There Should Be Blood

Genre-stretching horror writers look for a new vein.

by Justin Bauer

Joe Hill begins his collection of ghost stories with a near-manifesto, letting his character Eddie Carroll — the editor of a horror anthology — deliver an indictment of the sort of book Hill writes:

"He felt weak at the thought of reading another story about vampires having sex with other vampires. He tried to struggle through Lovecraft pastiches, but at the first painfully serious reference to the Elder Gods, he felt some important part of him going numb inside, the way a foot or a hand will go to sleep when the circulation is cut off. He feared that the part of him being numbed was his soul."

"Best New Horror," the leadoff story from Hill's 20th Century Ghosts, as well as his debut novel, Heart-Shaped Box, are rapidly building his reputation. But as skillfully as Hill diagnoses his genre's weaknesses, he can't keep Carroll's tale clean. Fascinated by a story submission, Carroll walks into catastrophe knowing full well what he's doing, and submits to the inexorable rules of his genre: so far, so good. But the story's close, which should snap with knowing tension, gets soggy with stock gestures. Somewhere between the living corpse of Mother and the amputee with the chainsaw, it becomes clear the circulation's been cut off.

Other pulp genres have been lifted out of the boys-book ghetto by writers anxious to recast their conventions without losing their pleasures — like John LeCarré turning spy novels into character studies, or Richard Price and George Pelecanos making urban opera out of crime stories — but the supernatural pulls hard toward the gothic. Willing suspension of disbelief demands exposition, which quickly veers into the flowery and Victorian.

A handful of writers in the last couple of years have actively resisted this tendency, though. Some do it through detail — Max Brooks' World War Z apes documentaries, and Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves does annotated scholarship; both almost succeed, but Brooks' imagination is stronger than his prose abilities and Danielewski sacrifices momentum to his footnotes. Last year Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts and Tom McCarthy's Remainder spiked postmodern wordplay with the uncanny. None of these books, though, quite restores the pins-and-needles.

David Wild

Barlow

Toby Barlow's Sharp Teeth should do the trick. It's a werewolf novel, and it incorporates a love story and a police story and a couple of long passages about bridge (without cracking a smile at the dogs-playing-cards tableau). It's also written in verse, by a Detroit and Brooklyn-based adman, and it shines even with all those handicaps.

That Barlow renders his story in free verse shouldn't be that frightening, really. He may nod at epic (opening with "Let's sing about the man there/ at the breakfast table"), but no grad-school seminar will study his verse; he's too free with syllables and stresses. But if scansion is no priority, Barlow's language is direct and slangy, and sacrificing iambs lets him glory in the constraints of short lines and rhythm.

The way Barlow uses his verse, in fact, blows any dust off Sharp Teeth; his lines and stanzas are pointed, and they force him to distill the motions of plot and character into the simplest hard-edged package. The transformation into werewolf does not involve drawn-out metamorphosis or great physical detail — instead: "The blood just quickens with a thought/ a discipline develops/ so that one can self-ignite ... It's a raw muscular power,/ a rich sexual energy/ and the food tastes a whole lot better."

The directness of Barlow's language comes off as, fundamentally, doggish, physical and fully bodied, concerned with gratification. Even his scenes of carnage are matter-of-fact, as when one wolf loses control:

They say he took out a Popeye's once.

It made the news, unsolved.

It took him an hour.

He walked in, just to pick up a bucket.

The smell hit, the change happened,

and the whole place had to go.

Chicken, customers, biscuits, and gravy.

Even if Sharp Teeth is a one-off — and it's not like anyone needs a renaissance in monster verse, nor should Barlow expect to reproduce something this perfectly singular — it's an encouraging one-off. Set against a backdrop of oversexed vampires and inbred woodsmen, Sharp Teeth is a shining example of how to get the blood flowing.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)