'Dark Gods' by T E D Klein
Jul. 24th, 2007 03:40 am![[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_talesFollowing several recommendations from you lot, I've just read T E D Klein's collection of four horror novellas, Dark Gods. Here's what I thought! There are a few spoilers in the first half, so beware!
I'm afraid to say the book gets off to a discouraging start with Children Of The Kingdom, which has a theme reminiscent of the great Fritz Leiber: the dark underbelly of a city as backdrop to supernatural terrors, and the way poverty and savagery can lie just across the road from middle-class gentility. An old folks' home is the unlikely setting for the re-emergence of a particularly nasty tribe. I hated this story - I won't go into too much detail, except to say that it's centred around rape. Rape is a really hard topic to use in horror fiction at the best of times, and Klein's effort ends in catastrophe.
For a start, he knows nothing at all about women. I also find it the height of bad taste to dress up rape scenes with elements of the supernatural, partly because I strongly doubt that anything could make the experience of being raped much worse than it already is! I don't like to see the very real, lasting humiliation of women paraded as just one shudder in a gallery of horrors. He also kicks off the story with a quote from a rape victim: "It taught me the foolishness of NOT being afraid", which is sickening in the context of the tale's sensationalizing of rape in the service of a cheap thrill. As a general rule, I also disapprove of using rape in horror because a horror story should make all the readers shiver and think 'boy, that could happen to me'. Unless the male readers go to jail, they're unlikely to feel that way about this...Gee, though, I sure am glad I had Klein to remind me to spend my whole life in fear, because I might've forgotten, and then who knows what would've happened? I might've had a good time, or anything.
To make things worse, Klein clearly believes that making his victims seem real is none of his business. A couple of the male characters are better developed (though the character of the narrator's grandfather is quite patronizing), but the female characters are just molestees to be wheeled on and offstage. There are some serious mistakes where basic psychological consistency is concerned, though I can't say more without spoiling it for you. And don't forget the race question: Klein's take on race relations left me feeling seriously uneasy, with his constant stream of references to the savagery and alleged tribalism of New York blacks supposed to serve as a backdrop of unease and pave the way for the more fantastical tribal horror that follows.
Now, I'm aware that Klein is partly doing this as a comment on white New Yorkers' fear of black people, but that doesn't account for his obsession with blacks (who remain the 'other' in all his novellas) and their capacity for crime . For him, even their music is 'tribal' - they can't turn on a stereo without being shoved several rungs down the evolutionary ladder! By the time a female driver exclaims 'I swear to God, if we see another Black again I hope we hit him!' I'd just had enough, social commentary be damned. Klein doesn't even have the excuse of writing in a more prejudiced era - the collection came out in 1979!
Luckily, Klein salvages the collection with his second tale, Petey a thrilling account of some grasping nouveaux riches engaged in throwing a big housewarming party, attended by several yachtloads of other yuppies. We soon find out that the house has been acquired for a song, in a dishonest deal that saw the original owner flung into the street. However, the house and the attic in particular still contain strange mementoes of the eccentric former owners' dubious pass-times...
Klein handles a huge cast here, writing mainly in dialogue and slowly weaving together the separate strands of his tapestry through conversation with a skill seldom seen in the genre. He abandons the Lovecraft stylings of Children... in favour of Jamesian hints and half-glimpsed horrors, with a good helping of dark Provencal folklore. That the reader soon works out roughly how things are going to end in no way detracts from the frights! Again, Klein skimps a bit on characterization - though they're all delightfully horrible (with the exception of a frumpy single woman) there is no variety and obviously no chance to sympathize. But that can't stop Petey from being one of the best stories I've read in years! The depiction of the hulking, hungry creature 'Petey' itself gave me some trouble in getting off to sleep that night...
As you can imagine, I approached the next one,Black Man With A Horn, with some trepidation. However, there isn't a lot of racism here, and the social comments are more amusing than offensive - when the elderly narrator's niece begs him to move to a safer part of town, he resists: "Forced to choose between whites whom I despised and blacks whom I feared, I somehow preferred the fear". Anyway, the novella is a cracker. The hero is a moderately successful horror writer and old friend of the late HP Lovecraft , but a chance meeting with a fearful missionary on a plane causes him to stumble into a real-life nightmare involving the Chauchas, a vicious Malay tribe that Lovecraft himself once wrote about.
Here we finally have a likeable narrator, who faces the problems and joys of old age while investigating a series of mysterious deaths. Despite being set entirely in the States, the novella has a pleasing exotic feel and works in some truly scary myths: the 'Black Man With A Horn' is a death-bearing deity with little to envy Cthulhu itself! Again, we are dealing with hints of hideous mutilations and bloodthirsty ancient creeds instead of fullblown gore. Some of the hints were almost too vague for me - when the missionary is describing his own tangles with the Chauchas, he never says exactly what they did to a member of his party they kidnapped for a few days, beyond that "they'd - they'd grown something in him". Another great success for Klein.
Klein strikes gold yet again with Nadelman's God, his tale of a jaded middle-aged advertising exec whose life takes a strange turn when a metal band chooses some supernatural doggerel he wrote at high school as lyrics for one of their songs. This results in Nadelman receiving some grisly fan-worship from an uncouth loser who takes it upon himself to build the dark new God of the poem on the roof of his mother's house. This story is hilariously batty and full John Waters-style ill behaviour, but also very scary, and the setting of a moribund winter sea-side resort is very atmospheric (though I wish Klein wouldn't keep using old folks' home residents as shorthand for slow spiritual death. My mother works in a home and she says many residents have the time of their lives there...)
This tale offers Klein's most in-depth portraiture yet, which is most welcome, though he does labour the point at times. And let's not forget his brilliant lampooning of Wiccans, Satanists and creeps in general (Klein defines a 'creep' as someone who thinks they know all the answers, and gloats over this secret knowledge.) When he and his wife make a tourist's visit to a ropey fetish club, where they meet two homely, pushy devil-worshippers and witness pock-marked women striding around in their knickers, you could be at a fetish or goth night today.(Nadelman meets one of them years later, swathed in a pastel puffer jacket, picking their nose on a train while reading about reincarnation. Priceless.) Klein's other stories can seem a touch fuddy-duddy, but Nadelman's God could have been written yesterday!
In conclusion: despite the wretched start, three-quarters of Dark Gods are ripping, gripping yarns, and taken as a whole the collection also provides an astute overview of the place of faiths old and new in the modern world, where a multitude of gods and creeds jostle for supremacy in the hearts of city people. There are some very cheap paperback copies around online - I only paid £1.25 for mine - so why not treat yourself?
I'm afraid to say the book gets off to a discouraging start with Children Of The Kingdom, which has a theme reminiscent of the great Fritz Leiber: the dark underbelly of a city as backdrop to supernatural terrors, and the way poverty and savagery can lie just across the road from middle-class gentility. An old folks' home is the unlikely setting for the re-emergence of a particularly nasty tribe. I hated this story - I won't go into too much detail, except to say that it's centred around rape. Rape is a really hard topic to use in horror fiction at the best of times, and Klein's effort ends in catastrophe.
For a start, he knows nothing at all about women. I also find it the height of bad taste to dress up rape scenes with elements of the supernatural, partly because I strongly doubt that anything could make the experience of being raped much worse than it already is! I don't like to see the very real, lasting humiliation of women paraded as just one shudder in a gallery of horrors. He also kicks off the story with a quote from a rape victim: "It taught me the foolishness of NOT being afraid", which is sickening in the context of the tale's sensationalizing of rape in the service of a cheap thrill. As a general rule, I also disapprove of using rape in horror because a horror story should make all the readers shiver and think 'boy, that could happen to me'. Unless the male readers go to jail, they're unlikely to feel that way about this...Gee, though, I sure am glad I had Klein to remind me to spend my whole life in fear, because I might've forgotten, and then who knows what would've happened? I might've had a good time, or anything.
To make things worse, Klein clearly believes that making his victims seem real is none of his business. A couple of the male characters are better developed (though the character of the narrator's grandfather is quite patronizing), but the female characters are just molestees to be wheeled on and offstage. There are some serious mistakes where basic psychological consistency is concerned, though I can't say more without spoiling it for you. And don't forget the race question: Klein's take on race relations left me feeling seriously uneasy, with his constant stream of references to the savagery and alleged tribalism of New York blacks supposed to serve as a backdrop of unease and pave the way for the more fantastical tribal horror that follows.
Now, I'm aware that Klein is partly doing this as a comment on white New Yorkers' fear of black people, but that doesn't account for his obsession with blacks (who remain the 'other' in all his novellas) and their capacity for crime . For him, even their music is 'tribal' - they can't turn on a stereo without being shoved several rungs down the evolutionary ladder! By the time a female driver exclaims 'I swear to God, if we see another Black again I hope we hit him!' I'd just had enough, social commentary be damned. Klein doesn't even have the excuse of writing in a more prejudiced era - the collection came out in 1979!
Luckily, Klein salvages the collection with his second tale, Petey a thrilling account of some grasping nouveaux riches engaged in throwing a big housewarming party, attended by several yachtloads of other yuppies. We soon find out that the house has been acquired for a song, in a dishonest deal that saw the original owner flung into the street. However, the house and the attic in particular still contain strange mementoes of the eccentric former owners' dubious pass-times...
Klein handles a huge cast here, writing mainly in dialogue and slowly weaving together the separate strands of his tapestry through conversation with a skill seldom seen in the genre. He abandons the Lovecraft stylings of Children... in favour of Jamesian hints and half-glimpsed horrors, with a good helping of dark Provencal folklore. That the reader soon works out roughly how things are going to end in no way detracts from the frights! Again, Klein skimps a bit on characterization - though they're all delightfully horrible (with the exception of a frumpy single woman) there is no variety and obviously no chance to sympathize. But that can't stop Petey from being one of the best stories I've read in years! The depiction of the hulking, hungry creature 'Petey' itself gave me some trouble in getting off to sleep that night...
As you can imagine, I approached the next one,Black Man With A Horn, with some trepidation. However, there isn't a lot of racism here, and the social comments are more amusing than offensive - when the elderly narrator's niece begs him to move to a safer part of town, he resists: "Forced to choose between whites whom I despised and blacks whom I feared, I somehow preferred the fear". Anyway, the novella is a cracker. The hero is a moderately successful horror writer and old friend of the late HP Lovecraft , but a chance meeting with a fearful missionary on a plane causes him to stumble into a real-life nightmare involving the Chauchas, a vicious Malay tribe that Lovecraft himself once wrote about.
Here we finally have a likeable narrator, who faces the problems and joys of old age while investigating a series of mysterious deaths. Despite being set entirely in the States, the novella has a pleasing exotic feel and works in some truly scary myths: the 'Black Man With A Horn' is a death-bearing deity with little to envy Cthulhu itself! Again, we are dealing with hints of hideous mutilations and bloodthirsty ancient creeds instead of fullblown gore. Some of the hints were almost too vague for me - when the missionary is describing his own tangles with the Chauchas, he never says exactly what they did to a member of his party they kidnapped for a few days, beyond that "they'd - they'd grown something in him". Another great success for Klein.
Klein strikes gold yet again with Nadelman's God, his tale of a jaded middle-aged advertising exec whose life takes a strange turn when a metal band chooses some supernatural doggerel he wrote at high school as lyrics for one of their songs. This results in Nadelman receiving some grisly fan-worship from an uncouth loser who takes it upon himself to build the dark new God of the poem on the roof of his mother's house. This story is hilariously batty and full John Waters-style ill behaviour, but also very scary, and the setting of a moribund winter sea-side resort is very atmospheric (though I wish Klein wouldn't keep using old folks' home residents as shorthand for slow spiritual death. My mother works in a home and she says many residents have the time of their lives there...)
This tale offers Klein's most in-depth portraiture yet, which is most welcome, though he does labour the point at times. And let's not forget his brilliant lampooning of Wiccans, Satanists and creeps in general (Klein defines a 'creep' as someone who thinks they know all the answers, and gloats over this secret knowledge.) When he and his wife make a tourist's visit to a ropey fetish club, where they meet two homely, pushy devil-worshippers and witness pock-marked women striding around in their knickers, you could be at a fetish or goth night today.(Nadelman meets one of them years later, swathed in a pastel puffer jacket, picking their nose on a train while reading about reincarnation. Priceless.) Klein's other stories can seem a touch fuddy-duddy, but Nadelman's God could have been written yesterday!
In conclusion: despite the wretched start, three-quarters of Dark Gods are ripping, gripping yarns, and taken as a whole the collection also provides an astute overview of the place of faiths old and new in the modern world, where a multitude of gods and creeds jostle for supremacy in the hearts of city people. There are some very cheap paperback copies around online - I only paid £1.25 for mine - so why not treat yourself?
