GRANTA: Horror and its many guises

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Granta 117: Autumn 2011

Horror

Distributed in India by Penguin

Edition: Paperback

Pages: 256

Price: Rs 699

isbn: 9781905881369

The usual chills and spills aren’t in the mix. Granta’s anthology dedicated to horror collates short fiction, memoir, reportage, poetry and art in order to understand the genre and its many manifestations primarily through the prism of literature.

It certainly won’t psych you out of your wits. It isn’t that kind of anthology. But you might find a sense of unease run down your spine occasionally as a new way of looking at horror takes shape in your head.

Granta 117: Horror is more David Cronenberg than Wes Craven. It proffers no elaborate Gothic effects nor does it place any emphasis on gore although some of the pieces talk about the centrality of blood in stories, films and real-life situations designed to shock us and throw us off balance.

Instead, it explores the horrors of disease, death, war, violence, personal loss, obsession, and the onset of dementia, among other things, through different forms of expression.

There are some fine writers here – Paul Auster, Sarah Hall, Stephen King (can a horror anthology be complete without the grandee of the genre?) and the late Chilean novelist and poet Roberto Bolano.

Not to say that the other contributors are any less significant. The writing is of a consistently high quality: original, insightful and, most importantly, gripping. And the range is quite astounding.

The Infamous Bengal Ming is darkly hilarious and wildly inventive. Taken from Indian-American writer Rajesh Parameswaran’s fiction debut, I am an Executioner: Love Stories, it is the tale of a tiger in a zoo (told from the perspective of the feline creature) whose love for his keeper triggers mayhem. He flees, strays into a nearby home and, despite his best intentions, ends up wreaking havoc.

Another unusual fictional piece is The Starveling by Don DeLillo. An inveterate moviegoer, Leo, has abandoned all vestiges of who he really is and has constructed a life for himself that exists and has meaning only within the darkened space of a movie hall. Each film is, for him, “a lifetime compressed”. Leo develops an obsession for an unnaturally thin woman who shares his passion and compulsively devours movies. He turns into a stalker and follows her around from theatre to theatre, movie to movie, with startling consequences. Booker nominee Sarah Hall weighs in with a chilling short story. She Murdered Mortal He. It catches a young couple holidaying in an African seaside resort. A bitter argument erupts. Matters come to a head. A break-up looms large. The woman stomps out of the salon tent in a huff towards the deserted beach. As she loiters around in the darkness, she sees a white apparition tailing her… Hall builds up the tension expertly.

The other notable fiction piece is by Stephen King himself. The Dune is about a 90-year-old retired judge, aware that “an old man’s body is nothing but a sack filed with aches and indignities”. It is a characteristic narrative with a sting in the tale that centres on a secret that the aged man knows about a tiny island off the coast of Florida.

The air of fear and foreboding that The Dune creates remains largely under the surface, but when the final twist hits home, the King touch comes into full play.

In an unusual essay, poet Mark Doty delves into an encounter between Bram Stoker and Walt Whitman, who, according to the latter’s biographer, was the inspiration for Count Dracula.

A reflection on love, death and blood runs like a thread through the other non-fiction pieces in the anthology. Among them is Will Self’s superbly realised False Blood, which is an account of the blood-letting (“two pints a week, eight pints a month”) that the writer must subject himself in order to live. A heroin addict for 20 years of his life, he dreads needles. He suffers from polycythaemia vera. He describes the ailment as “a disease that sounded like a Greek goddess spliced with an East End pub landlady”. Humour hides the gravity of the medical horror: the condition leads to the thickening of blood because of the overproduction of red corpuscles.

There is much else here. Ritualistic high-camp bloodbaths of Los Angeles’ Foam Weapon League are the subject of Daniel Alarcon’s The Ground Floor. Peruvian writer Santiago Roncagliolo’s Deng’s Dogs describes the days of his growing up in the shadow of violence unleashed by the Shining Path guerrillas.

Tom Bamforth writes about being a part of UN mission to the parched and dangerous Darfur desert. Novelist Paul Auster on the death of his mother and Japanese-origin American writer Julie Otsuka presents a poignant portrait of her mother as she grapples with the onset of Alzheimer’s.

Granta’s stab at horror is a fine blend of the campy and the classy, the ingenious and the instinctive. It’s eminently readable all the way.

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