In keeping with the Hallowe’en spirit, 21 October’s Fantastic Fiction at KGB readings featured twin terrifying tales from horror writers John Langan and Michael Cisco.
The Series, hosted by Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel is held on the third Wednesday evening of each month at the KGB Bar in Manhattan’s East Village. The venue offered an appropriately spooky ambience for the Samhain season, darkness and strange sounds… but that’s how it always is there. (A first-timer near me grumbled about the dimness and the difficulty in carrying on conversations. I’d brought a small flashlight, and shouted to her.) On the positive side, it’s a welcoming locale for the Series and the drinks are reasonable. As usual, the room was soon standing-room only (either or both a tribute and a drawback).
Kressel welcomed the audience, then introduced the first “fantabulous” reader of the evening, John Langan, who read from his novel (his first), House of Windows. The scene, set on Martha’s Vineyard, centered on a young woman haunted by the ghost of her husband’s estranged son… estranged because of his marriage to her. In the course of their quarrel, the father had cursed him, and the young man is subsequently killed in Afghanistan. For reasons unexplained, he is not, however, (yet) haunting his father (nor is his specter visiting George W. Bush or whoever the Taliban chief is). Langan held the audience rapt; as a longtime sf/fantasy fan sitting at my table acclaimed, “He did the ultimate for a horror writer. He made me cringe.”
After a break, series co-host Datlow presented International Horror Writers Guild Award-winning author Michael Cisco, who read “the grisly end” of his story in Datlow’s latest anthology, Lovecraft Unbound. (There will be a launch party for the collection of eldritch tales inspired by HPL next week at the SoHo Gallery for Digital Art. A contributor to the volume, Cisco will be reading once again. It’s a busy week for him.) His offering, “Machines of Concrete Light and Dark,” told in the present tense by a young woman, unnerved, yet was hauntingly spellbinding. Renewing an old acquaintance, on a train ride, the narrator is treated to her friend’s eerie theory of existence, a vision of voracious cosmic machinelike entities (Cisco’s nod to the gods of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos), mechanical, organic, and even immaterial—odors, textures, emotions, and actions—before she is swept along by her companion to a dark abode that is their final destination and ultimate doom.
At the back of the room, books by the evening’s readers were available for purchase from Barnes & Noble. Afterward, the guests and a number of the audience adjourned to a nearby Szechuan restaurant.
Ellen Datlow has posted photos of the evening here on Flickr.