Dark Shadows on the Moon
Reviewed by Douglas Campbell
Over the last few years, John B. Ford has thrown himself into the world of fandom, on and offline, with a cheerful energy that belies the subject matter of his fiction. I first encountered his writing through a 1997 booklet, advertised in this publication, Macabre Delights and Twisted Tales. This came in a smearily printed two colour cover, appeared to consist of copied typescript, and was adorned with illustrations as subtle as fish tank ornaments. The whole production was reminiscent of fanzines of the seventies and before. Despite this unprepossessing package, there was clearly something very odd indeed going on. If he threw away the weaker stuff, I thought, and put together an understated chapbook, he’d really have something. Well, now Ford has done better than that, with a first hardcover Tales of Devilry and Doom, followed up by a sharply produced anthology (published by Hive Press in the USA).
The introduction to Devilry and Doom is a passionately enthused piece by one Michael Malefica Pendragon. It must be said that this does offer a perceptive structural analysis of Ford’s work, but Pendragon goes on to hail him as a genius, ‘the modern master of the horror story’, and describes his work elsewhere as ‘up there with the best of Lovecraft and Poe’. This is, of course, absolute tosh, and it can do a writer no good at all to be flattered in such extravagant terms relatively early in his career. However, this hyperbole shouldn’t blind anyone to Ford’s peculiar talents.
For those who haven’t encountered him before, Ford’s favoured approach is the short short story, rarely more than a dozen pages. His style is heavy and polysyllabic, to the point of being tortuous, and is openly modelled on Robert W. Chambers and William Hope Hodgson, pastiches of both these writers being included here. Sinister doctors, mental institutions, premature burial, and, in particular, the period immediately following death, are his recurring themes. Characters are often helplessly carried off into apocalyptic scenes of demons torturing dead souls, perhaps most strikingly in the effective King in Yellow pastiche ‘Transfiguration’. Some of these stories read like accounts of sleep paralysis, a syndrome in which sleepers remain conscious of their real surroundings, but are unable to move, as often-terrifying dream imagery intrudes. Ford is perhaps over-fond of plot twists in which the narrator is brought face to face with a decaying corpse, a tactic run into the ground by Tales from the Crypt. He may be his own worst enemy in writing so much. Over and over again, I found myself thinking that, if I’d only read this story, I might be inclined to believe he was everything Pendragon thinks he is. Despite the over-ripe prose, Ford is no decadent. There is no trace of sensuality to relieve the unremitting gloom, although a theme of odd mysticism is present, with narrators frequently giving vent to anguished and apparently heartfelt appeals to their God. If he’s a revivalist, he’s a hell-fire revivalist; there is none of Lovecraft’s materialist SF horror. Ford’s visionary landscapes are Old Testament stuff, out of Bosch and John Martin, with perhaps a touch of Spiritualism or Theosophy or whatever the hell it was that provided the physics of Hope Hodgson’s universe.
Sometimes this works but sometimes it falls to the level of Lovecraftian fan fiction. I was amused and irritated in equal measure by the repeated deployment of internally contradictory phrases about ‘The moaning of tortured corpses’. The corpses of the tortured do not moan. You cannot torture a corpse, and, even if you tried, it still wouldn’t moan. Characterisation and dialogue are crudely handled, and repetition becomes a problem if these stories are read in one continual sitting. However, these are flaws that can be fixed; despite these raw edges, Ford has something that can’t be faked and can’t be taught: he writes of the impossible with absolute conviction. He seems to have a direct line to his unconscious, and his nightmares ring true in a way that the industry-standard genre product rarely does. And, after a while, you may start to hear those corpses moan.
The influence of Thomas Ligotti seems to have released Ford from the obligation to struggle with conventional characterisation and plot, freeing him to pursue his muse along more experimental avenues. (Although you have to wonder who is really chasing whom?) Ligotti is the dedicatee of ‘The Eternally Descending Blade’, one of the best stories in Dark Shadows on the Moon, and also ‘The Maze for Jaded Brains’ and ‘The Infection of Time’ also seem to be a product of this breakthrough. I’m assuming this is a recent development, although the bibliographical provided here muddies the water still further. Certain pieces are listed as ‘Date unknown’, which introduces the slightly chilling possibility that Ford doesn’t actually remember having written them: a possibility entirely consistent with the feel of automatic writing from the beyond.
In Borges’s ‘Pierre Menard, author of Quixote’, aesthete sets himself the task of writing Cevantes’ classic spontaneously, without copying the text. He achieves only fragmentary drafts, although his peers argue that these fragments, though identical to the original, are a superior achievement; the point being that, even if Menard had succeeded in his Quixote, the resultant book, arising out of its original context, would not be the same novel. Ford often seems like a man limbering up for that great day when he will rise from his bed, sit-down at his keyboard, and reel off Lovecraft’s ‘The Outsider’ or Shiel’s ‘Xelucha’ in one draft without even thinking about it. But, of course, they wouldn’t be the same stories. For Ford’s literary idols their style was a natural, if perversely extreme, development of literary culture, and it has internal rhythms that are very hard for a modern writer to catch. What Ford is attempting, in resurrecting these old styles to confront his personal darkness, is doubly perverse. If the results often seem forced, the project is yet, of course, admirably Quixotic. I imagine creative writing tutors dread encountering the likes of Mr Ford: his work is relentlessly inward-looking, it features all of the clichés of one or more of the widely despised genres, and he employs the techniques of writers who died before his parents were born. Worse, his style is that of what came to be the Lovecraft school. (There is a select group of writers whose work ought to come with a warning not to try this at home; Burroughs is perhaps the other name that springs to mind, but Lovecraft must be loitering diffidently at the front of the pack.) Worst of all, from such a conventional perspective, he can make it fly. Not every time, but, particularly in the strangest and most apocalyptic narratives, your feet will leave the ground. And what is more, through his small press activity, Ford seems to be attracting disciples.
John Ford’s writing has little to do with the classic ghost story, although ghosts do appear, primary as narrators. This is weird fiction, by any definition you care to employ. I imagine that, as they say in the music business, Ford could be very big in Japan. He will be of interest to GSS members as an extreme contemporary development of the Lovecraft tradition; more specifically of earlier writers who were key influences on Lovecraft. His writing is uneven and repetitive, replete with exclamation marks and arbitrary capitalisation, but, at its best, it has a visionary intensity that lifts it far above the morass of fan writing, and his prolific activity displays rapid development. Tales of Devilry and Doom is his first hardback limited to 250 copies, collecting hat seems to be mostly early work. If you’ve enjoyed Ford’s writing in the past, I’d move fast. Dark Shadows on the Moon may be recommended to the intrigued but as-yet-uninitiated as a comprehensive survey of Ford’s career to date. It offers thirty-five stories, perhaps more than flesh and blood can take at one sitting, and includes seven tales published for the first time. I venture to suggest that the cover price is a bagatelle to a person of your means. You could spend four times as much on something not half as weird, and if you’re reading this you probably have. Why wait fifty years for the heirs of today’s small presses to revive such wild blooms?
