Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts Read online

  Contents

  Praise for Orrin Grey’s Painted Monsters & Other...

  Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts

  Other books by Orrin Grey

  Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts

  Frontmatter

  Dedication

  The Monster Guy: An Introduction to Orrin Grey

  Epigraph

  The Worm That Gnaws

  The White Prince

  Night’s Foul Bird

  The Murders on Morgue Street

  Ripperology

  Walpurgisnacht

  The Red Church

  Remains

  The Labyrinth of Sleep

  Lovecrafting

  Persistence of Vision

  Strange Beast

  Painted Monsters

  Afterword & Acknowledgments

  Titles Available from Word Horde

  About the Author

  Praise for Orrin Grey’s Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts

  “Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts is a fantastic follow-up to Grey’s first collection, Never Bet the Devil. This is the kind of writing that shows what can still be done with the classical weird.”

  —Laird Barron, author of The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

  “The ghosts of old movie monsters stalk the pages of Orrin Grey’s second collection. Here we find grave robbers and haunted houses side-by-side with vampires and kaiju. ‘The Red Church’ even features a serial killer who could have been taken (or is that sliced?) straight out of an Argento film. But it’s the great German Expressionist F.W. Murnau whose influence is perhaps felt most keenly. In the title piece, Nosferatu’s Count Orlok is recast as a reclusive Mexican auteur, while Murnau’s Faust provides the dramatic images which close out the eerily beautiful ‘Night’s Foul Bird.’ Such haunting scenes recur throughout Painted Monsters, spaced together as closely as the stills on a film-strip and coaxed into motion by Grey’s rapid-fire pacing. This is an outstanding collection, one to which you will return again and again long after the house lights have come up.”

  —Daniel Mills, author of The Lord Came at Twilight

  “The horror genre is a many-splintered thing. Grey collects those splinters, mixes and matches them, concocting a beast of a collection that is as fun as it is scary, as charming as it is chilling.”

  —Philip Gelatt, writer of Europa Report and Petrograd, director of The Bleeding House

  “In his latest collection, Orrin Grey not only pays homage to the classic horror films of yesteryear, he tears down the silver screen to reveal the true horrors that lurk on the other side. Fans of H. P. Lovecraft, Vincent Price, and the Hammer horror films will feel right at home.”

  —Ian Rogers, author of Every House Is Haunted

  “Orrin Grey’s work specializes in old-school horror iconography—Universal monster movies, Roger Corman Poe adaptations, found footage epistolary narratives—run through a pop-culture blender set on frappé, and Painted Monsters (whose title derives from a quote from Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets, with old Boris Karloff playing a version of himself while commenting on a version of his career) proves no exception to this rule. The result: inventive, assonant, literally dreadful. If you’re looking for something between Ray Bradbury’s headlong genre-bending fabulist glee and the Insidious movie franchise’s unapologetic vaudeville creep, then Grey’s your man.”

  —Gemma Files, author of Experimental Film

  “Orrin Grey’s roots (or should I say tentacles?) run deep, squeezing the best from horrors both classic and obscure, twisting them in his own particular way. He’s a fine storyteller who’ll pull you in, and so will Painted Monsters. Don’t miss it!”

  —Norman Partridge, author of Dark Harvest

  Painted Monsters

  & Other Strange Beasts

  Other books by Orrin Grey

  Anthologies:

  Fungi (with Silvia Moreno-Garcia)

  Chapbooks:

  Gardinel’s Real Estate (with M. S. Corley)

  The Mysterious Flame

  Collections:

  Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings

  Painted Monsters

  & Other Strange Beasts

  Orrin Grey

  Word Horde

  Petaluma, CA

  Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts

  © 2015 by Orrin Grey

  This edition of Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts

  © 2015 by Word Horde

  Cover art © 2015 by Nick Gucker

  Cover design by Scott R. Jones

  Edited by Ross E. Lockhart

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

  ISBN: 978-1-939905-15-4

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-939905-16-1

  A Word Horde Book

  www.wordhorde.com

  For Vincent Price, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee,

  Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre, and all the rest.

  They don’t make ’em like you anymore.

  The Monster Guy: An Introduction to Orrin Grey

  1. Monster Awareness Month. Late in 2010, Orrin Grey e-mailed me to ask if I’d be interested in participating in something called Monster Awareness Month. During the following March, Orrin and a handful of other writers would post appreciations of and reflections on various monster-related texts on a dedicated website. If I wanted to contribute something, Orrin wrote, they’d love to have me.

  I did take part in Monster Awareness Month, with a short, autobiographical piece on my childhood viewing of a couple of B-movies. I was happy enough with my essay, but it was Orrin’s contribution to the project that I found most impressive. In a lucid, thoughtful essay, he discussed the films of Guillermo del Toro, shuttling back and forth between the politicized phantasia of Pan’s Labyrinth and the anarchic hero’s journey of Hellboy. Critics often divide del Toro’s movies into his more historically-rooted productions and his more adventure-oriented features, with the former receiving the lion’s share of acclaim. Orrin bridged the gap between these kinds of films through the figure of the monster (which, for what it’s worth, still seems to me the unifying concern in del Toro’s work). In particular, Orrin highlighted del Toro as an artist in love with monsters, to such a degree that he felt compelled to do something interesting with them.

  Afterwards, I would realize that this description might be applied to Orrin’s creative work, as well.

  2. Marsupial Werewolves and Fried Alligator. I first met Orrin Grey in May of 2011, at the World Horror Convention, which was being held in Austin. I’m sure we exchanged greetings at the con hotel, itself, but I didn’t spend any substantial time with him until the second night of the convention, when I and a couple of friends ventured across the street from the hotel to an enormous restaurant specializing in Texas and southwestern cuisine. Sighting us at our table in the bar, Orrin waved for my friends and me to join him in the restaurant proper. He was seated with Joe Hill and Steve Niles, a plate of fried alligator on the table between them, dipping sauces to either side. After introductions were made, Orrin, Joe, and Steve returned to the serious business of listing and arguing the top ten werewolf movies ever made. I couldn’t contribute much more than my appreciation for An American Werewolf in London and Ginger Snaps; the rest of the discussion left me far behind. At one point, the conversation moved to the third film in the Howling series, which is set in Australia and in which the werewolves have become marsupial. Orrin had a surprising amount to say about the virtues of the film.

  It’s tempting to make a joke of this, but I’m reminded instead of something Stephen King mentions in Danse Macabre, his informal study of the horror field. There
is, King argues, genuine aesthetic pleasure to be found in a great many movies that might appear, at first glance, unpromising. Such enjoyment is an experience distinct from that of celebrating camp. In embracing camp, the viewer takes pleasure in the failures of a film and, really, in their ability to transgress accepted norms of taste and merit. What King describes is the ability to recognize a film’s successes, its moments of integrity, whether of character, plot, or theme, through the fog of those elements that don’t work. You might call it the experience of the aficionado, and it arises from an understanding and appreciation of the way a specific kind of film works, its traditions and tropes. King compares it to the ability of some experts to tap a glass and know from the resulting sound if it’s cheap glass or priceless crystal. It’s a gift in short supply. I believe Orrin demonstrated it, between bites of alligator.

  3. Fungal Reading. The next time Orrin invited me to contribute to a project, it was an anthology he and Silvia Moreno-Garcia were co-editing. Titled Fungi, it was to feature stories in which the eponymous organism played a central role. Knowing their prospective contributors, Orrin and Silvia cautioned against heading directly for the Cordyceps option (that’s the so-called “zombie fungus” that colonizes the brains of insects and turns them into its vehicles). We might wish to consider some of the previous uses to which writers and filmmakers had put the fungus. There was, of course, Jeff VanderMeer, whose Ambergris stories and novels run riot with fungal organisms and technology. But there was also William Hope Hodgson’s story, “The Voice in the Night,” and its film adaptation by Japanese director Ishiro Honda, Matango (aka Attack of the Mushroom People aka Fungus of Terror). Those who wanted to range even further afield could have a look at Stephen King’s “Grey Matter” or Brian Lumley’s “Fruiting Bodies.” Who knew? I thought.

  Of course, the answer was, Orrin.

  4. From Goethe to Barron (to Grey). Unsurprisingly, Orrin Grey’s fiction is full of monsters. It’s also no surprise that his stories display an awareness of the traditions in which he’s working, deftly moving between popular image and literary incarnation. Take the figure of the witch, which is at the center of his excellent story, “Walpurgisnacht,” his contribution to Ross E. Lockhart and Justin Steele’s The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron. The story is full of allusions to the world of Laird Barron’s fiction, from the lost films of Eadweard Muybridge to the Black Ram Lodge. It also echoes the plot dynamics of some of Barron’s stories, focusing on a couple whose relationship is starting to fray, leaving them vulnerable to unholy forces. At the same time, as its title indicates, the story alludes to the scene of the Witches’ Sabbath in Goethe’s Faust Part 1. In so doing, the narrative draws a line between Goethe and Barron’s uses of the witch. In addition, the story makes implicit reference to James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and explicit reference to Goya’s art, specifically his Black Paintings. The story offers a perfect symbol for the relation between past and present art in its description of the Sender Brocken, a pair of towers, one old, one new, one a hotel, the other a great antenna. (Needless to say, the image also evokes the interchange between Barron’s fiction and Orrin’s.) In the hands of a less-skilled writer, so elaborate a narrative construction might collapse under the weight of its own ambitions. But Orrin avoids this fate by building his story around a sympathetically-drawn protagonist, whose struggle to understand the events unfolding around him lends the story resonance. The result is a narrative that succeeds on its own terms, even as it pays tribute to Laird Barron’s work.

  In this regard, “Walpurgisnacht” is typical of the stories assembled in this, Orrin Grey’s second collection. With a sure hand, Orrin brings elements gathered from his extensive, appreciative knowledge of the horror tradition together with compellingly-drawn characters to craft stories whose effects linger long after their final lines. The word monster, etymology tells us, refers to that which is shown. What is shown in these stories is the talent of their author. Orrin Grey is a monster: watch him.

  —John Langan

  “My kind of horror is not horror anymore.

  No one’s afraid of a painted monster.”

  — Targets (1968)

  The Worm That Gnaws

  I’ve ’ad loadsa bad jobs in my day, but this un’s the worst by a mile. Trompin’ around in the boneyards at midnight, diggin’ up dead folks wi’ a wooden spade, breakin’ open the caskets wi’ a mattock, an ’aulin’ ’em up an out by the ’eads. Christ.

  The mist creeps up ’til it’s so thick ya can’t ’ardly see the groun’ for it, makes the tombstones look like ships at sea where they thrust up outta it. Cold as a witch’s tit, an only one bottle between us, Wolfe an I.

  ’Course it’s illegal. I ain’t ’ad but a job or two that weren’t, in one way or t’other. But the fines ain’t steep, an the constables tend ta look t’other way. ’Sides, the pay’s worth the risks. Good pay, for a fella like me, or a fella like Wolfe.

  ’E’s the boss, is Wolfe. Been at the game a long time, compared ta me, an ’e ain’t like ta let me forget it. Big fella, shaped like a barrel, face all red an puffy from too much drink. “You’d drink too, if ya’d seen what I seen,” ’e always tells me, as if I don’t drink.

  Knows ’is business, though, give ’im that. ’Ere we are, at the grave. Anna Fairchild. Pretty name. Wonder if she’s pretty? Wonder if she’ll still be pretty, when we get down to ’er? Won’t be after, that’s for sure. We’ll push Wolfe’s big metal hook—like a fishhook fer catchin’ whales—up unner ’er chin, inta the soft stuff there an through ’er jaw, then both of us’ll get on the rope, ’aulin’ ’er up. Girls is best, ’cause they’re light.

  No, she prob’ly won’ be pretty after all that. An if she is, she won’t be when the sods at the anatomy school get done ’ackin’ ’er up.

  Still, she’s dead an I ain’t. She don’t got no cares, an me, cares is all I got. That’s the way a the world.

  Wolfe loosens up the sod, an now I’m diggin’. ’Ate this bloody spade, ’ate this bloody weather. Least it ain’t rainin’. Cloudy. Cold. But no sign a rain. Thank Christ fer small favors.

  Fella with a skull for a ’ead over there watchin’ me, lookin’ down on me like ’e knows what I’m doin’ an ’e don’t approve. Why would ya want a great big statue a Death right there on yer tombstone, remindin’ everybody what come ta visit ya, I dunno. Damn waste a money, is what it is! The whole thing: fancy caskets an tombstones an statues. The dead don’t care. They don’t know the difference between this place an the operatin’ table.

  I don’t want no damn tombstone when I die. A good thing, too, cause I ain’t like ta ’ave one. I could ’aul corpses outta the ground from ’ere ’til Judgement Day an not ’ave enough coin for a monument like Ol’ Skull-Head there.

  Naw, when I’m dead let the anatomy classes ’ave me. Let ’em cut me up an parcel me out ta the students. Marcus gets the upper torso, Robert gets the right ’and, Louis gets the left, an Peter can ’ave the ’ead this time. Let me make a few shillings for some other Resurrection Man ta waste on whiskey an girls.

  Wolfe says it’s ’cause I’m young that I ain’t worried about death. “The older ya get,” ’e says, “the more scared ya get a dyin’, an the less scared ya get a everythin’ else.”

  The sound a the spade on the casket is ’ollow, like somebody rappin’ on the door wi’ their cane. ’S lonely like that, too. Makes ya think about tree branches tappin’ against the window at night, an all the scary stories ya got told when ya were little. Mostly, though, it just makes ya wanna get the damn job done.

  Wolfe always puffs up like a bantam rooster before ’e swings the mattock. ’E looks like a right arse, but ’e’s good an in a coupla swings ’e’s got a ’ole cleared an we can see Miss Fairchild’s ’ead.

  ’Cept... Bugger me, it’s just a skull. Did we get the wrong grave? We ain’t never got the wrong grave before.

  Wolfe’s light on the ’ea
dstone. Anna Fairchild. ’Course it is, ’cause I read the name on the damn thing once already, didn’t I?

  Mary Mother a God, somethin’ moved in there! Wolfe’s still got the light on the ’eadstone, so I grab ’is arm an push it down.

  She sure ain’t pretty no more. An she sure as hell ain’t movin’. But somethin’ is. There, I see it again, inside the skull.

  Worms! Oh bloody ’ell, the casket’s full a worms!

  ***

  Goin’ back empty’s always bad for business. The schools rely on us for bodies, an if we can’t supply ’em they’ll find some other blokes who will. Plenty of folks around wi’ more bills than scruples. Wolfe an I don’t pretend we’re anythin’ special.

  ’Course, we didn’t really ’ave much choice. Not enough time to pick out another body, an what were we suppose ta do, bring ’em a skeleton an a bunch a worms? Doubt they’d wanna give up their shillings for that.

  Wolfe’s seen a lot more a life—an death—than I ’ave. I ask ’im, ’as ’e ever seen anythin’ like that before. ’E just shakes ’is ’ead. “No,” ’e says, an again, “No.”

  ***

  Resurrection men. I don’t know who first started callin’ us that, us or them. I don’t know ’ow many of us there is. Don’t really think of us as an “us.” There’s just me an Wolfe. We seen some other blokes, but we try ta stay outta their way, an if they know what’s good for ’em they stay outta ours.