Black Leather Required

Entry from Supernatural Fiction Writers (ed. Richard Blieiler, 2 vols., Scribners, 2003). Written by Darrell Schweitzer. Excerpted by permission.

David J. Schow

(Vol. 2, pp. 833-838)

… Schow inevitably got himself labeled a writer of "splatterpunk" (an ostentatiously "loud" type of horror fiction, contemporary, hip, and characterized by no-holds-barred explicitness) with the publication of a feature article, "Inside the New Horror," (in) the October, 1988 issue of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine … the article was intended to be, as Schow later described it, a preemptive strike, whereby certain new, hot horror writers would label themselves before someone else labeled them. Schow himself is credited with coining the term "splatterpunk."

The creation of a new horror movement had the effect of making the writers involved more visible. They had captured the field's attention, unquestionably, but it is clear that, quite early on, Schow had the foresight to wonder "what next?" He seems to have distanced himself from the movement almost immediately after aligning himself with it. Significantly, no story by Schow is included in the 1990 manifesto-anthology Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror … and as early as an interview in the Spring, 1990 Weird Tales, conducted by Bill Warren, he refers to splatterpunk in the past tense. In a 1996 interview published in Cemetery Dance, he described "the splatterpunk image" as "the image that's one channel on the dial," and goes on to say, "I detest doing the same thing over and over, even within the range of explicit stuff or loud stuff or violent stuff. I am trying to vary my dynamic range" (p. 48).

The point is well-taken, because Schow's "dynamic range" has always been broad, and more significantly, when splatterpunk melted away … it was Schow who was left standing, very much an individual writer of considerable range and talent. The critic S.T. Joshi has suggested that it is more likely that splatterpunk will be remembered because of Schow than the other way around.

Schow's first published work was, rather atypically, science fiction, sold to the magazine Galileo in the late 1970s. He seems to have gone through the usual phase of writerly poverty, then supported himself by penning men's action-and-adventure novels (some under the pseudonym Stephen Grave) for a series he has since playfully referred to as "The Eviscerator." The experience formed the basis for a satirical fantasy, "Pulpmeister" (in Seeing Red, 1990), in which a hack writer meets his own character, then tries to set up the character to write his books, only to discover that this killer-cum-mercenary-cum-hero is not a very good writer … at least not at first.

By 1987, Schow had won a World Fantasy Award for the short story "red Light" (collected in Lost Angels, 1990), which contains a certain amount of loud and sarcastic, but still deftly precise, prose ("She pulled off her workout shirt and aired a chest that would never need the assistance of the Maidenform Corporation, breasts that would soon have the subscribership of Playboy eating their fingernails" [p. 15]), but is actually a sensitive and haunting story about a photographer who is unable to resist photographing a celebrity model until he has virtually consumed her soul; she ultimately disappears. The protagonist, like a lot of Schow heroes, is a cynic hoping for redemption. he brags about discarding lovers like tissues, but he claims to actually love this particular woman. He has difficulty forming any sort of stable relationship. His narrative voice, sarcasm and all, is an authentic one.

Schow certainly could, when he chose to, write in the splatterpunk mode, with such "classics" of the form … as "Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy" (in Black Leather Required [1994] and Book of the Dead [1989]), which is exceedingly gross but far more parodic than genuinely frightening. The saving grace of this and such stories as "Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls" (in Seeing Red) — about a film critic who vents his frustration writing hostile reviews of gore flicks, then finds himself magically transported into one — is that Schow does not take them seriously.

More genuinely frightening are such stories as "Night Bloomer" (in Seeing Red), about a nasty corporate worker who dispatches his boss with the seed of a lethal plant, only to find the seed's hideous growth continues within himself. "Life Partner" (in Black Leather Required), about a woman who prefers her lover dead, is on one level a witty satire of sexual conflict. The story, however, creates genuine unease. The novella, "The Falling Man" combines several familiar Schow tropes (explicit sexuality, difficult or failing relationships, the vanishing of a loved one) to considerable effect, as does "Pamela's Get" (in Lost Angels), in which a dead woman's imaginary companions try to assume reality on their own.

It is impossible to discuss Schow's fiction without mentioning Hollywood. The author is very much the product of Southern California culture, and a lifelong fan of fantastic TV and films. Indeed, the first book he published under his own name was The Outer Limits: The Official Companion (1986), which grew out of a series of articles he and Jeffrey Frentzen had written for Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine. His 1990 story, "Monster Movies" (in Lost Angels) is simply a paean to classic horror movies. "Gills" (in Crypt Orchids, 1998) is a deadpan-funny story about an entity resembling the Creature from the Black Lagoon, living in semi-retirement in Hollywood and griping about shoddy remakes of his original exploits. "One for the Horrors" (in Seeing Red) is an eerie, touching story about a mysterious theatre that shows classic films with never-before-seen footage, and even films that were never made. "Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You" (also in Seeing Red) tells of a cinema haunted by a truly preternatural supply of cockroaches — again, a loud, outrageous story bordering on knowing, controlled parody.

Discussion of the first of the novels attributed to Schow, The Kill Riff (1998), is beyond the scope of the present volume. It is a psychological thriller, about a man whose daughter is killed in a riot at a rock-and-roll concert and gradually slides into madness as he stalks and kills members of the band. It is a riveting narrative, fast-paced and filled with convincing details, but ultimately less interesting than Schow's second novel, The Shaft (1990), which by contrast is definitely in the supernatural mold.

The Shaft seems to contain some autobiographical elements. Schow mentioned in an interview that he once had a six-month job in Chicago, but he was so unenamored of the Windy City that he maintained an apartment in Tucson, Arizona, during the entire period. Indeed, the depiction of a wintry Chicago is very much that of an uncomfortable Southern Californian removed reluctantly from his environment: dark, cold, filthy, menacing. This is more than exaggeration or hype. It contributes effectively to the novel's atmosphere as one of the characters, a drug dealer, is forced to flee his familiar, sunny home (in this case, Florida, not California) to Chicago after the accidental death of his boss' latest sex toy. In the dark, strange world of Chicago's underclass, he resumes his trade and takes up residence in an outrageously dingy apartment building, the Kenilworth Arms, which is no ordinary slum dwelling, as in one chapter it seems to literally devour one of its tenants.

Into this environment come two other characters, an artist fleeing a failed relationship, and a prostitute. Despite their differences, they become companions in a struggle for survival against menaces both natural (drug dealers and gangsters, the police) and supernatural. In the building's central ventilation shaft dwells a quasi-Lovecraftian monster, the presence of which is never completely rationalized in the course of the novel but which may be seen as an outward manifestation of the evil spirit of the Kenilworth Arms. Indeed, the building is one of the great haunted establishments in supernatural fiction, ranking alongside Shirley Jackson's Hill House and Stephen King's Overlook Hotel.

The strengths of the novel are many. Schow uses vulgarity and explicit material not to shock, but to produce a genuinely convincing portrait of the people and events described. Schow's prose is like a series of ugly but evocative photographs, selected and snapped from precisely the right perspective. The characterization is entirely believable. While it is useless to speculate how many gangsters and drug dealers Schow has actually met, one must credit either his imagination or his reportorial skills for the way that he is able to convince the reader that he knows exactly how these people act and think. At times, he can almost make them sympathetic — or perhaps it is more accurate to say that he makes us understand how they justify themselves from their own points of view. The supernatural menaces are effective because they enhance the already-menacing sense of place and situation. As if it is not bad enough that someone has to climb down a filthy, fetid airshaft in a Chicago slum apartment in the dead of night in the middle of winter to retrieve a bundle of cocaine (which might mean the difference between life and death and promise a better future for the characters), there also happens to be a monster down there — and the building itself seems alive and malevolent.

The Shaft is a fine example of "urban horror" in a tradition that goes as far back as Charles Dickens' "No. 1 Branch Line, the Signalman" (1866), but is exemplified by such classic Fritz Leiber stories as "Smoke Ghost" (coincidentally, also set in Chicago), "The Hound," and "You're All Alone." Inexplicably, in 2002 this book had still not been published in the United States, although the original short story, which also failed to sell until it appeared in the Schow issue of Weird Tales, was later republished in Black Leather Required.

In the absence of his promised third novel, Schow in the early years of the new century continued to demonstrate a mastery of the short story. His 2001 collection, Eye, contains several first-rate tales, some of them supernatural, some borderline. "Blessed Event" is about fears associated with pregnancy and childbirth. One of the characters, beneath his human guise, is a bizarre, beaked entity that can devour a woman's foetus "the way a gull swallows a fish" (p. 52), then insert its own "meat" instead. For this reason, a man has murdered and disemboweled his girlfriend. He tells his tale to a pair of detectives. It is certain by the end of the story that the bird-headed things exist, but there is no explanation of their nature or reason for their existence. They could as readily be extraterrestrials, demons, projections of human fears.

"Watcher of the Skies" is somewhat difficult to categorize. Indeed, it is an original to the collection because Schow could not sell it separately — too science fictional for the weird/horror magazines, too horrific for the science fiction ones. The story concerns children who befriend something, a creature that is very likely a stranded space alien. But this is the nightmare version of E.T. without magic or a happy ending. Eventually the adults kill the alien and treat the children as if they had done something shameful. Eventually, as the children grow up, the incident passes away with their childhood and becomes an effective metaphor for the seeming irrationality of adults, to whom children can never explain certain very important things.

Other stories in the book reiterate now-familiar Schow themes. In "Calndar Girl" we meet a man who (unsurprisingly) has had a long series of unsuccessful or superficial relationships with women. He now works for a pornography publisher and discovers that a model currently being featured in the publisher's magazines seems to be the very same centerspread girlhe had fixated on since adolescence, completely unchanged despite the passage of decades. It turns out that she is indeed the same, an immortal being kept alive by her "lovers," who give her years of their lives in order to keep her young.

"Entr'acte" is about a man who receives a phone call in the middle of the night; the caller instructs him to get away immediately, because the woman in the bed beside him is not human. This happens to be the case, but the man's lover manages to make him forget the discovery (even though he has scars from his encounter with her true, alien self) and things go on as before.

"Holiday" is almost a reverse image of the same story, and is one of the very few weird tales (perhaps the only one) narrated by a tattoo. A crude, drunken boor, very much a caricature of a typical Schow protagonist, has acquired a tattoo during one of his all-night binges. It is exactly what one would expect, a female figure with enormous breasts, hips, and pubic hair, but little else. But this figure is alive, and resents its grotesque appearance. Being unable to come to any sensible terms with its host, it spreads over his entire body and absorbs him, becoming a normal woman with a tattoo of a caricatured man rapidly disappearing from her shoulder.

Some of the other stories are not fantastic, such as "2¢ Worth," which is an interesting parallel to Ray Bradbury's "The Pedestrian," about a man who is deemed a social deviant because he reads books, and "Quebradora," about an American murderer who flees south and finds a new life and a kind of redemption behind a Mexican wrestler's mask.

A survey of Schow's fiction, from Seeing Red and Lost Angels through Eye makes clear that Schow is not a supernatural writer of the Lovecraftian or Leiberesque sort, with his focus on the cosmic and on intrusions from beyond the realm of human experience, nor is he, like Thomas Ligotti, primarily preoccupied with questions on the unreality of existence. Even when Schow uses fantastic tropes (either classically supernatural or taken from the imagery of science fiction), his focus is on the immediate, Earth-bound world of interpersonal relationships, more often than not, sexual relationships. That the woman in "Entr'acte" is some sort of alien or demonic being is only of interest because of the way she highlights gender tensions, in this case, to borrow the phrase Schow attributes to Gordon Van Gelder, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, the perception of "Woman as Other."

Similarly, "Watcher of the Skies" is more about the relationships between children and adults than it is about visiting aliens. In these concerns and approaches, Schow may be placed firmly in the Southern California school of horror and fantasy writing, that which is typified by Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone TV show and the writers centered around him, particularly Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont. Schow's work contains more explicit sexual content than that of the former writers, as is unsurprising for a product of his generation. He happened to be writing at a time when considerably more explicitness was allowed, but unlike many other, lesser talents, he has generally used this freedom to good effect, rather than for gratuitous shock.

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DJS notes that "Pulpmeister" and "Red Light" were both originally published in Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine, in 1982 and 1986 respectively. "Blood Rape of the Lust Ghouls" was first published in Night Cry magazine in 1986. "Night Bloomer" was original to Seeing Red, but "Life Partner" was originally published in Dark Voices 5: The Pan Book of Horror (1993). "The Falling Man" and "Pamela's Get" were both originally published in Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine (1988 and 1987, respectively), as was "Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You" (1984). "One for the Horrors" first saw print in the much-venerated Whispers magazine, in 1983. Original publication date of The Kill Riff was 1987. The correct title of the cited story is "2¢ Worth" (the Encyclopedia had it as "Two Cents Worth").

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