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: "The Monkey's Paw" by W.W. Jacobs

Well, kiddies, Blog-o-ween 2023 is just flying by, is it not? We are more than halfway to Halloween. In fact, we have two weeks until the big day arrives. Fourteen days to pack in as many spooky movies, TV shows, books, and old time radio programs as we can before we have to pack it all in, give Thanksgiving a cursory nod, and then pretend we care about Christmas. It almost makes you want to wish for more time to enjoy it all, doesn’t it? And what would the harm in that be? Wishing for a little more free time to enjoy the things in life that give us pleasure, huh?

Obviously, you are not a Twilight Zone aficionado.

And obviously you are not hep to the subject of today’s Blog-o-ween post. For Mr. and Mrs. White and their son Herbert, the opportunity to have their wishes granted is too good to pass up. Unfortunately, they are too busy imagining how much better their lives will be to notice that the chalice their friend the sergeant-major is handing them is poisoned. Let’s gather round the fire on such a cold and wet night at this and let W.W. Jacobs tell us the story of fate, wishes, and...“The Monkey’s Paw.”

“‘To look at,’ said the sergeant-major, fumbling in his pocket, ‘it's just an ordinary little paw, dried to a mummy.’

“He took something out of his pocket and proffered it. Mrs. White drew back with a grimace, but her son, taking it, examined it curiously.

“‘And what is there special about it?’ inquired Mr. White as he took it from his son, and having examined it, placed it upon the table.

“‘It had a spell put on it by an old fakir,’ said the sergeant-major, ‘a very holy man. He wanted to show that fate ruled people's lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow. He put a spell on it so that three separate men could each have three wishes from it.’”

It’s a wet and windy night, and the Whites are huddled around the fire awaiting their friend, Sergeant-Major Morris, fresh off the boat after spending twenty-one years in India. Whiskey is poured and time is passed with the soldier’s tales of “wild scenes and doughty deeds; of wars and plagues and strange peoples.” Soon, however, conversation turns to another subject: a small, mummified monkey’s paw in the sergeant-major’s possession.

The paw, the old soldier tells the Whites, was enchanted (or perhaps “cursed” is a better word? Heh-heh-heh!) by a holy man in India. It gives three people three wishes each:

“‘Well, why don't you have three, sir?’ said Herbert White, cleverly.

“The soldier regarded him in the way that middle age is wont to regard presumptuous youth. ‘I have,’ he said, quietly, and his blotchy face whitened.

“‘And did you really have the three wishes granted?’ asked Mrs. White.

“‘I did,’ said the sergeant-major, and his glass tapped against his strong teeth.

“‘And has anybody else wished?’ persisted the old lady.

“‘The first man had his three wishes. Yes,’ was the reply; ‘I don't know what the first two were, but the third was for death. That's how I got the paw.’

“His tones were so grave that a hush fell upon the group.”

Boy, isn’t the sergeant-major the life of the party?

The soldier leaves the paw with the family, but warns them of the consequences of their actions. But what’s the harm in it, the Whites wonder?

What indeed?

What follows is one of the great short stories in all of literature. It is, like “The Hook” (notice how we keep coming back to that tale?), told economically, and because of that simplicity, the punch at the end lands even harder.

I can recall reading “The Monkey’s Paw” in a junior high English class. It was probably a part of the lesson where we learned about the types of conflict used in literature. You know, the old tropes of “Man vs. Self,” “Man vs. Nature,” “Man vs. Society” and all that? (What “Woman” got up to in these stories, we never really discussed.) (What do you want? It was the early 1980s.) “The Monkey’s Paw” fits right into the “Man vs. Fate” trope, don’cha think? I can remember my head spinning at the irony of the wishes Mr. and Mrs. White made in the course of the story. And that dénouement — the knocking at the door, Mrs. White desperately trying to pull the bolt back to let her poor son into the house, and Mr. White, just as desperately, looking for the paw in order to make his final wish and hopefully to set the scales of fate and freewill in balance again.

William Wymark Jacobs was born in London, England in 1863. He began his working life at the age of sixteen as a clerk in the Post Office Savings Bank. He had his first short story published in 1885, and while literary success was slow to come, Jacobs was able to quit his job at the post office and dedicate himself to writing by 1899.

Jacobs wrote across many different genres, including tales of the supernatural (natch), humor, and stories of the sea. “The Monkey’s Paw” was included in his 1902 collection The Lady of the Barge and was also published in the September 192 issue of Harper’s Monthly Magazine. He would also go on to write for the theater and films, producing mainly adaptation of his own short stories, such as The Ghost of Jerry Bundler and The Bravo. Jacobs died in September of 1943 at the age of 79. British novelist, essayist, and historian Ian Hay wrote that he was

“quiet, gentle and modest...not fond of large functions and crowds. He invented an entirely new form of humorous narrative. Its outstanding characteristics were compression and understatement.”

“The Monkey’s Paw” is a tale that is nothing if not a wonder of “compression and understatement.” It has been anthologized countless times. Countless times, people! A list of the publications in which you can find it are longer than your arm. Heck, it’s longer than Wilt Chamberlain’s arm. Any good anthology of classic supernatural tales should carry Jacobs’s most famous story. I have it on my shelves in the collection Dark: Stories of Madness, Murder, and the Supernatural as edited by Clint Willis. (We’ll have another classic tale from that anthology coming up soon.) If you don’t want to get up from your seat (and who can blame you — it’s nice and comfy here by the fire), then you can follow this link to the Project Gutenberg version of Jacob’s story.

Not only has “The Monkey’s Paw” been anthologized countless times (countless!), it’s found its way onto the radio waves just as many times. For your listening pleasure, I offer this 1980 episode of the excellent Canadian radio series Nightfall. The sound design of this dramatization is chilling enough to make you toss an extra log onto the fire and pull the blanket closer around your shoulders. Brr!

How about television and movies? Well, “The Monkey’s Paw” has been filmed countless (countless!) times, as well. Here is a version from 1982 starring Sloane Shelton and William Cain.

Well, that’s all for today, fiends. I hope you enjoyed yourselves and learned your lesson. It doesn’t make any sense to go about wishing things were any different than they are. You know what they say about wishing, don’t you? You can wish in one hand, spit in the other, and see which one fills up first.

Of course...the person who said that probably didn’t have a monkey’s paw in one of their hands to help them along. What’s one wish going to hurt? One little, teensy-tiny wish and then it’s...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

Blog-o-ween 2023: "The Sideways Lady" by Lynda E. Rucker

Today’s Blog-o-ween 2023 post feels like returning to visit an old friend. We’ve got a haunted house to explore on Halloween, a group of enthusiastic young ghost-breakers to follow, and a spooky old urban legend to prove true. We’re also dipping back into what has quickly become one of my favorite collections of creepy tales, Stephen Jones’s Terrifying Tales to Tell at Night: 10 Scary Stories to Give you Nightmares! So without further ado, let’s go trick-or-treating with author Lynda E. Rucker, then once we get our fill of fun-size Charleston Chews and Almond Joys, we can all head on over to the Beaumont House and see if we can’t have a chat with...“The Sideways Lady.”

“A family vanished, sixty years after the house’s previous occupants died under mysterious circumstances. An old house of ancient, unknown, and perhaps evil provenance. A specter known only, enigmatically, as ‘The Sideways Lady,’ and a small town, caught in the grip of terror for more than a hundred years...’

“Toby said, ‘We aren’t gripped by terror.’

“‘Shut up,’ Stevie said. She went on reading...”

It’s Halloween, and young Stevie is determined to explore the ruins of the local haunted abode, the Beaumont House, so that she can share it with her favorite website, True Hauntings. Her little brother, Toby, is less determined, but along for the ride, nonetheless. The children have recently moved with their father to a new town after their mother’s death. It was their mother who had instilled in them a love for all things creepy and weird. Their father, still grieving, doesn’t seem to notice them much, and so he just tells them not to stay out too late.

Once trick-or-treating has run its course, Stevie and Toby, joined by two other kids from school, Taylor and Tristan, enter the Beaumont House. Taylor and Tristan consider themselves to be “urbexers,” or urban explorers, and they claim that their grandmother grew up with Kathleen Beaumont, a girl whose family owned the house years before. The house had once stood in England, but a rich man had it moved to America, because his wife always wanted to live in a castle. The two of them were found in the house, dead of unknown causes. The house stood empty for sixty years, until the Beaumonts moved in, mother, father, and three teenaged children. And that’s when, so the tale that Taylor and Tristan tell goes, young Kathleen claimed that someone called “The Sideways Lady” had come to live in her house and kept her up all night trying to crawl into bed with her. Soon thereafter, the Beaumonts pulled Kathleen out of school. Friends of the girl claimed that she had summoned a demon and needed to be exorcized. Then, on Halloween night in 1969, the Beaumonts, like their predecessors, all went missing. People say that Kathleen’s spirit still walks the halls of the house, trying to lure people inside to share her fate.

So who’s ready to do a little exploring?

A little exploring is just what our fearsome foursome do. They may come to regret the decision. What do they find in the Beaumont House? Who is the old woman who offers them cakes? Who is the woman Stevie sees in the moonlight pouring through one of the windows? What is the true history of the house?

“The Sideways Lady” ticks a lot of boxes for me. It has a young protagonist from whose perspective we experience the events of the story. It’s a story about an urban legend, so there are multiple versions of the “truth” being passed around. It uses excerpts from other sources in its telling — newspaper and internet sites. All in all, Lynda E. Rucker has put together a great little tale that moves from beginning to end very well.

As I mentioned above, this is another story I discovered thanks to Stephen Jones’s Terrifying Tales to Tell at Night. Alas, it is to be the last story from that wonderful collection for this Blog-o-ween season, but what a story to go out on! I urge you all to track Jones’s anthology down. There are plenty of other stories in it to send a shiver down your spine - “Click-Clack the Rattlebag” by Neil Gaiman, “The Chemistry of Ghosts” by Lisa Morton, and “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” (not to be confused with that other Are You Afraid of the Dark?) by Charles L. Grant to name but a few. And like the other stories we’ve talked about, all of these tales are accompanied by the excellent artwork of Randy Broecker. I mean...just look at that picture of the Sideways Lady up above and tell me it isn’t creepy as all get out!

Lynda E. Rucker was born in rural Georgia in the United States. After graduating from college, she moved to Oregon and then, later, to Dublin, Ireland. She has several short story collections to her name, the latest being Now It’s Dark from Swan River Press. She’s written She was the winner of the Shirley Jackson Award from Best Short Story in 2015 for her tale “The Dying Season.”

So far as I can make out, “The Sideways Lady” was written for Terrifying Tales to Tell in the Dark. It hasn’t been collected anywhere else, not even in one of Rucker’s own books, and that’s a shame, I think. It’s a great story that deserves to be placed elsewhere.

That’s all for today. Be sure to stop back tomorrow to find out what spooky story we’ll be talking about. And be sure to stop over at the Beaumont House on your way home this evening. There’s a lonely woman who lives there, and from what I hear, she’s not...half bad looking...heh-heh-heh!

One more thing...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm?

Blog-o-ween 2023: "Blue Mist Road"

We are going to switch things up a little bit for today’s Blog-o-ween 2023 entry. I don’t have a particular author or short story in mind. In fact, the stories that I want to talk about today don’t really have a coherent form or a known provenance. Like the campfire tale of “The Hook” that we discussed at the beginning of this Blog-o-ween, these stories just seemed to pop into existence, then got passed around from person to person. As the tales were told and re-told, each “author” lent his/her/their own spin to them. The times in which they were told also had an influence on what was said to have happened. These tales may not have a specific author or subject, a particular form or content, but they all share one trait in common: they all take place on “Blue Mist Road.”

“Blue Mist Road” is not its correct name. Its actual name is Irwin Road. In total, it runs for two-and-a-quarter miles from Babcock Boulevard to Route 910 (otherwise known as Wexford Road) in the North Hills area of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Much of this distance, however, is closed to vehicular traffic. It is one of scores of narrow roads that run through the woods of Western Pennsylvania. The trees growing alongside the road reach up and join their canopies to form a natural, leafy tunnel through which the road travels. Although it is only a half mile from the golfers and boaters in North Park, two-and-a-half miles from the suburban sprawl of Gibsonia, and three miles from the shopping plazas of Wexford, Irwin Road feels as though it exists in the middle of nowhere. There are no streetlights running along its length, and very few houses. Whatever drives there, drives there alone.

Irwin Road picked up its moniker of “Blue Mist” or “Blue Myst” because of an eerie mist that envelops the area from time to time. For such a small strip of land, Blue Mist Road has more than its fair share of urban legends and spooky stories. It seems that every fear, every bad feeling, every dark tale in the surrounding countryside found refuge in the woods that run along the road.

Blue Mist Road is home to many ghosts and goblins. Some of these are of the type to be found on any similar stretch of road. For instance, there is the story that a family was once driving on Blue Mist Road when either a drunk driver or a deer forced their car off the road and head-on into a tree. There were no survivors, but it is said that if you drive there and put your car into neutral, their ghosts will push your car back in the way that it came. Talk about AAA roadside service! It’s the Afterlife Automobile Association!

Other stories concern the ruins of several old houses in the area. With only its stone foundations intact, one house is said to be called “Midget Farm” because (so the story goes) it was owned by a little person hoping to escape the scrutiny of his neighbors. Anyone caught stopping nearby or coming close to investigate the ruins is attacked and chased away by a group of angry little people.

I don’t make the news, people. I just report it.

Other stories report that if you drive your car to the closed section of Blue Mist Road and honk your horn three times, then you will awaken and anger the spirits there. If you think about it, however, what you are probably awakening is some poor slob that has to get up at the butt-crack of dawn and go to work. I’d be angry, too, if a bunch of people kept blowing their horns outside my house.

No discussion of urban legends would be complete if we didn’t also take a look at the times in which certain stories became more prominent. In the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, the predominant tale was less ghostly and, unfortunately, much more real. It was said then that Blue Mist Road was a meeting place for the Ku Klux Klan. Gruesome stories of murders and lynchings were passed back and forth. None of these stories (like many urban legends) had any basis in fact, but the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, heightening racial tensions between whites and blacks, as well as the strains being felt throughout the country due to the Generation Gap surely contributed to the proliferation of these stories.

Jump forward a decade or so, and we find a nation caught up in another panic, this one of the Satanic variety. Beginning in the early 1980s and carrying on into the twenty-first century, more than 12,000 unsubstantiated cases of alleged Satanic cults abusing children and making human sacrifices have been made. In the early years of this panic, role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and musical acts like Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest were said to be dissolving the morality of American youth and leading them down the path to Satanic worship.

With this fear gripping the nation, is it any wonder, then, that people began to speak of witch and Satanic cults operating in the woods beyond Blue Mist Road? There were tales of hikers finding ritually slaughtered animals, pentagrams drawn with chalk or blood, and, sometimes, the hoof prints of a goat-like creature walking on two legs. Other stories were told (most likely of the “my friend’s brother’s girlfriend said this actually happened...” variety) of kids walking out into the woods in order to party down only to stumble upon a cadre of men and women in black robes conducting some sort of dark ritual. Whoops! Truth be told, this kind of story just sounds more like it was told by someone who listened to too much Iron Maiden as a kid.

One last story about Blue Mist Road before you go. At the intersection where Irwin Road meets Route 910 there is a cemetery called, appropriately enough, Crossroads Cemetery. There, you will find a pair of headstones belonging to a husband and a wife. Due to erosion, the two headstones are sinking and slowly coming together. Aside from mundane explanations about land subsidence (boring!), there are two other stories about the headstones. One is romantic, the other...not so much. It is said that on nights when the moon is full, the stones come together and “kiss.” The other tale says that when the two headstones finally do come together and touch...the world will end.

Yikes!

Most of the above tales were taken from Thomas White’s book Legends & Lore of Western Pennsylvania. Other tales of Blue Mist Road, you can find several websites dedicated to urban legends and/or the history of the area, like Weird U.S., Positively Pittsburgh, and The Parting of Veils. I also found some good information thanks to The Uproar: The Student Voice of North Allegheny Senior High. Aris Paster wrote an excellent piece entitled “Petrifying Pittsburgh” back in October of 2021.

I’d also like to end today’s post with an invitation to all of you to share your own spooky stories and urban legends that are prevalent in your neck of the woods. Maybe in the future, I can collate these stories into a single post. And maybe then I will include my own tales of witches and Satanism that supposedly took place on a deserted road not far from where I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, Tevebaugh Hollow Road.

Until then...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!

Blog-o-ween 2023: "The Thing from the Grave!" by Al Feldstein

Life is unfair. Things may seem bad now — and they are pretty terrible — but believe me when I tell you that what we are living through now is nothing new, nothing out of the ordinary. Things have always been bad. Prejudice, war, pogroms, and sheer, mindless brutality have been the way of the world from time immemorial. The scales of justice have always been off-balance, and they’ve never tipped in favor of the innocent. Any gains that have been made by the victims of our collective bloody history have had to be torn from the breast of the powerful, the wealthy, and the comfortable. And those gains are never won once and for all. They have to be fought for again and again and again.

Two quotes that I think succinctly sum up the above are from Henrik Ibsen and, my personal favorite writer, Harlan Ellison (and we’ll be hearing more from ol’ Uncle Harlan in a future Blog-o-ween post):

“To live is to war with trolls.”

—Henrik Ibsen

and

“The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.”

—Harlan Ellison

In other words, living is exhausting work, folks. You have to fight for it every step of the way. And the people you have to fight against are just a bunch of dumb brutes. Get used to it.

But we can’t be at war with the stupidity of the world twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, can we? Heck, no! So where can we find a place to rest our heads awhile in between battles? Who can give us succor in these trying times? What can give our batteries the recharge they need so we can get back to the barricades and fight on?

Sure, a trip to Rick’s Café Américain would do you wonders. I hear they have a helluva band. But Rick’s is all the way over in Casablanca. Might I suggest something closer to home? What would you say to a visit to your local comic books store? And once there, what would you say when I tell you that the relief you seek is to be found in the pages of a seventy-year-old horror comic?

Begun in the 1940s by Max Gaines, Educational Comics was meant to market comics about science, history, and the Bible to schools and churches. Following his death in a boating accident in 1947, Max Gaines’s place at the head of the company was taken over by his son, William. And that’s when things really started to cook.

Under William Gaines’s guidance Educational Comics became Entertaining Comics — or EC for short — and the company collected a stable of writers and artists that I don’t think has really been equalled since. Editors Al Feldstein and Harvey Kurtzman (who also served as writers and artists) led a ragtag group of freelancers that included Johnny Craig, Reed Crandall, Jack Davis, Graham Ingels, Joe Orlando, and Wally Wood. Beginning in 1950, they started what was known as “The New Trend.”

The comics of this New Trend dealt with more mature matters. Titles like Tales from the Crypt, Frontline Combat, Shock SuspenStories, and Weird Science brought the kids who feverishly read them under the covers at night or tucked into the center of more acceptable reading fare stories about racial equality, anti-war advocacy, nuclear disarmament, and environmentalism. Heady stuff for the children of pre-Civil Rights Era America!

It was in EC’s horror line — Tales from the Crypt, The Haunt of Fear, and The Vault of Horror — that these social issues were melded with a sense of (midnight) black humor and poetic justice. The baddies in these comics were usually greedy jerks who killed innocent people in order to get what they wanted. In turn, their cupidity was rewarded by the universe through the most ironic means. If that didn’t work, then the universe wasn’t above sending in a supernatural agent to rebalance the scales. Anything to get the job done, amirite?

Take, for instance, today’s story. Written and drawn by Al Feldstein (with colors done by Joshua G. Jones), “The Thing from the Grave” is the quintessential Tales from the Crypt story. It’s just the kind of tale to give the heart a lift...right out of your chest! Heh-heh-heh!

It’s a tale as old as time: Bill and Jim are in love with the same woman. Laura, much to Bill’s chagrin, marries Jim. Determined to have her, Bill waylays Jim one night on a dark and lonely road. And he isn’t looking for a ride into town either. Bill kills Jim, buries his body, and dumps his car into a ravine. Now, all Bill has to do is sit back and wait for Laura to get over Jim’s disappearance, and then it’s a one-way trip for the two of them to Smooch City, if you know what I mean.

And I think you do.

Unfortunately for Bill, Laura isn’t giving up on Jim. She just knows that something terrible has happened to him. What’s a fella to do when all his best laid plans have failed? You guessed it — it’s time to confess everything to the woman whose husband you’ve murdered, lock her in a cabin, and set fire to it!

Granted, it’s a strange solution, but this is a complex problem. Bill doesn’t have time to think things through!

How is Laura going to get out of this predicament? Did Jim really mean it when he said that if Laura was ever in any danger then he would save her...no matter what? Who — or what — is the thing that comes shambling out of the forest and chases Bill over hill and dale? Well, I’ll give you a hint, kiddies: it ain’t a woodchuck, that’s for sure.

“The Thing from the Grave” has got it all: a lover’s triangle, deceit, murder, shallow graves, arson, and retribution in the form of an undead corpse with love in its heart...if not skin on its face. You can’t have everything, I suppose.

The poetic justice of “The Thing from the Grave” is very tasty. As is the simplicity of the way the story unfolds. Over each of the seven pages (eight, really, but the first one is just a full-page intro), Feldstein uses the seven panels per page at his disposal to tell his story in the most economical way imaginable. Page one: Laura chooses Jim, Bill gets mad, Jim heads off in his car. Page two: Bill meets Jim in the dark, Bill kills Jim, Bill gets rid of the body and the car. Page three: Laura refuses to give up on Jim, Bill knows he’s beat and confesses. And so on. Boom-boom-boom. All killer and no filler.

Sure this doesn’t give the writer much time or space to deliver characters of the greatest depth and gravitas, but look at it this way: what Feldstein is telling us is simply another version of a campfire tale. A tale remarkably like “The Hook.” Go back to the first day of this year’s Blog-o-ween and refamiliarize yourself with that little ditty. Who are the boy and the girl in that story, what are their dreams, their desires, their fears? What about the killer? How did he end up losing his hand? How did he end up in an insane asylum? How did he escape? There’s no answer to any of those questions (except, perhaps, for the boy’s desire, which is a trip to Smoochville with his girl), and we don’t need ‘em. All we need is for the story, painted in broad strokes, to move ahead smoothly on its rails to its dénouement. The end. I think the best horror stories tend to be the shortest and sharpest ones. Ending them with the baddie getting buried alive don’t hurt either.

So, that’s our Blog-o-ween story for today. You can find EC’s comics at your local library. Services like Hoopla make it easy to pick up electronic versions of nearly the entire EC catalog. Check ‘em out today to stoke your inner flame until it’s an out-of-control conflagration. Winter is coming, and we all need a little something to remind us that it is possible to upset the order of things and to get a little of our own back, plus the vigorish. I mean, how else are we to have...pleasant—GOOD LORD! CHOKE...

Blog-o-ween 2023: Ray Bradbury

There are some writers whose works fairly scream “Halloween!” When you pick up one of their books, the air immediately turns crisp and cool. The smells of apple cider and burning leaves waft from the pages. And as you read them, you are transported to a world where the days grow shorter, the shadows longer, and the terrors richer. The world becomes a place where dogs bring back home more than cockle burrs in their fur, where trains stop at ghost towns in the middle of the night, and where fairground organs play dark tunes that only the dead can hear.

Today’s featured artist is probably best known for his tales of rocketships going to Mars and of firemen who start fires rather than extinguish them, but Ray Bradbury’s first collection of short stories, Dark Carnival, was published in 1947 by August Derleth’s Arkham House, a small publishing company dedicated to weird fiction in the Lovecraftian vein. (Pun intended! Heh-heh-heh!) Later, in 1955, fifteen of these outré tales would be joined by four new stories to become The October Country.

Today for Blog-o-ween, let’s jump in the car and go for a drive. Our good friend Ray is behind the wheel, and he seems to know these roads like the back of his hand. (Which seems odd, because Bradbury never learned to drive, and he had a lifelong aversion to cars.) While we motor along, he’ll tell us some of the tales he’s picked up in previous trips into this country. Strange tales, weird tales, tales of...The October Country...

Our first stop is “The Emissary” and we’ll visit the bedside of a sick young boy by the name of Martin. He’s been homebound for many months. His only contact with the outside world is through his dog. Dog runs through the streets of the town, the fields that lay beyond it, and every place in between, collecting bits and pieces of debris in his fur. Once home, Martin examines Dog’s pelt and learns of life outside his sick room. Dog brings friends, too, like Miss Haight, Martin’s teacher. Soon after, however, Miss Haight is killed in a car accident. And soon after that, Dog brings back to Martin the mud of the graveyard in his fur...and something else...company!

Let’s head a little further down the road, and visit “The Small Assassin.” Alice Leiber is a brand new mother. But Alice doesn’t feel motherly towards her baby. In fact, she feels downright hostile, as if the baby were trying to hurt her. Her husband, David, and her pediatrician, Dr. Jeffers, do everything to assuage her fears, but Alice won’t be talked out of something she knows to be true: her baby is trying to kill her. Then, one day, Dr. Jeffers makes a house call, and finds...well that falls under patient-doctor confidentiality.

Well, it seems we’ve gotten into a little fender-bender. Maybe having Ray drive wasn’t such a hot idea, after all. Strange, how a gaggle of rubber-neckers has shown up so quickly. It reminds Ray of a story called “The Crowd.” In it, a man named Spallner gets into a car accident. A crowd of on-lookers shows up and presses around him. He is convinced that they are trying to kill him. He survives, but becomes obsessed with the idea of the crowd and their machinations. He collects newspaper clippings and photographs of other accidents. In these photos are the same people, time after time, year after year. Who are they? What does the crowd want with Spallner?

Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920. His family moved back and forth between Waukegan and Tucson, Arizona, in the late 1920s and early 1930s while his father looked for employment. Finally, the family settled in Los Angeles, California, in 1934, and Ray’s creative life began in earnest.

An avid reader, writer, and moviegoer, Bradbury published his first story in Forrest J. Ackerman’s fanzine Imagination! in 1938. In 1942, at the age of twenty-two, “The Lake” sold for $13.75. By the time he was twenty-four, Bradbury was a full-time writer.

A list of all of the books and stories that Ray Bradbury gave to the world would be a lengthy blog post all by itself. Suffice to say, the man was prolific. All of the stories that we talked about today can be found in his book, The October Country, which can be found in print or audio at your local library.

You can also find them as episodes of The Ray Bradbury Theater, which ran on First Choice Superchannel in Canada and HBO in the United States in 1985 and 1986. Later seasons were run on USA Network until 1992. The show was an anthology series that featured Bradbury’s stories. These shows starred actors such as Jeff Goldblum, Eugene Levy, Peter O’Toole, Megan Follows, and so many more. Currently you can find The Ray Bradbury Theater on Pluto TV and Amazon Prime.

Audio-wise, we’ve got you covered. Here is a reading of “The Small Assassin” released by Caedmon Records in 1981 and performed by he man himself:

Tony Walker and his excellent Classic Ghost Stories Podcast presents the story of “The Crowd.”

And here is a fun one. Back in October of 1984, a group of actors came together at The Directors Guild of America in Hollywood to broadcast a live performance of Ray Bradbury’s stories. Actors like June Lockhart, Lynn Redgrave, Casey Kasam, Gary Owens and others brought to life the stories “There Was an Old Woman,” “The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone,” and...“The Emissary.” You can find the recording of that magical night here on the Internet Archive.

Well, that’s all for today. I hope you had a nice trip with us to The October Country. Sorry about the bumps in the road. Ray seemed to hit every single one of them, wouldn’t you say? He’s a talented writer, if not much of a driver. Still, the apple cider that we picked up at that roadside stand was delicious. Why, I’d bet my life that if you warmed some up tonight and stuck a stick of cinnamon in it, you’d be guaranteed to have...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!