Gary K. Wolfe Reviews The Dead Man and Other Horror Stories by Gene Wolfe

The Dead Man and Other Horror Stories, Gene Wolfe (Subterranean 978-1-64524-120-1, $50.00, 400pp, hc) June 2023. Cover by Tom Kidd.

Horror fiction might not be the first thing to come to mind when considering the impres­sive career of the late Gene Wolfe, despite some genuinely chilling moments in his most famous novels and a few oddities like An Evil Guest or The Sorcerer’s House, but The Dead Man and Other Horror Stories sets out to make a case for his skills in this arena. The problem is that, if we accept the common notion that horror fiction is characterized and even named by its effect on the reader – an idea going all the way back to Poe’s “unity of effect” – then horror does a pretty weak job of containing Wolfe’s imagination. Some of his most ardent advocates argue that he was always a literary rather than a genre writer, but that im­plies a distinction that Wolfe himself repeatedly rejected. The fact is that he knew perfectly well how and when to use horror, but to get back to that “unity of effect” problem, Wolfe’s best stories never try to do only one thing. While we’ll get our share of murderers, werewolves, vampires, ghouls, demons, “soul-suckers,” shapeshifting aliens, even a leopard woman, a treacherous computer, and one mean-ass crocodile, the stories they inhabit might be anything from fairy tale redactions to tone-perfect Victorian pastiches, deep-space SF, or Christian parable.

Not that Wolfe can’t go for that single effect when he wants to. In one of the handful of SF tales, “Talk of Mandrakes”, an exobiologist is offered a rare opportunity to examine an alien specimen that at first looks like a pile of sludge – until, in an ending worthy of an old EC comic, the scientist learns what the alien is really there for. The title story, “The Dead Man” (very nearly Wolfe’s first published story, from a 1965 men’s magazine), which involves that crocodile, also ends with a kind of shock-frame comics panel. The ironically titled “The Friendship Light” is a classic revenge tale involving resentful brothers-in-law, while “Mute” offers a terrifically unnerving setup, as a man named Billy randomly discovers a card on the street which turns out to be a religious saint’s card – but with his name and picture on it. As with several other tales, though, Wolfe frames Billy’s tale in layers of narrative wrapping paper – Billy has told the story to Augie, who is now telling it to the narrator. These framing devices – a manuscript found in a grave (“My Name Is Nancy Wood”), a journal and an audiotape log (“The Friendship Light”), a story passed on by an old friend (“Black Shoes”, “Redbeard”), a mysterious pamphlet found in a library (“Why I Was Hanged”) – not only remind us that these are told tales, but also introduce layers of possible narrative slippage. Wolfe’s narrators are famously tricky, and this just gives us more of them.

Probably the best-known stories are “The Hero as Werwolf”, a grim dystopian tale depicting a fu­ture in which humanity has divided itself into psi-powered Masters and cannibalistic lower classes, somewhat reminiscent of Eloi and Morlocks (but not really involving werewolves); “The Detective of Dreams”, a Chesterton-toned tale whose nar­rator is a brilliant detective who specializes in unpacking the dreams of others in a distinctly non-Freudian way; and “Redbeard”, a version of Bluebeard done up as a creepy serial-killer tale, again related secondhand. All three of these, along with “Bed and Breakfast” (whose title establish­ment is located near the entrance to Hell), were included in The Best of Gene Wolfe reissued by Tor a few years ago, but they’re the only stories that also appeared there; another half-dozen tales haven’t been previously collected at all. These in­clude the genuinely haunting “Josh”, with begins with two kids moving to a remote house to live with their father, who seems to have disappeared, and then abruptly shifts into another sort of tale entirely, and then shifts again before the apocalyp­tic ending; “Prize Crew”, another straight-up SF horror tale involving an abandoned alien space­ship; “Innocent”, in which a werewolf indignantly denies accusations of pedophilia while cheerfully acknowledging that he’s eaten quite a few folks; “Uncaged”, a period piece set in Africa involving that leopard woman; “Why I Was Hanged”; and “Talk of Mandrakes”.

In addition to “Redbeard”, a few other stories offer hints of some of Wolfe’s literary forbears. “The Walking Sticks” reads like a pitch-perfect echo of an M.R. James ghost story, with the ob­jects of the title seeming to take on a life of their own. “In the House of Gingerbread” is an even darker re-imagining of Hansel and Gretel. “The Death of Koshchei the Deathless” is based on a Russian folktale as retold by Andrew Lang, while “The Vampire Kiss”, vividly evoking the poverty of Victorian London through the eyes of a child, turns out to be literally Dickensian when we learn who the story is being told to, and who is passing it on to us. What nearly all the stories have in com­mon, though, is Wolfe’s uncanny ability to draw us into even the most disorienting tales through prose that is precise and evocative, and through voices that range from the vernacular rhythms of good old boys to the measured cadences of Victorian gentlemen. The Dead Man and Other Horror Stories is the first posthumous collection of Wolfe’s writing (although a collection of horror rarities and reprints, The Wolfe at the Door, is due this fall), but it’s enough to remind us not so much what we’ve lost, as what we still have.

This review and more like it in the July 2023 issue of Locus.

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