For Laird Barron
“...there is a certain place in any discussion of any one
thing in existence where knowledge ends and the
Great Vacuum extends on out into infinity.”
Ray Bradbury
INTRODUCTION
JOSH MALERMAN
THE SCARIEST HORROR story is the one told by a stranger on the front porch of a house party, plastic cup in hand, the two of you crossing paths circumstantially, both out to get some air, the music loud inside. He asks what you do. For people like me and Philip Fracassi, the subject of horror stories is never more than a few exchanged pleasantries away. But even if you don’t live in the genre, the subject comes up. Often, the stranger tells you his ghost story. It’s never more than a few sentences. He was gathering laundry from the basement. Saw his dead aunt peer around the furnace. She winked at him.
You say wow.
He says yeah.
Then he’s off, back inside, leaving you alone to fill in the gaps.
You can almost see the bar graph, can’t you? Dependent lines: the briefer the story, the more room to imagine horrors of your own. Some might say the horror story works best the smaller it is. Our stranger on the porch has given us more story than he knows: he’s the main character, after all, and speaking so suddenly about ghosts sets the mood. Yet, us readers, we long for more. At least a little more. Sometimes a lot. We want to spend time, as much time as we can, inside that scary story. Yet, we want that front porch mood to remain…
Where to look?
For a lot of us, the novel is home. The horror novel. And if the author fails at maintaining the menace for more than 300 pages? That’s alright, we give him or her a pass, it’s not an easy thing to do. But still, we jones, we fiend, we start to explore avenues where the scare is less diluted, less cluttered, less buried. The novella, we say. The novella! Without the full diversions of the novel, and with less expectation of things being neatly summed up, we find in the novella something closer to the experience we might find outside a house party.
Yet… even a hundred pages starts to feel too long. The brevity of the stranger’s story is never entirely out of our minds. Neither is the feeling it gave us.
His dead aunt.
Peering.
Winking.
Give us that! we say. Without all the build-up, without all the plot! Give us the smallest thing you got.
But it still has to scare us apart.
So, we turn, at last, to the short story.
And it’s here where we unearth horror at its most potent.
If you’ve spent a lifetime in books, you’ve no doubt read more than a handful of short story collections. Some readers explore this world exclusively, but most of us spend our time in Novel Land, with vacations to where the short stuff lives. Yet, every time we go, we ask ourselves why we don’t just move there. Buy a bungalow. Make a friend. Become a regular at the short story bars.
I have a theory about this.
I can easily remember reading Ray Bradbury’s The October Country in various settings in Michigan, each of those places fading into nothingness as Bradbury delivered unbelievable punch after punch. I started to get excited, in the nervy way, nearly manic: here wasn’t just a book, but a series of ideas so fierce, the electricity of the first story hadn’t worn off by the second. Bradbury simply didn’t let up. The same thing happened, the same state achieved, with Penguin’s American Supernatural Tales. I made notes after each entry, bullet-point ideas of my own. That single collection inspired a dozen novel ideas to come. M.R. James’s Collected Ghost Stories was another. Algernon Blackwood, too. The unforgettable fire of Edgar Allan Poe.
I learned from these books and others: the short story collection was where the real writers told tales. And anybody who could pull off a complete collection, cover to cover, without a dip on the way, was someone to applaud.
Applaud, then, for Philip Fracassi.
Beneath a Pale Sky belongs in that fantastic club.
Prepare yourself for this book. It won’t come at you with a sledgehammer, it’s not that kind of horror, but you’d be nuts to call what happens in these pages quiet. And while I’m not going to go through the book story by story, I’ll try my best to express how it’s going to make you feel.
Is it possible Fracassi grouped these particular stories together because he discovered in them a similar sound, a similar depth? It feels that way. It feels like he recognized the intoxicating combination that occurs in each: small scenario, enormous repercussions. In these pages we’ve got friends who ought to be lovers, earthquakes and drunk pilots, all the passion of life balancing atop the Ferris Wheel. Herein lies friends of the Devil and greedy scientists, mental homes and the music of Hell.
Was Fracassi aware of the collection as he pieced this together? Was Bradbury ever aware of his? Because the best collections are the ones where the stories work in tandem, the stories play as a team. This is not to say Fracassi left easter eggs of one story in another, but rather, Beneath a Pale Sky rolls out like music. Suggestions of early themes grow-up by the end, and the echoes of the those we began with never entirely go away.
