THE SKELETON MELODIES BY CLINT SMITH

The overall impression left by ‘Skeleton Melodies’ is of an author who is definitely going places. Some of his prose could do with a bit of pruning, but it’s a polished collection covering a wide variety of fears ancient and modern, and I will be watching Smith’s development as a writer with interest.

Hippocampus Press has published some fine new weird fiction authors recently, such as Richard Gavin and John Langan, so I was keen to try out Clint Smith’s latest collection The Skeleton Melodies, especially as it comes recommended by another talented US weirdsmith, Laird Barron.
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At first glance Dan Sauer’s cover artwork, with its rainbow of dark but lurid colors and gothic font, evokes the aesthetics of 60s colour horror films like The Masque of The Red Death, and it had me worried that Hippocampus were trying to peddle Smith as one of those Hammer or Roger Corman nostalgia merchants that have crept into literature recently. However, when you look more closely a great deal of beautiful etched detail and layering becomes visible in Sauer’s artwork, and you realize you are looking at something new and individual rather than just a re-hash of old stuff (go here to see it up close: https://clintsmithfiction.com/the-skeleton-melodies/).

This is one case where you can judge the book by its cover, because the same can be said of many of Smith’s stories. Things don’t begin very auspiciously: the opening story ‘Lisa’s Pieces’, which arguably has the highest profile of them all since it featured in a recent S. T. Joshi anthology, is one of the least interesting, being a fairly standard piece of Frankenstein/Herbert West-y medical horror, albeit updated for the present day. And as I read on, I found myself increasingly confounded by Smith’s love affair with alliteration, which is so extreme that it must be a deliberate stylistic choice and not just literary incompetence. The final story ‘Haunt Me Still’ contains the following gem: “The slate-streaked sky above the bevy of bereavers was suitably subdued for the occasion”, but there are many other examples. A lot of the stories are also marred by wordy passages of the “why use one syllable when five will do” variety.

However, these are just passages, and there’s a lot of good writing here too. I can guarantee the reader will learn a lot of strange new words like “antigodlin” and “maud” (although strangely these never seem to crop up in the excessively verbose bits) and Smith also impresses with his original descriptive skills on several occasions. In ‘The Rive’, a more successful piece of medical horror concerning a nationwide system enabling the old to vampirize the young, this description of institutional muzak is quite something: “The champagne music rushes back in with casual constriction, like a palm soothingly closing over a throat.” (Thank God Smith didn’t follow that old saw about never using adverbs, because that “soothingly” really makes the sentence.) In ‘The Pecking Order’ there is a lovely bit of sinister nature description, too: “Meg made her way through the sun-spoked tunnel as birds and the hum of insects swayed and folded like the pleats of an all-encompassing curtain.” Throughout the collection I saw valiant attempts to avoid lazy, conventional writing, and they are very often successful.

Nor should readers be deterred by the basic premises of some of the tales, which repeatedly start out in a very conventional manner, only to veer off and deepen into something more interesting. ‘Animalhouse’ at first appears to be another of those man-into-beast transformation stories that claim to be serious examinations of the violent underbelly of the “toxic masculine” psyche, but which so often simply serve as an excuse for extended scenes of gloating carnage wrought on ex-girlfriends and their lovers. However, this is not the case here; Smith’s use of violence and the possibility of violence is unusual, and the story also has a good sticky, bloody, feverishly feral quality that will ensure it appeals even to those with no hoots to give about gender politics.

Similarly, my favourite story in the book, ‘Fingers Laced, as Though in Prayer’ has a few (un)pleasant surprises up its sleeve. It all kicks off with a bus full of teenagers breaking down in the sunny fields of Someplace, America - fields which turn out to contain a lot more than just crops! Consequently, I was initially tempted to dismiss this one as a literary rip-off of the horror film Jeepers Creepers 2, but there’s a lot more to it than that. It’s psychologically very gripping and convincing, and the focus is on the budding entente between one of the schoolkids and the bus driver (a very overlooked figure in many teenage dramas, in film and on paper), a middle-aged woman who turns out to have an unusual past. Though not so unusual that the reader can’t feel a good deal of empathy and interest in her situation. A very satisfying and feminist story with a good dose of the weird.

Some of the material is a bit thin: ‘The Fall of Tomlinson Hall, or the Ballad of the Butcher’s Cart’ is a predictable cannibalism/social justice crossover, and ‘Knot The Noose’, in which American drug dealers at large in Jamaica bite off more than they can chew while attempting to secure an unusual strain of cannabis, felt rushed and a bit so-whatty. However, the latter story does have worth as a kind of prelude to one of the best pieces of writing here, ‘Fiending Apophenia’. This appears to be picking up where ‘Knot The Noose’ left off: the dodgy weed has now arrived in American cities and we experience its effects through the eyes of a young small-time drug dealer who finds his mind expanding in highly unexpected ways after his first smoke. This story shows that Smith can write well in a more informal, vernacular style, and in its depiction of somewhat lost young people battling a world warping and splitting into madness it is actually quite reminiscent of Laird Barron’s own recent writing, although I find Smith’s kids less relentlessly hard-nosed and more likeable than the Barron equivalent.

In fact, the predicament of the aimless twenty-something American is one of Smith’s fortes. The protagonist of ‘Her Laugh’ – about an easily embarrassed young man who becomes fascinated with his pretty but odd neighbour – could’ve seemed like an irredeemably whiney incel in the wrong hands, but in fact it is easy to identify with his social anxieties and root for him when the shit starts to come down. I also enjoyed the echoes of some of Robert Aickman’s more erotic material in this story.

And in case that’s not enough neighbour horror for you, ‘Details That Would Otherwise Be Lost to Shadow’ offers another exploration of that perennially fruitful horror topic, What Those Freaks Next Door Are Up To. A successful yuppie lady finds herself tempted into infiltrating the home of her elderly next-door neighbours, in a set-up that reminded me a bit of Ramsey Campbell’s brilliant piece of trespass terror ‘Call First’. However, whereas Campbell’s story left a lot to the imagination and ended on a cliffhanger, Smith delves two-fistedly into a description of the strange and awful contents of the house and its denizens. Not terrifying as such, but certainly unsettling.

The overall impression left by ‘Skeleton Melodies’ is of an author who is definitely going places. Some of his prose could do with a bit of pruning, but it’s a polished collection covering a wide variety of fears ancient and modern, and I will be watching Smith’s development as a writer with interest.

​Review by Daisy Lyle 

Over the past several years, Clint Smith has established himself as a powerfully imaginative writer of weird fiction. In this second collection of short stories, Smith shows why his multifaceted talents have established him as one of the notable weird writers of his generation. The Skeleton Melodies features such stories as “Lisa’s Pieces,” a grisly tale of cruelty and murder; “Fiending Apophenia,” in which a schoolteacher reflects poignantly on his past derelictions; “The Fall of Tomlinson Hall,” wherein Smith draws upon his own expertise in the culinary arts to fashion a story of cannibalistic terror; and “The Rive,” a highly timely post-apocalyptic account of the horrors that inequities in health care can foster.

Other stories treat of domestic strife leading to supernatural or psychological horror, such as “Animalhouse” or “The Undertow, and They That Dwell Therein.” The volume culminates in the richly textured novella “Haunt Me Still,” one of the most subtle and powerful ghost stories in recent years.

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