#and now the dead turned into an amalgamation ghosts who haunt this building

[blackkatdraws2]

They like to visit their favorite human every once and a while. [Original Characters]

The building is haunted, but the ghosts get attached to the workers [specifically the older ones who work there.]

The new workers are afraid of encountering them [most probably don't even know they exist and think it's just a rumor] while the older workers are used to them.

They're especially fond of this one guy in particular. He's been working here for 30+ years. They treat him like your indoor cat and he leans into their affection because he's a lonely starved old man who everyone sees as strict and indifferent.

[Note: This affection only extends to the older workers of the haunted building. (New workers have been reported fainting around their presence.) Others will not be treated as nicely. Please keep your distance and notify guards during an encounter.]

[thefieryeclipse]

“The Wall” Petlar - Pride Month

In honour of Pride, I’m reposting a segment from my post-series Heroes WIP as a short story here on Tumblr. You can consider it a standalone if you like, or if you want to read more you can find the full fic here ^.^

I hope you enjoy this dive into the memories of Petlary goodness behind “The Wall”!

(M, slash, m/m, angst, blood, tears, fluff, feels)

(This gorgeous gif, my favourite one ever, doesn’t belong to me. All credit to the original creator, but sadly I still don’t know who that is!)

SPOILERS BELOW FOR “TONGUES OF FIRE” - Chapter 38

Peter awoke on the ground, but he couldn't remember getting there.

Everything was silent. A pressing white noise so vacant it was deafening, and nothing at all stirred but the slow rise and fall of his chest. Lying on his back, he opened his eyes to the velvet blanket of a vast, cloudless sky high above.

A sky that was... flashing?

Confused, Peter frowned up at the moon chasing the sun between elongated skyscrapers, shadows washing over him where he lay while days and nights passed before his eyes like the swinging beat of a pendulum.

Feeling oddly weightless, he picked himself up from the middle of an abandoned city street, lined on both sides by a row of neat trees. And suddenly the niggling thought that he was forgetting something important didn't seem to matter anymore, that he was supposed to be somewhere else.

He didn't understand. It should have been New York City. The streets Peter had grown up in, the island on which he'd spent nearly every day of his life, but he didn't know this place. It was an amalgamation, a hybrid, a new face whose features merely resembled those of his hometown. The city was deserted: empty streets and empty buildings lined with a million windows gaping at him like hollowed eye sockets, watching him struggle to find his bearings. There were no signs of life. Not even a car had been abandoned by the sidewalk, not one old newspaper fluttered through the windless air. Peter shivered, although there was no temperature. His faint breath shuddered, although there was no sound.

And then the echo of raised voices behind him made his heart thump loudly in his chest.

Peter span just as the sun froze in the sky, high on the crest of a bright and clear morning. He recognised the voices rebounding off vacant husks of buildings around him, just before two men turned a corner and appeared into view, one storming ahead while the other tagged along angrily at his heels. Peter couldn't have hid even if he wasn't exposed out in a wide open road, his feet rooting him to the spot as his blood instantly ran cold.

“...like it or not, Peter, you're stuck here forever, with me, and I am trying here! Are you? 'Cause it sure as hell doesn't feel like it!”

“Am I supposed to feel guilty? You murdered my brother, I don't owe you anything!”

“Yes, I did. I murdered him.” Sylar snarled, and although he wasn't shouting this time his words reverberated further, more clearly, than the others before. “I slit his throat and watched him bleed out and I didn't even care. He died alone, Peter. Scared. Defeated -”

“Stop it!”

Heart racing faster, Peter saw himself turn on his enemy, hands balled into fists at his side. Sylar stopped walking in response, head held high. And all the while Peter was outside it all, unharmed, invisible on the outskirts as he just stood there gazing at the surreal sight unfolding before him. Holy shit.

“- And I've said it a thousand times before, and even if you don't believe me that doesn't change the fact that I'm -”

“Don't!”

“- Sorry.”

The word ricocheted around the barren city. It lodged itself in Peter's gut like a bullet shard, sympathy pains felt from the shaking young empath standing before him in the distance. “Stop saying that. You don't mean it. If you were sorry you wouldn't have killed him. If you were sorry you wouldn't have killed any of them.”

Sylar scowled after the smaller man as he continued storming along the street, drawing closer to where his dream-like counterpart stood. Neither of them noticed him at all.

“Oh I get it,” The killer tagged along again, more infused with a fiery emotion than Peter had ever known him. “You've never made a mistake. You've never looked back and wished for a do-over. That you could change, that you'd made different choices, that you knew then what you know now, because your life has been nothing but a series of winning decisions, is that what you're saying?!” Sylar grabbed after his accuser, wrenching him back around by the arm. “'Cause from where I'm standing, it looks like they only served to land you in the exact same shithole as mine.”

Peter tugged himself free. “At least I never killed everyone who ever tried to love me!”

The following silence rang out loudly. Now close enough to the pair to make out the nuances in both men's faces, Peter watched with a weight constricting his chest as Sylar reeled, deeply wounded. Regret shone plainly on his own self's face, for just a heartbeat too long before it was forcibly concealed behind a mask of defiance.

Sylar's reply was quiet, but not gentle. “Loved ones. Mothers. Friends. Tell me, where are yours, Peter?”

The counter attack winded Peter Petrelli. Both the haunted man currently backing away from his enemy's space, and the spectre set adrift in the strange city that didn't belong to him. Peter and Sylar glared at one another, two lost souls forced together among nothingness, concrete, brick and stone, the double-bladed burn of rage rising between them like smoke in the air.

Sylar tipped his head slightly in a manner anyone else could construe as sympathetic. “I wonder what's worse? The thought that everyone else out there is dead; or that none of your precious heroes have bothered to look for you all this time?” He twitched one heavy eyebrow to hammer the point home. “Do you think anyone's even noticed you're missing? Or do they just not care?”

For a moment, the looming promise of an echoing crack of a punch rang throughout the city. But none came. Peter didn't attack, and he didn't make a sound beyond the pained catching of his breath. Then he tightened his fists and turned his back on Sylar one last time, picking up the pace as he left the killer behind.

“Like it or not, Petrelli, I'm all you've got!” Sylar called after him, teeth bared. “And neither of us are going anywhere for a long, long time!”

Peter's heart lurched when his other self faltered a step, almost level with where he hid, veiled out of time. He fought the urge to reach out and bridge the impassable distance with a touch, as the same vulnerability and fear that itched within his ribcage flickered over the other man's face, pooling in his eyes. But then his dream counterpart pushed on, leaving a full, unobstructed view of Sylar's dampening temper in his wake.

Slowly, the killer's scowl eased. He hunched in on himself, watching every step as his only means of company walked away.

It might have been the first time Peter had ever witnessed something close to shame from the guy. Something close to regret. It was a painful pill to swallow, like it went down the wrong way. And when Sylar finally dropped his eyeline to the ground and turned his back, Peter hurried to follow his own footsteps deeper into the city without pausing to witness one more second of the killer.

But as soon as he took his first step the sky fast-forwarded again and he was alone.

Morning became noon became night as Peter found himself lost among vacant streets and stretching shadows that snatched at his heels like fingers. Guided by an invisible cord looped around his waist, he searched with no direction, intention or idea where he was going, just a ghost adrift in an endless maze that re-arranged itself in his peripheral vision.

He lost track of how many times the sun rolled across the sky before it stalled once again, a red glimmer hanging low between the towering spires of skyscrapers. Peter stopped running, somehow not even out of breath, once he was framed in the open mouth of a back alley, the sunset staining a towering brick wall blocking the far end crimson.

The hairs on the back of his neck tickled as he caught sight of himself once again, unmistakable in his fury, stalking the length of the alley ahead.

At the far end, Sylar climbed to his feet at the base of the wall to accommodate the approach. And even from this far away, with merely one glimpse of him, he certainly didn't look like the same, smug serial killer Peter's nightmares had been plagued by for years.

Again locked in place, he watched himself stomp towards the murderer without easing or slowing down; watched Sylar ball his hands into fists but not lift them; watched himself raise his arms and tackle Sylar around the neck, winding him, knocking the breath from them both – 

But it wasn't a fight. Instead, they both swayed with the momentum of something so unexpected, something so harmless, as a hug.

Alone on the outskirts of this secret, Peter's throat tightly constricted. He couldn't breathe. He didn't need to. He was only a ghost, anyway.

Floating closer to the exchange, he couldn't seem to make sense of the bewilderment shining plainly across Sylar's face. Or his own arms holding the guy close, or the sound of his soft, strangled voice muffled in the depths of Sylar's shoulder.

As if he hadn't ever been a mortal enemy. As if he wasn't a ruthless serial killer. As if he'd never heartlessly cut down Nathan Petrelli in his prime.

“You were right.” Realistically, the words shouldn't have rebounded down the alley, but Peter heard them anyway. “No one's out there looking for us. No one's coming to save us. It's just you and me, Sylar, and I just can't... I can't fight with you anymore.”

Peter's arms tightened around the taller man. And only then did Sylar let his eyes flutter closed and tentatively place his hands on Peter's back. He bent down into the hug, returning it, indulging in the feel of it as if it were the first of his life.

“It's down to us. Alright?” Peter continued huskily. “It's you and me, and I don't wanna live this way forever. I can't carry this... this hate much longer. I can't.” He paused to chase a breath, and when he continued his voice was dangerously close to cracking. “We can't keep going like this if we're gonna survive, here. We've gotta do better, Sylar. We've gotta make it work. Okay?”

For a long time the men simply stood there entwined, rocking slightly on the spot, where no one could see them and no one would ever know. And in that reprieve it didn't matter that they'd shattered one another in the past, or that they shouldn't want to hold each other close, because for a moment it was as if the fights had never happened and the miles of blood stained history belonged to someone else.

Watching, Peter struggled to swallow when Sylar slowly nodded his head in agreement. When he then pried the smaller man away with gentle hands and an unfamiliar softness to his eyes, and just held him there close, looking down into his face as the whisper floated down the alley and imprinted into the witness's skin.

“I want to make it work, Peter...”

Time sped up again before he could see what happened next, before he was ready, erasing the men, the wall and the words from the slate like they'd never existed at all.

Day and night pulsed around Peter once more as he struggled to keep up, resuming the endless path to nowhere with less blind trust than before. As he searched vacant streets he shivered, and as he walked broken roads he worried, plagued with the strangest sense that this time he'd left more than just the alley behind.

The city warped around him. Buildings moved when he wasn't looking. Brief flashes of sunlight revealed new sights that hadn't been there the moment before. And then night fell steady and constant upon the world and Peter was somehow high atop a rusting fire escape, outside the only window in the sprawling city that housed the warm glow of light. Of life.

Helpless to resist, he numbly phased through the window as if he were a phantom, heart pounding heavier than ever in his chest.

Inside, the apartment was dark, cluttered, unfamiliar. Floating shelves lined the walls, packed to the brim with canned food while their previous occupants scattered the floor in precarious piles of books. A workbench stood near the back wall, buried beneath some sort of mechanical scraps Peter couldn't make out from here. But he wasn't really looking. Because that glow of a light didn't come from within these rooms, he now realised, but from between them.

A hidden hatch stood open in one wall. A two-way mirror that revealed a winding, shadowy corridor beyond. And the swinging light bulb within lured Peter in deeper as if he didn't have a choice but to obey.

Just as before, the two living souls in this place didn't look up as he approached them in the dark. They didn't even acknowledge him. And just as before, Peter couldn't name the mass of emotions that ached within his chest at the very sight of himself and Sylar, sitting silently side by side on the floor, their backs against the dusty inside of a wall.

The taste of horror seemed familiar on his tongue. But if this was due to the tears currently drying on Sylar's flushed face, or the desperate screams scrawled by bloody fingertips on the walls, he couldn't decide.

“It's from... before. Way before, when my ability first...” Sylar tried then faded off, as if he didn't even know the words. Meanwhile, sitting beside him, Peter nodded and took a steadying breath, caught between giving his split attention to the crying man or the ghastly bloodied 'forgive me's towering above.

“S'okay.”

“No, Peter. It's not.”

Still sniffling slightly, the killer turned to Peter, exhausted and unguarded and unashamed of his vulnerability in a way that sent more spasms tightly clenching through the empath's heart. Because this wasn't an act and it wasn't a pity plea, and as much as he hated it, and as much as the sight made his stomach cramp as if he were about to throw up, Peter couldn't tear his gaze away from the blatantly human sight of the man visible in fractures behind his shattered facade.

Sylar's voice was soft when he elaborated, thick with a recent burst of emotion that had yet to fade. “None of it is okay. No matter what I do or how many times I start, I can never get past... this.” He blinked rapidly, not quite looking at a hundred broken attempts at redemption pressing in on him from all sides. “I've tried. I really tried, so many times, and I wanted to be better. But after all these years... I just don't think I'm strong enough on my own. And no one has ever stayed long enough to...” He stopped himself again, scowling at his own self-pity.

The Peter on the ground tore his focus from the sorry sight of Sylar, looking up again upon the defaced walls. A timeline. A mural of blood, sweat and tears, a memorial of the killer's endless battle with his demons. And Peter drank in each word despite the burn.

Please forgive me... Help me... I'm sorry... Forgive me... Please...

He closed his eyes just briefly, biting his lip. “I will.”

“What?”

“I'll stay.” Peter clarified, sighing out all the tension in his frame. Sylar stared at him. “I won't leave you. I won't run out on you. I won't lie, or betray you, or manipulate you like my mother did.” Now Sylar looked so affronted that a sudden telekinetic choke hold wouldn't be a surprise. But instead he just gaped at Peter, lips twitching soundlessly as he struggled to untangle his thoughts into something resembling words. “If you're serious about wanting to be better, Sylar... I'll help you.” Peter finished, a soft exhale. Only then did he meet the killer's eyes, and there was no room for doubt in that tiny corridor that he knew exactly what he was signing himself up for. That they all did.

Silence stretched for a long time. Until the older man recovered some semblance of his vocal chords. “Wh-why would you want to do that?” The question was laced with hope and suspicion, two compounds at war with each other.

But Peter just looked at him, and the honesty on his face was clear for all to see. “'Cause the guy who wrote this?” He glanced back at the blood-scrawled walls as if pained. “He never had that chance. And maybe if someone had just listened to him back then... none of this would've happened.” He offered Sylar a sad little curve of his lips. “Maybe all you needed was a friend.”

The killer's heavy brows eased from their furrow. Fresh tears streamed from his disbelieving eyes. Too late, he seemed to notice what was happening and averted his face, tremors consuming his hunched form.

And rather than leave, Peter leaned into him, a comforting warmth. And rather than recoil, the empath reached for Sylar's hand and held it gently, surely, and just sat with the man in silence while he cried.

And then time shifted forward again.

Left reeling on the spot, Peter the spectator, the ghost, tried to blink away the blurriness stinging at his own eyes. When it subsided he saw he was no longer crowded by bloody prayers or that lone, swinging light bulb: he was back outside on the fire escape. And that same old cord, his guide, was pulling him on again, but he didn't want to answer the call this time.

The tangled mass of feeling expanded further inside with every step he ascended the rusty staircase. More years flew past within moments. And the whispering breath of wind grew louder the higher he climbed.

On the final step, darkness blanketed the city for the last time. The sky was vast and starless high above, the rooftop captured in the cool tones and hues of the illusive moment between evening and night. Shaking slightly, it took Peter a moment to realise that the whispering breaths didn't belong to the wind, after all. And through shadow he discerned the shapes of two bodies on the ground, naked and writhing beneath a bundle of discarded clothing.

He meant to jump back from the scene but the steel cord wouldn't let him. So Peter was forced to hide here in the dark, unable to feel his limbs at the sight of his own self kissing the lips of his enemy. The pair broke apart with deep, shuddering breaths, and Peter watched himself lie back and smile sleepily at the man in his arms.

Then a murmur punctured the night, sending goosebumps rolling down his spine.

“Do you trust me, Peter?”

“Why, you think I'd do that with just anyone?” The empath chuckled and pressed a kiss to Sylar's shoulder. But when the man didn't laugh Peter propped himself up on an elbow to better look down upon him. “What's up, buddy?” He prompted with another small smile, trailing a hand over the killer's bare chest and stirring the hair there.

The gesture was so natural and yet so obscene, that in the rational corner of his mind Peter wanted to yell and run – no fly – away before he saw something else he'd never be able to shake. But he was still chained in place by something heavier than shock, and the warden of fate wouldn't let him move or even make a sound. Instead, he bore witness to the exchange of intimate touches, adoration, a familiarity that he'd never been able to keep with anyone in reality.

“I was just thinking about Elle.” Sylar confessed, looking up into the darkening sky.

Peter's caresses slowed. “Oh.” The spectre watched his own face fall slightly, far too familiar with that feeling not to experience second hand rejection gnawing at him now.

“Not like that.” Sylar appeased Peter slightly by prying the man's hand from his chest to absently entwine their fingers, but still didn't drop his gaze from the heavens. “I was thinking about how... how I didn't kill her for her ability. I killed her because she betrayed me.”

Peter frowned, the ease from earlier fading. “Is that supposed to make it okay?”

“No. But it makes it different. She lied to me. It was... personal, the others weren't.” Peter's sigh finally earned Sylar's full attention, and when the smaller man untangled himself from the killer as if to get up, Sylar held onto his wrist, keeping him there. “I could have loved her, Peter.”

On the far side of the rooftop, Peter felt that word impact like a sledgehammer to the gut. Love. But on the ground, he didn't look surprised by this information at all, reluctantly indulging the other man with a scowl still dirtying his brow.

“I trusted her. I let her in. But she...” Sylar's expression grew distant then, cast back through time. “...Recoiled. And I reacted. It was... fragile.”

The empath huffed impatiently through his nose, biting his lip. “What're you trying to tell me, Sylar?”

Sylar fell quiet, his face unmasked in a way that was entirely unfamiliar to his enemy. And more than he had when intruding upon the secret closet of bloody remorse, or catching the pair naked and breathless with sweat still drying on their skin, Peter felt wrong, voyeuristic, to be spying on such an intimate sight from the shadows as that expression.

Sylar reached up to trail Peter's long, tousled hair from obscuring his eye, a painfully sweet gesture. And when he took a breath it shook slightly. “This place? You and me? Whatever the hell we've gotten ourselves into... It's fragile, too. It's special.” He gave up on the stubborn lock when it refused to stay put, dropping his hands to fold across his stomach. A shadow of affliction passed over his face. “And if people knew they'd try to take it from us.”

Peter relaxed back down over his companion, lips quirking up on the working side. “Then we won't let them.”

Sylar tried to smile in response to the gentle nuzzling of his nose. A weak, short-lived thing. “You're too trusting, Peter, and I'm too destructive and it would be easy, too easy, to ruin this if they wanted, which they will. And if we ever do wake up and all this feels like a dream, I don't want there to be any doubts between us. Nothing they can use.”

Concern ghosted across Peter's features. He climbed free of his companion to fall flat on his back beside him, looking unseeingly into the ebony void far above. “Why are you saying these things?” He hugged his arms around his own torso, suddenly feeling the cold he hadn't a moment before.

And the spectre on the sidelines only drew closer to the scene, ever helpless, defenseless to resist.

Sylar turned his head to survey Peter, shadows emphasising the heavy angles of his face while his messy hair splayed out around him, thick and dark on the ground. He should have looked dangerous lying there so close, heart rate still elevated, skin still heated. He shouldn't have looked handsome, striking in his vulnerability. But he did. And only more so when amusement brightened the serial killer's features through the slight pursing of his lips. “Do you remember I told you about Lydia from the carnival?”

Still refusing to look at him, Peter just nodded, only more confused. An affectionate smirk twinkled at the corners of Sylar's eyes. And he was even less recognisable as the brutal murderer that had ripped reality to shreds in his wake.

“I've been thinking for a while, now. And if we ever get outta here... I want you to use her ability on me.”

At first, Peter just met the man's eyes, blinking quickly at him while he processed. Then he pushed himself into a sitting position, squinting down at Sylar as if the statement would be clearer from that angle. His hand shook while he ran it through his disheveled hair, and only upon close inspection was it evident that Sylar was holding his breath.

Stunned, Peter could barely muster his voice. “You'd trust me to read your soul?” He looked unsure, as if at any moment he expected his companion to reveal it as some sort of joke. But Sylar only nodded, that knowing, affectionate smirk washing across the rest of his features. And sudden tears welled up in the empath's eyes, refusing to fall, in the moment the truth finally hit home. “Really?” He breathed, a sound so small it couldn't carry the short distance across the rooftop.

But from above, his ethereal counterpart heard it anyway. And he saw Sylar laugh a little in response to Peter's disbelief, the deep, pleasant sound catching in his chest.

Equal parts horrified and entranced, Peter struggled to believe what he was witnessing from this man and that voice and those lips: the fearsome lone wolf who'd always killed before letting someone get too close, close enough to hurt him.

Yet, he saw his other self's eyes roam between Sylar's, so close below his own. And looking at the men now, having already obliterated so many boundaries to have gotten this far, sharing in the midst of the rubble they'd created, Peter could see every scar that had transpired between them, scrawling signatures embedded below one another's skin. They'd never be free of the other. They were already imprinted, marked forever like tattoos.

And for the very first time, it looked something close to beautiful.

On the ground, eyes wide and glistening, Peter hesitated slightly before skimming his knuckles across Sylar's cheekbone. The murderer caught his hand, cradling it between both his larger, stronger ones, the hands that had spilled an ocean of innocent blood long ago. “Only if you want it,” he smirked, “otherwise I was joking.”

Peter's answering grin illuminated his entire face, an emotion so potent that his unseen counterpart hungered for it, ached for it, even just to know what it felt like.

Because he was pretty sure he'd never smiled like that in his life. And he'd never known such a certainty as he was witnessing unfold before him now. As far back as he could remember, nobody had ever trusted him that much. He'd never found that someone who thought him special enough to want to hold, to want to keep, to want to let so close that it was literally, humanly impossible.

And now his heart broke when he saw himself lie back down against the rooftop, and his last reservations fell and pooled around his ankles as his other self leaned in and murmured against Sylar's lips.

“Alright.” He promised.

The kiss was gentle, intimate, achingly tender even from the outside. Soft lips against lips, hands cradling bare skin, smiles curving against one another while Sylar rolled atop Peter, pinning him to the cold ground. Night was entirely upon them now, and the whisper of deepening, breathless kisses leaked into the air, meanwhile on the outskirts Peter felt like he was falling. Like his core was being hauled up into the air by that same old invisible thread, leaving a vital part of himself behind.

The city was evaporating around him. The horizon floating away like ash, the walls closing in upon where he stood, trembling and weak, longing for a breeze to soothe the burning promise of tears gathered in his own eyes.

He'd seen too much. He hadn't seen enough. He didn't understand, yet it made all kinds of sense. That wrong was right and people could change, could forgive, and that try as he might Peter couldn't find the will in himself to deny what he knew had been real, once.

And suddenly he was enveloped by the heat of another man's arms around him, strong and sincere and reliable. He felt the living softness of someone else's skin touching his, although still he stood alone, his lips tingled beneath the sensation he'd almost forgotten was that of another pair against them, it had been so long. And he could sense every part of that body, he could breathe the familiar, comforting scent of his hair, and somehow he tasted the gentle press of Sylar's tongue in his mouth, and he felt safe. Trusted. He felt wanted more than he'd ever been wanted before. And it invaded his senses all at once, unrelenting, overstimulating, until he couldn't discern between fear and arousal and he no longer knew where the Peter on the ground and the Peter on the outskirts collided.

Only then, the shackles keeping him frozen in place broke free. Feeling returned to his limbs and he stumbled away from the illicit lovers as fast as shooting pins and needles would let him.

But he wasn't steady enough. And with that cord now severed, he fell.

[leekchess87-blog]

“We Are Looking in a Mirror”: Ramsey Campbell Curates the History of Horror

NOVEMBER 4, 2018

FIRST, THE BONA FIDES. The Folio Society is a British publisher that produces limited hardcover editions of classic titles, both fiction and nonfiction. Their books are handsomely produced and usually include original illustrations of very high quality. Until 2011, Folio titles were only available to subscribing members, but they are now sold to the general public via the company’s website. Although most of their releases are reprints, they have commissioned the occasional anthology of specialized interest, such as The Folio Book of Ghost Stories (2015), edited by Kathryn Hughes. The newly issued The Folio Book of Horror Stories (2018) is a follow-up volume with a more expansive editorial remit.

The book’s editor, British author Ramsey Campbell, needs no introduction to aficionados of the horror genre. He is arguably the most distinguished living writer of horror fiction, having won 12 British Fantasy Awards for his novels, stories, and anthologies, as well as lifetime achievement awards from the Horror Writers Association and the World Fantasy Convention. His fiction spans the gamut from eerie tales of supernatural dread to works of extreme, graphic horror, and this wide range perfectly equips him to helm a volume that purports to canvass the field from Poe to the present.

Campbell’s introduction makes the case for a generous construction of the genre’s borders. While horror is a form distinguished by its characteristic affects, those emotional states can vary from “supernatural fear” to “psychological disquiet” to “terror devoid of a physical cause.” Horror, Campbell writes, “is the least escapist form of fantasy […] It shows us the monstrous, sometimes to reveal that we are looking in a mirror.” The editor’s catholic tastes are evident in his choices, which start with Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and conclude with Adam Nevill’s “Hippocampus” (2015). There are 15 stories in all: two from the 19th century, five from the first half of the 20th, five from the second half, and three from the 21st. They include obvious classics alongside unexpected selections by major authors and a few contributions from relatively obscure talents. The book thus manages both to satisfy readers new to the field, by providing a sense of its historical development, and to please well-versed fans, by presenting them with unexpected gems.

There are a few surprising omissions, none more notable than Robert Aickman, whom the editor himself has often praised as one of the finest authors of weird fiction ever. Campbell acknowledges that another curious absence from the book — J. Sheridan Le Fanu — was the result of a lack of space, but while Le Fanu’s work is in the public domain and thus readily accessible, Aickman’s is not — though NYRB Classics recently released a welcome compendium of the author’s “strange stories.” Considering that a third of The Folio Book of Horror Stories is consumed by two long texts, Arthur Machen’s “The White People” (1904) and Stephen King’s “1408” (2002), it might have been possible to select briefer works by those particular authors in order to find room for Aickman, or Clive Barker, or Roald Dahl, or Richard Matheson, or Joyce Carol Oates, or any number of other worthy figures who are absent here. It should also be said that the canon presented in Campbell’s volume is exclusively Anglo-American: no Hoffmann, no Kafka, no Borges, no Quiroga.

But these are quibbles. If the reader wants a more extensive introduction to the genre, there are comprehensive works available, such as David G. Hartwell’s The Dark Descent (1987), which features 56 stories, or Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s The Weird (2012), which includes over 100. One of the chief pleasures of The Folio Book of Horror Stories is its relative concision, the fact that it can be hair-raisingly devoured on a single lonely night, as well as the opportunity it presents to witness one of the preeminent talents in the field curate a “greatest hits” volume. Campbell has edited more than a dozen anthologies, including award-winning installments of the “Best New Horror” series (1990–’94), but none of his previous stints as editor has afforded him the historical or thematic scope this one does.

Campbell shows himself to be a skillful anthologist indeed: the selected tales echo one another in curious and provocative ways. The first two entries are a case in point: both Poe’s “Usher” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) are tales of stifling claustrophobia, of domestic environments cursed by the tainted legacies of their past inhabitants. But while Poe’s story uses the distancing technique of an external narrator, who watches his childhood friend succumb to madness, Gilman offers an indelible first-person portrait: her narrator, by the end, is irremediably insane. As Campbell remarks in his introduction, works like Gilman’s show a particular strength of the genre — its ability to deploy narrative voices “impossible in conventional terms,” and thus to evoke extreme psychic states with terrifying immediacy. This contrast between distancing and immersive styles runs throughout the volume: Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zann” (1922) and Reggie Oliver’s “Flowers of the Sea” (2011) relate, from an uneasy but external vantage, the mental deliquescence of an acquaintance or loved one, while Shirley Jackson’s “The Bus” (1965) and Dennis Etchison’s “Call Home” (1991) plant readers squarely inside the nightmarish predicaments of their protagonists, who find themselves at the end — like Gilman’s narrator — trapped in recursive loops of lunacy.

Several of the stories combine these two techniques via the traditional framing device of the mysterious manuscript found in some cryptic archive. M. R. James’s “Count Magnus” (1904) features the diary of a researcher whose antiquarian obsessions summon a vampiric revenant; his frightful story is bookended by the bland observations of a narrator who discovered the manuscript “in a forgotten cupboard” of a dilapidated house. In Machen’s “The White People,” a pair of occult dabblers ponder a wild account of sorcerous initiation penned by a young girl who died in mysterious circumstances. The most unnerving of this subset of stories is Thomas Ligotti’s “Vastarien” (1987), in which a hapless bookworm is literally possessed by the eponymous tome: “Each passage he entered in the book both enchanted and appalled him with images and incidents so freakish and chaotic that his usual sense of these terms disintegrated along with everything else.” By the end, he has been absorbed into its fragmented dreamscape.

A turning point in the volume, historically speaking, is Fritz Leiber’s 1941 story “Smoke Ghost.” As the title implies, it is a tale of eerie haunting, but the eponymous specter does not lurk in some cloistered abbey or rural forest, as in Algernon Blackwood’s “Ancient Lights” (1912); rather, it is the veritable incarnation of big-city squalor and malaise. A grimy, shambling creature “with the soot of the factories on its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul,” it stalks the protagonist relentlessly, first as a series of sooty silhouettes glimpsed from his subway seat and high-rise office building, then as a demonic amalgam of all the psychological trials of urban life, and finally as a demonic idol demanding total subservience and devotion. In short, Leiber transplants a Gothic monster into a hyper-modern space, thus setting the tone for future chroniclers of urban anxiety and dread, such as Campbell himself.

The editor sums up Leiber’s achievement succinctly: “Whereas previously the supernatural might invade a mundane setting, in ‘Smoke Ghost’ that setting is its source.” In the wake of “Smoke Ghost,” even the most trivial incidents of modern life can be occasions for ghoulish horror: a bus ride (in Jackson’s tale), a message left on an answering machine (in Etchison’s), a night spent at a big-city hotel (in King’s). Works that revive the Gothic tradition more directly, such as Ligotti’s, come across in part as self-conscious pastiche: a deliberate reversion to the genre’s roots. It is a tribute to Campbell’s skills as an editor that such a brief conspectus of the field can lend itself to such large-scale observations and comparisons.

The stories in the book that most affected me were the three I had never read before. They are also the most graphically gruesome, thus giving the lie to the notion, advanced by some critics, that it is always preferable to suggest, rather than to explicitly unveil, a tale’s central horror. Margaret St. Clair’s “Brenda” (1954) is a skin-crawling story of a pubescent girl who, while on holiday with her parents, develops a weird psychic bond with a stinking, silent, shambling stranger:

He was not a tramp, he was not one of the summer people. Brenda knew at once that he was not like any other man she had ever seen. His skin was not black, or brown, but of an inky grayness; his body was blobbish and irregular, as if it had been shaped out of the clots of soap and grease that stop up kitchen sinks. He held a dead bird in one crude hand. The rotten smell was welling out from him.

The tale hints cryptically at — but never offers a clear answer for — Brenda’s motives in embracing this foul golem; as Campbell comments in his introduction, sometimes “an enigma can be richer than an explanation.” St. Clair was, during the 1950s and ’60s, a prolific author of science fiction and fantasy whose work is neglected today. The editor deserves credit for unearthing this genuinely creepy story from the moldering issue of Weird Tales where it has been immured for decades. Indeed, Campbell has done much to rehabilitate interest in this author’s work, having edited a retrospective volume for Dover Press, The Hole in the Moon and Other Tales by Margaret St. Clair (though this title has unfortunately been delayed by copyright issues).

Campbell’s own contribution to The Folio Book of Horror Stories is the sublimely grotesque “Again” (1981), a tale of claustrophobic entrapment so intense you actually feel vaguely frantic while reading it. While several of the stories in the book derive their frissons from repressed sexuality, there is nothing repressed about Campbell’s story: it is shockingly explicit in its grim evocation of an erotic slavery that survives death itself. I found myself stifling gasps at its baleful twists and turns. Surprisingly, the story was not included in Campbell’s 1987 volume Scared Stiff: Tales of Sex and Death, where it would have been right at home.

The final story in the volume, Nevill’s “Hippocampus,” is something of a revelation. Campbell calls it, in his introduction, “bracingly experimental,” and it is most certainly that: a calmly narrated exploration of an unmanned freighter adrift in mountainous seas, it slowly unveils — without ever fully explaining — the grisly bloodbath that claimed the ship’s crew. “The pale flesh of the rotund torso is whipped and occasionally drenched by sea spray, but still bears the ruddy impressions of bestial deeds that were both boisterous and thorough.” There are Lovecraftian hints of occult entities unearthed and unleashed, but these are mere background to a boldly cinematic and meticulously detailed tour of a floating abattoir. The effect is, by turns, bewildering and disgusting, and altogether brilliant. “Who can say what future [the story] adumbrates?” Campbell inquires. If “Hippocampus” is any indication of the present strengths of the genre, its future would appear to be as bright as the past so ably anatomized in The Folio Book of Horror Stories.

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Rob Latham is a LARB senior editor. His most recent book is Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings, published by Bloomsbury Press in 2017.

Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/we-are-looking-in-a-mirror-ramsey-campbell-curates-the-history-of-horror/