The new revised edition of CELLARS is
now available!
One of the first truly visceral horror novels, hard to believe CELLARS was
published in 1982 -- pre-Barker and pre-splatterpunk.
Within CELLARS the savvy Shirley reader will find many of the demon-seeds
that grew into his later dark fiction. Tom Winstead in the ST. JAMES GUIDE
TO HORROR, GHOST & GOTHIC WRITERS sums it up as a "fairly graphic...story of a
sort of demonic manifestation in the underworld of New York City. A writer who
is skeptical about the supernatural is called upon to assist the police in
solving a rash of horrible cult mutilation murders, The writer's employer shows
undue interest in the case, and though the writer quits his employ, continues to
pay him handsomely to assist the police. In the company of a psychic woman he
has been interviewing, and who quickly becomes his lover, they track down the
secrets taking place beneath New York, the rebirth of the cult of Ahrinam [sic], Many
of the themes in this book foreshadow a much more successful use in the novel
WETBONES."
Well, more or less. Mostly less. There's a great deal more to CELLARS than Mr.
Winstead notes. Lanyard, the writer, is a prototype of Shirley's "seeker-hero,"
but with no spiritual grounding, only a fanatical skepticism. The world and his life are a
mess, yet he feels there has to be "a hidden pattern that made sense of all the
random damage that was done to people. Life had to be more than a great obstacle
course...There had to be some hidden pattern making sense of it all. Beneath it
all." He denies the existence of the supernatural so completely that it blocks his acceptance of
what is happening around him.
New York City, circa 1981, is vividly depicted -- kinky sex, disco decadence,
drugs both chic (the days when cocaine was considered "not really addictive")
and dirty (junkies in shooting galleries), porn, the street life, pre-sanitized
Times Square -- and it's all placed in the pressure cooker of an October made
supernaturally hotter than August.
CELLARS is significantly subterranean. The killings take place beneath the
city and the city itself is a place where any ordinary drain becomes a direct
connection to a gruesome death. Drains go "into the secret places under the
city's skin where tubular infinities of liquefied civilization pumped through
crumbling pipes, gurgling." There are forgotten tunnels, a
secret subway train, a covert temple -- a first circle of hell.
As Halloween approaches, more are sacrificed to the Head Underneath, power
currents feed the evil, and children become murderous monsters. Lanyard and
Madelaine, an actress with psychic abilities face, some very nasty things. (Including,
for Lanyard, a seductive woman who suddenly has "four glistening, transparent,
rubbery tendrils extending from her vagina, wriggling like the antennae of
silverfish; beckoning, dripping yellow ooze..." A female counterpart of DRACULA
IN LOVE!)
CELLARS is unrelentingly dark, and it is Shirley's only novel so completely stygian.
Protagonist Lanyard has not sunk low enough to find the power beneath despair.
He has nowhere to go to find strength. There is no glimmer of redemption, no
spark of hope, no acknowledgment of a moral balance, no evidence that there IS
anything "beneath it all" except depravity and wickedness. Written during his
sojourn in New York City during a period in his life when he switched from
abusing psychedelics to abusing harder narcotics (although he never wrote on
drugs), Shirley was deeply punished with depression. He saw only dark side and CELLARS reflects this. Of all Shirley's novels this might be the
one that could be most interestingly re-written.
[And...perhaps it has been rewritten -- at least in part. A new edition is due out in June 2006 from
Infrapress.]
