Literary Horror discussion

Sounds good

I like the opening line: "It was Friday the thirteenth and yesterday's snowstorm lingered in the streets like a leftover curse." Noir detective and the arcane wrapped around one another in a single, telling sentence.

Hehe... Louis Cyphre... well that doesn't telegraph our antagonist... ; )

Although, I do have to say it does strain credulity that our friend Lou can't track down a soul on his own... so that's got to tell us that either this is just a red herring to snare our PI or, something really weird happen to Leibling. Just a few initial thoughts...

I read this years ago so I am just going to watch... heh heh.

Randolph wrote: "I have found the symbolism so far just a little too heavy handed."

You mean them meeting on the top floor of 666 5th Ave is too heavy handed... ? = )

Maybe Hjortsberg should have had them meeting in the basement.

Hard to track down this book, but I am expecting to have my copy by Friday. (Confess the first line quoted was what sold me - thanks, J.S.) :)

I think in the movie they pronounce it "Cy-phee-air."

Imagine Deniro introducing himself to Mickey Rourke as "Lucifer" not "Cy-phee-air". That would just kill the suspense right from the start.

I think it was, specifically, the combination of the blood and the sex that upset people.

Even if you guess that Cyphre is the devil there's still a lot of twisty plot left over.

I like Hjortsberg's dry noir tone and turn of phrase, "we shook hands with the mechanical formality of clockwork soldiers".

Starting to heat up now... Angel is getting involved with the dame (Proudfoot) and I think he now realizes, through his dreams, that Lou is not who he appears to be and may be actively tormenting him.

Ok, done. I thought it was a good read... not great. Some key things that stood out as negative distractors, but I'll save that for later discussion.

Ultimately, I think this story could have been a lot more successful at the novella length. Tons of filler that did nothing for me. But alas, that is my own personal bias against novels. I generally loathe the novel length.

Looking forward to a fuller discussion.

Save for some very rare well written novels in the horror/weird genre, I exclusively read short stories, novellas, and novelettes. And I very much agree with Ligotti's take on this. Its next to impossible to sustain the weirdness over a novel length. I find when reading most novels that the ending can't come soon enough. Even with this one, I found myself getting antsy and breezing through some of the passages I knew would add very little to the story. I mean c'mon, how many scenes are we going to get where Harry interviews a witness who knows nothing or nothing new about Johnny F?

There is a few good horror novels out there, but generally for me, anything over 250 pages is going to falter under the weight of the story length... like a marathon runner wearily stumbling to the finish line and collapsing under exhaustion.

I have so much respect for writers that have mastered the novella form. Its a real talent to be able to write something of major substance yet be concise enough not to let things drag. Its really the perfect length for the weird tale... at least IMHO.

Jodi wrote: "Interesting you say that, Benjamin. It seems like a lot more authors are writing novellas these days. Don't know if that's because I usually work w/short story writers, so their long fiction tends ..."

Hey Jodi, commercially speaking, novels have been what is en vogue and marketable. I think, if you haunt the small press scene, you will find a lot more novella's and short story collections being published. The small presses are much more willing to take a chance on shorter works as there is usually a small niche market (us) who prefer that form over the novel length.

I agree that the short form is ideal for horror...which isn't to say I haven't read great horror novels.

Anyone get the feeling with this book that it really, at it's core, was NOT an amalgam of noir and supernatural but really just a noir mystery with a supernatural element thrown in? At times, some of the supernatural elements/plot devices really did not feel well incorporated... something very haphazardly infused into the noir mystery...

Btw, Randolph, let us know when we can begin openly discussing key details in the story. There is one scene in particular that really irked me that I was hoping to discuss.

Jodi wrote: ""Benjamin wrote: Anyone get the feeling with this book that it really, at it's core, was NOT an amalgam of noir and supernatural but really just a noir mystery with a supernatural element thrown in..."

Hey Jodi,

I agree with your assessment... I really don't know what Hjortsberg was trying to do with Lou. The "magical" and "demonic" elements used to build up our adversary was done in such a slap dash fashion. And there is one scene involving Lou that just came off as ridiculous. I'm wondering if anyone else caught the absurdity of the scene. Hint... it at the end of the story... no spoilers though.

It almost felt like Hjortsberg went through his library's occult and mysticism section, checked out some random books for research, and threw it ALL into this mystery.

Not sure what Obeah, Voodoo, and Catholic conceptions of the devil have to do with one another.

Its hard to imagine a guy like Johnny F taking the time to become a practitioner of all of these religious/magical belief systems. I mean, who has time for all that?

SOME SPOILERS

For me it's noir with a twist and the twist being the occult. I like that - reading one genre with tastes of another. You think you know the template being written to and then you find you don't.

Also, I felt it was a riff on the theme that you carry your own hell with you. However you interpret the story, Harry/Johnny carries his own hell within him.

RIght at the end... Lou holding a pistol to Harry. Are you kidding me? Was Hjortsberg trying to be ironic or something? Prince of Darkness needs a snub nose revolver to intimidate our detective? And then inexplicably, he then disappears into thin air (which is actually believable).

The incongruity between these two elements is entirely absurd. I don't really get how Hjortsberg was trying to incorporate the supernatural/demonic elements into this story.
*sigh*

It just wasn't believable at all.

I didn't have a problem with that scene. For me it was just Ciphre playing games with Harry. He didn't need to hold a pistol to Harry, but he wanted to, to draw attention to it and because he wanted the gun itself for what comes later.

In my reading of the story, the mind games are important because Ciphre wants Harry to suffer. It's not the claiming of his soul that's so important, it's torturing and punishing of him for as long as possible: creating hell within him, so that it is a part of him and he is a part of it. It's what Lucifer himself goes through in Milton's Paradise Lost. Even the title of the book is Miltonic - Lucifer was the archetypal falling angel.

The gun scene in the office is also an expected part of a noir detective scene and so fits with that, whilst changing the template right at the end with the disappearance. As I know I've said before,(sorry to repeat myself), I love this tinkering with the template.

*shrugs*

I get the two scenes with Lou performing as a magician and as a "preacher", to mess with Harry. I also get, and liked the invasion of Harry's dreams and subconscious, to mess with Harry. The intimidation using such material means (a Saturday Night Special), coming from the Devil, struck me as nonsensical though. Perhaps, Hjortsberg was trying to honor the noir genre with this scene, but, I think it highlights the incongruity of the two genres, at least in the way Hjortsberg has attempted to combine noir with the supernatural.

Randolph wrote: "First, I think we can begin to drop spoilers in here. If you know how you might, I'm not saying you have to, put the spoiler tags in the post please do. If you don't just preface the entry with a..."

And no, Hjortsberg didn't do much to develop a sense of eeriness. His clumsy incorporation of the supernatural/demonic killed any potential eeriness.

Sure, there was suspense, particularly wondering who was going to get it next, but no sense of eerie or the weird.

I'm going to call this one a fun and very fast read--I went through it all in one sitting, took slightly less than three hours--and tip my hat to it for the ending; I'd bump it up half a star if I could for that.

I loved the little asides and references; I read the Emma Dodd Harvest Memorial Clinic as a shout-out to the Dodds from Harvest Home, and Angel's claim in Walter's Congress of Wonders to that he's not a salesman of "insurance or lightning rods" as one to the opening of Something Wicked This Way Comes, for example.

The sister thing didn't bug me; possibly because I went in knowing vaguely about Angel's history, I thought of it (in terms of technique) as foreshadowing (view spoiler)[the lie that Harry Angel and Johnny Favorite were different people; the one the reader sees is really the good one, and the evil one is off and away somewhere else. In terms of story, I took it as Maggie lying to stall someone who was setting her on edge about Johnny; I figured that Angel's contact would have mentioned a sister. (Something like "it ran in the family; they called her the Witch of Wellesley, and her sister flips cards in Carnegie Hall.") (hide spoiler)]

(And of course Favorite was a Gemini. Of course.)

Not really subtle, but at least nicely textured, you know?

WRT the Black Mass; my opinion of Angel took a very hard nosedive when (view spoiler)[he was just sitting there taking pictures of the rape and murder during the ceremony, and that made the rest of the book rather less engaging. (hide spoiler)]

I may pick up another William Hjortsberg later when I've got more time; this one felt like a fast, slightly pulpy horror/crime mix, and that's no bad thing, but I have a bunch of books to run through first.

Would probably have missed it if Harvest Home hadn't come up in discussion recently. (Keep thinking that there's a reference I should be getting WRT the white-haired woman with the leopard, but all I can think of is the second part of TS Eliot's "Ash Wednesday", and I'm sure that's not it.)

Sympathies on the weather and cold, hope you're better soon.