Charles Grant is one of my literary heroes. I admire him almost as much for his work as an editor and a genre stalwart as I do for his own excellent fiction. I grew up on the Shadows series he edited from the late Seventies until the start of the Nineties, where he showcased writers who could deliver the kind of “quiet horror” he preferred: Ramsey Campbell, Steve Rasnic Tem, Al Sarrantonio, Lisa Tuttle. I loved those anthologies, and I loved the moody, ambiguous stories Grant felt should be the heartbeat of the horror genre. Grant’s own work would fit comfortably in one of his anthologies, character-driven pieces leaning heavily on atmosphere. Grant could write description like few others, and his style possessed a lyricism that approached poetry at times. Like the following sentence: “Listening: the laughter stifled, giggling bitten back, footfalls and running and not a few dares; the snarl of dogs, the spitting of cats, the wingbeats of birds that deserted his trees; and the wind, and the rain, and the sun light to dark.”
“A Garden of Blackred Roses” appeared in Kirby McCauley’s seminal 1980 anthology Dark Forces, alongside classic stories by Stephen King (“The Mist”), Dennis Etchison (“The Late Shift”), and Karl Edward Wagner (“Where the Summer Ends”). Grant’s story might be a tier below such seminal works, but it is a fine story nonetheless. Essentially a triptych with a coda tacked on, “Garden” follows three different individuals who have stolen flowers (the titular blackred roses) out of an eccentric old man’s backyard. All three receive supernatural punishments for their transgressions, as these are no ordinary roses, and the old man much more sinister than odd. The plot is really a vehicle for Grant’s writing style and handling of character— this is a mood piece, not a chronicle of colorful incidents. I love triptychs (I even wrote one myself, a few years back), and the unusual structure pairs nicely with the subject matter. My only complaint is that each character is limned quickly and sketchily (nature of the beast when your story is broken up into discrete sections, I suppose), and Grant doesn’t do himself any favors by the authorial distance he keeps between himself and his characters. We night get in their heads a few times, but even then, they sometimes come across as odd and hard to love. Still, that is easily outweighed by Grant’s ability to creep you out in the most understated way, to use atmosphere and subtlety as weapons. I think Charles Grant is an acquired taste, and not all readers are going to dig him. But when he’s on his game, he provides a reading experience that is both unique and intoxicating. “A Garden of Blackred Roses” can’t currently be found in an e-book version, but it is in Scream Quietly: The Best of Charles Grant—a stellar collection, by the way—available in trade paperback on Amazon.
writing
SHORT STORY OF THE WEEK: “WHILE SHE WAS OUT” by EDWARD BRYANT
Short stories have long been my favorite literary art form (says the guy currently trying to plot his first novel). Stephen King once referred to the short story as “a kiss in the dark from a stranger,” and I concur— there is something both fleeting and unexpected about the best short stories that captures both the immediacy of poetry and the storytelling engine of the novel. I plan to highlight a story here every week that I recently read or re-read; I’m guessing most will be weird or dark or both, since that’s what where my literary compass points on most days.
I first discovered Edward Bryant as a character and a book reviewer, not a fiction writer. Bryant features in several Harlan Ellison nonfiction essays (someone I read voraciously as a young adult), and was a book reviewer for both Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone Magazine and Locus, serving as the chief horror critic for the latter for over a decade. I didn’t read any of Bryant’s fiction until I stumbled across a library copy of Night Visions 4 in the late Eighties, which featured six of his short stories. I’m sure that wasn’t why I picked that book up— it also had a handful of Dean Koontz stories and a couple of my favorite Robert R. McCammon yarns— but the Bryant stories were memorable enough that a few resonate over thirty years later. One, “Buggage,” made me toss my book across the room, but still…memorable.
“While She Was Out” was originally published in the first issue of Kristine Kathryn Rush’s celebrated hardback magazine, Pulphouse. It’s a “woman in peril” story— not my favorite subgenre of suspense tale, not by a long shot— but it is also about a lousy marriage and how that marriage is re-contextualized following a moment of crisis. Bryant starts and ends his story with the unhappy couple, but the bulk of the story takes place in a mall parking lot and the surrounding woods, where our long-suffering wife and mother is attempting to escape a quartet of homicidal youths she has managed to piss off. The story is expertly paced— the 19 pages fly by— and the violence is contained enough that it shouldn’t be offputting to too many readers. Still, all of the action is less of interest than what that action reveals about the emotional state of our main character. Our lady is angry, and it’s her anger that could arguably be her most formidable weapon against the thugs she faces here.
Like many short stories, it all comes down to the ending for me. And Bryant nails it— he crafts an ending that is a)surprising, b)feels inevitable, and c)wraps the story up nicely from a thematic standpoint, while revealing the changes in our main character via the events of the story with only one action and one line of dialogue. This is one of those stories that improves in stature the more you reflect on it, as Bryant does what most professionals do: make the hard stuff look effortlessly easy.
So…is this one of Bryant’s best stories? It could be. Again, the type of tale told isn’t my usual cup of tea, but Bryant gets so much mileage out of a hoary old suspense trope that I come away very impressed. So did a lot of people: it was reprinted in four other anthologies and was the basis of a 2008 movie starring Kim Basinger. I’ve never seen the movie: excellent short-story writer and critic Adam Troy-Castro said it was a color-by-numbers affair. I could see that, as this is a story that is much more than the sum of its parts. You can find it in the Best of Pulphouse in e-book on Amazon, nestled next to many other worthy stories.
nothing bad is going to happen 