Horror

In Delmore Schwartz’s story ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’, a young man dreams he is watching his father and mother’s engagement onscreen from a seat in a cinema. Weeping at the certain knowledge of the pain to come, he’s patted on the back by a woman. ‘There, there,’ she says, ‘all of this is just a movie.’ In a way, this moment distils the challenge of all oneiric narratives — it’s a fiction within a fiction, one in which anything can happen, but without real-world consequences. In this dark, brilliantly controlled debut, the Argentinian Samanta Schweblin uses the fabric of a dream to weave a novel in which everything is at stake and at risk: identity, love and existence.

Stand aside, Homer. I doubt whether even the author of the Iliad could have matched Alexis Peri’s account of the 872-day siege which Leningrad endured after Hitler’s army encircled the city in September 1941. I never knew, for example, that if an adult starved for months on a few ounces of bread daily, a sip of soup and very little water — if they were lucky enough to get their daily rations — you couldn’t tell when they were naked whether they were male or female. I wouldn’t have believed that starving parents might eat their dead children, or vice versa; yet 1,500 Leningraders were arrested for cannibalism.

Teenage girls all over the world have suddenly developed electro-magnetic powers that can be unleashed on anybody who bugs them. The effect of these electrical jolts ranges from a tingly sensation to scarring, shock, pain, permanent disability, dismemberment and sometimes death. So girls have all the ‘power’ now. Older women soon start zapping too, and thereby move into high office and make millions. It is the end of patriarchy as we know it: almost overnight, women’s tolerance of bullying and sexual harassment sinks to zero, and men start dropping like flies. They now become the world’s cowering victims, servants, slaves and playthings. Men have to adapt swiftly to their new lowly status, and to kinky, often catastrophic, types of sex.

It is not easy to avoid clichés when writing about J.M.G. Le Clézio. Born in Nice in 1940, the recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature is known in the Anglophone world as an ex-experimental novelist. His early work, exploring language and insanity, was praised by Michel Foucault. But since the 1970s his style has become more mainstream and his subjects — childhood, travel and landscape — more lyrical. Reviewers quibble over the quality of translations, especially when there are two of the same novel in relatively quick succession. Le chercheur d’or (The Prospector) (1985), was translated into English by Carol Marks in 1993, and has now been retranslated by C. Dickson.

One happy aspect of Lionel Shriver’s peek into the near future (the novel opens in 2029) is the number of unusually rounded elderly characters she presents. Her pitiless eye notes every mark of age and vanity in the older generation of the Mandible family, but they remain in robust health, sharp without being merely spry, and full of personality. They have too much life as far as the younger family members are concerned, waiting impatiently for the wealth to trickle downwards. Jayne and Carter, already in their sixties, will be disappointed, for Shriver’s doomsday scenario concerns a catastrophic devaluation of the dollar which wipes out the family fortune overnight. The Mandibles descend the social order rapidly, along with everyone else in the United States.

In the Californian town of San Bernadino, children are going missing; smiling faces grace a gallery of milk cartons. One September evening in 1969, Jim Sturges’s brother Jack rides under a bridge and never comes out. All that’s left is his Sportcrest bike, its front wheel spinning. Forty-five years later, 15-year-old Jim Junior lives in a state of reluctant siege. Traumatised by loss, his father has armour-clad their home, calling the cops if Jim gets home seconds after sunset. Jim has other problems, too; he and his friend Tub have caught the eye of Steve Jorgensen-Warner, the school bully. And now something nasty seems to be emerging from the sewers.

Following his beginnings as a science-fiction horror director, David Cronenberg has spent the past decades transforming himself into one of cinema’s most literary filmmakers. He has adapted for the screen — often brilliantly — novels by J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs and Don DeLillo. In each, he has paraded his obsession with lurid mutations in human form wrought by technology, disease and the imagination. In Crash (1996), he had bodies melding with machinery. In Naked Lunch (1991), he had bodies melding with insects — plus insects melding with typewriters.

Stephen King’s latest novel, Mr Mercedes, is dedicated to James M. Cain and described as ‘a riveting suspense thriller’ — a phrase so closely approaching 100 per cent semantic redundancy (a non-riveting thriller? A thriller entirely free of suspense?) that it tells us precisely nothing. All it does is declare that the reader will keep turning the pages. Which we will. That’s what King makes us do. Except Mr Mercedes isn’t, on the surface, a thriller; and you can bet that the consensus will be that King is writing what will be called ‘off-piste’. It’s a slender book, by his standards — only 400 pages — you can get it in your briefcase. There’s nothing particularly weird.

The fanfaronade for Ian McEwan's latest book Sweet Tooth, a seventies spy novel tantalisingly based on his own life and featuring a cameo from Martin Amis, has begun ahead of its publication date tomorrow. Two puff interviews (one in the Guardian and a slightly sexier one in the Daily Mail) with McEwan managed to include everything we already know about him. The first review in the Financial Times promises a 'rich and enjoyable' read. Wonderful. Given we'll be hearing quite enough about the book (which wasn't–gasp–nominated for the Booker Prize) we'll look at another big beast captured in the literary pages this week: Jeanette Winterson. The Daylight Gate is the second novel in the Hammer literary imprint series after Helen Dunmore's The Greatcoat.

The story is well known. One wet summer by the shores of Lake Geneva, Mary Shelley — 18 years old, living out of wedlock with the poet Shelley — had a horrifying dream, one that she would later write as the novel Frankenstein. What is less well known is that another of the key pillars of modern horror fiction — the vampire myth — was born during that same extraordinary holiday. Shelley and Mary had taken lodgings near Lord Byron, recently escaped from England following the scandal of his divorce, and — many speculate — incestuous affair with his half-sister. Accompanying him was his handsome and neurotic doctor, Polidori. In Shelley's party was Mary's half sister Claire, already pregnant by Byron and desperate to see him again.

Flesh. Lots of flesh. That was the simple promise of a Hammer horror film. In this collection of classic Hammer posters (The Art of Hammer by Marcus Hearn, Titan, £24.99) we have cleavages, writhing torsos and shining thighs aplenty. But it’s not just that kind of flesh. Over most of our female subjects leers a monster (usually played by the magisterial Christopher Lee), threatening to butcher their curves and leave behind a carcass. Little wonder that the blood-red acrylic is applied so liberally. More interesting, although generally less striking, are the posters that don’t follow the formula. The horribly sensationalist advert for The Camp on Blood Island (1958) carries the tagline, ‘Jap war crimes exposed!

The ghost story is a literary form that favours brevity. Its particular emotional effects — the delicious unease it creates, the shapeless menace and the unsettling uncertainty — work particularly well in concentration, as both Henry James and M. R. James knew so well. A ghost story does not need distractions. Susan Hill has already established herself as a distinguished modern exponent of the genre with The Woman in Black and The Man in the Picture. She returns to it in her latest novel — or, rather, novella, The Small Hand. It is set firmly in the present, in a world with emails and trips to New York; but, as so often with a ghost story, it is also full of echoes from the past. Adam Snow, the possibly unreliable narrator, is an antiquarian bookseller.