It took me a while to investigate T.E.D Klein’s work in any great detail. I was aware of him, that he was held in high regard and that he’d been around for a while. That last point was what put me off investigating any further. I figured that since he’d been around since the 1970s he would have a vast and dense back catalogue of work for me to work through, and that it’d be a bitch trying to work out where to start. Because of this, I didn’t bother trying.
How foolish of me. And how wrong.
The spur was reading Black Man With A Horn in the Cthulhu 2000 anthology edited by Jim Turner. It’s a fairly strong collection, if you ignore And His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood by the dreadful Poppy Z Brite, but Klein’s story stands out. It addresses the woes of the various contempories of Lovecraft who were relegated by history as nothing more than correspondents of ‘the master’, defined only by their relationships with him; and at the same time tells its own tale of ancient evil come to bear on the modern world. Klein’s collection Dark Gods brings this together with three other long-ish stories and I’d claim it as one of the most complete and masterful pieces of work ever produced in the field.
The Ceremonies is, to date, his only novel (Klein has said in interviews past that he will do “almost anything to avoid writing”). It is, at its heart, an extension of his short story The Events at Poroth Farm – largely considered a masterpiece, although I’ll confess that I’m yet to read it. The story follows the intersecting stories of two New York inhabitants. Jeremy Friers is a slightly down on his luck academic, looking for some much needed solitude to prepare a paper on Gothic Literature. Carol is a slim virginial red-head, not long left the convent life, who is trying to find her way in the city. Both are maneuvered into a supernatural plot to raise one of Klein’s customary ‘Old Evils’ by a sinister old man named Rosie, who dreams of bringing his master back into the world.
Klein conveys a wonderful sense of place and atmosphere – the small religious community that surrounds Poroth Farm (which is where Jeremy retreats to) is very clearly sketched, but it is in his descriptions of the wild woodland surrounding the farm that Klein excels. He is equally strong with his depiction of late 70s/early 80s New York – a dark and dangerous place, nonetheless brimming with life and excitement (Children of the Kingdom, from the Dark Gods collection is similarly strong in this respect). He creates a perfect sense of creeping dream, his writing charged with ambiguity and ’slight of phrase’, those little uneasy hints which gradually make an alarming kind of sense. This is strong horror writing and Klein’s knowledge of the field shines through every line, particularly in the way Jeremy’s summer readings – Machen, Stoker, James (Henry – about whose Turn of the Screw Klein is quite damning) – reflect his reactions to the events unfolding around him.
Klein is equally adept with his supporting cast – the Poroth’s themselves, a young couple recently returned to the bosom of their religious community after some time out in the big bad world and struggling to fit in with the farm life, are especially sympathetic. The rest of the community, and Poroth’s mother, are less convincing, but impact on the story so rarely that it doesn’t detract from the rest of the story.
If The Ceremonies has a problem then it’s the length. At over 500 pages, the story feels stretched. Klein doesn’t seem to have added much to the basic plot of the original ‘Poroth Farm’ and as such what story there is starts to feel a little thin. It’s never a boring book – there’s far too many nice little touches, hints of menace – but you can find yourself hitting a point where you’ve read 50 or 100 pages then looking back and realising that not a whole lot has happened. As I’ve mentioned above, The Ceremonies is Klein’s only novel so far (a second, Nighttown, has been mooted in the past but has yet to come to light), and in comparing it to the tales in Dark Gods it’s easy to reach the conclusion that he’s a lot better with the short form than he is with the long. Until he releases something else, it’s impossible to say for sure. At the moment, the only other book easily available is a recent collection amusingly entitled Reassuring Tales. I’d like to get a hold of it (not least to read the original Events at Poroth Farm), but at the moment it’s only available as a limited edition and I haven’t seen it around for anything less that £40. Shame, because Klein deserves a larger audience, but he’s not going to get it that way!
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