Seeing Red

by David J. Schow

Love lost and found. Betrayal. Death. Revenge. Seeing Red: It's one for the horrors.

Here is the first major collection of short stories by the award-winning author of The Kill Riff and The Outer Limits: The Official Companion.

Schow received the World Fantasy Award for 'Red Light' and the Twilight Zone Magazine Dimension award for 'Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You', both of which are included in this volume.

Genres: Horror, Splatterpunk, Short Stories, Fiction, Anthologies

273 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

David J. Schow is an American author of horror novels, short stories, and screenplays, associated with the "splatterpunk" movement of the late '80s and early '90s. Most recently he has moved into the crime genre.

Reviews

[Michael Fierce · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful collection of diverse horror stories by Splatterpunk author, David J. Schow, with several highlights.

My favorites, *Red Light* and *The Embracing*.

I don't know why, exactly, but the cover reminds me of Dario Argento's classic Italian horror film, Suspiria.

I made the mistake of lending my copy to a friend a million yrs ago and never got it back.
:(

I luckily picked up a Near Fine copy a few yrs back.
:)

Highly recommended for anyone who loves the best of the 80's horror period, particularly those craving a great example of what Splatterpunk was all about.

[Shawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was finally able to finish this after starting it last year and then leaving it on the opposite coast of the USA for 9 months. I bought this off the racks (remember when there were racks?) at the time it came out, read it once and put it aside. A lot of what I said about Joe R. Lansdale in my review of By Bizarre Hands could easily apply here as well. I read David Schow in the 80s, the era of TWILIGHT ZONE MAGAZINE and THE HORROR SHOW, among others, as outlets for solid short fiction in the genre. Schow stuck in my head as a "good writer", without anything he ever wrote really blowing me away, exactly (I never read a novel by him). Then he went to Hollywood (which crops up as a setting here quite a bit) and, I'm sure, still continues to write.

Overall, I enjoyed reading this. Schow is interesting as a writer - he's got aspects of Karl Edward Wagner (the love of pulp and forgotten niches of pop culture) and Richard Matheson (the desire to tell a straight-ahead story) and even Stephen King (the willingness to go for the gross-out if needed). With Lansdale, he shares the hard-boiled, muscular style (in scenes of action - this is probably a hold-over from reading Robert E. Howard, I'd reckon) at times, although while Lansdale is rural, Schow is decidedly urban. The shitty, hellish conditions of cities and city life in the late 70s and early 80s appears more than once. He's also a bit more indulgent in character psychology and motivation - he really works to make the characters believable as real people (sometimes to the detriment of the pacing).

He's also got something which I see rarely in modern short fiction - a sense of time. And here, I don't mean pacing either, I mean a lot of the stories here feel like, and describe, the times they were written in, and that time they take place in also has an actual history stretching into the past, a history of accrued events and shared experience. I could go off on a tangent here about my pet theory that sometimes in the mid 80's (and certainly moreso since the rise of the home computer), time and history stopped and we now live in an ever present bubble (I mean this in almost every way but "actually"). The characters I read in modern genre fiction, when I do read it (and I should say I don't get to read many modern novels, so I'm talking abut short genre fiction), never seem to have histories outside of plot-driven ones, never seem to have been born at a time like, say, the late 80's, and grown up through the 90's into the aughts - in the sense that events and attitudes occurring then effected them in any way. Or if that is acknowledged, it is only through gestures made towards pop-culture touchstones and nothing else (they've all seen STAR WARS). History has been broken, ground up into bits and the entertainment parts fed back to us through popcult references we either get or don't get on shows like FAMILY GUY. There is no history, no time, past the last few months - we live in a strange eternal "now" defined by entertainment and talking heads and history only exists as singular events to be pinned down and examined like the insides of a watch or to be colonized for more entertainment. There is no broad view, no swath, no continuity, just events that happen and then are argued over before being forgotten and wiped out by the next event, orchestrated or actual. I could get political here, about who that serves and why, but I won't. So it was nice to read Schow and encounter characters like a Vietnam vet barely scraping by - not the cliched "Vietnam vet" as symbolic figure, but an actual guy with his own opinions and experiences, the type of guy who actually existed, y'know, in the real world. Or the attention paid to the sweeping away of old landmarks and youth movements in "Scrawl" (the title is an actual, irreproducible graffiti scrawl, so I figured that would be an appropriate retitling). Writers can come from everywhere and everyone but the prevalence of mass culture nowadays makes me pine for a few less "raised in suburbia, cable-tv, role-playing games, bookish, reasonably comfortable and happy childhood" authors, or at least give me some who were paying attention to something other than themselves and their feelings as they were growing up. Schow captured his times while telling stories, and that's one mark of a good writer to me - he was paying attention while he lived.

The only other thing worth mentioning before the reviews is that loaded topic - "Splatterpunk". I had no idea that Splatterpunk was even still around, let alone taken seriously by anyone, until running across someone using the term again in the early 2000s. T.E.D. Klein, in his intro, says "I know that it amuses Schow to think of himself as something of a punk horror writer, a founding member of the 'Splatterpunk' school (a name he invented)". And that fits my memory of the time and term as well - "amuses". "Splatterpunk", at the time certainly, never struck me as a serious endeavor or an actual movement. Calling it a joke or a parody would be too strong, but it was really just a tongue-in-cheek (maybe tongue-through-cheek) commentary on "Cyberpunk"'s revitalization of sci-fi at the time. "Cyberpunk" was real, but "Splatterpunk" was just a goof, like Paul Di Filippo's Ribofunk, there wasn't really anything sustainable or laudable in it as a "movement". It happened, they got an anthology or two out of it (Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror and Splatterpunks II: Over the Edge, I'd bet those might have been more of a reason for its existence than anything else - publishers love supposed "movements") and then forgotten as the fad it was faded out. Even the parameters were dodgy - extreme violence was, contrary to the current perception, not missing from horror fiction of the time (although one could make the argument that it didn't show up in short fiction too often), as those grounds were plumbed quite thoroughly in the 70's race-to-the-bottom horror paperback boom. If splatterpunk was anything, it was attitude, specifically an attitude of grungy, nihilistic punk informed by that actual passage of history I mentioned above, finding soul-mates in tough-guy crime/noir writing and the cynicism of a disposable culture. Even that wasn't original (see the Decadents and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, for two) but at least it was honest to the time. Schow's splatterpunk, to me, would be equivalent to the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag or The Sex Pistols, whereas reviving splatterpunk nowadays would mean knowingly consigning yourself to being...Green Day, maybe? And who wants that? Well, I guess, people who live in an eternal bubble of history-less time, for one...

As always, there were a few weak stories here, although it's worth saying that even in weak stories Schow writes well, takes them seriously and you never feel like he's wasting your time. "Night Bloomer" features a yuppie corporate climber drone who becomes entangled, through the auspices of a mysterious femme fatale, in a plot to kill his boss through less than traditional means. It's well-written but takes too long to get to a fairly straightforward payoff. "The Embracing" is one of those "not really my cup of tea" stories, set in a future or alternate history world where criminals are punished by being blinded and set loose in a maze full of twisted, telepathic monsters. It's weird and plot-driven, pulpy and violent and would have been a good WEIRD TALES story back in the day - fans of sword and sorcery or dark fantasy may dig it. "Blood Rape Of The Lust Ghouls" is, obviously, another lurid tale, this time featuring a cretinous fanzine reviewer of shitty gore movies and his unhappy married life, and what happens when the one-sheet for the titular movie offers him an odd chance to escape. It's over the top and seedy and features a non-sequitar ending mirroring the spirit, and event, of the actual movie being reviewed. Kind of a throwaway, I thought. T.E.D. Klein really liked "Lonesome Coyote Blues" and I'll admit it's a fine, TWILIGHT ZONE-ish idea for a story - two men driving to Las Vegas stumble upon a radio station that plays songs that shouldn't/couldn't exist. Schow puts all the pieces together but it didn't really grab me, although the ending is a nice way of resolving the story's conceit, plot-wise, I'll give him that.

It should be stated that not every story here is "horror", there are a number of more straightforward "weird tales" and "Coyote" is one. And along those same lines is "Pulpmeister". Both this story and "Coyote", along with a few others here, feature Schow highlighting his love of pop-culture ephemera and trivia. In "Coyote" is was classic rock and roll, and here it's those 70's men's action series paperbacks, like THE EXECUTIONER or THE DESTROYER, the last gasp of pulp publishing. It also features that venerable story conceit, the fictional character who manifests in the real world, as a hack writer lands the assignment of continuing a popular soldier of fortune series, only to meet friction from an unexpected direction. It's not horror, but it is good-natured, if a bit thin plot-wise. "Incident On A Rainy Night In Beverly Hills" features another perennial story concept - the vast conspiracy, this time involving Hollywood and the *real* reason for STAR WARS, video games and why you don't get actual butter on your popcorn anymore. I liked it - the character psychology stuff is a little overdone and clogs the pacing, but it's another one of those "history" stories I mentioned and has a nice, suspenseful feel - I wonder if he tried submitting it to ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE at the time? A paranoid, somewhat agoraphobic and petulant woman hides in her run-down tenement in "The Woman's Version", afraid and judgmental of the people around her and wary of a frightening figure who haunts her, until the event she's awaited since childhood finally occurs. Again, nice suspense, and it put me in mind of Stephen King's "The Boogeyman".

And as the ghost of EC Comics haunts that King tale, so does it haunt "Bunny Didn't tell Us", a story I re-evaluated on my read here and liked a bit more this time around. It is, in essence, a straight-up TALES FROM THE CRYPT story, reset into a late 70s/early 80s crime milieu, as a mob goon is assigned the task of digging up a dead pimp buried with an enormous piece of jewelry. As you might expect, things do not go well. This has the same EC vibe as CREEPSHOW, with some wonderfully cartoonish descriptions and great pacing. I could complain about the fact that, plot-wise, it goes back to the well when it should have engineered a similar but different event for shock, but still, it's good fun and highlights Schow's gritty, noir writing.

A word about "Not From Around Here", that ends the book. It's longer than the other pieces here, almost a novella (or maybe it actually is) and I made a mental note that it was to Schow's credit that he took an idea that would have had to have been stretched out to fill a novel and instead just wrote a long story (this, to me, is a big problem with horror novels in general, too little substance for the length). A yuppie couple move to a rural bedroom community near San Francisco and run afoul of the neighbors, and then, something terrible that comes down from the hills. Unfortunately, my novel/novella comment gets blown out of the water by an ending that I just found poorly paced and head-scratching. You can almost see the point where he stops and says "how do I end this?" and I'm not exactly sure I even understand the implications of what's given here. Besides that, it's a quite entertaining story with honestly sketched characters who have understandable psychologies, and a unique monster that incapacitates its victims in an odd way. But that ending...huh. Maybe it *should* have been a novel...

There are a number of good solid stories here. I'll honestly say that nothing made me go, "oh, wow" (in my note-taking parlance, there were no "excellent" stories here) but Schow is like Lansdale in that his stories always respect you as a reader and he puts time into them, which counts for a lot. I reviewed "Visitation" in The Mammoth Book of Monsters - a former occult debunker turned occult detective falls into the ultimate metaphysical trap - and it's an enjoyable read, supplying a supernatural/physics explanation for its myriad hauntings. "Red Light" is another TWILIGHT ZONE like story, an inversion of Fritz Leiber's "The Girl With The Hungry Eyes", in which a famous supermodel drops out of sight and returns to an old flame, her original photographer, to escape the pressing attention of fame which she begins to feel has magnified to an almost vampiric level. Well-written, good character work and well plotted, it's quite touching.

The love of old movies and old movie theaters are explored in two stories. "One For The Horrors" - despite the title - is again in line, tone-wise, with "Coyote", "Red Light", et al. as a widower finds refuge in screenings at a local revival cinema and begins to realize he's seeing famous lost scenes in movies where they should't exist. Again, Schow shows off his erudition in ephemera about the things he loves, and in this age of DVDs and the internet, reading a story like this at the time and going "hey, yeah, that's the spider-pit sequence from KING KONG!" might not seem as powerful as it did then. It's an nice story, with a heart-felt ending. "Coming Soon To A Theater Near You", meanwhile, is full-bore horror - a tribute to the old fleapit grindhouse cinemas of yore, docking bays for the city's effluvia: the poor, the cheap, the crippled and the wasted, where a dollar could buy you somewhere to sit for 6 or 8 hours out of the cold or the heat or the violence or just out of your life's circumstance. This is also one of Schow's tributes to Hollywood at the time, the sleazy, seedy Hollywood of the disenfranchised, homeless and hopeless. In this case, a bitter Vietnam vet who begins to realize the cut-rate exploitation palace he wastes his days at has some very strange things going on with its staff and premises. The ending is particularly powerful, skirting the dregs of the bottom of society and forcing the reader to reevaluate their dismissive definitions by opening up a lower nadir. I am proud to say I was able to purchase the rights to this story from Mr. Schow himself and present it on the weekly horror fiction podcast I edit, PSEUDOPOD.org. The link for that episode is here.

And so we reach "Scrawl" (as I explained above, not the actual title - the actual title is a graffiti sigil unreproducible here), which treads the same ground as "Coming Soon", but from a different perspective. Probably the most "Splatterpunk" of the stories here (along with "Coming Soon" and "Blood Rape"), this is the milieu of late 70s/early 80s Hollywood as lived by those in the LA Punk scene - the no-hopers, nihilistic "no future" children of Reagan who live on the streets, scrounging for money and existing as living emblems of societal rejection and the plastic world they can't escape. It's to Schow's credit that he knows this scene and brings it across as neither positive or negative, just with honesty and empathy, sketching out a group of cohorts who live rough and what happens when one of them dies, and then the scene dies, and then the deaths don't stop. The solution to the mystery is interesting, an inversion of how these things usually go, and the writing is deliberately gross and foul in its description, aggressive in its attitude, which is as it should be. Karl Edward Wagner had a similar story about the death of punk (British punk, IIRC) - the title escapes me at the moment - and this does a similar job of capturing a moment in time that came and went as it was lived by people. Good on David J. Schow for having gotten it down!

[Cody | CodysBookshelf]

oh no! guess i prefer david j. schow’s work as an editor to his work as a writer. my hopes for seeing red were high, and unfortunately it didn’t work for me. i made it over halfway through the collection before realizing i just wasn’t enjoying myself. the stories herein are technically well-written, but schow’s style just isn’t for me. i dug a couple of the stories, but not enough to justify seeing this collection through to the end.

[Graham P · Rating 3 out of 5]

An energetic ode to horror pulp traditions, this collection of Schow's 1980s fiction doesn't pull any punches. While at times a bit too cheeky, there's something for every type of horror fan. Whether it's zombie pimps, killer roaches, pulp writers touching the void, or sleazebag punks tailing a vengeful ghost, 'Seeing Red' has no shortage of the amped-up grue that fed the 'splatterpunk' era of supernatural literature.

[Albert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty decent anthology. Great imagination and beautifully written, but to me at least these stories weren't very scary or disturbing. However, the last story, Not From Around Here, holy shit that one blew me away, one of the best horror short stories that I've read, loved it and will pull out this collection in the future just to re-read this one story.

[Marlin Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Schow is one of my favorite horror writers. He's got an imagination that's way out there and each story is unique. It's not easy to shake the chills or the visions he creates in his writing. Seeing Red was the first book that I read by this author and certainly won't be my last.

[Kurt Reichenbaugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good stories and cool writing. Stories I've revisited over the last two decades.

[Renee F · Rating 1 out of 5]

first book i didn't finish
....

[S. Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

David J. Schow is best known as one of the original horror writer “splatterpunks” of the eighties and nineties, as well as a horror film screenwriter and connoisseur (he penned a regular column for Fangoria magazine). Both of these elements are readily apparent in Seeing Red, his first published collection of short stories, which is overflowing with unflinching violence and gore that is reminiscent in style and substance of the golden age of the spatter film and horror novel.

True to Schow’s cinematic roots, many of the short stories in this volume are either directly or indirectly involved with the motion picture industry, and most are set in or around Hollywood. “One for the Horrors” and “Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You” actually take place in movie theaters, while “Incident on a Rainy Night in Beverly Hills” and “Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls” revolves around the film industry. These stories stand out as the best of the collection – and as a product of the splatterpunk era I might be biased – as these stories contain a passion and romanticism that is noticeably missing from some of the other entries. “Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls” stands out as the keystone of the film-related stories, a self-referential (and self-deprecating) homage to horror film reviewers that skewers the industry even as it revels in its excesses (and do I detect a nod to Chas Balun in his use of the phrase “chunk-blowing?”).

The best of the collection isn’t restricted to the film-themed stories; his story titled with an illegible scribble is not only a heartfelt love-letter to the dying west-coast punk scene of the late eighties, but a nearly poetic use of street vernacular that recalls past classics like A Clockwork Orange without a hint of mimicry. In fact, “scribble” is probably the most glaring example in this collection of Schow’s mastery of prose and general and the genre specifically. Also at the top of the list is the last story in the book, “Not From Around Here.” Not only does Schow subtly evoke the eldritch horrors of lovecraftian lore with ease with his tale of city-folk stumbling into a rural nightmare, but he showcases his ability to pull the reader effortlessly through the increasingly horrific narrative like the master storyteller he is. How this short story has not been adapted into a film is beyond me.

Schow’s nods to literary horror are less impressive, with “Pulpmeister” feeling too gimmicky (perhaps by design), and “Visitation” coming off as an overly-forced genre homage. Honestly, if you’re going to write a Lovecraft-inspired horror story, try not to actually mention Lovecraft in it.

“Bunny Didn’t Tell Us,” “The Woman’s Version,” and “Lonesome Coyote Blues” are unremarkable yet solid entries. A big deal is made on the front cover of the inclusion of “Red Light,” which won the 1987 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction, but its predictable resolution and neo-noir narrator (who is far less believable than Eye Man from ‘scribble’) puts it a step or two behind several more notable stories included in the collection. The two weakest links in the chain are probably “The Embracing” and “Night Bloomer,” with the former feeling like a writing exercise, and the latter an after-hours Twilight Zone reject.

With all of that being said, the few flaws within are minor, making Seeing Red a very solid collection of short stories, and a great starting point for anyone unfamiliar with this founding splatterpunk’s oeuvre.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though my kindle version had some pretty major editing and formatting issues, I enjoyed the large spread of divergent themes and tones in these stories. But it was the final story, 'Not From Around Here' that was the real prize.

[Clint · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cute little afternoon/weekend time-killer. David S. clearly loves to write. His stories are playful and shameless. A pleasure to read.

[Amanda M. Lyons · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book contains of the very few examples of horror that actually scared me and that's saying something!

[David Schwenker · Rating 2 out of 5]

General Comments
David J Schow and I share the same initials - that's about all we have in common. We certainly differ in taste. Some passages here would be good candidates for r/menwritingwomen - evidently in Schow's world, women are constantly naked with an insatiable libido - and the plots aren't good enough to suffer through the tawdry writing. I am being generous with the two stars.

Specific Comments

Red Light - 1.5 out of 5.0
A beautiful model has a copious amount of vigorous sex with a photographer before revealing she believes each photograph of her takes away a bit of her soul. The obvious happens at the end. Dull.

Not From Around Here - 1.75 out of 5.0
A monster incapacitates his victims by causing them to orgasm endlessly until they bleed - I haven't encountered that one before, I give Schow that, but it was ridiculous rather than terrifying. The ending is particularly underwhelming - the monster isn't even bothered by a shotgun blast to the face, but apparently just using one's bare hands is enough to kill it? Inconsistent, silly, and directionless.

[David Thirteen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my first time reading David Schow and there were stories in this collection that absolutely awed me. His take on hard-boiled splatter punk is gritty, disturbing, and good fun. As I find with many collections the great stories tend to overshadow and diminish the other entries, even when they're good in their own right, and this collection was no different. But the great stories really did shine, and Not From Around here is worth the price of admission alone.

One side note not reflected in my rating: the ebook is a very clumsy conversion of the original text. Likely it was scanned in and converted to digital by a computer program, leaving it in sore need of a thorough proofread. It’s a shame the publisher didn’t take this step considering the calibre of the material.

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

My only prior knowledge of Schow was that he was part of the splatterpunk moviement, so I was surprised by the relative lack of violence in this. “Not from Around Here” is the only story in the collection that delivered on what I was expecting, but the collection as a whole is solid. Most of these wound up being in the dark fantasy mold, which I normally do not care for. Thankfully, Schow is a talented prose stylist. He has a hip, postmodern cool kid style of writing, fanboyish but not obnoxiously so. The standouts for me were “Red Light”, “Bunny Didn’t Tell Us”, and “Not from Around Here”, but the stories where Schow writes about crusty old movie theaters deserve special mention. He makes me wish that grungy grindhouse theaters still existed.

[Stephen Cooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great collection of shorts which all offer something. Definitely had my favourites, that mostly involved cinema and photography, but plenty of decent well told stories. The horror isn't too extreme baring maybe the last story, but plenty of intrigue and imagery. Love his poetic style of writing too.

[Kevin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Almost all flash that gets so wrapped up in its tone, ignores and disappoints with its horror heart. Decent story concepts get muddled down in overly poetic prose. The last two stories are the best. Because they read as the least overworked.

[Chuck Knight · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic collection of stories from one of The Godfathers of splatterpunk! Highly recommended.

[Ryan Sasek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really awesome collection of short stories by Schow. Disturbing gritty splatter punk. The story “Not From Around Here” was fantastic.

[Shiba · Rating 4 out of 5]

.

[alexa · Rating 5 out of 5]

what a gorgeously written short story collection...

[Jay Sizemore · Rating 1 out of 5]

dnf none of these stories were remotely interesting to me

[Eugene Johnson Jr · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought it was good, it had it's flaw's, but then again it is a vary good read for the short storie lover.