intellectual snobbery) slights Bierce for his lack of a formal education, he then dismisses most of his journalistic work as "writing badly, doubtless writing too much." He opines that Bierce's writing is only considered interesting because of Bierce's legend and describes Bierce's nihilism as "brutal and simple as a blow, and by the same token not too convincing" and, "if taken in overdoses, a trifle tedious." Bierce's prose is "old-fashioned," "flawed with the bad taste of the period," and melodramatic.

Fadiman's extensive criticisms may or may not be true about the larger part of Bierce's oeuvre (I have, for example, seen Bierce described online as "ponderous Victorian melodrama"), but they definitely do not apply to the unsettling stories in this volume. Bierce's meticulous grammar (meticulous from the perspective of my relatively grammatically-impoverished ass, at least) and sentences (so typical of 19th-century American prose) chock full of prepositional phrases took me a story or two until I got into the rhythm of his language and storytelling. Once I did, though, each story read better than the one before. I find it hard to believe that he was mocked during his life by many critics for his rough writing, poor grammar, and lack of an education. If only today's university students could write this well.

Many of the stories struck me as strikingly contemporary, perhaps because irony is so central to his writing. As well, Bierce loves to mix the comic (the absurd?) and the horrific in a way that doesn't come through in other classic horror writers like Poe or Lovecraft. One commentator has noted that his "style and journalistic background gave his stories of war and strange disappearances such an uneasy realism that many mistook them for being true." That this realism is often tempered with a Dickian uncertainty about what is real and what illusory is perhaps why many of these stories are ahead of their time while also being of a piece with it.

The fact is, that of your own sanity you have no evidence that's any better than some lunatic who thinks he's Ulysses S. Grant or Jesus H. Christ. I certainly have no evidence of mine. For all I know you don't exist. Everything around me may be fictions of my disordered imagination. - Ambrose Bierce

This fusion of realism and radical skepticism has earned him the almost-postmodern accolade of "the master of magical cynicism," and this mastery is definitely on display in many, if not all, of Bierce's work in this collection.

• "One Summer Night" -- A scant story, merely a page and a half, about a man apparently buried alive, revived by grave diggers, and killed by the black spadesman. Chilling in its ruthless efficiency.
  

• "The Moonlit Road" -- Prefiguring Kurosawa's Rashomon, B,ierce tells the story of a murdered wife and her ghost from three different perspectives (son, husband/killer, wife/ghost).

• "A Tough Tussle" -- In this account of the horrors of war and the veil between lucidity and lunacy, a Union officer ends up sitting next to a Confederate corpse. When shots are fired, the two end up in a tussle from which neither emerges alive.

• "A Jug of Sirup" -- A morality play about how to behave in a store run, even after he's been buried, by a model citizen.
  

• "Staley Fleming's Hallucination" -- In which a man is killed by a hallucinatory dog, the phantom of the dog of the man whom he murdered.
  

• "A Resumed Identity" -- Think The Sixth Sense, or perhaps a less overwrought version of Lovecraft's "The Outsider," except that it was written in the late 1800s. The ghost discovers his lamentable status much to his sorrow.

• "A Baby Tramp" -- A genuinely heartbreaking story about an orphaned toddler who makes his way across the country to die on his mother's grave. Where was "Bitter Bierce" in this story, unless he was bitter against a God and Natural Order that would permit such horrors?
  

• "The Damned Thing" -- Was he killed by a mountain lion? Or was it something stranger? Shades of HP Lovecraft, "The Colour Out of Space."
  

• "The Stranger" -- A classic ghost story with a genuinely hair-rising ending.

Magical cynicism indeed. Lots of pointed satire and yet also such spooky stories. Another phrase I like that describes the voice which runs through these collected stories is "courageous despair" (most explicitly expressed in "The Baby Tramp.")

There are voices from the Past that can help us in our travail, and eloquent among them is that of the courageous despair of Ambrose Bierce. Behind all the bitterness and the thunderous nay-saying, one can detect a profound interest in, and fascination with, the human adventure. One of the surest signs of this is the vigour and precision of Bierce's language; he could not have created such excellences out of despair, no matter how vividly that despair served as his subject, for the language of despair is silence. There is a secret joyousness in such hatred, and it's a part of what appeals to me in all that I've read of Ambrose Bierce. -- Jack Matthews

I like that. The publishers should use that as this book's introduction in the next edition.

Gripping, disturbing, chilling--you'll look at the strangers around you in a new way

Carrion Comfort
Dan Simmons
Grand Central Publishing, 1990

How horrifying would it be to find someone else in that most intimate of "places," your own mind, using you as a marionette, steering you to commit senseless acts of violence as an absolutely helpless pawn in their sociopathic schemes? That is the central, chillingly effective premise of the epic second novel by award-winning author Dan Simmons. Ranging from a concentration camp in Nazi-controlled Poland to the genteel Southern city of Charleston, South Carolina, to the racially charged streets of Philadelphia to a private island off the Atlantic coast, this near-900-page chiller deftly covers an equally extensive expanse of literary territory, including elements of science fiction, supernatural horror, psychological thriller, and international espionage.

If I could summarize the plot in one paragraph, it would be as follows. Our world is populated by a vanishingly small population of psychic "vampires," individuals who can enter the mind of others to control their thoughts and actions. These creatures are sociopaths, amoral monsters who casually foment violence, commit mental and physical rape, and destroy lives in order to play their "games." Three such vampires, old colleagues in sociopathology, have decided to end their decades-long game with one another by attempting mutual homicide, using (of course) innocent bystanders as their weapons. The resulting mass murder brings together our protagonists---a psychiatrist and survivor of the Chelmno death camp, a young black college student whose father was a victim of the vampires, and a Southern sheriff whose demeanor belies a keen intelligence. Over the course of 850+ pages, these characters uncover a sinister cabal of "vampires" whose games seem to be leading toward the ultimate finale---destruction of the world itself.

At almost 900 pages (have I mentioned how long the book is?), Carrion Comfort could be a daunting, even boring, read in the hands of a lesser talent, and yet Dan Simmons is able to pull it off with aplomb. His use of various side characters, subplots, multiple points of view, and unexpected twists, along with an ever-climbing bodycount of innocent puppets, keeps the readers interest through the very last page. Most chilling, perhaps, are the first-person musings of Miz Melanie Fuller, a Southern belle "vampire" whose obsessions with scripture, race, and propriety exist side-by-side with her callous disregard for the lives of all the pawns she uses and discards.

I had the opportunity to do dinner with Dan Simmons a decade ago and found him to be a charming man with a warm, open manner. It amazes me that a story so profoundly dark and chilling could come from a person so engaging. I guess that goes to show that Simmons is great at what he does. Whether writing award-winning fantasy, horror, science fiction, or thrillers, he always seems to be at the top of his game, and Carrion Comfort is no exception.

(This review was originally written on August 17, 2007.)