Vampires Overhead

VAMPIRES OVERHEAD

ISBN: 9781553101680 (Kindle edition)

ISBN: 9781553101697 (ePub edition)

Published by Christopher Roden

For Ash-Tree Press

P.O. Box 1360, Ashcroft, British Columbia

Canada V0K 1A0

http://www.ash-tree.bc.ca/eBooks.htm

First electronic edition 2012

First Ash-Tree Press edition 2002

First published 1935

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over, and does not assume responsibility for, third-party websites or their content.

This edition © Ash-Tree Press 2002, 2012

Introduction © Jack Adrian

Original cover design © Jason Van Hollander

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

Produced in Canada

CONTENTS

Introduction
by Jack Adrian

VAMPIRES OVERHEAD

I. The Coming of Bingen

II. The Tunnel Beneath the Brewery

III. The First of the Vampires

IV. The River Through the Dead City

V. The Finding of the Screamer

VI. The Flight Across the Marshes

VII. The Valley of Security

VIII. The Killing of the Stranger

IX. The Opal Ring

X. The Death of Bingen

XI. The Future!

VAMPIRES OVERHEAD

Introduction

ALAN HYDER, in
VAMPIRES OVERHEAD
, created one of the great pieces of twentieth century horror pulp fiction. There is nothing clever about the story, nothing cerebral; certainly nothing sophisticated (sophistication is not a crime you could ever have laid at Hyder-the-writer’s door, probably never at Hyder-the-human-being’s).
Vampires Overhead
is crude, flawed, simplistic, and at times downright sordid. But it also has a scorching narrative drive; from the start Hyder grabs you by the scruff of the imagination and hurls you into the action, so that you’re forced to read on and on, blind to its author’s (actually very obvious) imperfections, blind to all the things that don’t add up, that don’t make sense—blind to everything, in fact, but the hurtling momentum of the terrifying here-and-now.

It’s a thrilling (in the best sense of the word) piece of pulp, and absolutely nothing Hyder wrote before its publication prepares you for its impact. Come to that, nothing he wrote after it comes anywhere near.

So who was Alan Hyder? Not someone who ever made it into the reference books, that’s for sure; not even that invaluable guide to Grub Street between the wars,
The Author’s and Writer’s Who’s Who & Reference Guide
. Nobody (so far as I’m aware) mentions him in books of memoirs set in the immediate pre- or post-war period, and the editors and publishers who (presumably) knew him a little and took him out to lunch once in a while must all by now be long since dead and buried.

Judging from his books it seems more likely he was either an ethnic West Indian, or a white Briton who was born or had been brought up in the West Indies (almost certainly Jamaica). On balance, my vote would go down on the latter. Workwise, he wrote just four novels, all pre-war, and a handful of normal-length short stories for the magazines of the day, as well as a host of short-shorts, most of which were later collected into two slim volumes.

Hyder’s first novel,
Lofty
(1932), is a grim affair (though told in an authorial voice of almost unrelieved facetiousness) describing a short and by no means merry life that leads to the gallows. Hyder’s themes are socio-realistic—the kinds of themes explored by American ‘naturalistic’ writers such as John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, and the young John Steinbeck, although I doubt very much that Hyder himself was aware of this. His primary influence, though certainly not in the actual writing, is manifestly Hardy, in that he seems deliberately to set his characters up as mere pawns of fate: struggle as they may, they cannot escape their doom. Lofty himself has a wretched but hectic childhood, joins up in the Great War, shoots an officer, deserts, befriends a prostitute, gives himself up, is hanged.

Although
Black-Girl, White-Lady
(1934) is altogether more adventurous in theme, plot, and setting, it is sabotaged by Hyder’s lack of general literary skills. His model here is the American chronicler of Deep South poor white trash Erskine Caldwell, whose early bestsellers
Tobacco Road
(1932) and
God’s Little Acre
(1933) had already attained near-classic status. Hyder turned his attention to poor black and half-caste trash. Set in Jamaica, the novel tells, in sprawling fashion, the tale of the beautiful Rina (short for Ocarina), the slum-child bastard daughter of a ‘fat Mammy’ and a ‘Spanish gentilmans’ from Kingston. Rina is more ofay than black and has a desperate desire for a white child, preferably (weirdly) from the dire Cyril, a lazy, selfish English boy from the upper middle class who eventually seduces her—‘pain seared thanksgiving through her arched body until her soul flowered’. She works as a prostitute in the local bordello, the ‘Scarlet Grasshopper’, presided over by the gross Madam Titicaca, and at the end of the book gets herself to a nunnery—possibly with child: Hyder’s prose in the ‘big moments’ (see above) is by no means a model of transparency, his actual meaning (i.e. what he wants to get across to the reader) frequently difficult to grasp.

An additional barrier to understanding is his tin ear for dialogue. It would be simple to quote generously—or, in fact, un-generously—from his prose, but this would be too much the sledgehammer/nut approach. A good deal of his dialogue (exclamation marks aside) has a certain crude force that is, at times, almost attractive. Too often, however, he descends to the ethnic, or at any rate his version of the ethnic: ‘Lawsy, suh! Wan’t too, Ise abettin’, a trip along to Noo Yark lak dem rich niggers has to meet dat person dere in dat place what takes de kinks outta black people’s hairs’, or ‘Married! Lawsy, suh. Ise suah bin too busy keepin’ dem men offern me to think ’bout gettin’ married!’ Long stretches like this—and there are many—make the book hard labour, certainly for the reader seventy years on who is used to a more naturally written black demotic as expressed by writers (both black and white) such as Walter Mosley, Robert B. Parker, Elmore Leonard, and Chester Himes.

Hyder’s fourth novel,
Prelude to Blue Mountains
(1936), is in many ways the most exasperating of the lot. It starts off as another Hardyesque slice of doomed lives battling hopelessly against the inevitable, and its plot may be epitomised in a single chapter heading: ‘Fate moves a pawn’. Its premise, however, though banal, is by no means slackly presented: Start Rasny Hansone, a generally mild and inoffensive man (and though owning a patently West Indian name, he seems to be a straight-down-the-middle white Britisher) strangles his nagging wife in a drunken rage. Leila Lavalette, sable-tressed gypsy beauty with dreams above her station, yearns for adventure and romance, not a dreary life on the road. They meet, are attracted, take it on the lam. But while on the run Hansone is betrayed by Leila’s father, who tells the cops where to find him. Up to this point the novel can be judged to be a reasonable additon to the 1930s’ socio-realistic ‘escape’ novels in which characters uncomfortable within the rules and mores of ‘polite society’ break out (usually violently) and are pursued by the guardians of society (usually, though not necessarily, the police, who are usually, though not necessarily, far more corrupt and brutal than those they are pursuing). James M. Cain’s
The Postman Always Rings Twice
and
Double Indemnity
are exemplars of this particular sub-genre. In Hyder’s rendering Hansone is captured, tried, and sentenced to death.

But Hyder then sabotages what is by no means a good book, but isn’t on the whole a terribly bad book either, by changing the social realism of the plot into sheer pulp fantasy. Leila employs a ‘crook’ (Hyder’s description, and we’re not talking criminal mastermind here) to break into the prison and free Hansone from the condemned cell. This is duly done with not much inconvenience to anyone; indeed with extraordinary ease—virtually ‘with one bound Jack was free’. Leila and Hansone flee across the ocean to Jamaica, but Hansone jumps off the ship near to land and battles a shark, losing a hand in the process (possibly Hyder’s attempt to mitigate the murder). Leila and her father make land, where they meet a good-time girl at a hotel. Leila’s father marries her. Hansone reappears, minus his hand, having miraculously made it to shore, and hitches up with Leila.
Fin
.

This claptrap, only marginally less silly than the average Jeffrey Archer plot, has to be read to be believed, and frankly one is at a loss to explain why it was ever published.  A glance at Hyder’s pre-war publishers may perhaps explain the seemingly inexplicable.

Lofty
was issued by Cranley & Day, one of a surprising number of publishers who seemed to spring up in the very worst moments of the Depression, and as swiftly, like mushrooms at high noon, died. Pawling & Ness is another; Denis Archer yet another. Perhaps Cranley & Day’s chief claim to fame (and it’s a legitimate one) is that, in 1933, they issued two cruelly funny satires, by one Robert Leicester (probably a pseudonym), on D. H. Lawrence and Radclyffe Hall:
Sadie Catterley’s Cover
and
The Hell of Comeliness
.