A review that originally appeared in Black Static #82/83:-
James Cooper has been published in Black Static eight times and he has two books out this year. His fourth collection of short stories, SCAR TISSUE (PS Publishing pb, 360pp, £15.99) comes with the tag line “Original stories inspired by Dark Fiction’s contemporary trailblazers”, and that’s a fair summation, albeit I might take issue with the word “contemporary”. More succinctly, it’s the literary equivalent of a tribute album, with Cooper delving into the work of writers he feels indebted to and trying to capture some of their magic on the page. The writers he riffs on are Peter Straub, Shirley Jackson, Robert McCammon, Clive Barker, Joe R. Lansdale, Ray Bradbury, Daphne du Maurier, and Stephen King, and each of Cooper’s stories is prologued by a mini-essay on why he feels those writers are so special and what he is attempting to do in the work that follows. First though we have an introduction by Nina Allan and a foreword by Cooper himself in which he reveals the thinking and motivation behind this collection.
Peter Straub’s tales of the Vietnam War are the inspiration for ‘A Brighter Garden’. There are two strands to the story, set in 2016 and 1971. In the latter Clay Newburg is a grunt in ‘Nam, this plot strand culminating in an atrocity and Clay losing his mind, with along the way a chilling evocation of the life of a soldier and the stress of jungle warfare that undid so many. In 2016 Clay is living hand to mouth, and digging a pond for a cantankerous old lady called Mrs Tillman, whose constant nagging he finds unendurable. It’s hard to know how to feel about any of this. We have mirror killings to bookend the story, but central to it all is Clay’s mental state, the way in which the war has never left him, how he is a good man but also an unexploded bomb waiting to go off. Regardless of his actions it is hard not to feel sympathy for the guy, who just wants to be left alone to get on with his work and life, Cooper perfectly capturing the man’s trauma, which is only a reflection of that felt by an entire country. Next story ‘The Man in the Field’ is a tribute to Shirley Jackson in general and ‘The Lottery’ in particular, which in a way is my problem with the story. It’s set in a religious community reminiscent of Shyamalan’s The Village with all the women Mother and all the men Father, and an act of sacrifice required that the enigmatic figure of the titular man enacts. I think if this had been pitched simply as a story by James Cooper it would have worked better, but as a Jackson tribute it’s entirely transparent – we pretty much know where the story is going, with only the details to be revealed. And by setting it in an invented community the template’s sting in the tail of modern people engaged in primitive practices is lost.
Robert McCammon tribute ‘Morning Glory’ is set in a diner, where a holy man and a young girl turn up for a bite to eat, but are joined by a man who is in pursuit of the girl, a child with special powers who has escaped from a government facility. Cooper captures perfectly the tone of McCammon in his southern charm period, with Father Tobin and the girl Eloise, giant Dewbre and diner owner Deke (the viewpoint character) brought to vivid life on the page. The ending is ambiguous, with Deke feeling that the girl is a monster, but also realising that she has been made that way by others. With hindsight the story reminded me of the King of Firestarter as much as it did Mc Cammon. Cooper’s take on Clive Barker is that transformation is central to so much of his work, so we get ‘The Unholy’, which opens with Mr Butterfield attending a bare knuckle fight at which the boxer Hopper demonstrates a super power. Butterfield works for the wealthy Embleton who is dying of a brain tumour and wants Hopper to take him to the demon/god Belphegor for a cure. In geographical terms this is the story that covers the most ground, from a rainy night in a rundown city to the icy wastes of the Arctic, and the one that hints at the more than the human, with a strong sense of the numinous. The characters are finely drawn and although he seems at times to be a supporting character, Hopper is the real subject of the story, with his response to transformation at the heart of what happens, the sense that he is not simply invested in saving himself, even if that was the point of departure for his odyssey into the unknown. The journey is the thing.
Next up we have ‘Roadside Revival’, inspired by the work of Joe R. Lansdale, and so inevitably there is gonzo action and larger than life characters. Hank Baelin is on the trail of preacher Reverend Jeb Faithful, who claims to bring the dead back to life and has beguiled Hank’s true love Evelyn. On Hank’s trail are the Vinn brothers and monster cop Officer Fuckwit, with an undercover Special Agent and a weaselly henchman making up the numbers. It all comes together at The Burning Heart Motel, and if the Reverend really can bring the dead back to life, at the end of the story he’s got a lot of material to work with. There’s gore galore and over the top action, larger than life characters and crackling dialogue, and every bit of it is a gleeful delight, with the reader just ploughing on in disbelief at the author’s audacity and Cooper retaining an element of doubt about Jeb Faithful’s abilities right to the end. ‘Childhood, Inc.’, as you might guess from the title, is a tribute to Ray Bradbury. Thanks to the eponymous organisation, John Traynor gets the chance to live again as a child. But things go wrong and he ends up stuck in the body of young Jimmy and at the mercy of bullying stepfather Rick and manipulative stepsister Lou-Anne. I guess you could pitch this as an antidote to the Green Town, Illinois sentimentalism of Bradbury, showing what life was really like for kids back in the 1950s. Initially it has the feel of something Bradbury might have written, though not the style, as I’m sure Cooper would be the first to admit (Bradbury was a one off), but though we, like the protagonist, anticipate an idyllic childhood summer, the reality is anything but. Eventually John/Jimmy comes to terms with his situation, accepts that shit has happened, and with his adult acumen is able to get out from under. But while you can applaud the way in which he pays back the bullying Rick, one has to wonder what happens to Jimmy’s mother as a result, and the story felt to me as if it ended up in the air, with no real explanation for the activities of the eponymous organisation.
‘The Birdwatcher’ owes its inspiration to Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The Birds’ and is set in the aftermath of that tale, when the threat of the birds has receded, though nobody is clear why this has happened. Nat has terrible memories of the time of the birds and is imagining both that they have returned and his family and friends are being transformed into creatures with bird heads. Whereas du Maurier’s story had about it the feeling of the apocalyptic this is more on a personal level, a tale of individual madness, of one man falling apart in a community that is struggling to get back to normal, Cooper succeeding in blurring the lines between Nat’s confused mental state and the state of the world itself. Inevitably there’s a Stephen King tribute, ‘Ordinary Day’ in which handyman Bill relates a tale of marital infidelity and murder to friend Mervin. As with so much of King’s work, tone is crucial and Cooper captures just right the homespun, just us folks here, tone of voice that has worked so well for King. The narrative itself feels a bit too much weighted in favour of the husband in the story, but I guess that attitude fits very well with the character of Bill. There’s an incident with a cop that I would expect to cause later problems for Bill in his cover up and which is not properly addressed. Regardless the whole production holds the attention from first word to last and is as close to the master’s style as it gets without being King himself.
Finally we have ‘The Lift’, a story inspired not by an individual author but by a type of film, those concerned with the use of psi powers. Thomas Kessler is a pickpocket with the power to read minds, which is useful when it comes to learning pin numbers. He is picked up by a government organisation which wants him to probe the mind of an agent suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder and get at the secrets he holds. This was another compulsively readable story, one that holds the attention all the way, with the use of psi powers adding a menacing thread to the narrative. Kessler does seem a bit naïve, in that you would expect the limitations in his situation to be apparent. On the other hand the figure of enforcer Culpepper is truly intimidating, an amoral monster who will do whatever is asked of him for the national good. And this seems to be the problem revealed in the story’s subtext, that people will act without considering the consequences as regards life and death. Along the way we have some fascinating interplay between Kessler and Burke’s two alternates, that add yet more depth to the story. Perhaps in the final analysis this is not a horror story as such, but a mutant one along the lines of X-Men. It was a great end to a strong collection, one with a unique over arching idea.
Trumpetville 