THE SCREAMING BOOK OF HORROR
Real-Time Review continued from HERE
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[It has also just dawned on me that THE SWARM by Alison Littlewood is, for me, a good example of the new HORROR WITHOUT VICTIMS genre that was inaugurated on 5 October 2012 with my Submission Guidelines for a new anthology shown upon this site. How serendipitous!] (9 Oct 12 – 9.55 pm bst)

[Here, as reference, is my real-time review in 2010 of BACK FROM THE DEAD Ed. Johnny Mains: http://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/08/22/back-from-the-dead/ where I suggest, inter alia: “This book reminds me of human existence facing out its own cruelties just as existentialists once faced out their sense of absurdity.”] (10 Oct 12 – 7.55 am bst)

One of the Family – Bernard Taylor
“Not the most prepossessing specimen, Guy observed, noting the single ear…”
And that single ear, as adumbrated in the previous story, is like a specimen in itself, a larva or fish or other disformed creature  from our original primeval pickle…as we continue the evolution cycle of Horror Fiction! This hilariously grotesque story worthy of Tales of the Unexpected or the Pan Book of Horrors deals with the seemingly unwelcoming side of the American protagonist’s list of long-lost specimens of his English family as he visits them one by one in episodic Dickensianisms … leading to a scene where specimens are diced with death, if clumsily, towards the ultimate evolution of gestalt gestation, arguably turning Littlewood’s cohesive swarm into something far less cerebrally theosophical! The moral? Blood may be thicker than water but best to eschew long-lost, ill-matured specimens of it. (10 Oct 12 – 11.10 am bst)

“Cut!” – Anna Taborska
“A moment later she jumped as something large and furry touched her ear –“
An ostensibly ordinary workmanlike story but one that, in retrocausal hindsight derived from its truly brilliant finale, becomes more brilliant than workmanlike as a whole! In similar hindsight, this transitional progression parallels the story itself, i.e. about a cinema film being directed with the paraphernalia of various factors, the booms, the financial producer, the cameras, the helpers, the actors etc — including, here, the amusingly obnoxious primadonna of an actress who wields a machete like a “limp kipper”, whom the director dare not get to rehearse before her being plummeted in to act spontaneously as the camera rolls for real — to produce an end result, a gestalt, cohered from all those factors for us to watch in the cinema. Possibly a bit like clumsy spontaneous human evolution itself producing each one of us – by means of by-passing natural selection! (10 Oct 12 – 1.25 pm bst)

Christmas Toys – Paul Finch
“He was vaguely aware that he could hear the cries of babes as they died under chopping blades.”
This story is a sheer delight. A wonderful tale for no other reason than great story-telling. In the last day or so at their annual conference, the Tory Government has given us upstanding citizens the green light to punish burglars as we see fit so as to defend our own homes – only with the mealy-mouthed proviso that we shouldn’t really do ‘grossly disproportionate’ things to such burglars. Well, arriving amid a  Christmas snowstorm, two burglars, inside a posh house, actually encounter a huge, ‘tacky’, timer-switched  seasonal-panoply of what I can only call a grossly disproportionate zoo of Christmas decorations. It can only be read to be believed, as I can’t do the descriptions of reindeer, various Santas, nativity crib, inflatable polar bear etc justice here.  A veritable Higgs Boson of a story. No real victims. You get what you deserve, you see. Another form of natural selection… (10 Oct 12 – 3.20pm bst)

The Quixote Candidate – Rhys Hughes
“I have the impression that all the films he watched became mixed up until they seemed part of one enormous film…”
Not only that: “Everything he saw from that moment was part of an ongoing project he was directing, every environment was a film set, everyone he met was an actor or actress.”  In tune with Taborska’s earlier ‘spontaneous actress’ being directed…. In the context of this book, this sheds light on humanity as a gestalt of film directions or, in other words, of fabricated fictions, naturally selected, leading to this ‘story’ (inspired by or in unconscious synergy with “The Vanishing Life and Films of Emmanuel Escobada” by Anonymous??) couched as a real-time interview (with the questions unheard)  of a super-hero Quixote’s sidekick – forever. A devilish conceit. However, outside the context of this Screaming book (only 100 of them published?), but in the context of the Rhys Hughes canon itself, I personally feel this is the greatest of his masterpieces (admittedly the greatest that I have read so far but I have read a helluva lot of Rhys Hughes stuff). This story is what I think I must have have been waiting for ever since I started reading his work in the early 1990s.  His “Most Promising Work in Perpetual Progress“. Rhys’ frozen Scream. Seriously so. A Horror without Victims, other than those victims who continue forever not to have read it.  I was such a perpetual victim – till now. (10 Oct 12 – 6.40 pm bst)

THIS REAL-TIME REVIEW NOW CONTINUED HERE

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