“Everyday Horrors” short stories book
Steve Rasnic Tem has written over 500 published short stories. His stories have won awards from the International Horror Guild, the Horror Writers’ Association, and he has won the British and World Fantasy Awards. His novels and writing with his late wife Melanie Tem are also lauded. His short fiction has been compared to that of Franz Kafka, Ray Bradbury and Raymond Carver. Joe R. Lansdale proclaimed him to be “a school of writing unto himself.” As a writer and a teacher of writing, immersing myself in this collection, “Everyday Horrors,” was a treat, but a dark one. This description by another was right on the money: “Steve Rasnic Tem’s large body of tales: imaginative, difficult-to-pigeonhole works of the fantastic crossing conventional boundaries between science fiction, fantasy, horror, literary fiction, bizarro, magic realism, and the new weird.”
With Christmas bearing down on us like a train jumping the tracks, I had to limit myself to three stories a day. The tone of each tale is solemn, grim, evocative of so many depressingly ordinary things in our lives as we age. As a woman in the seventh decade of life, five years older than the author, I could relate to Steve Rasnic Tem’s themes, just as I remember relating to Melanie Rasnic Tem’s excellent short story “Best Friends.”
I’m not sure that a younger reviewer would relate as well to this collection’s themes of death, dying and deterioration. There was a time when I, too, would have glossed over recitations of the indignities of aging. Now, fighting cancer, diabetes, auto immune hepatitis, fibromyalgia, asthma and side effects from the drugs prescribed to make you better (which seem to always make you worse), I could better relate to passages like this excerpt from Steve’s story “The Old Man’s Tale” (one of my favorites):
Steve Rasnic Tem.
“He was so tired of this, having to schedule his life around his unreasonable bodily needs, the toilet, his fatigue, his bouts of worry and anxiety. It was humiliating. None of those had been considerations when he was young.”
Ah, yes, remind me again about “the golden years.”
Or how about this soliloquy on aging from the same short story: “How do you know when you’re old? I really don’t know. I guess when everybody tells you. I look at other people—with their white hair, all their wrinkles—and I think they’re a lot older than I am. But most of the time it turns out they’re younger.”
As that story about a couple traveling to the Grand Canyon goes on, the author muses, “It’s too bad we can’t leave our sorrows there, isn’t it? If everybody drove to that giant wound in the earth and could toss their sadness inside, and walk away to get on with the rest of their lives, wouldn’t that be a great thing?”
The short story “Everyday Horror” begins this collection, a story of Aubrey and Jeff, two brothers who are involved in cleaning out their dead father’s things. The beauty of the writer’s vision is once again conveyed to us with a passage: “Suggestions of death and dismemberment journeyed across the darkening dome of sky. Symphonic wraiths gathered for meaningless consultations.” One of the brothers has inherited the ability to see and hear things that normal people’s senses cannot perceive. The brothers are dividing the contents of the house into a “KEEP” and “BURN” pile. [I must admit that I wanted the end of this story to be a colossal pyre, a funeral pyre, if you will, with flames crying out to the heavens; that’s just me.]
fire
“Fish Scales” followed “Everyday Horror” with the poetic story of Charlie, who has fish scales on his face, and a blind wife. This memorable line lingers: “Sometimes sorrow falls into such a deep place it cannot escape.”
This passage also caught my eye: “When he was a kid, he imagined the night creatures might think him dead if he lay still enough, and so they wouldn’t bother him. The logic of this now escaped him. A dead body was easy prey.”
I smiled. When I slept upstairs, alone in my isolated attic room, and a dream re-occurred, night after night, a nightmare of a man stealthily stalking me, following me down a shadowed street (and whispering my name in ever-increasing volume), fedora hat obscuring his features, I thought that if I kept my eyes shut tight and made my way down the treacherous stairs to where there was light and company, I would be safe. The danger of falling down the stairs (since my eyes were shut) eluded me. Logic, indeed, was on holiday as it is, to a point, in this story.
The young & the old.
“Gavin’s Field” gives us the story of Blackburn’s Field and how Gavin is bequeathed a house in Vermont by his father. Lines like, “The mist transitioned into a needle-like rain” give mood to the story of stone walls and characters like Lawyer Martinson and Whitby, the town watchdog. The gradual integration of Gavin into the Vermont town ends with, “Gavin decided not to struggle when the man-sized insect began feeding the mulch into his open mouth. It really wasn’t that terrible if he let himself relax and accept what he was being offered. The taste—rich and dark and nourished with death—was not at all unfamiliar.”
“An Gorta Mor” began the commentary on our world today, which continued with a story about the effects of the pandemic. As the author notes, “People had become unbelievably cruel, or perhaps they’d always been, and he’d just failed to notice…So much of the world had become poisonous. Poison permeated the air he breathed and the food he consumed.” All of this while waiting for food delivery and fighting a loss of interest in eating anything at all.
Steve and Melanie Rasnic Tem.
“Black Wings,” the story of Harry and Sheila’s marriage, is more a story of Harry’s obsession with birds. Harry has made their home into a temple to birds. Sheila does not seem that thrilled with his hobby: “Despite Harry’s protestations there had always been a stench of death and decay and negligence. But she couldn’t expect to have survived marriage to such a man without some lingering birdish stench.” We learn that Harry was struggling to put (yet another) cabinet dedicated to his all-consuming hobby, the birds, in an upstairs room, when an unfortunate accident ensued. Or was it an accident? Meanwhile, a black bird terrorizes Sheila, and one has to ask if it is karma: “Sheila took a step down, and her bird—all hers, it was too late to get rid of it now and too late to stop—was right beneath her shoe…As she lay there on the floor, thinking about the mess she’d made, something unexpected came over her and she heard herself making this awful sound with notes of both despair and defiance while she flapped her broken arms.” The bird theme may stem from a home that Steve and Melanie Tem bought from a bird enthusiast when they downsized from their larger family home.
“Bags” – Consumerism in all its aspects is criticized: “You buy, you throw away, and then you buy some more. The ‘regurgitating economy’ Dad called it. Dad was as bad as everyone else in this regard, but at least he recognized the problem.” There are other problems, health problems, for Dad. Ascites fluid must be drained. “It was hard to believe in upcoming catastrophes beyond the disaster which was already here.”
“Late Sleepers” – seemed to be a chance to revisit many memorable horror movie scenes. Theater one is closed in the small ready-to-close theater and off-limits for reasons that will become clear. “The stillness troubled him. He didn’t hear anything, but it seemed the noise of nothing was pounding in his head. He breathed deeply, smelling only the stale air.” The theater is closing this very night. Is that his house he sees onscreen?
“A Thin Silver Line” is “for Harlan Ellison;” silver is the color of death. [That’s too bad for me, because I just bought a new silver car that we call “the Silver Bullet.”] “A thin silver line: color of moonlight, or morning fog, the highlight on your grandmother’s lips. The fading borders of the dream just before you discover it is morning. It’s a separation keeping you from the dream, the day from the night, and the fantasy from nightmare. The division is less substantial than mist; you can cross it and not even know.” Bobby and Linda are expecting and then things go awry. Bobby’s father AND Linda are both heard screaming “Get it out of me.'” I’m in Texas writing this, so getting a ruined child out of its mother surgically is not an option in this state at this time. God help us all. Since many of the Steve Rasnic Tem works are going to eventually be warehoused at Texas A&M, this is not news to the author.
“Inappetence” is a term used to denote a lack of hunger. As the story puts it: “They slipped from the shadows to monitor his decline. Impatient, they moved forward to taste the light. All the world was hungry it seemed, except for him. Even the thought of food repelled him.”
“The Winter Closet” – this one was very short and dealt with the memories conjured up by the contents of “the winter closet.”
“Privacy” – “He’d come to understand that in solitude was the way people lived, even if they imagined otherwise. They pretended a knowledge of others they did not have. Now that he was elderly, the anxiety from loneliness had become palpable. He had to lie in bed with fists clenched until it passed. If a manual existed for old age, he would certainly read it.”
I second that observation.
And, “It wasn’t that he wanted to be a hermit. All he wanted was some control over people’s access to his life. It wasn’t that he disliked people. He simply believed they lied about everything.”
In the year of Trump, this certainly seems true. The end of this one may be a bit over-the-top, but the idea of privacy remains paramount.
“Monkeys” – Polly and Maude in a Jack-the-Ripper setting.
“When They Fall” – “He was an adult. He knew life was ephemeral. Each person was given the slimmest shard of time. But children had no idea. They dwelled in the forever now.” This one asks the poetic question: “Are we ghosts hiding within our costumes of flesh?”
A twenty-something Steve Rasnic Tem.
“The Things We Do Not See” – “One evening he became aware of a great shift in gravitation, as if something massive had suddenly entered this world. He could not see it, but he knew it was there.” A character named Cathy seems to have amnesia. Some salient observations about mankind include this: “True self-knowledge is a rare thing, an ephemeral moment of clarity out of a lifetime of confusion. Most of us will never experience such a moment. I wonder if it is even possible. Because our minds latch onto pain and pain consumes us and informs our stories about ourselves. Mental health involves countering those stories of pain with one positive ones. But they are still stories, still untrustworthy narratives of the truth that is out there…We cannot trust our memories of who we once were. Those times, that self, are all gone now. Look around you. See what exists in your world right now. Trust that.”
Dead things start showing up; the dead things keep getting large and larger. A generally open-ended finale to a tale with wise observations.
“Within the Concrete” – Carl and Grace are in this one, which observes: “It seemed he’d been better at solving things when he was younger. Now his brain was like cement slurry, right on the edge of hardening, after which no thoughts might escape.”
Very astute. Certainly relatable. Imagine how lost we’d be if we didn’t have the Internet!
https://www.facebook.com/reel/497657436685488
“The Last Sound You Hear” – Connor, the grandson, visits his grandfather. They listen to their hearts using a stethoscope. This one had a “Sixth Sense” ending. Read it for yourself to find out what is meant by that.
“Into the White” – I grew up in northeast Iowa. I still live in snowy Illinois half of the year with a place in Chicago. A journey back to the days when schools would be canceled because of the white stuff. Since I ran a school of sorts for a while (and had to be the one deciding when to cancel or when to persevere) I enjoyed the descriptions of the snow and the buried carousel beneath. The language is extraordinary for its poetic brilliance: “The sky was so intense, it became a dream scorched into his now.” Or, “His snowsuit began to shred. The emptiness washed over him, embedding itself in his flesh. He saw blood upon the snow. Ahead of him the sky began to tear. He thought at first it was the Northern Lights, but he came to believe it was something quite different.”
“The Old Man’s Tale” – I have referenced this previously, because it hit home and summoned so many memories, mostly of the Covid experience that we all just lived through (and which my mother lived through at the age of eleven, just as my granddaughters lived through it at the same age in 2020.) Steve Rasnic Tem says, “We still feel on the lip of oblivion. I can’t be the only one…Just to see something eternal when so many people we knew were dying, losing their jobs, fracturing inside.”
I remember the Covid experience through the prism of a breast cancer diagnosis (December 2021), a podcast that I had just agreed to conduct upon my return from an Alaskan cruise, and my daughter (a flight attendant) who was laid off for the duration. She moved from Nashville to Austin to join us. While I felt the isolation from others, just as everyone did, I had my WeeklyWilson.com podcast giving me a life-line for talking to others. I received many phone calls from people I had not heard from in literally years.
For the first time in nearly 20 years, I had my entire nuclear family together in the same place for more than just a few days. Since my children were born 19 years apart and my son works from home, as does his wife, the flight attendant daughter was assigned to amuse, educate and entertain the eleven-year-old twins. It was a strange time, watching the daily casualty reports on television from then-New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who was receiving plaudits for his daily reports to the nation. Do you remember when there was talk of Andrew Cuomo running for President, because of his high profile leading the nation at a time when we seemed to be leaderless? No? Well, that did happen, briefly.
Melanie & Steve Rasnic Tem.
In ”Whenever It Comes” the author writes: “It broke my heart trying to keep our children safe. I didn’t want to tell them the world had become a dangerous place. As parents we made mistakes, sometimes terrible mistakes, as all parents will. Yet our children still looked to us for answers…I didn’t understand how things worked any more. I didn’t believe anyone did. I no longer trusted people, least of all myself. No one knew for sure what lived inside the human heart. No one knew how this would end…It was a long year of quiet dread.”
In “An Old Man’s Tale” the author touches upon the dilemma of homelessness, as well as on Covid. “I’m not claiming to understand what I saw. I’m just putting it out there. I’m a rational human being trying to deal with the irrational, these phantoms at the periphery of my vision, like someone just arrived, or someone just left, or someone’s waiting there, ready to do some damage, cause some mischief. I don’t want to say it’s related to the pandemic, but maybe everything is, if you think about it.”
“People have changed so much the past few years, don’t you think? Things will be fine for a while, then these pockets of—I don’t know—derangement appear, and they spread through the population.”
Bee Gone, the book
The character’s wife, Jane says, “It’s that awful man they elected. People now think it’s okay to say anything that pops into their heads.”
As a blog dedicated to the whims of its owner with her interest in film and national politics, (and a person five years older than Steve Rasnic Tem), I can definitely relate to his observations. I listened to a University of Chicago professor try to explain all of the unrest and chaos, (and ascribing the change in our nation to the demographic shift from one that is predominantly white to one that is polyglot. The white males, threatened by immigrants and the loss of their preferred status (and their jobs), steeped in nascent racism and distrustful of authority, refused to support a bi-racial woman to lead our country, thereby sticking us with the other alternative, a candidate who lied and postured his way to power, much like a German autocrat of yesteryear. Shall we blame “The Apprentice?”
The lack of affordable housing and the high cost of groceries (which is bound to continue regardless of regime change) tied the vice presidential candidate to the status quo and the attempt by the geriatric incumbent to continue in office past his shelf life date doomed his second-in-command’s hopes. Whether she could have succeeded if President Biden had stepped down earlier, (as he had promised to do) is still a debatable point.
All I know is that book-ending my life with JFK at its political outset (age 15) and DJT near my demise is some sort of cosmic joke. It is these observations in a couple of the stories in “Everyday Horrors” that I enjoyed the most. When spaceships entered stories, I was less interested, but “different strokes for different folks.” The imagination of the writer still gripped me. The poetry of his language was pleasing.
As a blog that still devotes itself to discussing movies and politics, passages like this resonated with me: “We were sitting on that couch watching when the 500,000 deaths from Covid were announced. And we watched that George Floyd video again and again, trying to understand why it happened, and knowing it had happened many times before. We felt helpless as we watched it, and feeling helpless made us feel ashamed….We have seen so many terrible images. Those poor refugees. Children abandoned in the desert, or their bodies washed up on shore. You’ve seen those pictures too? Or am I crazy?
“He waited for an uncomfortably long time.”
Finally, someone in the distance said, “yes,” and another, “Yes, I think we’ve all seen them.”
The author and wife Melanie on their wedding day.
“The true facts of history are going to rise to the top however deeply you try to bury them. If people’s houses are burning, they’re going to find somewhere else to live. The way I see it, fires are burning all over the world.”
Adds Steve Rasnic Tem in words that we should all be able to relate to: “I wish the ones in charge would do a lot of things, but they don’t. The economy leaves lots of folks behind. On top of that, the climate’s changing. We pretend there’s nothing we can do. Pretty soon it will be our own family member, trying to find safety. Maybe you. Maybe me if I live that long. We need to do better if we want to save ourselves. We could start with those (homeless) folks out there…They expect people to cooperate and be on their best behavior during a crisis, but that’s not how people act.”
I enjoyed this collection to the point that I could absorb so much about misery, death and destruction right before the Christmas holiday. [Talk about a contrast in tone!]
There is no good time to dwell on misery. But there is a necessary time. Reading “Everyday Horrors” may be that time for anyone who appreciates mastery of the insightful phrase and a keen eye for commentary, coupled with the word skills to pull it off beautifully.
