Predators and Other Stories

PREDATORS AND OTHER STORIES

by

EDWARD BRYANT

Ed Bryant’s stories from the anthology Night Visions 4: Hardshell featuring all original stories by Dean R. Koontz, Robert R. McCammon, and Edward Bryant, edited and with an introduction by Clive Barker

Produced by ReAnimus Press

Other books by Edward Bryant:

Phoenix Without Ashes

Cinnabar

Among the Dead and Other Events Leading to the Apocalypse

Particle Theory

Neon Twilight

The Baku: Tales of the Nuclear Age

Wyoming Sun

Fetish

Darker Passions

Trilobyte

© 2014, 1987 by Edward Bryant. All rights reserved.

http://ReAnimus.com/authors/edwardbryant

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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

PREDATORS AND OTHER STORIES

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Predators

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The Baku

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Frat Rat Bash

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Haunted

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Buggage

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Doing Colfax

AUTHOR'S NOTE

DISCLAIMER

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INTRODUCTION

CLIVE BARKER

[Publisher’s note: This is the introduction to the original Night Visions 4: Hardshell anthology, edited by Clive Barker, with stories by Ed, as well as by Dean R. Koontz and Robert R. McCammon. Thanks to Clive Barker for permission to reprint it here.]

People say prostitution is the oldest profession; but I wonder. Certainly it’s got a good long tradition, honorable and dishonorable by turns, and if commerce were to have sprung into being from any particular exchange in the human experience, the sexual exchange is certainly prime material. Accounts of the profession’s existence can be found in some of the earliest histories, back to the beginning of the written word; and indeed there are probably creatures for hire in some of the shadier backwaters of our major cities who pre-date that.

But stories, and their telling, have surely been a means to profit for as long. And stories of fear have always had a central place in any story-teller’s canon. Something about them appeals. Perhaps they simply tell the truth of our condition in a way that is palatable, and honest, even in its fictional excesses. After all, we are born into a state of anxiety. Born, note; not made. Just as we are surely sexual from our first breath (because physical), so we are afraid (because vulnerable). It makes sense therefore that stories which dramatize our confrontation as spirits with the brutal business of physicality, and—at their best—seek to discover a pattern in our defeats and triumphs, should be of enduring interest.

Stories of the body: the doomed machine in which we awaken, prone to the frailties of age and the corruptions of disease. Stories of the mind: a system striving for reason and balance while the ape and the lizard were—and in our coils, still are—slinking through its darker places. Stories of God and the Devil: the actors we have cast to play our moralities out. Stories heroic or absurd; epic or elegiac: but all, in their different ways, touching upon the fears that we live with day by day.

To some, they may be Freud writ rampant; to others, a dip into the Jungian stream. To many, myself included, they are all these things, and more. Horror fiction, dark fantasy, grand guignol; however you choose to describe it, the genre fascinates.

But one should probably not be surprised that this area of fictional endeavour is often treated with contempt. The function these stories serve is too raw. It requires an admission of vulnerability in the experiencer; a willingness to confess to nightmares, in a culture that increasingly parades banality as feeling, and indifference as proof of sophistication.

But back to prostitution, for a moment—just as there’s always been a tradition of husbands indulging, in the company of professional ladies, desires they’d never dare confess to their wives—and wives taking lovers for the same healthy reason—so this kind of fiction is indulged. Behind closed doors, as it were: a secret vice. It’s on the shelves in greater and gaudier displays than ever, of course, and on the cinema screen, but it’s still perceived for the most part as gutter entertainment, ignored by critics who say it’s beneath their pen, while reading it beneath their desks.

There must be times in the lives of most who write in the genre, therefore, when this profession—despised at best, or condescended to—strikes them as strange. We spend our working days making traps; stories that will corner the reader into confronting, in fictional form, experiences most of humanity spends its time assiduously avoiding. Showing them the body’s corruption and the mind’s decay; showing them loneliness and cruelty; showing them the world gone mad.

There are, it’s true, differences in approach from author to author. Some eschew disgust as an objective—preferring to keep the atrocity out of sight; others (myself included) value the full confessional. Some like to keep the world their fiction describes realistic, indulging in only the subtlest tinkering with reality; others go for revolution. But whatever the stylistic or conceptional differences, we’re all in the same business at heart: selling fear. This, in these days of the unblinkered eye, when we see what we do with uncommon clarity, may seem perverse.

In a sense it is. That’s why I’m the first to applaud the author who comes up with a new twist, a new distressing notion, because perversity, by its nature, withers once it becomes acceptable; it perpetually needs new taboos. But taboo and perversity are not enough in themselves. If we merely celebrate the urge to appal we may find ourselves defending mere sensationalism simply because it make us nauseous. No, we must also have structure to our horrors, and—given that any narrative worth its sweat has some underlying metaphysic—meaning too.

Here, then, the whore and the horror writer finally part company. Our literature may be underbelly literature—fables of the forbidden which will only be indulged in private—but stories of fear have a chance to leave a profounder impression on their readers than any other fictional form, while the most the oldest profession is likely to leave you with is a burning sensation while passing water.

We who write and read and celebrate horror fiction have, I’d argue, our fingers on a pulse which beats where most people won’t even look, never mind explore.

And so, to three brave explorers, about to lead expeditions into that region: Mr. Bryant, Mr. Koontz, and Mr. McCammon. I don’t believe in giving too much away in introductions. After all, you bought the book for the thrill of discovery, not to have somebody give the game away before you’ve reached page one. I won’t therefore spoil your pleasure by hinting at the contents of these tales. What I can allude to, without giving anything away, is the range of effects these fine writers create.

The genre is often condemned—usually by those who don’t read it—for the narrowness of its vision and intention. It’s a similar argument, and no more valid, than that levelled at erotic literature; that somehow the desire to scare, like the desire to arouse, is a fundamentally shallow one. The stigma touches the purchaser as well as the purveyor. It’s seen as a failure of maturity to enjoy such stimulations. The same argument, of course, could be levelled at comedy, which ‘merely’ seeks to induce laughter, or love-poetry, with only love and loss on its simple mind. Such arguments strike me as nonsensical, and in the face of the kind of works these gentlemen produce should be apparent as such. They deserve better enemies, or none at all. Personally, I’d prefer the former: that is, to be opposed by people who have a thorough knowledge of the genre, rather than whined at by born-again Christians who saw an Italian zombie show once, and decided the whole thing was unholy.

It’s too much to hope for, of course: informed and intelligent criticism. It’s up to us to press ourselves to higher goals—and new perversities along the way; up to us to keep clear in our heads what good horror fiction can do to people—how it can debate matters of great consequence. How it can unveil the once upon a times behind apparent realities. How it can show the nursery-crib and the death-bed as equally haunted places, and every bed between—whether we’re sleeping or fornicating there—as touched by the same spirits. At its best it’s a visionary literature, with its feet in blood and its eyes on transformation; a literature not blinded by the conventions of ‘acceptable’ subject matter, a little in love with death, and all the more honest for that; a literature that looks, and looks again, and never flinches.

Here then, are several such tales. Enjoy. Three minds have dug deep to produce these fragments of their personal darkness for you, and loaned them. Imagine these gentlemen, if you will, seated beneath a shady tree, earning their daily bread selling their visions to any who’ll listen. They wouldn’t go hungry, I suspect. So what if whoring is the oldest profession. In the end, they go their way, the ladies of the night. But the man who sells you fear—if it’s good fear—sells you nightmares for life. There are few better bargains this side of the Devil.

But that’s another story...

April 1987

PREDATORS AND OTHER STORIES

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Try this at a party, sometime.

I have and it works.

Pick somebody out of the crowd.