Tales from the Nightside (1981)

Approaching Charles L. Grant (1942-2006)

Readers unfamiliar with Tales from the Nightside may prefer to read these notes only after reading the collection.

Tales from the Nightside (1981) by Charles L. Grant is a short story collection divided into three sections: Tales for Oxrun Station (five stories), Tales From Hawthorne Street (four stories), and Tales from the Night Side (six stories).

[nightside (noun) night·​side ˈnīt-ˌsīd: the side of a celestial body (such as the earth, the moon, or a planet) not in daylight (first used 1848, per Merriam Webster).]

The Oxrun and Hawthorne Street sections consist for the most part of family crisis stories and male midlife crisis stories. 

The Oxrun location -- a middle class Connecticut suburb -- is not depicted as a haven of financial security. "Coin of the Realm" is populated entirely by tollbooth workers, for instance. Hawthorne Street stories often feature preteens or teens as protagonists.

The Tales from the Nightside section tells stories from non-suburban U.S. locations, or other countries. One of the most traditional "horror" horror stories in the collection-- and one of the most successful -- is set in England: "The Three of Tens."

*   *   *

TALES FROM OXRUN STATION

“Coin of the Realm” (1981) takes place at a lonely set of toll booths on the night shift. Wes and his coworkers start getting weird coins that are not currency. Then Wes watches his own coworkers walking off the job and using the same coins as they depart.

     That Wes's intellectual game-playing was not playing at all, that he was right about the depression that had fallen on people, the need to escape, the need for comfort. But he was also wrong about one vital matter: those gods, all of them shunted aside in the glare of science's advance, were not calmly returning to embrace their people again.

                  They were angry.

                  They hated.

“Old Friends” (1981) begins with some lovely autumnal Saturday afternoon scenery:

[....] There was autumn grass slowly browning under brightly dying leaves; the brittle cold air that seemed to make the pavement crisp under the feet of the passersby who were hurrying to the college's stadium where the high school games were played; the languid haze of burning piles of leaves; a ragged cloud of starlings that swooped silently toward the scent of popcorn and candy; the clouds.

But the plot gets complex and increasingly opaque from there: is Davey, who seems to love living in the dark basement, anticipating a reunion with living friends, or dead ones? Grant comes close to allowing some emotional connection into the story, but shies away, apparently enjoying conundrums imposed on readers craving mystery and revelation.

“Home” (1981) is all about fitting in. Can a new homeowner in the Station, an older man with no kids or grandkids, but a yard filled with swingsets, sandboxes, and other kiddie amusements, make a place for himself? And what's with all the pet killings? And the vanished lawn boy?

“If Damon Comes” (1978) is the first Grant story I remember reading. It is a powerful and very effective story, one the reader will not soon forget. My fourth reading of it, yesterday, was the richest thus far.

The death of a child has been a recurring theme in US horror fiction since the 1970s. This is not to reduce “If Damon Comes” to a demographic footnote, however. In Grant's story, a child perceives his father's feet of clay about marriage and family. The father mistakes his attention and curiosity for love and need. The father is mistaken. 

As “A Night of Dark Intent” (1981) begins, Mike Worthy of the Station Herald arrives at a dinner party. A half dozen of Oxrun’s oldest grandees are holding a seance. He meets his fellow guests, and the medium, the dynamic Elizabeth. Via small talk that Mike catches, and some clues he does not, we realize this is not the night – or the event – Mike thinks it is.

[The title “A Night of Dark Intent” (1981) is taken from Frost’s sublime poem “Once By The Pacific” (1928), which can be read here.]

TALES FROM HAWTHORNE STREET

In “The Gentle Passing of a Hand” (1981), an orphaned ten year old boy named Jay turns to stage magic in the wake of a family tragedy. But when a year in boarding school suddenly looms, a secret imparted to Jay by a kid's birthday party performer called the Great And Astounding Albert presages more terrifying events to come..

A retired small-town cop gets hired as a safety officer at a municipal playground in “When All the Children Call My Name” (1977).

  “Well, I myself have a new job,” I said when she couldn’t offer me gossip. “I just saw Marve and he thought I’d make a great Chief of Police.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and grinned. “Actually, he wants me to babysit a playground.”

  “You don’t mean the one on Hawthorne Street?”

  “That’s right! How’d you know that was the one?”

  She fussed with the ashes of her cigarette, took a nervous puff and sent the smoke toward her lap. “Well, a lucky guess. It’s the only one I know of not watched by a school guard.” She faked a smile and brushed a strand of hair back behind one ear. “Aren’t you superstitious?”

  “About what, a playground?”

  “For God’s sake, Kit, haven’t you talked to anyone since you got back? Didn’t Marve tell you?”

  I blinked stupidly and shook my head.

  “Just around the time you came back,” she said, “one of the kids was murdered there.” 

Kit finds the park contested: neighborhood pre-teens versus teens. But the park also hosts another phenomenon, which may tip the scales in the showdown.

“When All the Children Call My Name” is slow-paced – if not sedate – and Grant seems satisfied with a perfunctory glance at the uncanny weirdness, which might have been better served with a different protagonist.

“Needle Song”  (1979) is a unique look at the late-1970s US economic and social crisis as perceived by neighborhood kids.

[....] his father, he recalled, had been complaining about things called deterioration, depreciation and plummeting values just before he had been hospitalized; and perhaps if Eric understood it more he might be convinced that this was what was killing the street, and all the other streets in all the other towns. He frowned, scratched at his chin and rhythmically, lightly, thumped his head back against the wall. Maybe. And maybe his father was so involved in just being an adult that he couldn’t see what was real anymore. That’s what Caren had said after her spaniel puppy had been killed by a driver who hadn’t even bothered to stop to say he was sorry.

  Murder.

  The word popped into his mind unbidden.

  “Eric,” Caren had said that afternoon, “we can’t just break into the house and kill her. How can you kill her?”

Grant makes good use of dialogue-as-action and weather description as emotional counterpoint.

“Something There Is” (1981) employs a theme favored in the old days: the sorrow and the pity of being a writer of horror fiction. Martin White, who.is also a writing teacher, has read the horror classics and is courting the horror muse.

[....] after reading all the books on the shelves several times over, she had heard his silent calling and had come to him, to guide him.

   But she was still at a distance, and he glared at the books.

I doubt that Martin White is Grant projecting, but:

[....] hunting for a clue to the authors' ability to write eloquently about the unspeakable, darkly about the commonplace; over and over and over again until he had memorized nearly every florid, majestic, purple, and bitter bitten paragraph. Nightmares. Sweat. The sounds of blood dripping whenever he turned a page.

TALES FROM THE NIGHTSIDE

“Come Dance with Me on My Pony's Grave” (1973) is a moody and effective story. Like “If Damon Comes,” it explores a crisis in which a father learns to fear his son. In this case, Aaron has returned from service in Vietnam. He has brought home David, orphaned son of a Montagnard wise-man.

Grant alternates scenes: flashbacks in Vietnam, and scenes during a present-day crisis on the ranch. Again dialogue and setting are crisply executed, and suggestions of the supernatural are skilfully unveiled.

“The Three of Tens” (1975) is English semi-rural pleasing terror done very well. It features a boy, his friends, a carnival, a man with an unusual prize to give, and later on some rawhead and river-ravaged bones abroad in the night. The young protagonist is confident enough for a Brian Lumley tale.

“Digging” (1981) has several moving parts and a large coincidence of a strange murder dead-center. At the climax, Grant retreats from sharp contradiction and the opportunity for a really weird denouement: instead, mood and motion are left to atomize into hot air.

“From All the Fields of Hail and Fire” (1976) has it all: a nighttime arsonist on the loose, adults dying in the flames, and their children disappearing. Will the isolated town of Covington be wiped out? In dreams, volunteer fireman Dave Tanner’s preteen son Gary – and Gary's best friend Kim – determine their enemy emanates from the standing stones in Savage's field. On a night of thunder, lightning, hail, and snow, the pair head for a showdown.

“The Key to English”  (1974) is an underpowered melodrama about strange disappearances at a private boarding school. Dynamics among a small group of students are depicted melodramatically, and the overall plot never suspends our disbelief. It's ABC Movie of the Week pot boiling.

“White Wolf Calling”  (1975) is another excellent story that seems to take place in an isolated corner of the Great Plains. Rumors are spreading about a white wolf whose sighting predicts death. Retired store owner Mars, our protagonist, is skeptical. He spends his winter days befriending and playing with Tommy,  the little son of a neighbor who recently arrived from Czechoslovakia. Grant excels here at evoking an unforgiving climate and a rural crisis that permits no miscalculations. It's a tense and suspenseful story, and a fitting story to end the collection.

*   *   *

Tales from the Night Side is an uneven collection. Many of the stories are undermined by their own stylistic aspirations. Others, simply by hewing to the craft of what a well-made postwar short story should be. 

The best tales are the ones where Grant deals with fathers and sons, orphans, tempestuous family romances, and the fears of parents that their kids find them inadequate and have already passed summary judgment on them.

A few of the stranger stories portray individuals -- adults and kids -- who call out: and too late realize something is responding, though not in the way they imagined or hoped.

Grant's characters do a lot of thinking, and most of them are very sharp. They observed weather and wildlife in a way that fills us in on their emotional states. They intersperse their own stream of consciousness reasoning with imagist flashes, recalled dialogue, or plot recapitulations. They take their time to mull all this over in complete sentences. It makes sense that professional Connecticut suburbanites would do this. It also makes for slower-paced stories.

This kind of writing style is not much seen today in horror fiction, but it used to be what tyro authors aspired to. You see it in Stephen King and Peter Straub's early novels, because they learned it from respectable instructors and writers they admired: everyone from Hemingway to Wolfe to O'Hara to Wouk to Cheever. It was the style that important writing rode on.

In his history Unutterable Horror, S. T. Joshi dismisses Grant's fiction in toto: hackneyed, unadventurous, boring, and prolix. Tales from the Nightside, he concludes, "contains almost nothing of note."

I beg to differ. 

I found powerful, worthwhile stories in  Tales from the Nightside, and encourage the reader to give tales like “A Night of Dark Intent,” “If Damon Comes,” “From All the Fields of Hail and Fire,” “The Gentle Passing of a Hand,” and “Come Dance with Me on My Pony's Grave” the attention they deserve.

Jay

25 March 2024