A Mark Samuels Collection
Oct. 23rd, 2006 06:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joysilence posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
darkling_talesI thought that Mark Samuels’ story “The White Hands” was the stand-out tale in the Stephen Jones collection “Best New Horror 14”, so when I found out that Tartarus Press had finally got round to publishing a cheap paperback copy of his book The White Hands And Other Weird Tales, I jumped at the chance to buy it. I was not disappointed - it’s the best modern single-author collection I’ve read for years.
Samuels returns time and again to the power of books, their physical nature, the knowledge they contain and their effect on their readers. ‘The White Hands’, ‘Vrolyck’ and ‘Kruptos’ all deal with the fates of those who seek forgotten lore or strange new insights by reading or writing philosophy or fiction; he explores the concept of knowledge as a harmful virus that propagates by destroying its carrier in a fascinating way. Some of his most horrifying images relate to books and paper - an apparently normal computer monitor which, when switched on, turns out to be stuffed full of crumpled paper scrawled over with bizarre instructions, a lost city built mainly of books, and so on.
However, Samuels’ tales are not mere nostalgic pastiches of Edwardian antiquarians gone wrong. All the tales in this book are set in the present day (with the exception of ‘Kruptos’, which draws on the horrors of a Europe occupied by Nazis). Like M R James and Wakefield in their day, Samuels deftly incorporates aspects of the modern world into his stories - a decades-old tragedy finds new, malignant life when a forgotten 40s horror film is re-mastered for VHS, graffiti and art installations are used to spread the word of evil like a cancer. I especially enjoyed ‘The Impasse’ (where a young lawyer is suckered into working for a faceless Organization specializing in deadly metaphysics - I never thought an office cubicle could be so scary!) and ‘Mannequins In Aspects Of Terror’, a cracking story about an unnerving exhibition of modern art in a crumbling office tower block from which all the workers have slowly drained away, in which Samuels’ quiet affection for greying 60s cubism becomes manifest.
But the heroes and heroines of these tales are at least as isolated as any fusty Benson bachelor - adrift in anonymous cities, they travel on trains through decaying urban sprawl, huddle in charmless office blocks or spend their nights in strip-lit cafeterias, often meeting other lonely people, but never connecting with them in any real sense. Perhaps “lonely” is the wrong word to use here, however - the white-collar workers, retired bachelors and obscure literateurs are usually so self-absorbed or simply blank that they don’t even realize their own condition - the reader is the one who feels isolated.
Parallels have been drawn between Samuels and Ramsey Campbell, another specialist in urban horror who also has an interest in Jamesiana and the world of books. But whereas Campbell’s forays into the latter type of tale give the impression of an author taking a holiday from his usual themes, Samuels seems to have a foot in each world at all times. This ability to combine two rather different types of ghost story with ease, resulting in raw, maddening outcomes where the reader constantly feels that they are on the verge of tying up the loose ends, but never quite manages, is what makes him special - that and an ultra-refined, but concise and subtle style which has nothing to envy a De La Mare or Oliver Onions. And if you enjoyed Terry Dowling's 'One Thing About The Night', you might want to check out 'Apartment 205', which spookily enough is also about a psychomantium!
Samuels returns time and again to the power of books, their physical nature, the knowledge they contain and their effect on their readers. ‘The White Hands’, ‘Vrolyck’ and ‘Kruptos’ all deal with the fates of those who seek forgotten lore or strange new insights by reading or writing philosophy or fiction; he explores the concept of knowledge as a harmful virus that propagates by destroying its carrier in a fascinating way. Some of his most horrifying images relate to books and paper - an apparently normal computer monitor which, when switched on, turns out to be stuffed full of crumpled paper scrawled over with bizarre instructions, a lost city built mainly of books, and so on.
However, Samuels’ tales are not mere nostalgic pastiches of Edwardian antiquarians gone wrong. All the tales in this book are set in the present day (with the exception of ‘Kruptos’, which draws on the horrors of a Europe occupied by Nazis). Like M R James and Wakefield in their day, Samuels deftly incorporates aspects of the modern world into his stories - a decades-old tragedy finds new, malignant life when a forgotten 40s horror film is re-mastered for VHS, graffiti and art installations are used to spread the word of evil like a cancer. I especially enjoyed ‘The Impasse’ (where a young lawyer is suckered into working for a faceless Organization specializing in deadly metaphysics - I never thought an office cubicle could be so scary!) and ‘Mannequins In Aspects Of Terror’, a cracking story about an unnerving exhibition of modern art in a crumbling office tower block from which all the workers have slowly drained away, in which Samuels’ quiet affection for greying 60s cubism becomes manifest.
But the heroes and heroines of these tales are at least as isolated as any fusty Benson bachelor - adrift in anonymous cities, they travel on trains through decaying urban sprawl, huddle in charmless office blocks or spend their nights in strip-lit cafeterias, often meeting other lonely people, but never connecting with them in any real sense. Perhaps “lonely” is the wrong word to use here, however - the white-collar workers, retired bachelors and obscure literateurs are usually so self-absorbed or simply blank that they don’t even realize their own condition - the reader is the one who feels isolated.
Parallels have been drawn between Samuels and Ramsey Campbell, another specialist in urban horror who also has an interest in Jamesiana and the world of books. But whereas Campbell’s forays into the latter type of tale give the impression of an author taking a holiday from his usual themes, Samuels seems to have a foot in each world at all times. This ability to combine two rather different types of ghost story with ease, resulting in raw, maddening outcomes where the reader constantly feels that they are on the verge of tying up the loose ends, but never quite manages, is what makes him special - that and an ultra-refined, but concise and subtle style which has nothing to envy a De La Mare or Oliver Onions. And if you enjoyed Terry Dowling's 'One Thing About The Night', you might want to check out 'Apartment 205', which spookily enough is also about a psychomantium!
