Stuff: Horror in space.

In space, of course, nobody can hear you scream. Partially because there ain't a lot of horror up there. Last year, NASA responded to a Freedom of Information Act request for:

1. The list or index or directory or catalogue of books for recreational/off-duty reading at the ISS. [International Space Station – CRWM]

2. The list or index or directory or catalogue of movies and television shows maintained at the ISS.

3. The list or index or directory or catalogue of books of music maintained at the ISS.

The eleven page response from NASA provides some interesting glimpses into the reading habits of our astronauts. It's no surprise that sci-fi books are a popular favorite on the space station. However, it may comes as a surprise that Lois McMaster Bujold, author of the multi-volume Vorkosigan Saga, is the single most represented author in space (with 8 books), just squeezing ahead of David Weber's eight-volume Honor Harrington series. Isaac Asimov has only two books orbiting the planet. Jules Verne a mere one. Arthur C. Clark is not represented at all. H. G. Wells remains a strictly terrestrial writer.

I was surprised to see that the business self-help book Ten Day MBA appears on the ISS's shelf. What budding capitalist felt, "Sure, being an astronaut is nifty and all – but someday I'll have to get a real job"? Perhaps the strangest book on the ISS shelf is Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine, a 1,200 page hardcover doorstop of a book about contemporary Biblical interpretation. The addition of this book is all the more odd considering that the shelves of the space station do not contain a Bible. They do, however, contain Darwin's Origins of the Species.

The sole horror novel available to astronauts is Dan Simmons's Winter Haunting, a spook story about a man returning to his small town home to confront otherworldly evil. Notably, the work is a sequel, though the previous volume is not available up there.

This suggests that Barker's Law – Clive Barker's hypothesis that every American home contains a copy of the Bible and a book by Stephen King – does not hold in space.

I assume that the brains at ground control decided, at some point, that the last thing a bunch of dudes in a small collection of pressurized tin cans floating in a vast all-destroying void needed was a bunch of films to freak them out, because there are very few horror movies maintained on the ISS. Even the titles tat might be considered horror tend to shade into action, thriller, and sciffy genre territory.

NASA reports that King Kong is available, though it is unclear whether astronauts are watching the classic original or Jackson's CGI blow-out. The Matheson adaptation Stir of Echoes, starring Kevin Bacon, is kept on the ISS. Your games of six degrees of separation need no longer be bound by gravity's pull! Finally, The Sixth Sense orbits above us. Though, honestly, it only gets watched once every mission. Once the new astronauts have seen and know the twist, it gathers space dust on the shelf until a fresh batch of newbies arrives.

What do you say, Screamers and Screamettes, should we buy NASA a copy of Alien for the International Space Station?

Books: The Dickens, you say?

After the critical and popular success of his epic length historical monster tale, The Terror, you could look at Dan Simmons's newest novel, Drood, and think that he'd learned two lessons from his last outing.

First, go historical. The Terror made a supernatural thriller out of the mystery surrounding a famed missing arctic expedition. Drood makes a wild penny-dreadful style mystery tale out of the twilight years of famed literary lion Charles Dickens.

Second, think big. Very big. Even in paperback, The Terror was a brick of a book. Drood is a real doorstop as well. For those unfamiliar with the publishing biz, a galley is an advance copy of a book that is run off pre-publication to get the tome into the hands of reviewers, store buyers, and so on. Generally, the galley is made of lighter, cheaper, inferior materials – it isn't built to last, just to be reviewed quickly. Even if the book's coming out in hardback (or cloth, as they say in the glamorous corridors of the quality lit biz) the galley is most likely paperback. Even in galley from, sans the hardback binding and heavier paper, Drood weighs in at about two pounds.

Aside from these immediately obvious points of reference, there's even a tiny bit of content overlap. The real life Dickens and Wilkie Collins, hereafter designated as RDickens and RCollins (to distinguish them from Simmons's fictional characters, hereafter designated FDickens and FCollins), created a play inspired loosely by the disappearance of The Terror expedition. Simmons has a little fun discussing the maudlin sentiments and purple prose FDickens and FCollins drape over the gaunt skeleton of the mysterious disappearance, giving fans of the previous book a darkly comedic study in contrast.

Given all that, you could be forgiven for thinking that you're going to get The Terror 2: This Time, It's Christmas. But the initial evidence is misleading. Drood is a very different beast. Where The Terror is grim, linear, bleak forced march for a dwindling series of doomed men, Drood is a surreal, tangled, and acid-etched look at the relationship between monumental artists. The Terror was dominated by the crushing narrative logic of overwhelming odds, the sort of mathematics one finds at the heart of body-count films. Drood is a dark funhouse full of sense-warping mirrors, blocked lines of vision, and trap doors.

Drood opens with a direct address to the reader by the book's first person narrator, FCollins. The following tale is presented as a manuscript that FCollins is writing after the death of his long-time friend and collaborator FDickens. The manuscript, we're told, is to be published 125 years after FCollins's own demise. One of the running gags throughout the book is FCollins's increasingly inaccurate suppositions about what the world of Twenty-first Century, the world of his imagined audience, must be like: Perhaps you dress like Hottentots, live in gas-lighted caves, travel around in balloons, and communicate by telegraphed thoughts unhindered by any spoken or written language.

After quickly establishing this framing device, the story starts off with the June 9, 1865 train wreck that nearly sent RDickens to a premature grave and is widely considered to have marked the beginning of a long downward spiral for the great author's physical health. On that day, as RDickens heroically assists rescue works in the search for survivors, he runs across the cadaverous titular Drood: a necrotic man with a skeletal, near-noseless face and a snake's hiss for a voice. FDickens comes to believe that Drood was at the crash site not to help save injured survivors, but to speed them on to the next life.

Using some proto-Holmesian deduction (another running in-joke involves the fact that FDickens and FCollins exist in world that doesn't have Sherlock Holmes yet – consequently they repeatedly struggle to find the now familiar vocabulary of mystery writing that is needed to describe what they're doing), FDickens tracks the mysterious Drood to London's foulest slum and recruits FCollins to assist in the hunt.

The trail leads our two authors to a maze-like subterranean warren-city known, somewhat obviously, as the Underworld. There we learn that Drood rules over the discarded classes, using them as a vast network of thieves, spies, and assassins. FDickens becomes obsessed with the figure of Drood, slowly uncovering his bizarre past: he's the castaway son of an Egyptian woman and a British man, a master of mesmerism, and the leader of an ancient sacrificial cannibal cult that traces its origins back to days of the pharaohs.

FCollins fears that he and FDickens are way out of their league, fears that are compounded when Inspector Field, a former police inspector who acted as a ghetto guide to RDickens and RCollins on various tours of London's worst slums and who was the inspiration for RDickens's Inspector Bucket in Bleak House, contacts him. Field tells FCollins that he has built up a network of freelance investigators, spies, and enforcers with the aim of foiling Drood. Drood, you see, is mad as a hatter. The archfiend wants to bring down the British Empire. Not out of any great love of the oppressed peoples of the world, mind you. He wants to establish a new dynasty of pharaohs in the heart of London. And, as if that was not bad enough, Field believes that FDickens is helping Drood in exchange for Drood's secrets to mastering the mesmeric arts (RDickens was a nut for mesmerism, even going so far as to attempt amateur sessions of hypnotic therapy on various folks).

As the novel progresses, FCollins find himself caught in a secret war between the fanatical Field, the nightmarish Drood, and the increasingly guarded FDickens, who appears to be playing off both sides. Surrounded by treachery and deceit, FCollins's own mind begins to betray him as RCollins's truly heroic levels of laudanum consumption begin to take their toll.

In tone, Drood reads like Victorian "sensationalist" novel – one of those mostly anonymously penned shockers that wrapped murder and mayhem in a thin layer of social conscience, the slim justification for their fixation on the morbid. The most famous of these fabulously trashy entertainments is A String of Pearls, the blood-soaked source of the famous Sweeney Todd, Demon Barber of Fleet Street. It's plot is so far-fetched and the character of Drood so fantastic, that I must admit that I was originally a bit turned off. The wealth of historical detail – sometimes an almost exhausting amount of detail, Simmons does not like to waste any piece of his research – leads one to mistakenly assume that Drood is going to play by the standard rules of historical realism, with some minor suspension of disbelief required to make Drood suitably monstrous. But when the story begins to really take off, that assumption proves wrong. Ride those bumps out though, and you'll be rewarded.

This brings us to my only real reservation about the novel.

The use of real public figures in a fictional setting is tricky. In The Terror Simmons pretty much had a free hand to do whatever he wished. Who, outside of a few devoted followers of the history of artic exploration, would know anything substantial about the men of the ill-fated expedition? Plus, the history books are unable to tell us what happened to the men, so Simmons had a blank canvas.

By way of contrast, RDickens is one of the most well known authors in the English-speaking world. Not only is nearly every scrap he ever published still in print, even tangentially connected works have been granted immortality by virtue of their proximity to him. His wife's cookbook, for example, is still available. If you want to eat spotted dick just the way RDickens liked it (stop snickering now!), rest assured that you can eat that very spotted dick. (Hey, seriously, stop snickering!) Then one has to account for the entire industry of RDickens scholarship, academic and popular, that must account for miles of shelf space. (Just yesterday publishers sent my wife a new book looking at Dickens just in terms of his creation of his famous "A Christmas Carol" short story – at 226 pages, this pop history is about 160 pages longer than "A Christmas Charol.") Furthermore, the use of RDickens and RCollins as a Holmes and Watson duo is nothing new. Not only has it been done before, there is even a long-running mystery novel series predicated on the idea. Finally, and perhaps most dauntingly, for the author thinking of using RDickens of RCollins as the basis of their own FDickens and FCollins, we're talking about two master stylists of the English language. Both of them somehow managed the impossible: they're mimics that can't be mimicked, creating writing that sounds, at once, like the voices of real people while, at the same time, never sounding like anything less than high artifice. How do you recreate that? If you're a writer who reads RDickens and RCollins and believes that you can recreate their success, then I assure you that you are neither a good reader nor much of a writer.

Simmons compensates for the familiarity of his scheme by delivering meticulously researched, but satirically drawn portraits of the two famous men. FDickens is brilliant and prodigiously talented, but he is also one of the biggest jerks to ever play the hero in a novel. He is overbearing, tyrannical, mercenary, and destructive. FCollins is a strange sort of parasite: poisonously envious of FDickens's but unable to live without his approval. Simmons's Wilkie is cowardly and selfish, proud but helpless. At times, Simmons almost seems savage in his take on them. So much so, in fact, that I sometimes found myself wondering just how British readers will take Simmons's novel. As for mimicking their style, Simmons doesn't really try. This is a wise choice, as there's no way to really succeed at evoking RDickens and RCollins's distinctive voices. It does, however, mean there's a weird disconnect between the voice of the narrator, FCollins, and the voice we know RCollins really has.

Those reservations aside, I recommend it highly. It isn't as immediately approachable as The Terror, but it is, in almost all other ways, a more ambitious, daring, and engrossing follow up. Chalk up two big wins in a row for Simmons.

Drood comes to you care of the fine folks at Little, Brown and Company. We're looking at a street date of February 9th, and the hardback's gonna set you back $26.99. Add three bucks to that if you're Canadian to cover Canada's national politeness tax.

Comics: Majors and generals.

Greetings, Screamers and Screamettes. Today, your humble horror host brings not one, but two comic reviews. That's right, boys and ghouls, AANTS is giving you both barrels of four color stupendiosity!

I've pair these two comics not because of any linked theme or similarities in their stories. In fact, it is hard to imagine ay two horror comics that could be more different. Instead, I think they both show what you can do in comics that I don't believe you can fully pull off in any other medium. These are great horror comics, each great in their own way.

First, we've got a historical horror comic set in the endgame on the European front in World War II. Desperado Publshing's Common Foe, written by Shannon Eric Denton and Keith Giffen with art by Jean-Jacques Dzialowski and Fredrico Dallocchio, is driven by a pretty simple high concept premise: US and Nazi troops fighting the Battle of the Bulge accidentally unleash a horde of blood-hungry demon vampire thingies. The soldiers must learn to fight together, natch, or end up monster grub.

With that, you've learned every essential bit about the set up and plot of the book.

The second book, Josh Simmons' House, has a deceptively simple premise. Three people go exploring a massive abandoned structure and run into disaster. The book is drawn in an expressively cartoonish black and white, contains not a single bit of dialogue, and is an utterly haunting slice of thoughtful horror despite the fact that we have no villains, monsters, ghosts (well maybe perhaps a tiny little glimpse of one - but that's not a sure thing), or slashers. Just three folks and a horrible accident.

So what makes Common Foe great? It exploits the comic medium's unique sense of the immediate. Of all the popular arts, comics seem to most often get linked to movies. This is unsurprising given the combination of visuals and dialogue, not to mention the industry-wide assumption that the goal of comics is to aspire to film – in fact, many comic artists now get gig storyboarding flicks and Marvel's own guidelines to writers suggest getting some film writing experience before tackling comic writing. But, I'd like to suggest that some comics often resemble the perfect pop single. They are direct, immediately involving, memorable, and with just enough layers of artistry to not make you feel stupid for giving them a little attention. This is exactly was Common Foe does. It takes its premise and delivers on it with a slick and professional precision.

The comic opens with a bang. A handful full of American soldiers are fleeing a horde of strange monsters – part zombie, part scarecrow, part shark. Explosions, gun fire, the Americans lose a Joe, and, finally, find shelter. In this brief moment, one of the GI's has a flashback that explains how the soldiers got in this bad situation. Far from the main battle front, two units – one American and one German – fight to control as town of no strategic significance. As one of the characters puts it: "The only reason they want it is because they think we want it." For the first fourth of the book, these two groups pound each other mercilessly. During a lull in the combat, the Germans notice that some fire has busted open what appears to be a well. Strangely, the stones of have small crucifixes carved into them. A local superstition perhaps? Whatever, they are in the middle of a war. The well is left unsealed. Enter the beasties. For the remainder of the book, the American and Nazi soldiers will battle a seemingly endless number of demon-things. The creatures shrug off gunfire, so the soldiers are reduced to running and hiding, setting explosive traps, and trying to keep alive until sunrise. The beasties, you see, don't like the sun.

The characters are stock and the action somewhat predictable, but the pace – which comics can crank up even past what films can deliver – and strong visuals overpower these. This is an army versus monster story the way "Good Vibrations" is a just a pop love song. It knows exactly what it needs to give you, and delivers fully on the promise. This would be too limited of an achievement for a film or a novel. A novel would demand more backstory and, as a film, this would feel curiously one-note. But it is a strength comic books have that they, like hard-liquor, can get more powerful through the process of distillation. This title's pleasures come from the efficient and competent way in which the book so expertly focuses on doing exactly what you know it would, leaving you with a feeling that more "writerly" comics no longer seem to credit as a worthy goal: you're left thoroughly entertained.

If Common Foe is the perfect pop single, Josh Simmons' House is the indie rock experiment. A wordless, black and white comic, House tells the story of three folks who explore a massive and rooting old home, and ultimately get separated and lost within its twisting corridors. The characters are all nameless. One is a young man, he seems to be the one who is encouraging the group to explore in the house in the first place. The second explorer is a lively, athletic blonde. She and the man will develop a romantic connection through the course of the story. Finally, we’ve got a stand-offish semi-Goth chick. The action starts off slowly. There's something child-like and almost sweet about the characters. The house they're exploring resembles the grim fortress asylum of Session 9, but they seem so eager and happy to explore it that the mood is lighter. Slowly, inevitably, the thin, intricate line-work of Simmons' grows heavier and dark pools of black ink crowd the page.

I don't want to give away much more of the plot other than to say it hinges on none of the standard horror devices. There's an accident and the characters are left to fend for themselves. They don't have to battle monsters or discover any great mystery about the house (and there are several curious things about it). All they need to do is find one another and get out. Despite this lack of standard horror elements, Simmons' story is as dark, grim, and despairing as anything I experienced in the genre. It goes deeper than scares, evoking a sad dread that is, in the end, harder to shake off.

Perhaps even more than Common Foe, House could only be a comic book. It exploits the most obvious feature of comics: the gutter, the break between panels. Comic readers get so used to the break, we tend to forget what a powerful impact it has on narrative. As a comic reader, we "fill in" the time and content of gutters. The trick is, the time element isn't a set thing. We look for clues in the panels that precede and follow the gutter, adjusting our expectations accordingly. We fill in the necessary content in the same way. This expectation that we'll need to fill in huge gaps in the story is part of the reader/writer contract all comic readers make with comic creators and it allows the comic creator a considerable amount of narrative freedom. For example, the lack of dialogue is a striking feature in House, but it doesn't have the same impact that making a silent film or a novel without any dialogue would have. Readers assume these characters are talking and that we're just not hearing it, something akin to the "fill in" we already have to do. It makes the way Simmons withholds info from the reader a subtle game. It's a game Simmons pays well. He purposefully undermines our ability to "read" the gutters, leaving us – like his characters – bewildered and lost. How long have they been trapped? Where are they in relationship to one another? Eventually the negative space of the gutters will grow, leaving characters and actions trapped in disjointed bits of panel – sometimes little more than a spec on a otherwise inky black page.

Before, we've discussed what horror comics can't do. Horror novels have the capacity to depict inner emotional states better and are, at their best, more emotionally immersive. Film can deliver the physical sensation of fright like no other medium does. But comics have a unique ability to combine focus with narrative freedom and that opens up the potential for stories you just couldn't do any other way.

As a little treat, for sitting through all that, below is a page from House.

Books: As if slowly starving to death in the arctic wasn't crappy enough already.

Dan Simmons is a hardworking journeyman writer who has, for decades now, happily hopped from genre to genre, steadily producing reliable solid entertainments. Such writers are not uncommon in the ghettos of genre lit: they produce a huge body of work and patiently wait the day when history decides to elevate them to the status of "forgotten genius" or, more likely, lets them fall into the collective forgetting of the genre fan's group-consciousness. With The Terror, his 2007 genre-bending historical fiction/adventure/fantasy/horror novel, Simmons may have short-circuited the normal critical appraisal and secured himself an A-list slot among those genre writers who have leapt from the genre ghetto into the mainstream.

The Terror is a meticulously-detailed, fantastically-imagined novel that fills in the blanks on one of maritime history's most enduring mysteries: the fate of the 1845 Franklin expedition to discover the Northwest Passage. And there are plenty of blanks to fill. After nearly three centuries of failure, the British Admiralty decided to get serious about this stuff and authorized Sir John Franklin, experienced arctic explorer and former colonial governor of Tasmania, to make another attempt. The expedition would sail on The Erebus and The Terror, two arctic exploration ships that featured several cutting-edge technologies: new reinforced hulls that pre-figured the later iron-clads, a steam hating system, retractable iron propellers and rudders that were driven by train engines ad could be pulled up out of freezing water to prevent their being damaged during arctic winters. The crew was a hand-selected collection of experienced arctic explorers, seasoned sailors, and scientific experts. The expedition was fitted-out with more than three-years worth of fuel and food. Never was any expedition for the passage so well staffed and equipped.

The expedition set sail from Greenhithe, England on the morning of May 19, 1845. Captain Dannett, of the whaler Prince of Wales, encountered them in Melville Bay moored to an iceberg in the summer of 1845.

And that was the last time anybody saw them alive.

Rescue and research expeditions have since found scraps of the doomed expedition. But the two ships have never been found and no journals or logs have ever been recovered.

Working with such a broad, blank canvass, Simmons creates an epic story that pits the expedition crew against the murderous arctic conditions and against a seemingly unstoppable killer beast prowling the frozen wasteland. Not to get all high-concept on this review, but think of some bizarre combination of Poe and C. S. Forester. Simmons' historical research is exhaustive and detailed, but he doesn't let his commitment to rigorous detail stop him from creating a surreal and magical nightmare beast and using it the way Peter Benchley used his own toothy white monster. The result is an excellent fusion of historical fiction and gothic fantasy – a fully realized artic exploration adventure that weaves in and out of top-notch horror tale. (If these genres are all that different: many of the details of arctic exploration are as scary and horrific as any imaginary threat a horror writer cold come up with. I'd take getting eaten by an abominable snowman over death by scurvy any day.)

The book's not perfect. Simmons' book can be a slog. At 700+ pages, it isn't a quick read. Further, Simmons' exhaustive research sometimes gets a little exhausting. For example, tangential scenes involving the Fox sisters, two fraud spiritualists who feature as stray footnotes in the story of the actual Franklin expedition, pop up twice without much explanation for readers who are less versed in arctic exploration lore. Still, for the most part, Simmons doesn't waste his research. I rarely felt that Simmons was filling pages with unprocessed research notes, exposition for the sake of using details he discovered but couldn't work into the narrative in any thematically important way. Though he does fill his pages: Darwin, colonialism, politics, the works of Poe, Eskimo mythology, environmentalism, and class warfare all get play on the pages of Simmons' book. In less confident hands, this would be a mess. But Simmons lets his strong narrative sense take control and this keeps the book from chasing down some random tangential rabbit hole.

All and all, The Terror is not only one of the best horror novels in recent memory, it’s a great read for non-genre fans. It's available in a trade paperback format - $15.00 from Back Bay Books – less than the cost of dinner and a movie.