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Morbid Tales Quentin S Crisp Mark Samuels 9781872621838 Books

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Morbid Tales Quentin S Crisp Mark Samuels 9781872621838 Books

Now originality does not necessarily mean good. There are stories in this collection that are outstanding, some that are adequate, but all of them have a truly original voice. Mark Samuels ("The White Hands and Other Stories") wrote the foreword to this collection commenting on this originality, and he was not wrong. If nothing else, Crisp has found his voice very quickly and with very strong results. In most (not all) of these stories he has found something that touches the reader.

WARNING: MULTIPLE SPOILERS

"The Mermaid"
The protagonist is unnamed (perhaps I did not read closely enough), or at the very least is rarely named. This character was extremely layered, a facet and strength of many of the characters in Crisp's tales. I think when QSC fails it is because he failed to truly develop the character. He does not fail here. The protagonist is a man haunted by purpose. He begins the story in apparent consolation telling the reader that he has found his "story," and thus is now fulfilled. He begins the tale by explaining his two lifelong fascinations: magic and the erotic. By serendipity alone he finds a book about mermaids, and his fascination is peaked. He soon becomes an expert ("or as near as one can be an expert on something that doesn't exist") on mermaids. For example, he discovers everything he can on the hangyojin, the Japanese version of the mermaid with the exception that it is reversed (i.e., the lower half is human and the upper part is fish). He moves to a village by a beach that his studies have indicated were the location of mermaid sightings. He lives there, alone, isolated, waiting, believing in a belief that is not recognized by the world outside his home.
And one day he finds her. Gwendoline. He, in essence, kidnaps this mermaid. He is as honest with Gwendoline as he is to the reader about this. She accepts it. And their relationship starts to build. He can communicate with her, initially, only through a powder Gwendoline possesses in a box the narrator found previously in the story. Eventually, he learns her language and the powder is not critical to their communication. She tells him of her world, and through the powder, he can even experience it. It is in these passages that QSC writes brilliantly and powerfully. The descriptions of her world truly feel like being transported to a completely different reality. Only in Clark Ashton Smith have I seen a totally alien world described so clearly and poetically.
Eventually the subject between a man and a woman turns to sex. And Gwendoline and the narrator are no different. The narrator reminds the audience of his twin fascinations (magic and the erotic) and how they seem to merge into one in Gwendoline. The problem is they cannot consummate the relationship. But . . . Gwendoline tells of a way they can. It is through an ancient book from her people that possess certain rituals. In this book is a ritual to allow a mermaid to have sex with a human. The narrator performs this ritual and that is when the O. Henryesque ending occurs. Because throughout the latter part of the story, one gets the sense that something is not quite right. That there is something Gwendoline is holding back from the narrator, that there was a reason that she so readily acquiesced to her kidnapping, that she needed something from the narrator. At the end of the ritual, she becomes a hangyojin, the Japanese version of the mermaid with the lower half of a human and the upper half of a fish. The tale ends, as does Gwendoline.

"Far-Off Things"
This story concerns a man's reflections of when he was a boy in love with a girl named Leah. He watches her from afar, admiring her, falling in love with her. She learns (and through his eavesdropping, so does he) that she is dying. At this knowledge, she leans out her window, tears dropping on the flower below her and says, "If only I could live as long as one of those, I would be happy." She continues to get better. When the boy picks the flower and gives it to her on Christmas day, she wilts at her doorstep.
This was an interesting concept, but as I mentioned before, when QSC fails in a story it is usually because of inadequate character development. This is an instance of that.

"Cousin X"
This concerns both Sasha and her cousin, Cousin X. It begins when they are children. Cousin X's family comes over for the summer at Sasha's family's house. Cousin X is the black sheep of the family. Sasha begins to see why. He is just plain weird. But the focus is on the word "weird." The whole crux of the story seems to revolve around this exploration of the good side and bad side of the strange, weird, outré, odd, whatever you want to call it.
When Sasha and Cousin X first meet, Sasha faints at the sight of him. "Later in life, when she was to learn the meaning of the phrase déjà vu, it was this memory she referred to first." The fainting is not caused by outward fear, shock, or terror. No, there is something else, there is the contact with the truly strange. Their parents react the same way any parents would. Sasha's parents flip out and protect their daughter (both immediately by taking her away from Cousin X's presence after she faints and for the duration of the story by disapproving of her interacting with Cousin X). Cousin X's parents reprimand him. You kind of feel sorry for Cousin X during this reprimand. You get the sense that this is a reoccurring pattern in his life and also that he knows that people think he's strange, but he Just Does Not Know Why he's so strange.
After this incident, Sasha seems to have a strange attraction to Cousin X. This is when Cousin X shares his world with her and this is both a beautiful and tragic piece of prose QSC gives us. In short, Cousin X can see INTO things. He knows magic. "Magic shows you how things really are. And people are really naked, but they pretend they're not," he tells Sasha. The best way to summarize what Cousin X's perspective holds is in a short dialogue between him and Sasha at their first non-fainting interaction:
We find Sasha walking up to Cousin X who is dismantling a radio (one of his favorite activities):

"Why are you always taking things apart?"
"I want to know how they work," said Cousin X, as if this were self-evident.
"Why?"
"Because . . ." he began, twisting loose a tiny screw with one of his penknife blades, "because if you know how things work then you can control them. And if you start early you can get ahead of everyone else."

It is after this point that some of the most beautiful prose in all of weird literature (literature in general) is produced. Cousin X proceeds to show Sasha the world as he sees it, the "Unlived World." It is the world we all walk in, but never stop to reflect on. The world as a child, as a saint, as a spirit sees it. All the beauty, all the mystery and majesty that lies before us but we never stop to reflect upon. They share this world together and it is the happiest time of both their lives. But. Something is missing. Cousin X still wants to see how things work ("because is you know how things work, then you can control them"). This need betrays him suddenly and violently. One day, as their summer vacation nears its end, Sasha goes to find him, as she does every day. She screams. Their parents run to see what is happening and are horrified. Cousin X is covered in blood. It's not his. Before him lies the body of a dead kitten. "I just wanted to see how it works." He says through tears. For the first time he is lost, he does not know his way in this or his world.
The story cuts to many, many years later, when Sasha is in her late(?) thirties at her younger sisters wedding. She's sitting alone at a table reflecting on the emptiness of her life and how it could have passed her by so fast. In her contemplation, she notices a "disheveled" figure walk out of the wedding hall. Something seems familiar about him, so she follows. Eventually she finds him sitting alone in an office of the building. Cousin X knows it's her, and she knows it's him. They begin to catch up. Sasha doesn't have much to tell. Aspirations not met, goals not reached, life not lived as she thought it would have been. Cousin X tells his story. He has, for the majority of his life since last he saw Sasha, been institutionalized. But, he assures her he has worked through his problem and is cured. He shows her some of the things he did to himself as he rolls up his sleeves and shows her his self-inflicted scars, telling her it made him feel alive. He tells her his experiences of knowing he would never be understood and that he is "balanced." ("Happiness and balance are two very different things.") He tells us perhaps the saddest thing he could say, "I've been pushed through madness and come out the other side, and in the process the rags of my dreams have been stripped from me, and here I am, utterly naked."
Then she asks him, asks him why he killed the kitten. He is surprised, he always thought she knew. "I did it because I didn't want us to be separated. I thought if I could find the link between the body and soul, the most basic mystery of how the world works, then we could be together, truly together, and free, for ever and ever." He wanted them to be together forever and realizes he failed and has lived with that sadness his entire life. She never knew and she realizes it was all for her. Then he says what is perhaps the most chilling line of the story, "But it might work now. I'm sure it would if we try again." He asks her to lock the door. She does. He pulls out a penknife. She's happy, truly happy. As they look at each other, smiles on their faces, Cousin X says, "Trust me."

"A Lake"
This is, without a doubt, my favorite story from this book. To call it Lovecraftian would be both accurate and inadequate. It IS Lovecraftian, but the same way Ligotti is Lovecraftian. It is not an imitation or an "homage" (which is the same thing). It is an original and beautiful piece of horror literature.
The story begins with Stephen, a student studying in Japan, at a lake with his friend, Komakichi. The lake is dead. It is surrounded by life, mountains, trees, etc, but the lake, and all it touches are dead. The smell Stephen has is that of rotting fish carcases. This begins Stephen's infatuation and obsession with the lake. He finds out that it is connected with recent suicides (recent meaning over the past decades) and more distantly, with a type of Japanese suicide cult, the Mamushi cult who worshipped a great black serpent that was said to have lived in the lake. Now, this plot line is good enough to secure it a place as a truly original and brilliant piece of weird fiction. What separates it, and ultimately elevates it to a piece of genius and aesthetic perfection, is the way QSC truly takes us through the process of Stephen's infatuation with the lake and the discovery of its true power. This story is easily QSC's most powerful and gripping tale, and perhaps one of a dozen tales of weird fiction written in the last decade that will still be read fifty years from now. To give a sense of how incredibly good it is, one can take a line from the story, at the point where Stephen realizes the true nature of the lake, "The lake was many things according to perspective. Now Stephen saw once more that it was a dark mirror. The universe was a dead end, ending in a mirror; the universe only existed because it was reflected in that mirror." Beautiful.

"The Two-Timer"
I do not know if this story was intended to follow "A Lake," but I don't think any story could adequately follow the previous one. Either way, it really does not succeed as a good story. The premise of the story is that the protagonist can stop time. It's an interesting premise, but QSC did not seem to know what direction he wanted to go with the story. It is basically a humorous recount of the protagonists' adventures when he can stop time and his realization of how truly vulnerable human beings are when shed of their authority, social conventions, and pretenses. Good idea, but seemed like filler to me.

"The Tattooist"
Now he's back to form. This story was moving on so many levels. The story is told as the manuscript of a tattooist, Shane. The Tattooist, Shane, is not the main character of the story, but merely the Ishmael-like voice of the tale. This is about The Boy (the only name he is ever given). The Boy comes in one day to Shane's tattoo shop and asks for Death to be tattooed on his arm. He has a picture. It's a picture from a comic book, with Death looking like a cute, Goth girl. The Boy gets the tattoo and it is the best work Shane has done. He and his friends take the Boy out for drinks. Everyone seems to like him, even the racist, homophobic, aggressive, over-testosteroned Mark, who gives the Boy his switchblade as a gift. Shane sees the Boy intermittently over the next few months. When he sees the tattoo, it looks more and more real every time he sees it. It looked alive. This is pretty much the last time Shane sees the Boy, in his tattoo shop. The rest, as Shane says, is the "oral fossil of the event left behind." The events boil down to this: Mark and the Boy were having a few beers. Mark got upset, his homophobia taking over, and knifed the Boy. Mark went to jail. There was one inconsistency. The Boy's tattoo was gone, not due to the stabbing, but due to a self-inflicted removal. Years later, Shane is at the Boy's grave. Mark shows up. He gives Shane the knife he used to kill the Boy, except . . . the handle has the tattoo on it, the same flesh under a layer of varnish on the handle. This encounter contains more beauty than I can adequately put into words and it is truly an achievement by QSC; the power and naked vulnerability of the scene. After this, Mark becomes the local pariah, eventually being stomped to death by a gang of teenagers, while Shane begins to have "visions," even accidentally incorporating them into his tattoos. Shane's story ends with his contemplation of words the boy told him, "Sometimes getting what we want is painful." Shane's manuscript ends there, with the unnamed benefactor of the manuscript stating the Shane's body was found dead, covered in the most beautiful tattoos, stories covering his body like a modern day illustrated man. Tattoos done in Shane's inimitable style.

"Ageless"
This story, while terse and initially confusing, is filled with striking beauty. Unfortunately, it does not hit you until the O. Henryesque ending of the story. Which is why, sadly, I cannot relate the story without giving away the entire point of what QSC is trying to do. This may seem a tad bit hypocritical of me, as I've just previously spent seven stories telling you start to finish what happens in each story. However, I cannot emphasize enough that both the beauty of the story and the climax of it are intertwined. On the surface, it is about a man and a woman on a rooftop playing a game. But its deeper level is about love, about a connection, a moment, a perfectly tragic slice of time that can never be reproduced. This story frustrated me initially, as I was trying to understand QSC's "point" with this story, then realized that no point is necessary, only the perfection of the moment, whether that moment be triumph or tragedy, success or failure. Because such a moment is timeless, it will never age.

"Autumn Colours"
This story haunted (still haunts) me in the same way as Etchison's "You Can Go Now." The tale revolves around Andy and Adrienne. It begins when they are together, discussing life, love, and all the things true friends discuss. The discussion turns to betrayal. Adrienne talks about a previous betrayal by a lover, how it was like her fear of a Jack-in-the-box when she was a child. She was afraid of what would pop out of the box, and certain something would. She says true friendship never betrays, but that in the end, "you're the only one who can stay with you all the time, and sometimes that's hard to bear." The story is fast-forwarded to years later, where Andy is a teacher at a college (teaching the same subject as QSC, Higuchi Ichiyou, a Japanese poet). He has just taken a handful of pills. As he says, "time betrayed him," and in essence, life betrayed him. Dreams unfulfilled, life unlived, promises undelivered. Then we go to Adrienne. Receiving a letter, about (not from) Andy. "Verdict of suicide" blazes to her eyes, and the Jack-in-the-box pops out. Life continues on.

END OF SPOILERS

All these stories, particularly the last, are of the highest caliber. "Autumn Colours" best captures truly moving literature as anything I've seen any contemporary writer do. QSC has just begun his career, and I hope it continues onward, because though there are many imperfections throughout, the beauty far overshadows those missteps. A little like walking into a rose garden that has a few stray weeds among the flowers. I sincerely hope QSC continues his work, because if this is where he is starting, he has made an impressive debut indeed.


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Morbid Tales Quentin S Crisp Mark Samuels 9781872621838 Books Reviews

When reading a single-author short story collection with an introduction or foreword by another writer, I usually leave the foreword until after I've finished all the stories. When I'm just beginning a book, the substantial claims and effusive appreciation of the introducer can seem wildly overblown and be tremendously off-putting; by the time I reach the end, I'm often inclined to agree with them. So it was with Quentin S. Crisp's Morbid Tales, of which Mark Samuels writes, "His work is quite simply literature of the highest quality." Indeed it is.

I shouldn't have been surprised by this, I suppose. I had described Crisp's novel "Remember You're A One-Ball!" in rapturous terms, as "a literary novel of the first order," which indeed it is. And yet I wasn't sure what to expect from his collection, even though it was published by Tartarus Press, the standard-bearer for classic and contemporary supernatural fiction. But as I read the first of the eight stories in Morbid Tales, the novella "The Mermaid," I realized I was once again at the beginning of something truly special.

What distinguishes "The Mermaid" is not its plot outline, which is familiar from many a similar supernatural tale, but its combination of fantasy world-building and psychological depth. Like many of Crisp's protagonists, the first-person narrator is somewhat at odds with the world, a searcher after beauty and purity of a type that is difficult if not impossible to find. The titular creatures are the object of his particular obsession, and given the sort of book this is, it will come as no surprise that he eventually finds one. What ensues is at once a classically eerie tale and a deft portrait of sexual repression and something not unlike pedophilia. All this is brought across by Crisp's prose, which has a visionary quality and contains but is not confined by the vaguely formal voice of much 20th-century British fiction.

"Moments after I had swallowed the powder I experienced a strange, rippling disturbance of my senses. I heard the bubbling of an underwater world, the great wash and drag of currents through a reef, like the eerie, stifled workings of the inside of a body. I saw the rush of bubbles, twists of light dissolving, drowning and beneath, and around, the restless swelling shadows of ocean, a phantasmagoria distorted by the constant motion of waves, stirring as furtively as the tentacles of an octopus. Then I began to hear the chattering of voices in a language unknown to me. It seemed a language as sad and cold and ancient as the dripping, silvery waves themselves, a language like the forgotten treasure of a sunken ship. And the voices-- they were shrill, almost human, like the cries of gulls. I do not know how to describe them except to say that they brought to my mind, without me knowing why, certain very distinct images, such as the fins of fish spread thin and elegant, and fish bones, and sea storms, and fresh, dark, dripping blood, cold and salty."

"The Mermaid" is the longest of these morbid tales, and perhaps the finest, but there are several other small masterpieces, including "Cousin X," in which a childhood visit from a strange and mysterious cousin opens up a young girl's sense of the world, with far-reaching and rather disturbing consequences; "The Two-Timer," in which a Twilight Zone-style supernatural talent becomes the basis for a meditation on cruelty, unhappiness, and the loss of transcendent innocence; and "The Tattooist," a hypnotic story about pain, sexuality, nostalgia, and joy that I cannot possibly describe simply by listing its plot elements; its success is all in atmosphere and language, the unearthly calm of its engimatic central figure and the paradoxical beauty of the landscapes with which he is associated.

Of the four long stories in the collection, the only one that I don't think succeeds is "The Lake." The psychology of its protagonist is less clear than in other stories, and as a result the manifestations of supernaturalism, while individually striking, feel disconnected and fail to contribute to a larger whole. On the level of sentence-by-sentence craft the story is a joy to read, but its conclusion lacks the weight for which it seems to strive.

Of shorter pieces, "The Two-Timer" has already been mentioned. The relatively brief "Far-Off Things" retells a lesser-known fairy tale in a literary language that captures the underlying cruelty of the story's moral universe, creating a storyteller's distance and then smashing it to great effect. "Ageless," the shortest of these stories, is a well-crafted evocation of a particular moment, but that moment and ones like it are so much a common thread in Crisp's work that the story feels like a side-note, a variation on a theme rather than something meaningful in itself. And then there is "Autumn Colours," the final tale in this collection. It takes up some of the same motifs as others, but approaches them in a different way, resulting in a story that is closer to traditionally-defined contemporary literature, and yet has an effect unlike anything else I've ever read. (It may, from an allusion within the text, bear some similarity to Japanese literature, with which I am woefully unfamiliar.) It is not a pleasant reading experience, and after first finishing it I wasn't sure the story was a success. But I now think that was a kind of shrinking away from its truth rather than an honest critical response. "Autumn Colours" is, in its own way, as fine a tale as "The Mermaid."

This review was originally written before Morbid Tales was reprinted and made available as an e-book, so it encouraged readers to seek Crisp's other, more affordable work and discover whether it was to their taste. Happily, for those with e-readers Morbid Tales is now the most readily available Crisp title, and a steal at its present price. Check out the sample, and if it appeals, buy the volume. It will provide entry to a particular world of beauty, terror, and eccentricity that no other writer can access.
Now originality does not necessarily mean good. There are stories in this collection that are outstanding, some that are adequate, but all of them have a truly original voice. Mark Samuels ("The White Hands and Other Stories") wrote the foreword to this collection commenting on this originality, and he was not wrong. If nothing else, Crisp has found his voice very quickly and with very strong results. In most (not all) of these stories he has found something that touches the reader.

WARNING MULTIPLE SPOILERS

"The Mermaid"
The protagonist is unnamed (perhaps I did not read closely enough), or at the very least is rarely named. This character was extremely layered, a facet and strength of many of the characters in Crisp's tales. I think when QSC fails it is because he failed to truly develop the character. He does not fail here. The protagonist is a man haunted by purpose. He begins the story in apparent consolation telling the reader that he has found his "story," and thus is now fulfilled. He begins the tale by explaining his two lifelong fascinations magic and the erotic. By serendipity alone he finds a book about mermaids, and his fascination is peaked. He soon becomes an expert ("or as near as one can be an expert on something that doesn't exist") on mermaids. For example, he discovers everything he can on the hangyojin, the Japanese version of the mermaid with the exception that it is reversed (i.e., the lower half is human and the upper part is fish). He moves to a village by a beach that his studies have indicated were the location of mermaid sightings. He lives there, alone, isolated, waiting, believing in a belief that is not recognized by the world outside his home.
And one day he finds her. Gwendoline. He, in essence, kidnaps this mermaid. He is as honest with Gwendoline as he is to the reader about this. She accepts it. And their relationship starts to build. He can communicate with her, initially, only through a powder Gwendoline possesses in a box the narrator found previously in the story. Eventually, he learns her language and the powder is not critical to their communication. She tells him of her world, and through the powder, he can even experience it. It is in these passages that QSC writes brilliantly and powerfully. The descriptions of her world truly feel like being transported to a completely different reality. Only in Clark Ashton Smith have I seen a totally alien world described so clearly and poetically.
Eventually the subject between a man and a woman turns to sex. And Gwendoline and the narrator are no different. The narrator reminds the audience of his twin fascinations (magic and the erotic) and how they seem to merge into one in Gwendoline. The problem is they cannot consummate the relationship. But . . . Gwendoline tells of a way they can. It is through an ancient book from her people that possess certain rituals. In this book is a ritual to allow a mermaid to have sex with a human. The narrator performs this ritual and that is when the O. Henryesque ending occurs. Because throughout the latter part of the story, one gets the sense that something is not quite right. That there is something Gwendoline is holding back from the narrator, that there was a reason that she so readily acquiesced to her kidnapping, that she needed something from the narrator. At the end of the ritual, she becomes a hangyojin, the Japanese version of the mermaid with the lower half of a human and the upper half of a fish. The tale ends, as does Gwendoline.

"Far-Off Things"
This story concerns a man's reflections of when he was a boy in love with a girl named Leah. He watches her from afar, admiring her, falling in love with her. She learns (and through his eavesdropping, so does he) that she is dying. At this knowledge, she leans out her window, tears dropping on the flower below her and says, "If only I could live as long as one of those, I would be happy." She continues to get better. When the boy picks the flower and gives it to her on Christmas day, she wilts at her doorstep.
This was an interesting concept, but as I mentioned before, when QSC fails in a story it is usually because of inadequate character development. This is an instance of that.

"Cousin X"
This concerns both Sasha and her cousin, Cousin X. It begins when they are children. Cousin X's family comes over for the summer at Sasha's family's house. Cousin X is the black sheep of the family. Sasha begins to see why. He is just plain weird. But the focus is on the word "weird." The whole crux of the story seems to revolve around this exploration of the good side and bad side of the strange, weird, outré, odd, whatever you want to call it.
When Sasha and Cousin X first meet, Sasha faints at the sight of him. "Later in life, when she was to learn the meaning of the phrase déjà vu, it was this memory she referred to first." The fainting is not caused by outward fear, shock, or terror. No, there is something else, there is the contact with the truly strange. Their parents react the same way any parents would. Sasha's parents flip out and protect their daughter (both immediately by taking her away from Cousin X's presence after she faints and for the duration of the story by disapproving of her interacting with Cousin X). Cousin X's parents reprimand him. You kind of feel sorry for Cousin X during this reprimand. You get the sense that this is a reoccurring pattern in his life and also that he knows that people think he's strange, but he Just Does Not Know Why he's so strange.
After this incident, Sasha seems to have a strange attraction to Cousin X. This is when Cousin X shares his world with her and this is both a beautiful and tragic piece of prose QSC gives us. In short, Cousin X can see INTO things. He knows magic. "Magic shows you how things really are. And people are really naked, but they pretend they're not," he tells Sasha. The best way to summarize what Cousin X's perspective holds is in a short dialogue between him and Sasha at their first non-fainting interaction
We find Sasha walking up to Cousin X who is dismantling a radio (one of his favorite activities)

"Why are you always taking things apart?"
"I want to know how they work," said Cousin X, as if this were self-evident.
"Why?"
"Because . . ." he began, twisting loose a tiny screw with one of his penknife blades, "because if you know how things work then you can control them. And if you start early you can get ahead of everyone else."

It is after this point that some of the most beautiful prose in all of weird literature (literature in general) is produced. Cousin X proceeds to show Sasha the world as he sees it, the "Unlived World." It is the world we all walk in, but never stop to reflect on. The world as a child, as a saint, as a spirit sees it. All the beauty, all the mystery and majesty that lies before us but we never stop to reflect upon. They share this world together and it is the happiest time of both their lives. But. Something is missing. Cousin X still wants to see how things work ("because is you know how things work, then you can control them"). This need betrays him suddenly and violently. One day, as their summer vacation nears its end, Sasha goes to find him, as she does every day. She screams. Their parents run to see what is happening and are horrified. Cousin X is covered in blood. It's not his. Before him lies the body of a dead kitten. "I just wanted to see how it works." He says through tears. For the first time he is lost, he does not know his way in this or his world.
The story cuts to many, many years later, when Sasha is in her late(?) thirties at her younger sisters wedding. She's sitting alone at a table reflecting on the emptiness of her life and how it could have passed her by so fast. In her contemplation, she notices a "disheveled" figure walk out of the wedding hall. Something seems familiar about him, so she follows. Eventually she finds him sitting alone in an office of the building. Cousin X knows it's her, and she knows it's him. They begin to catch up. Sasha doesn't have much to tell. Aspirations not met, goals not reached, life not lived as she thought it would have been. Cousin X tells his story. He has, for the majority of his life since last he saw Sasha, been institutionalized. But, he assures her he has worked through his problem and is cured. He shows her some of the things he did to himself as he rolls up his sleeves and shows her his self-inflicted scars, telling her it made him feel alive. He tells her his experiences of knowing he would never be understood and that he is "balanced." ("Happiness and balance are two very different things.") He tells us perhaps the saddest thing he could say, "I've been pushed through madness and come out the other side, and in the process the rags of my dreams have been stripped from me, and here I am, utterly naked."
Then she asks him, asks him why he killed the kitten. He is surprised, he always thought she knew. "I did it because I didn't want us to be separated. I thought if I could find the link between the body and soul, the most basic mystery of how the world works, then we could be together, truly together, and free, for ever and ever." He wanted them to be together forever and realizes he failed and has lived with that sadness his entire life. She never knew and she realizes it was all for her. Then he says what is perhaps the most chilling line of the story, "But it might work now. I'm sure it would if we try again." He asks her to lock the door. She does. He pulls out a penknife. She's happy, truly happy. As they look at each other, smiles on their faces, Cousin X says, "Trust me."

"A Lake"
This is, without a doubt, my favorite story from this book. To call it Lovecraftian would be both accurate and inadequate. It IS Lovecraftian, but the same way Ligotti is Lovecraftian. It is not an imitation or an "homage" (which is the same thing). It is an original and beautiful piece of horror literature.
The story begins with Stephen, a student studying in Japan, at a lake with his friend, Komakichi. The lake is dead. It is surrounded by life, mountains, trees, etc, but the lake, and all it touches are dead. The smell Stephen has is that of rotting fish carcases. This begins Stephen's infatuation and obsession with the lake. He finds out that it is connected with recent suicides (recent meaning over the past decades) and more distantly, with a type of Japanese suicide cult, the Mamushi cult who worshipped a great black serpent that was said to have lived in the lake. Now, this plot line is good enough to secure it a place as a truly original and brilliant piece of weird fiction. What separates it, and ultimately elevates it to a piece of genius and aesthetic perfection, is the way QSC truly takes us through the process of Stephen's infatuation with the lake and the discovery of its true power. This story is easily QSC's most powerful and gripping tale, and perhaps one of a dozen tales of weird fiction written in the last decade that will still be read fifty years from now. To give a sense of how incredibly good it is, one can take a line from the story, at the point where Stephen realizes the true nature of the lake, "The lake was many things according to perspective. Now Stephen saw once more that it was a dark mirror. The universe was a dead end, ending in a mirror; the universe only existed because it was reflected in that mirror." Beautiful.

"The Two-Timer"
I do not know if this story was intended to follow "A Lake," but I don't think any story could adequately follow the previous one. Either way, it really does not succeed as a good story. The premise of the story is that the protagonist can stop time. It's an interesting premise, but QSC did not seem to know what direction he wanted to go with the story. It is basically a humorous recount of the protagonists' adventures when he can stop time and his realization of how truly vulnerable human beings are when shed of their authority, social conventions, and pretenses. Good idea, but seemed like filler to me.

"The Tattooist"
Now he's back to form. This story was moving on so many levels. The story is told as the manuscript of a tattooist, Shane. The Tattooist, Shane, is not the main character of the story, but merely the Ishmael-like voice of the tale. This is about The Boy (the only name he is ever given). The Boy comes in one day to Shane's tattoo shop and asks for Death to be tattooed on his arm. He has a picture. It's a picture from a comic book, with Death looking like a cute, Goth girl. The Boy gets the tattoo and it is the best work Shane has done. He and his friends take the Boy out for drinks. Everyone seems to like him, even the racist, homophobic, aggressive, over-testosteroned Mark, who gives the Boy his switchblade as a gift. Shane sees the Boy intermittently over the next few months. When he sees the tattoo, it looks more and more real every time he sees it. It looked alive. This is pretty much the last time Shane sees the Boy, in his tattoo shop. The rest, as Shane says, is the "oral fossil of the event left behind." The events boil down to this Mark and the Boy were having a few beers. Mark got upset, his homophobia taking over, and knifed the Boy. Mark went to jail. There was one inconsistency. The Boy's tattoo was gone, not due to the stabbing, but due to a self-inflicted removal. Years later, Shane is at the Boy's grave. Mark shows up. He gives Shane the knife he used to kill the Boy, except . . . the handle has the tattoo on it, the same flesh under a layer of varnish on the handle. This encounter contains more beauty than I can adequately put into words and it is truly an achievement by QSC; the power and naked vulnerability of the scene. After this, Mark becomes the local pariah, eventually being stomped to death by a gang of teenagers, while Shane begins to have "visions," even accidentally incorporating them into his tattoos. Shane's story ends with his contemplation of words the boy told him, "Sometimes getting what we want is painful." Shane's manuscript ends there, with the unnamed benefactor of the manuscript stating the Shane's body was found dead, covered in the most beautiful tattoos, stories covering his body like a modern day illustrated man. Tattoos done in Shane's inimitable style.

"Ageless"
This story, while terse and initially confusing, is filled with striking beauty. Unfortunately, it does not hit you until the O. Henryesque ending of the story. Which is why, sadly, I cannot relate the story without giving away the entire point of what QSC is trying to do. This may seem a tad bit hypocritical of me, as I've just previously spent seven stories telling you start to finish what happens in each story. However, I cannot emphasize enough that both the beauty of the story and the climax of it are intertwined. On the surface, it is about a man and a woman on a rooftop playing a game. But its deeper level is about love, about a connection, a moment, a perfectly tragic slice of time that can never be reproduced. This story frustrated me initially, as I was trying to understand QSC's "point" with this story, then realized that no point is necessary, only the perfection of the moment, whether that moment be triumph or tragedy, success or failure. Because such a moment is timeless, it will never age.

"Autumn Colours"
This story haunted (still haunts) me in the same way as Etchison's "You Can Go Now." The tale revolves around Andy and Adrienne. It begins when they are together, discussing life, love, and all the things true friends discuss. The discussion turns to betrayal. Adrienne talks about a previous betrayal by a lover, how it was like her fear of a Jack-in-the-box when she was a child. She was afraid of what would pop out of the box, and certain something would. She says true friendship never betrays, but that in the end, "you're the only one who can stay with you all the time, and sometimes that's hard to bear." The story is fast-forwarded to years later, where Andy is a teacher at a college (teaching the same subject as QSC, Higuchi Ichiyou, a Japanese poet). He has just taken a handful of pills. As he says, "time betrayed him," and in essence, life betrayed him. Dreams unfulfilled, life unlived, promises undelivered. Then we go to Adrienne. Receiving a letter, about (not from) Andy. "Verdict of suicide" blazes to her eyes, and the Jack-in-the-box pops out. Life continues on.

END OF SPOILERS

All these stories, particularly the last, are of the highest caliber. "Autumn Colours" best captures truly moving literature as anything I've seen any contemporary writer do. QSC has just begun his career, and I hope it continues onward, because though there are many imperfections throughout, the beauty far overshadows those missteps. A little like walking into a rose garden that has a few stray weeds among the flowers. I sincerely hope QSC continues his work, because if this is where he is starting, he has made an impressive debut indeed.