2025 read #95: Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre, edited by August Derleth.

Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre, edited by August Derleth

418 pages

Published 1947

Read from December 9 to December 14

Rating: 3 out of 5

Spanning from the era of anonymous traditional ballads to the 1940s, this ambitious collection purported to be the first to anthologize fantasy and horror verse. It samples broadly across time, from William Blake in the 1780s to Dorothy Quick in the 1940s, and has at least one poem from each decade in between.

I decided to read it for three reasons: 1) to expand my poetry education; 2) to maybe find cool public domain lines to turn into titles; 3) to pad out each of the relevant decade tags here on my reading blog. (Hey, it’s particularly hard to find anything I want to read from the 1800s, 1810s, and 1820s. I’ll do what I must to bulk those tags up.) I was successful at 1 and 3.

There’s no way I could individually review over two hundred poems. I do want to single out a few noteworthy entries from each era, though:

Anonymous traditional ballads

Anyone familiar with Steeleye Span would know most of these selections. I’ve published a story inspired by “Twa Corbies” and a poem queering “The Wee Wee Man,” so of course I’m going to be fond of them. One new to me was “William and Marjorie,” a ghost visitation with a nicely folkloric three-sets-of-three climax, which ends with a rare triumph for the woman.

1780s-1790s

William Blake’s “Fair Eleanor” (1783) is so archetypal in its turgid gothic style that I could have sworn I read it before, but apparently not. It’s interesting to see an old poem structured more or less like a modern short story: in media res opening, followed by filling in the backstory, then climax.

Robert Burns’ “Address to the Deil” (1786) is a banger, recalling the greatest hits of Scottish Twitter as the narrator sarcastically flatters and taunts the Devil with the casual familiarity of one drinking at the same tavern.

Walter Scott’s “The Eve of St. John” (1799) is an extended variant on a common ballad trope — the fair lady wife trysts with the rival of the lord, only this time the rival is already dead — but the narrative (and its rhyme scheme) is solid.

1800s

The book’s lone selection from this decade is “The Lake of the Dismal Swamp” by Thomas Moore (1806). It’s fine. I like the imagery of the firefly lamp and the white canoe.

Why are there so many good Anglophone writings from the eighteenth century, but so few from the first couple decades of the nineteenth? Not just in this anthology, but in general.

1810s

There aren’t that many more offerings from this decade, so I’ll have to single out James Hogg’s “Kilmeny” (1813), a long narrative poem about a mortal woman who visits the land of the spirits before returning to the Scottish greenwood. Some quite lovely descriptions here.

And of course I should mention “Kubla Khan or a Vision of a Dream” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1813). Everyone quotes the opening stanzas, but the rest of the narrative is oddly unremarkable. Anticlimactic, even.

1820s

Of the two selections from this decade, I’ll have to go with John Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (initially 1819, but revised in 1820, so I’m still counting it). I’ve wanted to read Keats ever since I obsessed over Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos as a fledgling adult, back in the early ’00s. I even bought a collection of Keats’ poems back then, which followed me through several moves, only to be donated unread. “Dame” turns out to be a solid enough tale of getting caught in a fae lady’s thrall. A promising introduction.

1830s

There are four poems included from this decade, the most memorable of which is Richard Harris Barham’s “The Hand of Glory” (1838). Truth be told, the narrative felt rather puerile.

1840s

Inevitably, we must single out Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” (1845). It’s one of those cultural fixtures so incessantly referenced and parodied that every kid knows about it. I read it, in fact, as a child, maybe 10 years old, expecting a tale of terror equal to its cultural ubiquity. It is, of course, nothing at all like what my childhood self expected. Rereading it for the first time as an adult, I’m impressed with the fluency of it, the seeming effortlessness of Poe’s meter and rhyme. A classic worthy of the title, just not what a preteen in the 1990s might consider “scary.”

Poe’s “Dream-Land” (1844), which I hadn’t heard of until now, reads like a draft sketch that would, via William Hope Hodgson, Weird Tales, and the 1970s adult fantasy boom, evolve into the familiar fantastic vibe of D&D. I enjoyed it!

Thomas Hood’s “The Haunted House” (1844) is excessively long to my taste, but I enjoyed the opening depiction of fauna and flower taking refuge on the grounds of the namesake haunted house.

Another one of Hood’s ghostly narratives, however, “Pompey’s Ghost” (1842), is remarkable for how racist it is. Most of the poem is spent trying to cram in puns on the word “black.” Imagine the Predator meme format, with “1840s” and “1940s” shaking hands, and the handshake is labeled “Racism.”

This was a weirdly hopping decade for poetry, at least in this book. I also want to mention “The Sands of Dee” by Charles Kingsley (1849), which makes excellent use of repetition to build atmosphere.

1850s

After the glut of poetry in the previous decade, there isn’t much to pick from in the 1850s.

“The Witch Bride” by William Allingham (1850) is a slight but well-written retread of a familiar theme.

Richard Garnett’s “The Highwayman’s Ghost” (1859) is another fun trifle with a self-explanatory title.

1860s

“The Legend of the Glaive” by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1863) is interesting as a prototype of the heightened language of classic Sword & Sorcery and its imitators. We  get a reference to the hero’s “quivering sinew,” as well as catch an inkling of the far-off Conan within a ghostly Norseman’s “Gigantic sorrow.”

Another standout is one I’ve already reviewed on its own: Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti (1862). It’s the first poem in this entire collection known to be written by a woman.

1870s

James Thomson’s “The City of Dreadful Night” (1874) is an interminable meander through typical Romantic shades of mortality, but beginning in section IV it becomes unexpectedly compelling, repetition fashioning an uneasy map of lands between Heaven and Hell:

As I came through the desert thus it was,

As I came through the desert: Hell is mild

And piteous matched with that accursèd wild

In its own fatalistic immensity, “City” bludgeons the reader into respect, and even an occasional slip of atheistic awe. Plus it uses London as a metaphor for being alive in a godless universe, which is just about the most 1870s thing I can imagine.

1880s

James Whitcomb Riley’s “A Glimpse of Pan” (1883) is our earliest, uh, glimpse of Pan. It pre-dates Machen’s The Great God Pan by eleven years. It isn’t much, but it does what it says on the tin, as the saying goes.

1890s

Slim pickings again for this decade. The best I can scrounge up is “Luke Havergal” by Edwin Arlington Robinson (1897), which is middling except for the astonishing couplet:

God slays Himself with every leaf that flies,

And hell is more than half of paradise

1900s

Lizette Woodworth Reese’s “A Windy Night” (1906) is unexpectedly modern, jumping from the small town mundane by the firelight to the fey hunt outside. Quite good.

1910s

“The Superstitious Ghost” by Arthur Guiterman (1918), while fine, isn’t really my cup of tea. But its humor feels like a preview of the earliest issues of F&SF thirty years in the future.

“Dave Lilly” by Joyce Kilmer (1914) jumped out at me for its Berkshires setting, name-dropping North Adams, a town my partner R and I almost moved to. The poem is otherwise unremarkable, a pleasant tale of a ghost fisherman fishing for ghost trout on the side of Greylock.

“The Sorceress of the Moon” by William Rose Benét (1914) has to take its place among the prototypes of 20th century fantasy. So much Sword & Sorcery-adjacent imagery!

1920s

Another brief bit of magic from Lizette Woodworth Reese, “Bitters” (1928) casts a botanical spell after my own heart.

Amy Lowell’s “A Dracula of the Hills” (1923) is both the first non-rhyming poem on the table of contents, and the earliest example I’ve ever read of taking a common fantasy or horror trope and setting it in the hollers of Appalachia.

Another rambling free verse poem from Lowell, “The Paper in the Gate-Legged Table” (1924), is notable for its Weird Fiction quality, presenting a tale of grass (that metaphor for mortality) coming to consume us all, and the man who strives with crazed desperation to avoid the common fate:

The terrible, blind grass, feeling its way

With little patting hands. Feeling its way

Slowly, horribly, over all mankind.

There is no safety anywhere at all

Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Hashish-Eater: or, The Apocalypse of Evil” (1922) is notable for how pompously it reads in the present day. Smith’s antique hyperbole equates being stoned to cosmic perception, and goes on longer than a doom metal track. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to enjoy here. Almost any line could inspire a painting on the side of a van:

…And I read,

Upon the tongue of a forgotten sphinx,

The annulling word a spiteful demon wrote

With gall of slain chimeras; and I know

What pentacles the lunar wizards use…

But Smith blathers in a similar vein with little variation for some seventeen pages. It’s a lot. It took me the better part of a day to work my way through it. (In Smith’s defense, it was a really bad day.)

Stephen Vincent Benét’s “Metropolitan Nightmare” (1927) is a marvelously evocative (and prescient) poem of climate change in New York City. Unfortunately, I detect a Jazz Age anxiety about the city becoming “African.”

Robert E. Howard’s “The Harp of Alfred” (1928) is straightforwardly effective at what it sets out to do.

1930s

It’s rare that I’ll encounter a folkloric or fantastic idea that’s entirely new to me. Roy Helton’s “Lonesome Water” (1930) dishes up one such concept: a man drinks the titular water and finds himself bound to the Appalachian hillside. Quite interesting.

H. P. Lovecraft’s “Psychopompos” (1937) is famous and widely considered a classic. I see the artistry in its lengthy recitation, but I felt it was a pretty basic Weird Tales medieval fantasy revenge plot gussied up with rhyming couplets.

Lovecraft’s “Fungi from Yuggoth” sequence (published individually over the 1930s; collected and published in 1943) is treated here as a single poem rather than thirty-six separate sonnets. Reading them together, this makes sense, as the first ten form a consecutive narrative, and the rest are variations on the theme. I have to acknowledge the craft that went into writing a short story in sonnet form; goodness knows I’ve yet to write a rhyming sonnet to my own satisfaction. If I could write a cycle of connected sonnets, I’d consider it my greatest accomplishment as a poet.

Ashton Clark Smith’s “Outlanders” (1937) is a fun sonnet about barbarian adventurers.

“The Singer in the Mist” (1938) is another solid poem by Robert E. Howard. He certainly had his niche. Most of his offerings here committed to his hypermasculine fatalism / nihilism schtick, and didn’t land so well as this one.

1940s

There was a healthy selection of poems from this decade. I can’t tell if I felt most of them were a step down from the rest of the book (editor Derlith’s own poems left me unimpressed), or if I’m just too depressed from recent life events to appreciate them. I did like some of them, though:

Vincent Starrett’s “221B” (1945) is at once charming and tragic, a bit of Sherlock Holmes fan-fiction that yearns for pre-war innocence.

Dorothy Quick’s “Tree Woman” (1946) is a neat sonnet about a woman in a Druidic wood.

Leah Bodine Drake’s “Changeling” (1942) feels adjacent to a picture-book in its rhymes and repeated refrain, but I liked it. The exact same review applies to her “Wood Wife” (also 1942).

Lastly, “The Goats of Juan Fernandez: A Note on Survival” by Coleman Rosenberger (1947) could pass for 2020s ecopoetry, particularly its closing line.

—

This has been surprisingly enjoyable, all in all. You know me, I love a wide-ranging anthology that collects from all different decades. Too bad about the unrelated turns life has taken while I read it, though.

2025 read #94: Flower Fables by Louisa May Alcott.

Flower Fables by Louisa May Alcott 

Illustrator unknown

182 pages

Published 1854

Read from December 6 to December 8

Rating: 2 out of 5

It’s that time of the year again: time to cram antique kids books to pad out my reading numbers.

Aside from a Reader’s Digest Condensed Classics bastardization of Little Women, this is my first book by Lou Alcott. It’s a bundle of six fairy tales (plus some poems) Alcott wrote as a teenage tutor for young Ellen Emerson, daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. For those of us more used to the predatory nature of the little folk in old folklore and modern fantasy alike, Alcott’s fairies are disorienting in their sweetness. These are gentle fantasies of singing flowers, insect infirmaries, and magical dew drops. Even the mean Frost King melts under their ministrations.

Knowing what we know of Lou Alcott’s feelings of gender and sexuality, it’s interesting to examine the heavily gendered worldview developed in these early stories. The fairies are exemplars of girlish virtue, as it was conceptualized at the time. Purity, humility, industry, universal love, and dutiful care are emphasized over and over again, in direct opposition to pride, corruption, and willfulness. The only masculine main characters are cruel and selfish, like the Frost King and Thistledown (except, of course, the Father god, who is benign but remote). It’s up to women to repair the harm men cause, and to redeem their wayward souls for them. One might read between those lines.

Or it could just be what teenage Alcott felt was expected of stories for the young daughter of a Transcendentalist. It’s also uncomfortably close to the assumptions behind modern Evangelical gender constructs, even if, for Alcott, they may have been rooted in aversion.

Still, I’m glad I read Fables. It’s fascinating to see the way fairies were romanticized this early. I’m looking forward to reading Alcott’s more mature output, though.

2025 read #93: Strata by Laura Poppick.

Strata: Stories from Deep Time by Laura Poppick

Illustrations by Sarah Gilman

244 pages

Published 2025

Read from December 4 to December 6

Rating: 3 out of 5

My perennial wish: more pop science books intended for people who are well-versed in the basics and want something more.

Strata is not that book. In her prologue, Poppick writes that she intends this book for folks who maybe haven’t thought about rocks before — an introduction to Deep Time to get more people to engage with the geology, and the world, around them. Noble, especially in our dismal age of anti-intellectualism. But it’s a bummer that this is the majority of what popular science has to offer as a genre.

Poppick does the science journalist thing of interviewing colorful experts, spending a significant chunk of the text sketching personalities via anecdotes of fieldwork or risky bush piloting. I get why human interest stories are so prominent, given the tastes of the audience. It’s also good to contextualize scientists as human beings, especially when we consider the history of white men excluding everyone else from science for so long (and pressuring other demographics out of the field to this day). I want more than that, though.

Clearly, what I want is something closer to a college textbook. Which isn’t the fault of this book in particular, but rather the nonfiction publishing market at large.

Poppick unpacks four broad “stories”: the oxygenation of the atmosphere; the Cryogenian; the rise of terrestrial plants and, with them, mud; and the thermal maxima of the Mesozoic. Each of these is investigated with an eye toward a better understanding of our current moment of global catastrophe. If it helps even a handful of people understand the perils of the present through an appreciation of the past, I’ll count this book as a success.

As one scientist she interviews says, “[P]eople could be more happy if they spent more time looking at rocks.” I can’t argue with that.

2025 read #92: The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell.

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

408 pages

Published 1996

Read from November 23 to December 4

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I first heard of The Sparrow as a teenager, sometime in the late ’90s. My domineering father rarely permitted books newer than the Edwardian era, but I did read newspapers, which is where I happened upon rumors that a novel about a Jesuit in space was being made into a movie starring Antonio Banderas. That was a tantalizing sequence of words to someone just beginning to encounter the literary, overtly philosophical bent of late ’90s sci-fi in magazines like Asimov’s. Back then, like now, it was rare that high-concept science fiction ever made the jump to theaters. It was rare enough that it stuck in my memory.

The movie, of course, was never made. (Later, Brad Pitt of all people wanted to star as Father Emilio Sandoz. It’s for the best that a movie never came of it, really.) And somehow, in the decades of adult life that followed, when I was free to read whatever I liked, I never took the time to track down the book.

Finally reading it, I’m disappointed by its vibe. This isn’t the ethereal, elevated novel I’d constructed in my teenage imagination. It’s far closer in tone to Crichton’s technothrillers (though, obviously, better written). Rather than a literary masterpiece, it’s pop intellectualism plastered around the framework of an airport novel. Doria Russell builds her plot news-magazine style, hopping from one underdeveloped POV to the next to dole out information. There’s even a Crichtonesque subplot about Japanese business interests buying out Arecibo to automate its technicians out of a job (though Doria Russell out-Crichtons Crichton by having her Japan casually conquer Asia by the 2010s). It’s jarring when you anticipated a character-focused drama.

The 1990s were just a weird time in sci-fi, when bold new ideas jostled against garbage that should have been abandoned in decades past. The Sparrow makes good use of the harrowing nitty-gritty of space travel: radiation poisoning, isolation, the slow death of the human body without the nutrients it evolved to absorb. Doria Russell cleverly applies relativistic effects to a dual narrative timeline. She also embraces lazy, wince-inducing stereotypes; national ancestry determines characterization. Japanese businessmen contemplate seppuku; Muslim terrorists plant bombs; Italians have links to organized crime; a character of Jewish heritage tells herself Arbeit macht frei. Yikes.

In a clumsy way, beneath the stereotyped characters and the requisite Nineties gestures at theological profundity, Doria Russell attempts to examine sexuality, gender, and their attendant power dynamics. After belaboring the spiritual motif (and physical realities) of Sandoz’s celibacy, the narrative slowly unravels the mystery of how he, the final survivor of the Jesuit mission to Rakhat, was found living as a prostitute on the alien planet. The hierarchical society of Rakhat’s inhabitants, and their own restrictions on reproductive autonomy, feeds into this commentary, which makes up a little bit for how prosaic, how thoroughly not-alien, they feel. I’ve read Star Wars books with more alien aliens. (Doria Russell’s decision to give her caste-divided aliens vaguely subcontinental phonemes doesn’t help, either with originality or with beating the stereotype allegations.)

The book as a whole is ambitious but flawed. A relic of its decade, which can often seem more distant and dated than the 1980s.

2025 read #91: Mislaid in Parts Half-Known by Seanan McGuire.

Mislaid in Parts Half-Known by Seanan McGuire

146 pages

Published 2023

Read December 1

Rating: 3 out of 5 (maybe 3.5?)

Way back in the day (which, thanks to the speed with which consensus reality has crumbled, here means 2022 or so), the fantasy fiction side of Twitter went into a tizzy over the cover of this installment of the Wayward Children series. A Doorway to dinosaurs! McGuire cautioned readers that dinosaurs really weren’t the focus of the story, but I’ve been excited about this entry ever since. Its cover is the entire reason I resumed reading through the series after a lapse of nearly seven years.

Mislaid continues the storylines of Lost in the Moment and Found (with Antsy now attending Eleanor West’s school, conscientiously if naively applying her talent for finding lost things) and Where the Drowned Girls Go (with Cora back at school with new friends, all of them escapees from the Whitethorn Institute). I tend to find the main School-based storyline less interesting than the more or less standalone books that establish each new character’s backstory. Lost in particular was a highpoint for the series; Mislaid feels even more like a step down in comparison.

It doesn’t help that Mislaid (and Antsy) is tasked with doling out a bunch of exposition about Doors, Worlds, and the ways they work. As a worldbuilding author myself, I’m not convinced any of this is strictly necessary. I found it interesting, but would’ve preferred a more emotionally charged storyline to the nuts and bolts of what is, essentially, how the Looking Glass operates.

And McGuire was right to caution her fans against thinking Mislaid is a dinosaur novel. I mean, it is enough of one for my purposes. But we don’t reach the dinosaur world until page 100, and we pop right out of it again just two chapters later. It’s a charming interlude, and well worth reading the series to get there. If only we’d gotten a full novel of it (instead of more banter between half a dozen main characters).

2025 read #90: Lost in the Moment and Found by Seanan McGuire.

Lost in the Moment and Found by Seanan McGuire

146 pages

Published 2022

Read from November 21 to November 23

Rating: 4 out of 5

Oof, this one comes swinging for your heart right from the start. (Even the contents warning made me tear up, it was that sensitively written.) Today’s hero, Antsy, has to flee from home when her stepfather’s grooming and gaslighting gets to a crisis point. She ends up in a shop of lost things, joining a magpie and an ancient woman in their travels through Doors.

Antsy’s story is heartbreaking and defiant, one of the best (and most devastating) Wayward Girls stories McGuire has written. The fantasy elements map so perfectly onto the character’s personal journey and the book’s thematic elements, something I love when authors pull it off.

My main complaint is that, as is often the case in this series of novellas, there just isn’t enough room for Antsy’s tale to develop as much as I would want it to. We skip from her first day or two of adjustment to a couple years into her shopkeeper apprenticeship. Though, reluctantly, I have to admit this accelerated narration is once again thematically consistent with the peril Antsy finds herself in.

I do wish Lost hadn’t taken the time to dole out exposition for the rest of the series, and instead had been its own standalone, rather longer novel. But the story we get is one of the best in the series so far, so I won’t complain too much.

2025 read #89: Sea Siege by Andre Norton.

Sea Siege by Andre Norton

176 pages

Published 1957

Read from November 19 to November 21

Rating: 2 out of 5

Let’s continue the nautical theme from Treasure Island with this early atomic pulper. It’s a somewhat interesting stew of 1950s cliches and concerns, mixing aqua-lung diving, a young man with father issues, intelligent octopuses, Seabees building a submarine base, radioactive sea monsters, and global nuclear war. The second half becomes a West Indies-flavored, less good version of On the Beach (which was published the same year).

Sadly, we have to weather a white author in the 1950s attempting to portray islanders of intermingled ethnic heritage. (There’s a “voodoo witch doctor.” Every islander speaks in dialect and says “mon” in every sentence. The entire island is impoverished and lazy and superstitious, except for a few motivated individuals who become San Isadore’s “natural leaders.”) Still, while tiresome, and quite racist, it isn’t as comprehensively racist as it could have been in 1957. Small victories?