THE SELF-CONDEMNED NOVELS OF ROBERT McCAMMON

 

Robert R. McCammon rode out of the horror tsunami of the 80s, obviously led by King—Carrie, 1974—with the other Big K in perfect publishing position with Whispers, Koontz' breakthrough novel of 1980.(1) McCammon saw print with a dozen novels during the decade, starting with Baal in 1978 and winding down with Gone South of 1992. He then “retired”, citing personal reasons plus a conviction that the horror genre had indeed gone south with too much glamorama a la Hollywood, turning it into “rage and violence. Such things are all too common in our world: are we here to try to make things better, or to try to compete with the heavy darkness that is bludgeoning people's minds into Silly Putty? I, for one, want no part in layering more darkness onto that weight, and calling it a "fun entertainment."(2) After bucking the Slasher/BashHer trend highlighted by Silence of the Lambs,(3) he re-invented himself as an historical novelist with Speaks the Nightbird of 2002.

Since then, McCammon has refused to renew the copyrights on his first 4 books--Baal of 1978, Bethany's Sin and The Night Boat of 1980, and They Thirst from 1981--effectively banning any further printings. He doesn't think these “simply early efforts . . . [are] very deep or anything”,(4) as they are more learning studies than important, lasting works. But, more importantly, he has put his financial blood where his mouth is in regards to his earlier denouncement.

MAJOR UPDATE

as of 01/25/2011

According to a news release by Subterranean Press, they are re-printing the earlier novels in signed, limited formats, obviously under McCammon's approval. At $75 to $250 a pop, so much for "financial blood where his mouth is". I have not followed any gossip around the internet track because I don't care. What's left to say?

Anyone familiar with McCammon's oeuvre has got to be concerned with this thinning of his herd. Surely, the later books of his horror phase are more subtle, polished, and endearing, relying less on the heavy hand of gorror and schlock. Boy's Life of 1991, with its Bradbury-esque atmosphere of nostalgia and lost innocence, turns the supernatural more to magic than malice, and is considered by many to be his magnum opus.

But saunter into any used book store and you'll find McCammon well represented in the dwindling horror section. That's because this stuff's just plain fun to read. It's quirky, it's wide-eyed and curious and nail-biting, and, even though the plots are classic and pretty well worn, there's an enthusiasm pumping and thumping through freshly-washed setpieces that feels not so much as constructing from actualities as unrestraining their possibilities. McCammon's leaps are like jumping over hiking trail washouts, compared to Koontz's more—I don't know—cerebral floatings over unassigned territory. There's an insinuating weirdness to Koontz, whereas McCammon is just plain audacious. And King, well, he's exactly that during this period of the 80s; there is no comparison regarding him.

In the Afterword, McCammon explains that “Baal is my Angry Young Man novel” (Pocket Books, ISBN 0671664840, c.1978, reprinted 1988, p.345). It was his first work and written when he was 25 year old, so there is foundation to say Baal is rudimentary and pretty maladroit stuff with lots and lots of petulant angst burning up this Canaanite pagan demon god.

The next installment finds Baal leading hysterically-religious, uncontained mobs in the desert of Kuwait. He's the foretold Messiah, the coming Prophet, to this gathering stratum of humanity. From the wealthy, Arab potentates in their gold-embroidered tents with red-rich rugs, arriving in exotic cars with “their back sides raked by the rocks and bodies of the poor” (p.132), to the “protruding bones, sunken gums, and listless eyes” of the poverty-stricken and sick “people [that] swarmed like mad frothing animals” (p.131) over the “hard-packed, excrement-covered sand” (p.129). If there is a human hero, we meet him here as Dr. James Virga, professor of theology. We also meet Baal's opponent for his Mankind's Demise campaign in Michael, never named as the Archangel himself but possessing the knowledge and power of that celebrated rabbinical super-soldier of the Jews.

The endgame is played out in the white purity of the Artic. Since we're all still here and not “in the flames of lust and madness [where] the demon prince bestrides the earth” (cover blurb)—or, are we?—it's safe to assume Baal is effectively vanquished. The strength of—and probably the only reason to read—this novel is McCammon's impressive visualizations and fear-squeezing pacing of desperate if not abysmal situations. He saves the best for last, as Baal has to be crowbared out of his elaborate labyrinth of ice corridors, “filled with corpses of children, frozen like butterflies under glass” (p.302).

So as not to come off too funda-fanatical with his Heaven and Hell polarities, the author tosses in some last minute metaphysics. “There is completeness in the combination of good and evil,” Michael explains as an addendum to all this carnage, chaos, and cruelty. “Satan has never been a secondary power, he is the equalizing darkness to Jehovah's light . . . The cosmos was, and is, a combination of celestial and demonic energy” (p.315). By clearing up pre-Creation forces, McCammon moves out of the traditional Kabala universe which seeded the names and fundamental positionings borrowed in Baal for the cheesy harmonies of Gnosticism so embraced by modern New Agers.

And before I forget, Baal has one of the groaniest similes I've ever read:

It becomes apparent that McCammon is striving like some of the great film directors to place winning works in multiple genres.(5) I mean, okay, they're all films like this is all horror, and he's dropping a bomb in each category. Baal is Demon. Bethany's Sin is Possession. The Night Boat is Zombies/Haunted House. They Thirst—the one after this—Vampires.

And a WWII German U-boat surfacing in the Caribbean with its crew intact—well, kinda—and ready to rumble is a pretty creative Haunted House story. Our discoverer—David Moore—has a pre-existing condition to Haunted, as he's the surviving captain in the sinking of his family's boat that claimed his young wife and daughter in the backstory. Our land-locked hero is Steven Kip, constable of the setting's fishing village on an island somewhere—both physically and attitudinally—between Jamaica and Haiti. He represents the civilized society long-established by foreign colonists and feels duty-bound to the still-existing concords of the British West Indian tradition. The island natives living in their own jungle village hate and refuse this so-called protection, as expressed by Cheyne, Chief Father of the Carib. When the anacri boat shelled his village during WWII, his father died and his mother was driven insane. Now, he feels the Nazis are back “to rip pieces of my soul away” (p.319). If Sue Grafton wrote his sections, it'd hafta be called Cheyne is for Comeuppance.

Our final hero against these zombie bubbleheads comes from the assumed voice of reason and categorization of the Western World: the British Museum, Jamaica branch. She's Jana Thornton and McCammon's first heroine. While she's not a love interest, she is assigned some dialogue that is noteworthy, especially as info dumps. Yeah, she needs to be saved at the end, but she doesn't run screaming from this “slime vomited up from the guts of the sea” (p.187). Essentially, she's just another dude, but with a menstrual cycle.

As with Baal, there is the belief that the Universe is governed by forces beyond mankind's control. So you won't miss stepping into this bottomless puddle, McCammon names Moore's earlier family skiff's coffin Destiny's Child. Moore can only balance a guilt-ridden existence with his own life's sacrifice in good cause, so poetically referred to in the last paragraphs as “a small boat heading into the sun with her sails filled and all the great expanse of the sky beyond it” (p.343). Like Cheyne—and even more so like Evan Reid from Bethany's Sin—Moore dies as a perceived duty to family and/or tribe. But, more importantly here, eternity's seesaw returns to level when its antipodal riders null each other's weight.

They need more cowbell.

They Thirst is considered to be McCammon's finest work of the condemned, first 4 novels. And it is—by sheer, outlandish temerity alone. As far as vampire novels go, it's running in the vein between Garton's Live Girls of 1987 and Somtow's Vampire Junction of 1984. It contains his most character population, and, although it is not the worldwide staging of Baal and limits its locations to Los Angeles, it is far more expansive in atmospheric detail, structure and complexity, and symbolic intent. It feels like the shadowboxing of a contender about to step into the best-seller ring.

As the previous novel, The Night Boat suffers from not having a human-shaped villain of imposing presence, They Thirst makes up for this with triplets. Kobra is a brazen psychopath even before he becomes a vampire. He slaughters a bar full of “shitkickers” along with their jukebox just for “the bloody smell” and to feel “electric with life” (p.19). Roach is a one-jolt Igor stuck in a mental arroyo of twisted sexual and murderous need. Although he does not ingest the roaches himself, it is hard not to see some channeling from Stoker's Dracula through the memorable padded roomer, Renfield. Coincidentally, the celebrated Count also travels to Los Angeles—err, I mean, London—to be among the “teeming millions” (Heritage Press, reprint copyrighted 1965, from Chapter IV, “Jonathan Harker's Journal”, p.58).

Apexing this pestiferous pyramid is, of course, The Master himself, aka Prince Conrad Vulkan, King of the Vampires. And here's where McCammon throws the tropes backatcha. As leader, you'd expect refinement from centuries of experience that'd take Kobra and Roach's brand of malevolence to greater diabolical levels through, well, vulpine cunning. After all, Vulkan was a young, Hungarian nobleman who, in 1342 AD, disappeared in a carriage crash and has presumably been working the undead lifestyle successfully ever since. He's overwhelmed thousands of humans for their blood; he can read and control human minds; his taste buds will identify a hundred thousand flavors; he communicates with dogs, rats, bats, and flies, and can even summon up a bilious cloud or two.

But there's a coupla things you need to know about Conrad: 1, he answers to a father-like figure he calls the Headmaster, and 2, he's more a modern-day, ego-whining teenager than an 800-year old Master. In fact, if it wasn't for the backstory, it's conceivable to think the Prince took a hiatus from vampirism and became Baal some novels back. His wannabe card reads Alexander the Great, who was 20 years old when proclaimed King. Vulkan's only three years shy at 17, and he's already generaling a couple of million bloodsuckers in the LA basin.

Immortal and ageless Prince Vulkan is, of course, the credo of a youth-dominated pseudo-culture force fed to us by the greatest promulgation machine in human history. This SOS had a lot more screech to it 30 years ago, and not Las Vegas, nor New York, but Los Angeles/Hollywood has gotta be the consummate sound stage for its transmission. Vulkan is “a fucking black-as-sin Peter Pan” (p.485) and Southern California houses two titular Neverlands(6). With his petulant leadership skills and tantrum-throwing strategy sessions, it's preposterous to imagine that he could execute a Bloefeld-like program of domination by his bloodsucking hordes. It is short-sighted—not to mention poor planning—to add competition among the demon soldiers for a dwindling food source while taking over the world. Conrad is a child, and, like a child, he has been given instructions as surely as Hollywood and Madison Avenue have on which notions and contrivances to sell. He's just not mature enough to maintain the working gimmicks and find the loopholes tunneling humanity's fatal flaws.

Ah, the Headmaster.

McCammon's universe is dominated by the Christian ethic, or, at least, by its names and terminology. “God made mankind . . . and Satan made the vampire” (p.329), one character says, and they are continuously battling for Man's soul. If so, They Thirst is a rather Biblical skirmish. The Headmaster provides the sandstorm that brings the whole Mojave desert to blast Los Angeles down to bare metal as surely as Jehovah typhoons the huge LA basin under 200 feet of ocean, turning it into a “cauldron of holy water . . . [so] all the evil would be cleansed” (p.496).

But you don't read McCammon for ecclesiastical nuance. They Thirst is like—to paraphrase Frank Zappa—cruisin' for burgers in downtown LA. You're familiar with streets, avenues, and freeways, but it's exploring all the side roads and alleys looking for that unusual and perfect sensory rush—or burger stand to rival Tommy's—that really makes the trip.

Like tuning in the car radio to hear not Wolfman Jack but DJ Tiger Eddie motormouthing where the young flesh is located for the vampire hunting parties. (p.378)

Or calling an ambulance only to have the EMTs chew through the injured. (p.290)

Then there's the packed disco dance floor where looking for the partner of your dreams amongst those “with hunger in their eyes, their childlike faces vulpine and as pale as the ashes of a long-dead fire” (p.279) could be literally life altering.

Okay, how ‘bout merging onto the freeway and facing not typical stalled gridlock, but a wind storm of such magnitude that you've never seen “so much sand without a bottle of Coppertone . . . and a transistor radio beside the chair” (p.345).

McCammon throws in an old-fashioned rumble between rival street gangs, a mortuary laid out like the House of Usher with boxed inhabitants in clown makeup and smoking cigarettes, cemeteries tossed for their coffins leaving the dirt nappers on the lawn waiting for room service. Like the eyes of the undead eerily seen through their translucent, closed eyelids, this read's all about the details.

If you've got your Sneer Screen in place, this novel is going to be a disappointment. It is easy to tear through all the clichés and stereotypes, description mistakes of the Los Angeles landscape,(7) or the bombastic writing style using overexerted prose. Admittedly, the novel is too feathered, losing focus with spinning down stories like Rico Esteban and his underaged, prenado girlfriend lost in the barrio. The amended story arcs of Mitchell Gideon, the Mortuary King, and Paige LaSanda, the “stunning, ash-blond” (p.168) real estate agent could probably be eliminated. Even using Gayle Clarke for a Lazarus confrontation with Roach at the end can't save the character of the bucket-of-blood reporter from fading into the page like disappearing ink.

Yes, there's lots of extraneous stuff creeping around.

Fans call it atmosphere.

This'll be a hard book to find in a decade or so. Pricewise, it's tough now and probably the only one worth salvaging out of the 4 self-condemned novels. Although I'm kinda partial to Bethany's Sin, I realize that, like with Abrams' 2008 film Cloverfield, revealing the catch before you even set the hook destroys the curiosity and bewilderment that's so exciting yet so fragile in mystery stories like this.

Many books worse than these have been published with subsequent print runs not renewed, causing copies to become finite. Rarely is the demand ignored by their creator, however. Robert R. McCammon has displayed honest conduct with his final word on these works. It is now up to the readers to keep them alive.

How ‘bout it, gang? Any takers?