Blog-o-ween 2023: "The Bacchae" by Elizabeth Hand

Just the other day, I was having an online discussion with someone about the 1980s Satanic Panic (Hello, johnwithanhberry!) In the course of that conversation, I mentioned that I used to watch the evangelical preachers on television because, aside from the fact that they were comedy gold, they would rail against heavy metal and punk music with a real gusto. Heck, they had better musical tastes than a lot of my friends! I used to sit there with a notepad and pencil and jot down all the albums I needed to buy the next time I was at National Record Mart. “Dead Kennedys? Check! W.A.S.P.? Alrighty, then! Talking Heads? Wait...Talking Heads are Satanic? Okay, okay, Pastor Gary Greenwald, whatever you say!”

I find this method to still be useful in this new Satanic Panic we find ourselves in. (Now with 33% more panic!) Nosy parental groups and know-nothing political action committees are demanding the removal of scores of titles from school and public libraries. Why? Because they’re too violent, they’re too sexy, they’re too “woke”! Hell, sign me up, I say! You got a list of those book titles handy so I don’t get carpal tunnel syndrome writing them all down?

Today’s Blog-o-ween subject is another example of my “Well, if it’s making [enter your favorite stick-in-the-mud, busybody group here] uncomfortable, then it’s gotta be good.” style of media consumption. It also doesn’t hurt that it’s a damn fine story.

Now, just imagine (or as my college French teacher would say, “Imaginez...imaginez...”) it’s 1991, you are perusing the letters section of the British magazine of science-fiction and fantasy, Interzone, and you come across this doozy that fairly drips with butthurt male indignation:

“I think I have seldom encountered a story as repulsive as ‘The Bacchae’...It was a vile parade of anti-male hatred, an exhibition of baroque man-killing justified, so it seems, by the crimes of discarded beer cans and a dying fish...[It] is nothing more than a snuff movie in prose, heaped with feathers, jewels, and fins...I hope that you’ll never again subject the magazine’s readers to similar chuckling depictions of agony.”

If you are like me, then your very next thought is “Where, oh where, do I find Elizabeth Hand’s short story, ‘The Bacchae’? I have to read it!” What kind of kinky kicks are committed in said story that could have ruined this poor guy (and, of course, it was a guy) for marriage and caused him to write such a strongly-worded letter? Let’s find out...

“She got into the elevator with him, the young woman from down the hall, the one he’d last seen at the annual Coop Meeting a week before. Around her shoulders hung something soft that brushed his cheek as Gordon moved aside to let her in: a fur cape, or pelt, or no, something else. The flayed skin of an animal, an animal that when she shouldered past him to the corner of the elevator proved to be her Rottweiler, Leopold. He could smell it now: the honeyed stench of uncured flesh, a pink and scarlet veil still clinging to the pelt’s ragged fringe of coarse black hair. It had left a crimson streak down the back of her skirt, and stippled her legs with pink rosettes.”

It is the not-too-distant future (next Sunday, A.D.), and the earth is in the throes of an ecological collapse. There are shields in orbit to protect the planet from the sun’s UV radiation. Gordon, our protagonist, is wandering through the landscape of his city as a sort of “stranger in a strange land.” There seems to be a shift occurring of which poor Gordon is slowly becoming aware. Women seem to be lashing out, striking back against the men in this world.

“Gordon had heard of some of these on television, but other tales came from friends, male friends. Near escapes recounted in low voices at the gym or club, random acts of violence spurred by innocent offers of help in carrying groceries, the act of holding a door open suddenly seen as threatening. Women friends, even relatives, sisters and daughters refusing to accompany family on trips to the city. An exodus of wives and children to the suburbs, from the suburbs to the shrinking belts of countryside ringing the megalopolis. And then, husbands and fathers disappearing during weekend visits with the family in exile.”

Gordon hears the story of Debbie Delucia on the evening news. She was on trial for the murder of a young man she claimed had assaulted her the summer before:

“The young man had been beaten severely about the face and chest with one of Ms. DeLucia’s high-heeled shoes. When he was found by the parking lot attendant most of his hair was missing. Gordon switched off the television when it displayed photographs of these unpleasantries, followed by shots of a throng of cheering women outside the courthouse.”

Ms. DeLucia was found not guilty.

The next morning brings the story of three women who, having left a nightclub and been harassed by a group of young men, killed one of them “with a ferocity the newspaper described as ‘demonic.’”

Gordon finds that his partner, Olivia, is also experiencing some sort of awakening, a kind of violent metamorphosis. One night, they take a walk by the river. Gordon wants to get back to the street, but Olivia walks to the river’s edge and pulls a dying fish from the water. She angrily accuses Gordon of being blind to what is happening to the world, of not caring that this poisoned planet is becoming unlivable. “There’d be nothing left at all,” she tells him, “if it was up to people like you.”

Uh-oh, Gordy!

On their way home, Olivia confronts two men and proceeds to kick the everloving snot out of them. Worse (at least from Gordon’s perspective), she seems to enjoy the violence.

What is happening to Olivia? What is happening to the world? Why does there seem to be a switching of gender roles, with men afraid to walk the streets alone at night for fear of running afoul of predatory women? 

In her notes about this story in her collection The Best of Elizabeth Hand, she says that “the Bacchae” is her “ecofeminist homage to J.G. Ballard.” After its initial publication in Interzone, Hand says readers named it their most hated story of the year and that

“The mostly male readership of that magazine hated it and wrote letters to that effect, which is how I knew I’d done a good job and hit a nerve.”

Oh, yeah, you did!

You can see the inspiration and influence of Ballard in Hand’s tale. However, where Ballard would have detailed and investigated the ecological space, Hand is more concerned with the psychological toll that space has on the individuals within it. Hand uses the play “The Bacchae” by Euripedes to great effect. In that ancient Greek tragedy, King Pentheus is torn asunder by the women of his kingdom, driven mad by the god Dionysus during a festival. Hand’s women are also driven mad, not by a god, but by a world destroyed by men.

After being published by Interzone, “The Bacchae” was included in the anthology Best New Horror 3, edited by Stephen Jones and Ramsey Campbell. It later made its way into Hand’s own collections Last Summer at Mars Hill and The Best of Elizabeth Hand. You can still read it online here on the Nightmare magazine website.

The Dark Tome (which I always call “The Dark To Me” because there’s just something about their logo that makes me read it that way) is an audio drama podcast that follows a young girl named Cassie who uses the books she finds in a spooky old shop as doorways to other worlds. One of the stories she travels to is “The Bacchae.” It’s a slightly different telling of the tale, but still an interesting one. You can find the link to the episode here.

This is the second Elizabeth Hand story we’ve written about for Blog-o-ween 2023, so if you want to learn more about this amazing writer, then jump back to the post about her novel Wylding Hall here. Since writing about that short novel, I’ve had the opportunity to listen to its audiobook, and I have to say that I loved the way it used multiple actors to mimic the epistolary-documentary interview narrative format of the novel. Highest recommendations!

So, we come to the end of another Blog-o-ween entry. I hope you enjoyed it. Remember, fellas, not everything in this world is meant for or about you. One man’s repulsive, vile parade of baroque anti-male hatred is another woman’s...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

Blog-o-ween 2023: Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand

Since we are heading into the weekend, I thought I would dead-icate (heh-heh-heh!) Fridays here at Blog-o-ween 2023 to longer form stories. We won’t be checking out anything that can’t be read (or listened to for you audiobook fans) in an evening or two. Don’t worry, I’m not going to make you read The Naked and the Dead or anything. I mean, that sounds like an erotic thriller starring Andrew Stevens and Shannon Tweed...

...wait a minute...is The Naked and the Dead the basis for an erotic thriller with supernatural overtones about a high-profile security firm employee (played by Andrew Stevens) who sets up cameras in a swanky mansion in the Hollywood Hills and captures the ghost of a starlet who dances in the nude every night at midnight (Shannon Tweed, natch) and he has to solve her murder so she can find peace and move on but he’s fallen in love with her and can’t let her go? And all this happens against a backdrop of chiaroscuro lighting, neon, and a musical soundtrack made up of saxophone and synthesizers? Is that what The Naked and the Dead is about? Why aren’t we reading that?!

Sorry...got off the main road for a second there.

Anywho, today’s Blog-o-ween entry is a short novel by American writer Elizabeth Hand. It isn’t an erotic thriller set in 1990s Hollywood concerning itself with the surveillance of naked starlets, but it is a folk-horror set in 1970s England and involves a documentary film, a psychedelic folk-rock band, and the supernatural. All these factors come together at an ancient, crumbling house in the Hampshire countryside called...Wylding Hall.

Windhollow Faire, a 1970s acid-folk band with one record to their name and a tragedy in their past, retreats to the country to lay the ghost of the suicide of their lead singer Arianna and to put together enough tracks for their second album. Their manager suggests they take off and isolate themselves from the world at a place called Wylding Hall. Things don’t go to plan, however, when Julian Blake, songwriter, guitarist, and former boyfriend of the dead Arianna, begins acting weird (or is that “wyrd”?) He seems strangely familiar with Wylding Hall and its environs, history, and architecture, even though he tells the group that he’s never been there before.

Then, one day, Julian disappears.

And it’s Julian’s mysterious disappearance that draws a documentary film crew together forty years later to interview everyone involved — the surviving band members, their manager, etc. What happened to Julian? Where did he go? Did the mysterious woman who showed up at the local pub the band was playing in have anything to do with it? Why does every person who stayed at Wylding Hall have a strange story to tell?

The genius of Wylding Hall, I think, is in its construction as an epistolary novel made-up of single person interviews. It reminded me of Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s book Please Kill Me: the Uncensored Oral History of Punk. That book is a fascinating collection of remembrances, anecdotes, and yarns culled from hundreds of hours of interviews with scores of people who were there when it happened. These interviews are then presented to the reader in a seemingly unstructured way. There is very little in the way of scene-setting or context. McNeil and McCain remove themselves from the playing field, so to speak, and let their subjects speak for themselves.

I imagine the documentary film crew doing the same in Hand’s novel. They collected all their interviews, then pulled out the parts that they wanted, the snippets that made the best, most coherent story, and set it down for the reader to take in and make up their own minds about what happened. Hand does a wonderful job of giving each of the interviewees their own voice and point-of-view, so that it really feels like we are hearing from different people from different backgrounds with different desires and who have come to different conclusions. It is masterfully done.

This being a folk-horror story, there are plenty of unsettling occurrences that may or may not involve strange rituals, old folk tales, poems that might be spells, and sacrifice. Hand blends all of these together in a heady brew that is powerful, but not overwhelming. She never hits the reader over the head with anything. Everything is subtle, strange, unsettling, as if it were taking place just out of the corner of the eye.

Elizabeth Hand was born in 1957 and grew up in Westchester County, New York. She sold her first story, “Prince of Flowers,” to Twilight Zone Magazine in 1988. Two years later, her first novel, Winterlong, was published by Bantam Spectra. She has written movie tie-in novelizations for The X-Files, 12 Monkeys, and Star Wars. She is a columnist for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She also created and wrote the 1990s DC Comics series Anima.

Both the novel and its multi-narrator audiobook should be available electronically at your local library. If you’d like a soundtrack to go along with your reading, may I suggest listening to Pentangle? They are a band who would have traveled the same circles as Windhollow Faire, and their music is a beautiful and haunting accompaniment to Wylding Hall.

So, cue up the music, pick up your copy of Wylding Hall, settle into a comfy chair in front of a roaring fire...preferably located in a crumbling, rural manse...and...well...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!