Book Review: Lesser Demons

Lesser Demons by Norman Partridge (Subterranean Press, 2010)

Partridge's latest release (the first since his modern classic of Halloween lit, Dark Harvest) is a standout collection of ten stories/novellas.  Long renowned for his ability to hybridize genres, Partridge more than lives up to his reputation here with these potent mixes of crime fiction, horror, and dark fantasy.

"No one answered his knock, so Keyes kicked in the door," the author writes in the opening line of the leadoff story, instantly demonstrating his flair for the hard-boiled.  But "Second Chance" is no ordinary heist-gone-wrong story.  A sense of imminent betrayal predominates as the protagonist attempts to claim his share of the take from an armored car holdup, yet the climactic twist shocks nonetheless; Keyes suffers a double-cross unlike any he could have imagined.  A re-reading of Partridge's deftly plotted fiction (which tends to begin in medias res) is often rewarded, and a second tour through "Second Chance" reveals just how carefully the author prepared for the fantastic turn of events in the story's conclusion.

In "Road Dogs," Partridge serves up a novella of werewolf noir.  A laconic but hot-blooded tough guy (a character, we learn from the equally-enjoyable story notes at volume's end, whom Partridge would love to see Viggo Mortensen play if the piece were ever filmed) seeks the truth about his sister's brutal murder, only to find himself pitted a shapeshifting grifter.  "Durston," meanwhile, melds horror with the Western, as an ornery gunslinger is haunted by the hanged-man apparition of the partner he sold out to the local sheriff.  A good gloss on this story might be "When Bad Things Happen to Badass People."

No less than his eponymous desperado Durston, Partridge knows how to shoot from the hip.  Damn, but can this guy sling a simile.  Don't believe me?  Consider this gem of a passage from the title story: "The corpse hit the road like a sack of kindling ready for the flame.  It was a sight.  Crows must have been at the driver's face, because his fishgut lips were gone.  Those scarred words carved on his skin still rode his jerky flesh like wormy bits of gristle, but now they were chiseled with little holes, as if those crows had pecked punctuation."  But by no means is this writer all style and no substance; there's deeper meaning to be unearthed in Partridge's fiction.  Take, for instance, "Carrion," an eerie tale of a shuttered house standing in the middle of the Arizona desert (depicted in Vincent Chong's astounding dust jacket illustration) and the accompanying supernatural buzzards that feed on misery and hatred as much as on flesh and blood.  The story, though, is ultimately a rumination on the human--on the need to carry on despite the experience of horror (the protagonist is a veteran haunted by the bloody battles of World War II), and on the hopes and dreams that form a vital part of any man's innards.

There are only a couple of entries in this collection that prove less than stellar.  The offbeat "And What Did You See in the World?" perhaps suffers from the strictures imposed by the circumstances of its creation: this commissioned story (for the anthology Embrace the Mutation) had to create a narrative based on the scene in a J.K. Potter artwork.  Partridge's "The Fourth Stair Up From the Landing" is an effectively atmospheric haunted-house tale (and the most overtly American Gothic work in the collection), but the distant third-person viewpoint employed, coupled with the complete absence of dialogue, leads to a bit of obtuseness.  I really wanted to love this particular story, yet ultimately felt a need to bridle my enthusiasm.

I had no such problem with the remaining four tales in Lesser Demons, which are flat-out brilliant.  In "The Big Man," radiation from atomic testing in New Mexico has supersized spiders, scorpions, bats--and one human being.  Partridge is obviously referencing classic 50's sci-fi here, but the author's tongue is never planted in his proverbial cheek.  "The Big Man" isn't some postmodernist parody but rather a moving fable in which an orphan boy learns key life lessons about the nature of fantasy.

An element of satire, though, is present in "Lesser Demons."  On one level this is a harrowing piece of Lovecraftian fiction, stocked with exotic creatures (and even more ominous monstrosities waiting in the wings).  At the same time, "Lesser Demons" sets itself apart as a critique of Lovecraft's work, in particular the passive, bookish characters who narrate the Mythos tales.  Partridge contrasts the tactics of his gun-toting, go-getting sheriff narrator and the sheriff's deputy (and fellow apocalypse survivor) who spends his time with his nose buried in a Necronomicon-like tome.  When the deputy reads aloud from the book at one point, the sheriff grouses: "The words sounded like a garbage disposal running backwards.  I couldn't understand any of them."  One would be hard-pressed to find a better encapsulation of the difference between Partridge's and Lovecraft's sensibilities.

As in "The Big Man," Partridge plays with scale in "The House Inside," a novella that reads like Toy Story scripted by Richard Matheson.  A mysterious change in the sun has killed off earth's humans while simultaneously bringing toys to life.  From the perspective of the cowboy figurine who becomes the hero of the tale, the dead boy sprawling on the lawn where he'd been playing looks "like a giant, pudgy mesa."  In another terrific bit of description, Partridge writes of the "cat-hair tumbleweeds" drifting across the hardwood floor of the titular house.  "The House Inside" features plenty of rousing action (as the cowboy and a separate platoon of toy soldiers make arduous journeys to get out of the sun and into the house, where a ravenous, mutant spider happens to be lurking).  Yet the novella also excels at introspection, conveying the existential angst of the toys as they struggle to deal with, and make sense of, a doomsday scenario.

"The Iron Dead," a novella original to this collection, is your basic yarn about Prohibition-era bootleggers, a small-town Montana sheriff--and vanquished vampires resurrected by the Devil himself and transformed into infernal cyborgs.  Like "Lesser Demons," "The Iron Dead" includes a slew of nasty monsters (who seek to augment their army by scavenging engine parts and human organs alike).  they are opposed by the literally iron-fisted hero, Chaney (whose allusive name points to Partridge's unabashed fondness for American Monster Culture).  the novella is Partridge at his incredibly-imaginative, rip-roaring best.  As he notes in the afterword, he wrote "The Iron Dead" as if he were submitting the piece to Weird Tales in the 1930's.  Based on the result, Partridge could well have expected an avid acceptance letter from Farnsworth Wright.

Lesser Demons belongs in the personal library of any fan of short-form genre fiction.  And a word to the wise: don't hesitate to purchase this book; the trade edition has already sold out from the publisher, and a finite number of copies remain at sellers such as Amazon.com.  After that, there's only one place where you'll be sure to find Partridge's collection: on the next Bram Stoker Awards ballot.