Toys in the "Mental" Attic

Toys in the (Mental) Attic

01/17/2005

Sarrantonio, Al. Toybox. New York: Leisure Books, 2003. ¸ 1999. 255 p.

Many of the short stories in Al Sarrantonio's Toybox begin with a whimsical version of the phrase "it was a dark and stormy night." At first, I wasn't sure what to make of this collection of adult fiction (in the sense that the writing style would appeal to adults, rather than young adults) in which each and every story's protagonist is a preteen or teenager. But then I ran across a February Publisher's Weekly review which stated that "at their best, which is quite often, these stories remind the reader that the most effective horror tales reduce us all to babes lost in the woods of our dark imaginings," and some of the tales began to gel for me. Unfortunately, I found that on the whole, the stories in Toybox were too consistently imagistic and open ended (rather than linear or narrative), and they became tiresome. The phrase "too much of a good thing" comes to mind when I look at Sarrantonio's first collection of stories.

Although he is known as a novelist and editor of various anthologies, Sarrantonio has spent the last two decades of his life producing short fiction as well. Like the stories in Toybox, mainly written between 1981 and 1991, his weird tales usually explore rarely touched upon themes in the genre, and they defy the typical formulae associated with horror, even when horror is produced on the small scale of the short story. His tales read like a darker version of Ray Bradbury, as he produces worlds where the lines between the real and the grotesquely magical are blurred, so much so that his characters interract with a degree of normalcy with monstrous beings, such as the Personification of Fright (which Sarrantonio makes synonymous with The Bogey Man). As such, his stories have as much in common with dark fantasy as they do with horror.

Toybox is chock full of fantasy turned ominous (and sometimes downright evil). "Pumpkin Head," the opening tale of the book, sets the stage well. It introduces readers to a preteen girl who feels out of place as the new student in class during a Halloween party. She wins favor when the children discover that she is an expert storyteller of the macabre, as she regiles them with a rendering of a tale-within-the-tale, the story of Pumpkin Head, a boy, like herself, who is shunned because of his hydrocephalism. In her story, the boy decides to take revenge on the students at school who tease him (shades of Columbine abound). This is bad news for her classmates, for the girl also harbors a terrifying secret. But even "Pumpkin Head" falls on its face, for its ending is left so open as to defy even the logic of horror. Sarrantonio's second offering, "The Man With Legs," shows a lot of promise early on, as a brother-sister pair debate whether they will go the the house of a strange man. They do go, and discover something about themselves, as well as about the mysterious stranger, but again the story ends without saying much. "Under My Bed" is a dopelganger story narrated by an abused boy which ends at least with some sense of destiny, but seems trite at best.

This is not to imply that there aren't gems within this collection of what seem like various stages of rough ideas. My personal favorite is "The Spook Man," one of the Fright Personified tales in the collection. Here, four children, three male and one female, decide to pay a visit to the spook man, and what they find in his abode both entrances and frightens them. Ultimately, they are given the opportunity to become one of the spook man's "children" and live with him forever, a choice which tests the metal of each of the four. Saying any more would give away the ending to a fine story which has something to say about the nature of horror fiction and its readership (hint: the decisions of the children mirror the results of an often cited horror readership survey done by the Gallup organization in 1988). The other Fright Personified tale, "Bogy," is not nearly as thought-provoking, but it is atmospheric and fun. "The Corn Dolly" is also a well-written piece, more in the Rod Serling than Ray Bradbury vein. It is one of those stories that ends in a masterful one-sentence twist, of the type that completely pulls the rug out from under the reader, but is nonetheless believable given the context of the fiction.

The stories near the end of Toybox are more horrific, darker, more genre oriented. "Children of Cain," a doppelganger story of two boys who share a passion for torturing and murdering all creatures great and small, offers some promise as being the best of the bunch, but its ending is formulaic, and to be honest, is a bit of a let down. Then there is "Richard's Head," a tale of an introverted genius whose head begins swelling unexpectedly, and a relationship gone sour. "Red Eve" is a futuristic vampire science fiction/horror story in which the world's population has outgrown the planet and lives in a glass dome above it. Each of these latter stories is promising, but they fall prey to Sarrantonio's stylistic preoccupation with atmosphere, to the exclusion of a discernible plot line.

Then again, perhaps it is simply this reviewer's preference that short fiction includes, even to a small degree, some kind of linear plot device. Other critics have found that Sarrantonio skillfully balances his minimal plots against an abundance of eerie imagery, as he drums into readers' heads the significance of dark autumn nights, mysterious strangers, spooky toys, grotesque Halloween costumes, and menacing elders. Still, there are others, who like myself, feel that short horror fiction should by its nature be more intense than Sarrantonio's offerings, which are at best, as one reviewer stated it, "odd."