DREAD STATE: A Political Horror Anthology by Michael Paul Gonzalez

DREAD STATE: A Political Horror Anthology Reviews

• 
  blake

  I evolved a philosophy a few years ago that politics makes people mean and stupid. This came from being on Twitter, and realizing otherwise intelligent, kind people could say the most horrifying things and overlook the most obvious truths in the name of politics. (I do not exempt myself from this, either, which is why I try to avoid politics.)
  
  This was the last book I received from Crystal Lake Publishing as a perk for supporting their crowdfunding efforts. It was last because I put it on the bottom. (Heh.) And I pretty much knew what to expect.
  
  You may have heard of "clap humor". It's when, rather than writing a joke, a comedian expresses a political idea that his audience agrees with. The audience doesn't laugh, but they approve, so they clap, and that's good enough for pretty much all the late night talk show hosts these days.
  
  "Dread State" brings the concept of "clap horror". It's not scary, but you approve, so you clap.
  
  If you approve. The problem is, the necessity to strike out at a particular political party removes your ability to see things through their POV. In fact, political correctness (from whatever source) demands that you do not. Therefore you end up with terrible caricatures for characters.
  
  The stories in this collection can be broken down into a few categories:
  
  1. Horror stories that are politically/governmentally themed
  2. Splatter porn for Trump haters
  3. Not horror stories
  
  Paul Moore starts the book off strong with a nice story ("The War Room") of ancient evil in the #1 category.
  
  Then Ray Garton gets his Henry Kissinger hate on, which—eh, it's a good enough story ("The Blood of Patriots and Tyrants") and doesn't feel cheap.
  
  Jason Brock ("Return of the Gipper") is probably the best example of "clap horror" in the book. In "clap humor", the audience isn't enjoying anything like humor—just the frisson of imagining their ideological enemies squirm—in this story, one can't really be scared, but presumably enjoys same frisson. It's so pointless, by the end, the editor had stopped reading it.
  
  "Death and Suffrage" was a perfect example of the problem caused by introducing politics to art. It reminded me of Joe Dante's execrable "Masters of Horror" short, "Homecoming"—which a quick Google tells me was based on "Death and Suffrage". This is funny, because they're not that similar, if I recall the MoH correctly, except in the same (stupid) conceit: That the dead, coming back to life, would vote Democrat.
  
  In the "Homecoming" short, it was specifically vets. Vets were mad they'd been killed in war, and they were going to vote out those warmongering Republicans! But vets generally vote more conservative, even if injured, and even if they lose family members in war. The author has arrogated to himself the voice of the dead, and with that power he gives them no respect.
  
  This problem appears in spades in "Death and Suffrage" because, honestly, the entirety of the population of the U.S. that died before, let's say, 1980 would find modern people freakish, and would be so change averse as to guarantee the election of the most reactionary people.
  
  In fact, this story hinges on gun control, which—honestly, how blinkered do you have to be to believe that the dead rising from their graves would encourage people toward gun control?
  
  Bailey can write, too, so this is a great example of my thesis.
  
  "The Governor's Execution" by G. Ted Theewen was a fine example in the #1 category, though a little confusing.
  
  "GOTV" by Tom Breen was a cute gag. There's a long tradition of such stories in horror, and a real panache needed to play the joke out long enough but not too long.
  
  "The Fool on the Hill" by Lisa Morton was one of the strongest stories in the book. More post-apocalyptic sci-fi than horror, but I'll allow it.
  
  "How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Wall" by Simon McCaffrey is a good example of talent wasted by political myopia. The opening description is of a cramped living space in a crowded area. I was sort of confused when that turned out to a dystopic vision of The Wall, because it sounded like someone describing life in a "blue" enclave like San Francisco. McCaffrey does some good writing, and it's wasted because he's shut himself off from half of humanity.
  
  "Willow Tests Well" by Nick Mamatas. I dunno. Reads like a fevered conspiracy. I was expecting a better payoff. It kind of fits with "Seeds" because I had the same sort of feeling: that underlying a lot of people's political mindsets is a malignant cynicism.
  
  But, hey, you know: It's horror. You can't really bitch about malignant cynicism, amirite?
  
  "The Tie-Breaker" by Kevin Holton. Totally more apocalyptic sci-fi than horror. And kind of a goofy '80s sci-fi at that. But fine.
  
  "The Year of the Mouse" by William F. Nolan. Another thinly disguised #2-style entry. Not even horror, just...I mean, it's a blog entry at Daily Kos or something.
  
  "Your Own Damned Fault" by David Perlmutter. I dunno. A riff on "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" Not really horror.
  
  "Love Perverts" by Sarah Lagan. While laden with tropes, political and otherwise, this was well executed and the author seemed to care about her main character. Said character is short-sighted, vain and superficial, but the author knows this and gives us a more complete picture than the purely political does. In that sense, the story transcends, even if the message here is "people are awful" (which, see above, we can't complain about in horror), it's not a message of "those people, and they alone, are awful". One of the longest stories but also one of the most engaging.
  
  "Gadu Yansa" by Sonni K. Brock was basically classic bad-'70s enviroporn. Breaking ground for a pipeline will unleash some Amerind Revenge Mojo. I didn't see how things hung together.
  
  "Feast" by Joseph Rubas. All your political enemies are powered by demons. Pure #2.
  
  "Hyper-Pluralism" by Bobby Wilson. Not horror. Not a story. Even more a blogpost than "Year of the Most" but at least not entirely one-sided.
  
  "That Hot Summer Night In Healey's Bar" by Anthony Ambrogio. OK, on some level, it's just a bunch of puns strung together to make a horror story, but I ended up liking it. It felt like a Twilight-Zone-style shaggy dog.
  
  "Everybody Listens To Buck" by Nicholas Manzolille. Another one with a kind of fun TZ feel, like "It's A Good Life". This and the last were kind of a relief after the marginally written previous three. Some effort went into these, and our narrator in this one feels fleshed out.
  
  "Getting Out To Vote" by Hillary Lyon. At some point, with another 2-3 page story, I began to wonder: Is there just a dearth of politically themed horror. It's not that this is bad, or anything, but it's really not much of anything, either. The transition to zombie in the writing is a nice touch, though.
  
  "Take Me To Your Cheerleader" by Mark Allan Gunnells. OK, it's like a segment on The Simpson's "Treehouse of Horror" but that's not bad.
  
  "The Sixth Street Bus Holds An Election" by Curtis Van Donkelaar. Yeah, I feel like the editor called up some authors and said, "Hey, got any political-based horror? Yeah? Great! Shoot it over! Oh...hey, it's only a page-and-a-half. No worries, I'll call up someone else..." and then that cycle was repeated over and over again. I didn't get the point of this. I increasingly feel like I'm reading writers' exercises.
  
  "The Candidate" by Luke Styer and Skip Johnson. Not only straight-up #2 but kind of funny to read after
  The Great Revolt. Not only is it "clap horror" (except that it's not horror), it's a written from a POV that never strays for a moment from the dominant 2016 media-driven narrative.
  
  The book closes with Ray Bradbury's classic "The Pedestrian", which fits into Ray Bradbury's large oeuvre of general dystopic futures filled with people who are hypnotized by TV and punished for doing things outside the norm. It's not really horror, but it's kind of funny, because it's also not really political—because Bradbury knew that the threat was never politics, but a demand for conformity that leads to a dehumanization of The Other and a demand to stifle books (and speech) that offends.
  
  Why, if he were still alive, he might call it "hate speech".
  
  By the way, he wrote that story BECAUSE he got stopped by cops for walking out on the street at night.