Revelations

The Barnes & Noble ReviewEditor Douglas Winter has come up with a unique idea for an anthology and found the writers to give the idea vivid life. “What better way to mark the close of the twentieth century,” Winters writes in his Afterword, “than through a sequence of stories, one set in each decade of the past hundred years?” The stories (short novels, really) are, as befits the final years of a century, “latent with apocalypse.” Perhaps the most powerful story in the book is David Morrell’s “If I Should Die Before I Wake,” a piece set in the 1910s. An epidemic is running loose and the people find themselves unable to deal with it in any sense. Particularly devastating is the loss of the children. After I read a few pages, I remembered Graham Greene’s line about “the terrible wisdom of God.” Morrell was thinking similarly. One of his characters says, “Sometimes God can be cruel.” What gives the piece its depth is not only its classical theological concerns but also the pleasingly detailed way Morrell presents the second decade of this century. There’s talk of such newfangled inventions as automobiles and radios. Morrell contrasts this kinder, gentler era with the ravages of the epidemic, and the counterpoint is chilling. F. Paul Wilson’s “Aryans and Absinthe” is an equally stunning achievement. I happened to be reading through a recent book about Nazi Germany, the author persuading us that the average German knew much more about the extermination of Jews than he was willing to admit. Wilson makes the same point here, and quite dramatically: It was clear from the very beginning,what Hitler intended to do with those he despised, Wilson suggests, and the German people followed him willingly nonetheless. Wilson’s story concerns a young man who has convinced himself that even though “[s]ome of the most bitter people have chosen Jews as their scapegoats,” he and his mother (who is Jewish) will be fine as long as they “keep a low profile.” Wilson paints a convincingly lurid picture of decadent, “Cabaret” Germany, also giving us some of Hitler’s earliest and most legendary triumphs, including the beer-hall victory. And, as always with Wilson, he twists and turns the story line so that you end up in a very unexpected place. Joe Lansdale’s “The Big Blow” shows the writer’s fabulist impulses to very good effect. The time is the 1900s; the place is Texas. A mysterious white boxer named McBride is hired by some locals to take care of a local black boxer named Johnson, $200 if McBride beats him, $500 if he kills him. This being Lansdale country, nobody is exactly all good or all bad, but Johnson is a believably drawn man of great decency, no easy accomplishment. Too many decent people make dull reading. Lansdale gives him good and true life. McBride, on the other hand, is a redneck bully boy you’d like to pour gasoline over and then ignite, just to watch him die, to quote an old Johnny Cash song. Lansdale very cleverly juxtaposes the impending fight with an impending flood of Old Testament proportions. The action sequences are the story’s strongest moments. Nobody writes complicated action better than Lansdale. He is able to give you the cinematic surface but also a glimpse of the horrified souls caught up in the action. An excellent piece of work. Ramsey Campbell’s story “The Word” is a tale told by the editor of a fanzine that specializes in eviscerating most of the books it reviews. The editor spends a good deal of his time trying to find a copy of a book called “The Word” by an author named Jess Kray, a writer the fanzine editor would love to trash again. But what starts out as a seemingly mundane story takes a number of deeply disturbing turns as we learn more and more about “The Word.” In addition to offering us a haunting look at a contemporary prophet, Campbell has also given us a devastating portrait of the kind of pseudo-literary loner who hopes to make everybody else just as isolate and unhappy as he is. He puts all his hatred and arrogance into his slashing book reviews. This is the only power he possesses, the only way he can strike back at the world that has dismissed him. Until, that is, he makes contact with “The Word.” Campbell is a gifted writer, and he’s rarely been better than he is here (including some great shots at the sad-comic good intentions of political correctness, a production of “Jesus Christ Superstar” performed entirely by people in wheelchairs). This is a work with real echoes, one the reader is likely to recall for years afterward, a serious story about our need for God, told by a fool and knave. There are other excellent pieces, too—nary a clinker in the entire anthology, with good work from Clive Barker, Poppy Z. Brite and Christa Faust, Charles Grant, Whitley Strieber, David J. Schow and Craig Spector, Elizabeth Massie, and Richard Christian Matheson. Each author is good at conveying the historical aura of his or her particular decade, as well as giving us a sense of a dark and dangerous universe. A memorable collection to be sure.—Ed Gorman