Deep Dark Green: by John Connolly

Among strange stories there are some stories so strange that they approach the frozen region locked inside David Copperfield's heart. John Connolly's Deep Dark Green is one such story.

In a valley town lives a creature which feeds on the lives of the young. After unspeakable tragedy the townspeople flood the valley, leaving the creature chained inside its dwelling, at the bottom of a new lake. But it lives on, luring more victims into the viscous waters that are now its home. The narrator details one such incident, when he and his young lover ignore word of mouth warnings as old wives' tales and stray to the edge of the lake to make love. His lover enters the lake naked and does not return. He follows, diving deep into curious water, and sees an ordinary cottage sunk into mud, and decorated by tumbrils of weed that are the bodies of its victims; his lover already the trophy of an old monstrous wife, and his young love become an old wives' tale.

A beautiful story, impeccably conceived and developed; short, powerful and tragic. The prose is as viscous as the lake at the surface, but the deeper the story goes, the more intense is the sensation of holding one's breath as Connolly beaches his consonants and drowns his vowels. As context I was reminded of the old Welsh film, The Last Days of Dolwyn, in which a valley town is flooded for different reasons, with similar results.  

Deep Dark Green is contained in John Connolly's collection of stories, Nocturnes, a rather outstanding volume which places him in a strange, welcome place.

Niemandswasser: by Robert Aickman

Robert Aickman's Niemandswasser, the third story in his 1975 collection, Cold Hand in Mine, often reads like a Central Powers take on The Shooting Party. Set shortly before the First World War it follows the mood and movements of Prince 'Elmo' after a doomed love affair. Having failed to kill himself Elmo withdraws to an obscure family castle where he becomes obsessed with stories of a strange creature living in a nearby lake. The fact that the creature is said to inhabit Niemandswasser (No Man's Water) - that part of the lake which is beyond territorial waters - serves only to drive Elmo's now revived deathwish and he sorties alone onto the lake, determined to treat with what he believes to be the mistress of No Man's Water... the rest is history.

Niemandswasser is a monster story only to the extent that Aickman is monstering a war; or more specifically, the attitudes of continental drift that led to war. The story contains a very definite sense of an otherness travelling beneath Europe, leaving its trace along borders and under bodies of water before erupting into France in 1914. It is also to be found in the decadence and purposelessness which seems to inhabit Elmo and the various characters he encounters, all of whom display a carelessness and complacency which cannot be accounted for. There is always something else. And there are intimations of Arthur Machen's The Terror, a novel in which the outraged animal kingdom rises up against mankind's cruelty on the Western Front.

And Niemandswasser ends on a stunning note of war correspondence which makes everything that has gone before seem so Ruritanian as to have been unreal.

Definitely a curio, even by the strange standards of Aickman's stories, Niemandswasser shares themes with the last story in Cold Hand in Mine, The Clock Watcher.

Barbary: by Jackson Kuhl

Two-Legged Tobacco

Appearing in the latest issue of British horror zine Black Static (Issue 31) is Jackson Kuhl's medicinal mummy story, Barbary.

Suffering from a degenerative condition of the eyes, our protagonist, an unexcited sailor, seeks relief through his pipe -- smoking neither tobacco nor opium, but a blend of the mummified remains of ancient Egyptians, sold to him by the wizened types who populate the back streets of any port of call. Kuhl inventively details the curing process of this exotic smoke, throwing in a hierarchy of kings to be crumbled into a bowl and sucked through a stem of centuries: the ceremonies around embalming and burial add something to pleasure and pain relief, and our protagonist finds his tastes to be aristocratic and expensive. However, a poor sailor needs as must, and he often finds himself resorting to a more contemporary blend, made up from the human refuse he finds in back alleys. In turn this leads to physical marking out of our sailor as an outcast, beyond the pale -- as his tastes decline, so does his conscience, leading him closer to the corruption of the ultimate blend, Anubis Gold, or pwned cannibalism.

Kuhl vivedly evokes a dissipated waterfront atmosphere; the cumulative effect of his prose deposits in the memory an arresting still from any 1930s double feature film -- perhaps, Mr Moto's Last Warning b/w The Saint Takes Over. There are wonderful echoes of Cornell Woolrich's story of physical and moral degeneration, Jane Brown's Body. And, as a pipe-smoker myself, I raise my Peterson to the author who has written an authentic horror story which works through artifacts rather than artifice, and which delights and surprises throughout. This is the first Jackson Kuhl story I've had the pleasure to read and, I hope, not the last. Well worth investing in a copy of this issue of Black Static to read Barbary alone.

Incidentally, the story is nicely illustrated by Ben Baldwin, who has chosen a bent pipe...