The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection
- Автор: Датлоу Эллен, Виндлинг Терри
- Год: 1992
- Язык: английский
- Год: St.Martin’s Press
- Жанр: Ужасы
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Autonomedia publishes (sometimes in conjunction with Semiotext(e)) well-produced attractive paperbacks on a variety of arcane topics, ranging from a reprint of Hakim Bey’s book of rants, T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, to Horsexe, a study of the phenomenon of transsexuality by Catherine Millot. Horsexe includes some Freudian and semiotic gobbledygook (skip the equations), but it’s a fascinating topic and a fascinating essay. Historically there have always been groups that denied their birth gender (in fact, there have been religious cults—the Skoptzy sect of early twentieth-century Russia—that regularly castrated the men, but I don’t buy the premise that they wanted to be female, rather that they wanted to keep themselves pure and away from the female) but it wasn’t until relatively recently that transsexuality could become a physical reality through science and technology. Some women consider male-to-female transsexuality as just another patriarchal ruse to denigrate women. What frightens and frustrates most women about the male-to-female transsexual is that it seems to reinforce sexual stereotypes “with a view to maintaining women in the conventional, subordinate role from which they were on the point of freeing themselves . . . they gauge femininity in terms of conformity of roles.”
Hannibal Lecter, My Father by Kathy Acker (Semiotext(e)—Native Agents Series) is a collection of several short pieces by Acker and an interview with her by Sylvere Lotringer about her life and art. Included is her first piece, written when she was twenty-one. (I call them “pieces” because although mostly fictional they aren’t what one would call stories.) Also included is the play Birth of the Poet performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival in 1985.
Holy Horrors: An Illustrated History of Religious Murder and Madness by James A. Haught (Prometheus, 1990) is an invaluable complement to Torment in Art. It’s difficult, in light of the evidence in Holy Horrors, to counter the author’s argument that religious faith keeps “groups apart, alienated in hostile camps” and that “religious tribalism sets the stage for bloodshed. Without it, young people might adapt to changing times, intermarry and forget historic wounds. But religion enforces separation. ...” Holy Horrors uses some of the same illustrations as Torment in Art but puts them into a very different context—torture used in a religious fervor against heretics and infidels, indeed, against anyone with whom the majority religion didn’t agree. Haught covers everything from human sacrifice to the massacres of the Crusades, the Sepoy Mutiny, the Nazi Holocaust and the insanity of Jonestown.
Bloodlust: Conversations with Real Vampires by Carol Page (HarperCollins). One s first reaction to the title is, what a great idea! The conversations are with people who think they are vampires—they suck or drink blood regularly. Some of them feel the blood keeps them younger-looking but, as the author points out, the majority use blood drinking as a power trip—the persuasion of a “donor” is paramount to the satisfaction. None take it from those unwilling to supply it and no one is hurt physically. Nothing supernatural here. Unfortunately, the people interviewed are basically sad misfits and/or completely nuts but their stories are not very interesting.
Female Perversions: The Temptations of Madame Bovary by Louise J. Kaplan (Doubleday/Anchor). Traditionally, sexual perversion has been considered an exclusively male realm. In the definition most often used by psychoanalysts, “what distinguishes perversion is its quality of desperation and fixity ... a person . . . has no other choices . . . would otherwise be overwhelmed by anxieties or depression or psychosis. Kaplan s thesis is that perversions . . . are as much pathologies of gender role identity as they are pathologies of sexuality ...” and that “these stereotypes are central aspects to perverse strategy.” Dr. Kaplan tries to show how certain behaviors of females, including kleptomania, self-mutilation (delicate cutting) trichotillomania a mania for hair-plucking and anorexia are indeed perversions by her definition. She uses Flaubert’s Madame Bovary for examples because on every page . . . there is a fetish of one sort or another. ” A fascinating, thought-provoking book. ’
Broken Mirrors, Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento by Maitland McDonaugh (Sun Tavern Fields-UK) is the first English language book on the Italian master of baroque grand guignol horror films such as Suspiria and Four Flies on Grey Velvet. Although a serious critical study, it’s accessible for those not well-versed in Argento’s oeuvre. It made me, whose seen only two of his films, want to see the others. Expensive ($30) but good-looking hardcover with stills from the films, ads and lobby cards.
Shock Xpress: The Essential Guide to Exploitation Cinema edited by Stefan Jaworzyn (Titan Books-UK) is a compilation of six years’ worth of old and new material from the British magazine. Includes an illuminating interview with the British censor, an interview with John Waters, and an interesting historical piece about freaks in the cinema starting with Browning’s Freaks in 1932 (not shown in Great Britain until 1963). Entertaining. They take their schlock very seriously.
Prism of the Night: A Biography of Anne Rice by Katherine M. Ramsland (Dutton) is a must for her fans. A moving portrait of Rice’s life and how it relates to her several writing personas using interviews with her friends and family. Included is her relationship with her husband, poet Stan Rice, and the terrible tragedy of their young daughter s leukemia. Ramsland is sensitive to the subject and provides a good overall view of Rice’s life and works.
The Thrill of Fear by Walter Kendrick (Grove Weidenfeld) is an erudite, exasperating and often self-contradictory look at the evolution of horrific fiction (Kendrick generally means film, even when he uses the word “fiction,” causing much confusion), which is certain to infuriate most horror fans and other supporters. First, Kendrick holds a very narrow view of what he defines as horror—strictly fiction/film meant to convey chills—and that’s it. Not discomfort, eeriness or a subtly creeping fear. Kendrick is so patronizing toward the subject, one wonders why he’s even interested in writing about it. Furthermore, at whom is the book aimed? Some quotes from the book: “. . . the effects it aims at, no matter how skillfully they are handled, remain physicaclass="underline" cold sweat on the brow, upstanding hairs on the nape of the neck. ...” “The entire nineteenth century failed to produce a single first-rate novelist who specialized in chills; the best the twentieth century can do in that line is Stephen King” (ignoring Peter Straub and Shirley Jackson among others). “The ingrained conservatism of scary entertainment, its characteristic habit of telling the same old story, using devices that were hackneyed 200 years ago, no doubt owes something to its confinement to a cultural ghetto.” Aside from the fact that he might be talking about any bad fiction, horror or otherwise, he’s wrong in his perception that horror fiction was always ghettoized.^ Only with the enormous popularity of Stephen King has horror become a genre. Before that, horror novels such as The Turn of the Screw, Dracula, We Have Always Lived in the Castle and other novels of quality were not forced into such rigid classifications.