Joseph Payne Brennan (1918–1990)

I picked up 'The Shapes Of Midnight' because Stephen King acknowledged Joseph Payne Brennan as a horror writer on whom King had patterned his own stories and because these are stories from an earlier generation of horror writers, that pre-date the saturation of popular culture with Slasher movies and Final Girls and Creature Features.

The ten stories in the collection cover a lot of ground from weird werewolves to calm psychopaths, from gothic castles with dark secrets on stormy nights, to show more hospital corridors with a deadly stalker. Some of them felt as if I was reading M R James or Edgar Alan Poe. Others felt like they would have been perfect for 'The Twilight Zone'.

This was a refreshing read that brought me back to the basics of how to tell a horror story in the first-person and deliver anything from unease at the uncanny to fear of the truly monstrous.

I've commented on each of the ten stories below.

DIARY OF A WEREWOLF

As the title suggests, most of this story is in the form of a diary written by a werewolf. Set in rural New England in 1958, it describes the descent into violent madness of a man who left New York City on the advice of his doctor who warned that the man's many 'dissipations' would lead to physical and mental ruin, to live in Hemlock House which stands on the edge of a small village amid 300 acres of deep forest. It turns out not to have been a wise choice.

The setting and the content of the story are classic gothic horror. The diary format gives the gothic a modern twist by providing an insight into the man's mental decline and inherent amorality. The language of the diary seemed to owe more to the start of the century than the middle of it, but this added to the Gothic feel of the story and might be accounted for by the man's age. What I liked most was that our werewolf's transformations were mental rather than physical and seemed more like the release of a darkness he'd brought with him to the woods.

THE CORPSE OF CHARLIE RILL

A great example of a simple but effective monster story. The monster here is the reanimated corpse of Charlie Rill. The corpse part is important. This isn't Charlie coming back to life. This is a dead thing, unnaturally animated. It has no thoughts, no desires. It is powered entirely by an instinctive compulsive to tear apart every living thing it meets. It's a linear tale of pointless bloody destruction and it is wonderfully, perfectly horrific.

THE PAVILLION

I love the directness and simplicity of this story. The beach pavilion in a winter storm becomes not a pleasure palace but a gloomy, watersoaked, storm-damaged tomb. The main character is slowly pushed from cold-blooded calm to frantic mind-voiding terror by the environment and what he finds, and doesn't find there. This reminded me of Edgar Allan Poe. I think this is how he might have written a sequel to 'The Cask Of Amontillado' with Montesor returning to check that Fortunato was still behind the wall.

HOUSE OF MEMORY

This story walks the border between it-was-all-in-my-imagination and sometimes-wierd things happen. It's a low-key personal encounter with an event that rippled the surface of reality as the person understood it and demonstrated the power of obsession.

THE WILLOW PLATFORM

This story had the sort of atmosphere that I expect of an M R James ghost story. Care was taken to base it in a credible contemporary rural locale populated with believable people so as to increase the impact of the supernatural event at the heat of the story. The supernatural element didn't stir me but I liked the description of the time and place.

WHO WAS HE?

At first, the slight tale of a recuperating man's strange encounter on the cardiac ward had me shrugging and going 'Meh... not horror' But I kept thinking about it and I realised how jaded my tastes have become. It's not horror in the horror-movie-made-me-jump way but, if this had happened to me, if I was the man recounting this tale, I know I'd be haunted by it. I think that's a flavour of horror that's worth preserving.

DISAPPEARANCE

The punchline to this story is telegraphed about halfway through but that doesn't really diminish the impact as the story seems really to be about how rural life works - what people accept and what they question and how eccentricity to slide into something darker unremarked.

I admire how the tone of the story pulls the reader into the mindset, establishing the narrator as a reasonable man with a story to tell and inviting you to sit awhile and listen. Here's how it starts:

"AT THE TIME of Dan Mellemer's disappearance I happened to be a deputy, and Sheriff Kellington asked me to accompany him when we drove over to the Mellmer place to investigate."

The rhythm of that sentence, unhurried and full of promise is so perfectly judged that it triggers a "Did I ever tell you about the time that...?' sense of intimacy.

THE HORROR AT CHILTON CASTLE

This is a full-blown Gothic nightmare complete with a stranger at a deserted village inn, a thunderstorm with fierce winds and flashes of lightning that serve as the only illumination of the Norman castle that lours over the village, a chance encounter leading to a dour mission reluctantly agreed to and a monstrous secret walled-in to a room in the deep bowels of the keep. Wonderful images delivered in straight-from-the-shoulder prose with no compromises.

THE IMPULSE TO KILL

This time the narrator is a psychopath for whom only face-to-face killing can bring relief. What makes the story chilling is that the narrator is not crazed or out of control. He's calm, patient, cunning and completely convinced that he's only doing what's natural. This story has the impact of seeing a shark's fin cutting through the waves at a beach. It's not evil or even malicious, just relentlessly, implacably hungry and perfectly equipped to feed.

THE HOUSE ON HAZEL STREET

This is an intriguing and original idea. I liked the set-up and the atmosphere but the ending felt abrupt. It's an odd story to end the collection on. I'd have used THE IMPULSE TO KILL as the last story, bookending the collection with two murderous narrators. show less

The Shapes of Midnight by Joseph Payne Brennan

I went into this book blind. I did not know who the author was, or when the book was written, only that the cover looked interesting and it was in one of my favorite genres (the horror anthology). I am very glad that I did, because it was like some kind of mirror into my own reading history.

In the afterword, there is a quote from Stephen King that calls Brennan "one of the most effective writers in the horror genre" and I have to agree. Not show more because of the actual chills in the stories (honestly, I didn't find that many) but because of the obvious influence he had on the genre, particularly Stephen King himself.

Reading the book, unaware of the history behind it, I felt myself thinking "This would have been perfect for Weird Tales." more than once. I was, of course, 100% right. Brennan wrote hundreds of stories for that classic magazine.
I also found myself thinking, "This guy loved him some Stephen King." It turns out I had it backwards!

These stories are nothing all that unique to the experienced reader of horror, and the "twists" in them are not twists at all, today. But this is because Brennan literally created many of them.

Of the stories in this collection, I found I liked The Pavillion best. A story of murder, guilt, and revenge(?) from beyond the grave, I found myself imagining it shot for shot in some early 80s horror anthology movie (Creepshow, of course).

Disappearance is another proto-King story. Indeed, I can see direct influences of several King stories here--the taciturn farmer with a secret, the missing family member, the grisly discovery. They all seem buried deep in our horror conscience now, thanks to stories like this.

As horror, honestly, there probably isn't much here for the modern fan, but as a glimpse into the roots of the genre this is a very interesting (and still quite fun!) read.

I'd like to thank the publisher for the review copy! show less

I am going out on a limb here to say that this is one of the finest true horror stories that I have ever read, It is based on the now well used theme of the animation of something by leakage of chemicals from a government facility and its rampage through a small rural community.

The theme of a creature created out of the swamp might remind comic aficionados of 'The Heap' from the Golden Age and its successor 'Swamp Thing' (made great by Alan Moore). The accidental official creation of show more something violent and uncontrollable out of a human is, of course, 'The Hulk'.

This story is thus not to be marked as good for originality but rather for execution. Brennan gives us sustained and remorseless visceral horror as a force emerges at the edge of a peaceful community which offers blind total brutality without any smidegeon of thought or intelligence.

I have not found a date for the story but internal evidence suggests the early 1950s (someone else can correct me) while his use of hobos as anti-heroes and their liminal nature (similar to their role in 'Slime') suggests a last remembrance of the earlier depression.

Opinions differ on Brennan. Luminaries like S T Joshi appear not to be impressed by his lack of 'literariness' but I think his pure, clear, story-telling pulp prose is not designed here for the gothic and the atmospheric. It is there to shock and thrill like Mickey Spillane's.

From that perspective, the clarity of story-telling makes the visceral aspects more horrific. Joshi may be right about its application to later Lovecraftian tales. There is no suggestion, no unease - he tells it like it is. Perhaps the visceral aspect derives from war service overseas.

I hope to read more Brennan in due course though I suspect that I might agree with Joshi when I get to self-evidently Lovecraftian derived material. We'll see. show less

Perfect slim collection of old school frights. Written for Weird tales but a mite better than the average WT fare; the kind of tale that scared the crap out of you before we became more jaded. Even where the ending is predictable to those of us who have read too many of this kind of tale, we love it when Brennan delivers the payoff.

Highly recommended.