2026 read #5: Queens of the Abyss, edited by Mike Ashley.

Queens of the Abyss: Lost Stories from the Women of the Weird, edited by Mike Ashley

350 pages

Published 2020

Read from January 25 to January 29

Rating: 2 out of 5

I collect old magazines. I have a lot of them. I want to make a point of reading some of them this year, especially as I make progress on my current novel project and hope to focus my energies back on short story writing later this year. So I plan to read short stories, ideally in the form of old magazines I own, for at least 20% of the reviews I write this year—the collapse of my nation, of course, permitting.

Naturally, I’m beginning this pattern with an anthology instead of a magazine.

This is another entry in the British Library Tales of the Weird series, featuring a selection of women authors from the heyday of pulp short fiction. I’ve read just one of these stories before, which is unusual after all the anthologies I’ve encountered in recent years. My partner R got it for me for the holidays, and I’ve been looking forward to it. Or as much as one can look forward to anything days, I suppose.

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“A Revelation” by Mary E. Braddon (1888). The author’s life is more interesting than this story, which is a rote gothic ghost number featuring clumsy descriptions, amateurish exposition, racist caricatures, and a see-through plot. It ends with an absurdly convenient twist and a middle aged man marrying his dead friend’s teenage child. It’s very much 1880s magazine fare. Not a promising start. F

“The Sculptor’s Angel” by Marie Corelli (1913). This medieval tale of an artistic monk who takes advantage of a poor young woman, only to be visited with dramatic irony after her death, is at least a step up from the previous story. We get some ever-relevant commentary on “the pitiless egotism of men,” though I think the narrative lets the sculptor off too easily. Perhaps a solid D

“From the Dead” by Edith Nesbit (1892). After his new wife confesses a past deception to him, our narrator, against his own conscience, gives her the cold shoulder. She disappears, only to summon him to her deathbed some months later. This being the type of story it is, he arrives too late. Macabre melodrama though it may be, it serves as an empowerment fantasy: maybe, somehow, even if by paranormal means, men might be made to suffer the consequences of their actions. I think we all can vibe with that right now. C-

“The Christmas in the Fog” by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1914). This quasi-autobiographical anecdote begins with about seven pages of justification (almost a third of the essay) for why a quasi-autobiographical anecdote is worth writing down and being read. The incident itself sees the author, referring to herself in the third person as the Romantick Lady, stuck for three days in an unusually Londonish smog on the Mersey. She decides to scrape together some kind of Christmas gift for each of the 150 immigrant children down in steerage. It ends with her musing whether her self-appointed charity might have “planted the seeds of pauperism” in the poor children. Horrors! All in all, you couldn’t get more pre-war 1910s than this.

“The Haunted Flat” by Marie Belloc Lowndes (1920). Banal self-improvement-aided-by-a-spirit yarn. I liked the small domestic details of a young working woman setting herself up in a rental flat. The identity of the helpful spirit is an absurd coincidental twist of the sort beloved by religious revivalists (including, in this instance, Spiritualists). D?

“A Modern Circe” by Alicia Ramsey (1919). Ramsey lays it on a bit thick with Italian stereotypes, up to and including labeling Italians a “primitive race,” but otherwise her writing is quick and modern, her descriptions evocative, and the titular “Mad Virgin” is positively delightful after a slog through generic ghost tales. Possibly C-

“The Nature of the Evidence” by May Sinclair (1923). Another piece inclined to Spiritualism, this time an account of well-to-do heterosexual unhappiness involving the man’s late first wife. Well-written, and interesting for hinting at ghost-fucking at such an early date, but otherwise forgettable. D+

“The Bishop of Hell” by Marjorie Bowen (1925). This story begins with more promise and unique vibes than anything else in this anthology so far. A defrocked priest in the late 18th century, so dissipated that his intimates give him the nickname in the title, hatches a desire to corrupt the bride of his generous cousin and benefactor. The story is twenty shades of purple, but enjoyably so. C

“The Antimacassar” by Greye La Spina (1949). I read and reviewed this story in Women of Weird Tales. There, I said, “I enjoyed the element of loom-weaving; the hidden message in the antimacassar was an interesting touch that deserved a better story.”

“White Lady” by Sophie Wenzel Ellis (1933). Brought down by clumsy prose and absurd dialogue (“Now, as always, you prefer your unnatural flowers to me”), this story of a woman competing with an anthropomorphic flower for the affections of her fiancée gets points for embracing its own pulpy ridiculousness. C

“The Laughing Thing” by G. G. Pendraves (1929). The prose and atmosphere of this Hudson Valley-set haunting were fine. Pendraves’ dialogue was another matter, hammering obvious plot points into the ground; it takes the better part of two pages for an old man, fleeced on a land deal, to fully articulate just how hard he’s going to haunt the place once he’s dead. (“Wha-a-a-at?” responds the swindler.) Still, a solid example of its type. C-

“Candlelight” by Lady Eleanor Smith (1931). I believe this tale of middle class philandering is meant to be humorous, or at least ironic. An awkward dinner party is interrupted by the arrival of a Romani girl from the woods, who gets goaded into telling their fortunes (and spilling all their tawdry secrets). Altogether on the wrong side of 1930s pulp, and felt interminable to boot. D-

“The Wonderful Tune” by Jessie Douglas Kerruish (1931). Snowed in at a Swiss inn, the narrator and his companions find themselves in the company of a master violinist, who plays elf music that compels all things to dance—including the avalanche-crushed corpses stashed in the other room. Somewhat ridiculous in the way all the “OooOooh, watch out, a corpse!” stories were, but not painfully bad. D+?

“Island of the Hands” by Margaret St. Clair (1952). Out of every story on the TOC, I’d been looking forward to this one the most. Immediately, we find ourselves in the hands (hehe) of a storytelling professional. Garth is a watery planet that feels remarkably like a midcentury floatplane-and-cabana getaway. That’s just set-dressing for a standard (but well-written) Weird Island story. Aside from the inevitable skeeviness of midcentury heterosexuality, I enjoyed this one quite a bit. If only more of the anthology had been like this! B-

“The Unwanted” by Mary Elizabeth Counselman (1951). Our narrator is climbing Alabama hills for the census when she happens upon a broad Appalachian stereotype (because boy howdy did midcentury writers love Appalachian stereotypes). The mountain man points a gun at her and tells her to leave. But the woman of the house invites her up to chat, and we quickly find ourselves in a gentle, sad, unclassifiable tale of motherhood and lost children. Just as quickly, this story went from forgettable page-filler to a minor wonder (however dated and iffy it might be for modern readers). B-

“The Seventh Horse” by Leonora Carrington (1943). A surreal little fable about a horse (or a woman?) in a garden. One of the best (and weirdest) stories I’ve ever read from the 1940s. B+

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And that’s it! After slogging through so many forgettable ghost stories, the last few entries were an unexpected delight.

2026 read #4: Wildwood by Colin Meloy.

Wildwood by Colin Meloy

Illustrated by Carson Ellis

544 pages

Published 2011

Read from January 10 to January 24

Rating: 3 out of 5

In the early years of this blog, I must have checked this book out of the library half a dozen times. I never did read it, though, put off by its ever-so-slightly-too-precious opening. After a while it slipped out of my mental must-read pile.

An odd pop culture conjunction brought it back to mind. In the Dropout comedy special Demi Adejuyigbe: Is Going to Do One (1) Backflip, there’s a bit where Adejuyigbe gets a staged phone call from a character who introduces himself: “It’s me! Colin Meloy! Lead singer of the Decemberists!” This bit became a vocal stim for my partner and me, a harmless bright spot during this dismal dystopian winter. It led to me getting back into the Decemberists, and it led to R purchasing and reading a copy of Wildwood. I’m reading it now on their recommendation.

First of all, it is really hard to read a heroic children’s adventure novel at a time when fascists openly wage civil war upon the decent folk of one’s country. I would read for a page or two, hit a wall of who cares about any of this right now, and go back to doomscrolling. Not a great mindset for a fair book review.

Secondly, either because of the book’s pacing or my own admittedly distracted reading, I felt it took a while for Wildwood to hit its stride. Again, maybe that’s my fault. I wanted it to be a “magic hidden in the heart of the city” urban fantasy, something along the lines of War for the Oaks or Wizard of the Pigeons, but from the pen that produced “The Mariner’s Revenge Song.” Instead, it’s a talking animal fable for precocious readers, with a pinch of Portlandia.

For a book called Wildwood, it has an unexpected amount of towns, gas lamps, mail trucks, and paddywagons. It isn’t until the halfway point that the setting comes into its own and begins to feel like a distinct addition to the atlas of fantastika: a charming melding of urban and bucolic, highwaymen and talking coyotes, ghostly bridges and rain forests. It’s in these details that Meloy’s storytelling genius shows through. That, and the indomitable power of people resisting evil overlords and secret police. Turns out there was a reason to care about this after all.

2026 read #3: China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh.

China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh

312 pages

Published 1992

Read from January 4 to January 10

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 (would be higher but it aged badly)

CW: fictional sexual assault, anti-queer violence

This Hugo- and Nebula-nominated novel dates from the heyday of white authors appropriating other cultures to make their writing seem more interesting. I’ve wanted to read it for a long time, only to bounce off casual anti-Chinese slurs on the first page. Because this was also the era of equating bigotry with gritty realism. Bad times!

Unfortunately, I already spent $9 on a paperback copy from eBay, so I felt obligated to finish it.

Zhang is one of the foundational queer sci-fi texts. Its queerness, like its Chinese background, was appropriated. McHugh handles it more respectfully than, say, Frederik Pohl did in Gateway, but it’s still broadly stereotyped: Zhang cruises Coney Island, and has a penchant for blond white guys. McHugh also tours queer trauma and state violence in ways that may have been adventurous in 1992’s mainstream, but verge on feeling exploitative from a straight author nowadays (and probably did at the time, too).

Structurally, Zhang is more like a loosely linked series of short stories and novelettes than a cohesive novel. Classic first novel stuff. We follow Zhang himself from Brooklyn to Baffin Island to China. But we also get chapters from other perspectives, filling out the world: an extreme sports kite racer; a goat farmer in a Martian dome; a sheltered young New York woman who alters her face to fit beauty standards and promptly gets raped. 

One unifying thread, the central character of the whole book, is the setting McHugh has created. Another unifying thread, the book’s emotional motif, is that you can never go far enough to escape yourself, that you have to find your own reason for continuing despite the seeming futility of it all.

McHugh is an excellent writer; her POVs pulse with interiority, and the universe is vividly realized, full of life and texture. However, her future New York, despite the intervention of centuries and Maoist revolution, isn’t far removed from the New York of the 1990s imagination. Homosexuality is still frowned upon outside gay clubs. Gay men are still described as “bent.” It’s a strange mix of future extrapolation and not being able to imagine certain things ever changing.

2026 read #2: A Horse Came Running by Meindert DeJong.*

A Horse Came Running by Meindert DeJong*

Illustrated by Paul Sagsoorian

147 pages

Published 1970

Read January 3

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

So far as I recall, this was the very first chapter book I ever read. It was in my older brother’s English textbook for 6th grade, the same textbook that introduced me to The War of the Worlds (via an account of the 1938 radio drama), and had chapters from Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH and Sweetwater, as well. The full text of A Horse Came Running was included at the end of the textbook, presumably for a capstone unit or something along those lines.

I ate it up as an 8 year old. I assumed it was set in Kentucky (which, as the old family home we returned to for summers in my youth, had been a major scene in my life), and the plot revolved around a tornado (one of my earliest fears and fixations). I’d never particularly been into horses, but I was a big-hearted child, and immediately loved the horses in the story. I felt very smart and accomplished, reading a book for 6th graders all on my own.

It took some time (and way too much money) to track down a copy on eBay. But it was nice to revisit it. It’s a solidly done children’s book, capturing the magical thinking and mental bargains that make up childhood thought. It creaks with age, unfortunately, emphasizing obedience as a virtue, and dropping some casual misogyny in a boy’s-life sort of way. There’s also a lot more “the young horse is now the wife of the old horse” chatter than I remembered. I think the textbook version wasn’t as complete as I always assumed; I didn’t recall the inevitable death of one of the horses, at any rate.

2026 read #1: Shadow on the Hearth by Judith Merril.

Shadow on the Hearth by Judith Merril

277 pages

Published 1950

Read from December 31 to January 3

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

The most interesting aspect of this tale of nuclear war is its domestic perspective. After bombs drop on Manhattan, the danger isn’t a breakdown of civil society or roving bands of Westchester wastelanders. Rejecting the notion that America could be caught flatfooted by its enemies, Merril has a secret squad of all-American white men prepped and organized in every community for this very eventuality. Instead, the danger comes from radiation sickness, boozy socialite neighbors, and gas leaks, plus the occasional over-zealous members of the White Man Squad all too eager to replace our main character’s missing husband or flirt with her teenage daughter.

Hearth is, inevitably, tainted by its era’s assumptions of gender and divisions of labor. It also sags in the middle, abandoning anything like pacing in favor of moment to moment verisimilitude and repetitive conversations. It is not, in any modern day sense, a good or essential novel. (I only began reading it because I was on a plane and I had it on my phone.) Still, it was worth a read, if only to get a different contemporary perspective on nuclear anxieties.

2025 read #96: Valley of the Flame by Henry Kuttner.

Valley of the Flame by Henry Kuttner

156 pages

Published 1947

Read from December 8 to December 18

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

In the remote future of 1985, there are still lost worlds. Brian Raft works in an experimental clinic deep in the Amazonian jungles, until a strange and seemingly inhuman man arrives, steals a mysterious medallion from a dying pilot, and escapes upriver with one of Raft’s protégés. Raft pursues the pair into the mountains, and stumbles into a realm of cat-people and titanic trees.

Valley is interesting as a bridge between the early twentieth century Lost World motif and the later twentieth century trope, “a weird thing came from space and altered a spot on Earth around it.” An asteroid impact created the titular Valley, packing in enough “life energy” to accelerate metabolic processes in all lifeforms. In the thirty or so years since some random dude triggered the metabolic process, millions or billions of subjective years have passed for creatures in the Valley.

The summary is the most interesting thing about this book. As can be expected from a story of this date, there’s an awful lot of chatter about race and racial types and “degeneration.” That brings it down a lot. Also spoiling it for me: it just doesn’t pay off on its concept. There are a couple cool scenes, including an encounter with a garden of sensual delights that nearly pleasures Raft into defeat, something I’d love to recycle / improve upon in a Sword & Sorcery story. But that’s about it.

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.

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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.