Tag: charles l. grant

Short Story Review: “Hear Me Now, My Sweet Abbey Rose” by Charles L. Grant

October 27th, 2024

(Cover by Chesley Bonestell. F&SF, March 1978.)

Who Goes There?

Every time I’ve encountered Charles L. Grant’s stuff I’ve been indifferent at best, which is a shame because he really did put in the work. From the ’70s until his untimely death (only a few days after his 54th birthday), Grant was a prolific practitioner of dark fantasy, spooky science fiction, and what he called “quiet” horror. Grant’s brand of horror doesn’t seek to gross out or even scare the reader in the conventional sense, but to invoke a certain uneasy atmosphere; this is one way of saying his stories can be very moody, in a way that for some reason does not appeal to me. Not to say he was a bad writer; he clearly exceled in his wheelhouse, just that I find said wheelhouse to be a case of style over substance. It says something that other than his Nebula-winning story “A Crowd of Shadows” I would say today’s story is my favorite from Grant, but I still didn’t care for it. Obviously some people did care, at least at the time: “Hear Me Now, My Sweet Abbey Rose” got a World Fantasy Award nomination. It’s also set in the perpetually haunted Connecticut town of Oxrun Station, a favorite fictional locale for Grant, although for some reason the folks at ISFDB have not yet added this story as an entry in that series despite it being explicitly set there.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March 1978 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series VII (ed. Gerald W. Page), Horrorstory: Volume Three (ed. Gerald W. Page and Karl Edward Wagner), and the Grant collection A Glow of Candles and Other Stories.

Enhancing Image

Nels Anderson has moved with his family to a farm in Oxrun Station, suppoedly to get some fresh country air but really as a way to distract Nels from business problems. He’s with his wife Kelly, and his three daughters, Grace, Abbey, and Bess; he loves all his daughters, of course, but it becomes apparent that Abbey, the middle child, is his favorite. The thing is that Abbey is no longer a child—none of them are. We’re talking eighteen to twenty. Nels’s daughters are at that age where they have every right to go chasing after boys, although Nels is not ready for this—not that he wants to admit it. The narrative is thus broken up between present-day life on the farm and unattributed conversations between Nels and Kelly, which seem to be flashbacks, in which the two mostly discuss their love life and their relationship with the kids. We learn they were hoping for a son, hence them having three daughters instead of one or two. We learn Rose is Abbey’s middle name, in a bit of obvious symbolism. We also learn Abbey sometimes have nightmares, about dying, which are serious enough that her parents express concern about them. As for life on the farm, Abbey is miserable, although she’s not quick to say so, life on the farm not being what she had hoped for. She wants to appease her dad but there’s only so much she can do. Thus we have a family drama which doesn’t seem to have any horror elements, or anything supernatural going on; since this was published in F&SF we can guess something will happen, but as is typical of his work, Grant is slow to show his hand.

It could be that I’ve seen this kind of story before and that a lot has changed since the ’70s (but also not enough has changed), but I wasn’t terribly interested in Nels’s dilemma with how he should treat Abbey. There is the faintest hint that Nels is possessive of his daughter because he’s in love with her himself, and this incestuous urge is too shameful to be spoken of, but if that was an implication on Grant’s part then there’s no payoff for it. A father who is unwilling to let his 19-year-old daughter live her own life is not in itself an uncommon case, but given the conversations the two have it’s implied that no man would satisfy Nels as Abbey’s daughter because he projects himself onto the boyfriend role. This is all but confirmed when three young men (one man for each daughter) come to the property, drunk, with one saying he’s here to take Grace on a date. Grace herself says that the men had previously harassed her and Bess, and would not take no for an answer. Now, in fairness if I was a parent and three complete strangers came to my home saying they were here for a date with my kids, I would be quite skeptical. Given that the boys are being threatening, and decidedly not sober, Nels has a choice: he can try to either deescalate, or give these boys an ass-kicking. He picks the latter. This choice is framed as not the wisest of things to do, but it’s also totally understandable, and frankly it’s hard to blame Nels for kicking the men off his property. Of course, since this is ostensibly a horror story we know things will only get worse, and that the three men will figure back into the plot somehow.

Maybe this would have been more effective had it not been so short (a dozen magazine pages that go by quickly) and had it seemed like Nels had more of a choice in the course of events. Like what is he supposed to do here? The obvious point Grant wants to make is that Nels obsesses over his daughters too much and Abbey in particular, but if there’s any abuse, we don’t see it. Apparently Abbey declined to go to a high-class college so she could stay close to her family, instead (if the flashback is anything to go by) going to a local community college, which we’re told is a bad thing. Okay. What exactly is wrong with going to community college? Could you maybe illustrate more clearly to us how Abbey’s codependant relationship with her dad has made her life worse? We are told, but not really shown, that Nels is doing the wrong thing. Maybe if he had an incestuous crush on his own daughter and is trying to keep her all to himself like that then there would be a real problem, but while (like I said) there’s the faintest hint of this being the case, Grant doesn’t follow through on it. The other thing is that Nels’s unhealthy relationship with his daughter is set up to have tragic and unforeseen consequences, albeit telegraphed through Abbey’s nightmares about her dying. We all have dreams about dying, but in the context of this story Abbey’s nightmares are taken as premonitions, as if there’s something different and supernatural about them, despite nothing being shown that this is the case. I could go on for a minute, but my point is that the story’s attempt at building dread is unearned.

There Be Spoilers Here

Nels’s harsh treatment of the three men comes back to bite the family, or so it seems. The five of them go on a picnic when, from somewhere distant, a shot rings out. Then another. Kelly is wounded in the shooting and Abbey is killed, perhaps as the latter had predicted she might be. Presumably one of the men had taken to sniping at the family, but nobody sees the shooter and the three men are never arrested, on account of having lullabies. What started as a vacation home becomes a tragic memory. It isn’t until the very end that the story turns supernatural—maybe. Nels refuses to leave the farm, with the rest of the family even leaving him behind. He is unable to go. He talks to a big tree, the one Abbey had clung too as he died, and he hears her voice in his head. “Turnabout, father, is not always fair,” she says. She wanted to leave the farm, but now she’s stuck here, as a spirit tied to the tree. Of course, there’s nothing to prove that this isn’t just Nels talking to himself in his mind. Again I’m left wondering, what was Nels supposed to do here? Have the family leave the farm early? Send Abbey back home? Grant interrogates his protagonist but does not provide an alternate course of action. I don’t get it.

A Step Farther Out

Nope, can’t say I was a fan.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: October 2024

October 1st, 2024
(Cover by David Palladini. F&SF, April 1977.)

Let’s talk about horror.

Everyone has their preferences when it comes to genre, which makes sense; there are only so many hours in the day, and time plus one’s temperament equals a preference for literature that seeks to entrance, excite, and/or titillate. We also like to be scared sometimes, or at the very least uneased. I’ll be honest with you, when someone tells me they simply have no appetite for horror I’m tempted to give them the side-eye. As far as my own genre preferences go I would put horror only behind science fiction—and not by much. The key difference is that I can enjoy SF at really any length, whereas I very much believe horror is at its best at short story and novella lengths, which is an old-school belief not least because the novel has dominated horror since at least the ’80s.

The conventional narrative (and I do think this is more or less accurate) is that prior to the ’70s, horror had at most fleeting moments of mainstream recognition. There were exceptions, but they were exceptions that proved the rule. Maybe ever few years you got a horror novel that reached bestseller status. But then, in the ’70s, what had been a once-in-a-blue-moon thing became something of a trend, arguably started when William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist and Richard Matheson’s Hell House both came out in 1971. In the film world the influx of horror can be explained by the advent of the MPAA rating system combined with independent studios like New World Pictures pumping out exploitation cinema by the truckload, but in the literary world the rise of horror is harder to explain—except for one thing. Stephen King had been writing since the late ’60s, but his debut novel Carrie became a bestseller when it was published in 1974, and the crazy part is that noy only did King (a snotty 26-year-old at the time) gain overnight success, he managed to sustain it with more hits. The meteor shower that was King in the ’70s brought a change to horror that it had not seen before, and frankly will probably never see again. Many writers (some of whom are more elegant than King) would hop on the horror bandwagon, but none can be said to have reached King’s level.

While the horror novel was in, the short story was not so much. For most of the ’70s The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction was the only genre magazine to publish horror with any regularity. Magazine of Horror did mostly reprints, and by 1972 was no more, while Weird Tales had a brief revival in the early ’70s, only to go dormant again. So it was up to F&SF to pick up the slack. For the magazine’s 75th anniversary, and in covering short stories from the ’70s, we’ll be focusing more on horror, dark fantasy, and spooky science fiction. These are mostly the usual suspects when it comes to horror, but there are one or two surprises.

For the short stories:
1. “Longtooth” by Edgar Pangborn. From the January 1970 issue. One of the most criminally overlooked SF writers of the ’50s through the ’70s, Pangborn wrote some pretty touching fiction that went against the rather hard-headed norm of the times. He would spend the last decade or so of his life on a post-apocalyptic continuity, but “Longtooth” is both a standalone and detour into horror.
2. “The Smell of Death” by Dennis Etchison. From the October 1971 issue. Etchison started writing in the ’60s, but he gained more prominence in the following decade as the horror boom for film and novels had kind of a trickle-down effect. He would also later become acclaimed as an editor, on top of writing, winning the World Fantasy Award multiple times for his horror-centered anthologies.
3. “In the Pines” by Karl Edward Wagner. From the August 1973 issue. Wagner debuted in 1970 and would remain a mainstay of horror and heroic fantasy until his untimely death in 1994. Last time we read Wagner it was one of his Kane stories, but “In the Pines” is an early example of his mastery of scares. I believe this also marks his only appearance in the pages of F&SF.
4. “The Same Dog” by Robert Aickman. From the December 1974 issue. Aickman has a reputation as a writer’s writer, with good reason, being your favorite horror writer’s favorite horror writer. He debuted in the early ’50s but remained a hidden gem in the UK until the ’70s. Aickman would appear in F&SF several times throughout this decade, with “The Same Dog” being an original publication.
5. “The Ghastly Priest Doth Reign” by Manly Wade Wellman. From the March 1975 issue. Wellman remained a presence in American fantasy writing for six decades, and especially in the latter half worked to evoke the rural mysteries of his adopted home state of North Carolina. For better or worse Wellman’s most authentic fiction is distinctly Southern in flavor, this story being one example.
6. “My Boat” by Joanna Russ. From the January 1976 issue. Known much more for her SF and criticism, a fair amount of Russ’s fiction (especially early on) was horror, such that even some of her SF oozes with a certain existential dread. She even wrote a few stories set in the Cthulhu Mythos, of which “My Boat” is one. I suspect this will be a Lovecraft pastiche with a Russ-type twist or two.
7. “Manatee Gal Ain’t You Coming Out Tonight” by Avram Davidson. From the April 1977 issue. This will be the first time we’ll be reading a story by one of F&SF‘s editors. Davidson was already a respected writer when he took over F&SF for a few years in the early ’60s, injecting the magazine with eccentricity. This story is actually the second in an episodic series starring Jack Limekiller.
8. “Hear Me Now, My Sweet Abbey Rose” by Charles L. Grant. From the March 1978 issue. Grant got his start in the ’60s and would soon become one of the moodier and more experimental horror writers of the following decade, winning awards for his efforts. Truth be told, I’ve not been keen on the Grant I’ve read, but as I’ve said before, I’m usually open to giving authors another chance.
9. “Red as Blood” by Tanith Lee. From the July 1979 issue. This is the third consecutive time Lee’s appearing on my October slate, although this won’t be the case next year for reasons I’ll give… in due time. But for now it’s safe to say I’ve warmed up to Lee, gradually, and can see how for decades she was a mainstay of horror and dark fantasy. “Red As Blood” marked her first appearance in F&SF.
Won’t you read with me?

Tag: charles l. grant

Short Story Review: “Hear Me Now, My Sweet Abbey Rose” by Charles L. Grant

Things Beyond: October 2024