I am home and among my own cats. I had an irrational fear that Autolycus would be indifferent or hostile to me after four days with other cats; he is purring on my shoulder as we speak. He is soft and black and he has key-lime eyes and he smells like himself. Lydia and Selwyn each had their own clean feline smell, but neither of them was my cat.
William Sloane's To Walk the Night (1937) and The Edge of Running Water (1939), collected under the title The Rim of Morning in 1964 and reissued in 2015 by the New York Review of Books, now look like cutting-edge fusions of noir fiction and cosmic horror, but I wonder instead if their existence only tells me how interrelated the two genres were at the time. To be fair, I'd like it to be true because I've thought of it before, but writing like Sloane's suggests it's not just wishful thinking. I read the first novel last night and the second this afternoon on the commuter train back from Providence; I have a slight preference for the former because it's plotted with cinematic prescience and my kind of alienation, but the latter goes deep into the kind of parapsychological fringe science that I didn't think would become common currency of horror until the 1970's. (It was adapted for film in 1941 as the low-budget, less cosmic and more ghastly The Devil Commands, starring Boris Karloff and directed by Edward Dmytryk, but![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks correctly identified Val Lewton as the ideal producer for this material. I understand he would have missed out on The Edge of Running Water if Columbia got there first, but Cat People (1942) proves to me that he'd have handled To Walk the Night well.) Both feel to me like very early treatments of ideas that became much more common in later horror and science fiction and neither can be discussed without spoilers: both novels are structured as slow burns toward terrifying revelations, incredibly logical and even guessable by the reader ahead of time, but knowing what must fit the missing space in the plot is not the same as the thing itself when you get to it. They're beautifully written, too. Stephen King in his introduction compares Sloane's style favorably to Raymond Chandler's and I can see it. He is extremely good at the kind of first-person narrator who is not simply a lens.
Hestia is talking to me now, I assume about her weekend. Or the fact that I have not fed her since I got home, which means she has never been fed, not once, ever. Excuse me.
William Sloane's To Walk the Night (1937) and The Edge of Running Water (1939), collected under the title The Rim of Morning in 1964 and reissued in 2015 by the New York Review of Books, now look like cutting-edge fusions of noir fiction and cosmic horror, but I wonder instead if their existence only tells me how interrelated the two genres were at the time. To be fair, I'd like it to be true because I've thought of it before, but writing like Sloane's suggests it's not just wishful thinking. I read the first novel last night and the second this afternoon on the commuter train back from Providence; I have a slight preference for the former because it's plotted with cinematic prescience and my kind of alienation, but the latter goes deep into the kind of parapsychological fringe science that I didn't think would become common currency of horror until the 1970's. (It was adapted for film in 1941 as the low-budget, less cosmic and more ghastly The Devil Commands, starring Boris Karloff and directed by Edward Dmytryk, but
rushthatspeaks correctly identified Val Lewton as the ideal producer for this material. I understand he would have missed out on The Edge of Running Water if Columbia got there first, but Cat People (1942) proves to me that he'd have handled To Walk the Night well.) Both feel to me like very early treatments of ideas that became much more common in later horror and science fiction and neither can be discussed without spoilers: both novels are structured as slow burns toward terrifying revelations, incredibly logical and even guessable by the reader ahead of time, but knowing what must fit the missing space in the plot is not the same as the thing itself when you get to it. They're beautifully written, too. Stephen King in his introduction compares Sloane's style favorably to Raymond Chandler's and I can see it. He is extremely good at the kind of first-person narrator who is not simply a lens.Hestia is talking to me now, I assume about her weekend. Or the fact that I have not fed her since I got home, which means she has never been fed, not once, ever. Excuse me.
