Let's face it: I read scary stories all year 'round but when October arrives, I take the opportunity to double down on horror and churn through some creepy tales. This year, I've decided it's going to a motley collection of gory, spine chilling short stories.
To start, I picked up a collection of short stories called Lovecraft's Monsters that I've been meaning to read for years. Looking for recommendations, I stumbled onto a Reddit post that praised pretty much any anthology edited by Ellen Datlow. That's when I was reminded of this squamous, tentacled knot of terrifying tales that slithered into my reading list a couple of years and has been lurking there ever since.
What better place to start than a short story by Joe R Lansdale? I wholeheartedly recommend Lansdale's books. He writes in a number of genres, so there's pretty much something that will appeal to everyone in his work. For those people who love crime, you will devour the Hap and Leonard novels and epic works of Texas noir like Cold in July. If you're after a western, Lansdale has you covered. The Thicket and Paradise Sky are a couple of dark, engaging contemporary westerns and wonderful works of literature to boot.
I was kind of gleeful when I realised that there was a short story by Lansdale in Lovecraft's Monsters.
'The Bleeding Shadow' is an ominous little story that melds the cosmic horror of Lovecraft with the legend of Robert Johnson. The hero of the story—a hardboiled, unlicensed private investigator—is roped into an investigation when a former lover asks him to find her brother who recently sent her a sinister recording pressed on vinyl that conjures dark shadows with its unearthly sounds. This wonderful little tale of comic horror will definitely wrap its tentacles around you.
From a writing perspective, I was struck once again by Lansdale's use of simile. Alma May is a woman who could 'melt butter from ten feet away' and the recording that she plays becomes stuck in the protagonists' head 'like an axe'. Then the Lovecraftian horror oozes its way into the story: "There was something moving in there, something that slithered and slid and made smacking sounds like an anxious old drunk about to take his next drink." If that doesn't keep you up at night, the abomination that pursues our heroes attempts to squirm its way into our reality "like a rat easing its nose into hot dead meat."
As I creep cautiously through October, shining my flickering torch on these short stories, I'm also interested in developing a sense of how short horror stories work from a narrative perspective. 'The Bleeding Shadow' has a lot in common with longer fiction. Lansdale begins each scene with a very clear objective and Richard faces conflict—both supernatural and not—that he confronts with the hard-nosed tenacity of a noir hero. The opening pages of the story set up his motivation beautifully and help to explain why, despite the chilling recording, he decides to take on the case. From a storytelling perspective, I loved the extended monologue from Tootie at the story's midpoint. There is something wonderfully engaging about the campfire quality of someone recounting a creepy story.