Preface: Approaching Charles L. Grant (1942-2006)

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[....]  it is something more than a matter of mere attention or concentration when one reads the individual sentences each one for its own sake, or on the other hand, uses them as stepping stones, as rapidly as possible, to come to the narrative payoff, like Eliza crossing the ice. I have often used the example of Flaubert and how reading speed determines the very nature of the object to which his name is attached: at one rhythm offering the very prototype of a modern realism, at another the appreciation of a multiply savorous nascent modernism, and at its slowest pace that postmodernity Sartre discerned when he spoke of the immense gaps between each sentence (those fateful silences again!).

Fredric Jameson, Allegory and Ideology (2019)

Starting 20 May I will be posting a series of reviews on the horror fiction of U. S. author Charles L. Grant (1942-2006).

I began reading Grant haphazardly in the early 1980s. Stories in anthologies and publications like Rod Serling's Twilight Zone Magazine were memorably arresting. "If Damon Comes" (1978) and "A Garden of Blackred Roses" (1980), two unalloyed masterpieces, have stayed with me for three decades.

Recently, rereading Joshi's 2012 book Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, I was by the extent of his low opinion of Grant.

[....]  his besetting sin was both a frustrating vagueness and an excessive restraint in the depiction of supernatural phenomena, with the result that much of his work is vitiated by diffuseness and tameness. [Joshi 883]

[....]  the Arkham House volume Tales from the Nightside (1981) contains almost nothing of note. [Joshi 884]

What Joshi criticizes as shortcomings in Grant's work, particularly the short stories, are in many ways facets he praises in De La Mare, Shirley Jackson, and Dennis Etchison.

This February, I read Tales from the Nightside (1981), a collection of frequently powerful stories. After finishing that, I just kept going.

I hope you will find my thoughts on Grant useful, and share your own responses.

Jay

17 May 2024

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