2026 read #36: The Travels of Marco Polo by Rustichello da Pisa and Marco Polo.*

The Travels of Marco Polo: A Modern Translation by Rustichello da Pisa and Marco Polo*

Translated by Teresa Waugh from the Italian translation by Maria Bellonci

Photographs by Sergio Strizzi

207 pages

Published ca. 1300 (English translation published 1984)

Read from July 1 to July 12

Rating: 2 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

I call this a reread even though I never read this specific translation, which seems like a fair way to handle classics in translation. Whatever version I read as a kid was probably some standard midcentury edition. This one is a typically 1980s tie-in edition for an Italian docu-drama film, with color plates from the film’s production and extensive medieval and early modern illustrations, but no modern map, no glossary, and no endnotes. Context was not yet a priority, I guess.

I found this edition in the library a few months back, and was struck by two thoughts: I miss when nonfiction books were lavish, illustrated affairs, and also I want to read more weird old books wavering on the line between folklore and nonfiction to get more ideas for Sword & Sorcery stories. So that’s what we’re doing here.

Unfortunately for my purposes, Travels is more of a medieval gazetteer than an adventure story. It’s fascinating in historical context: what mattered more to their sensibilities was the information attributed to distant places rather than one person’s narrative of adventure (even if said information was extensively massaged and augmented to suit European expectations by romance writer Rustichello). When they get to itemizing every single province of Cathay, with the same three rudimentary bits of information, it becomes particularly tedious.

The most disturbing thing about reading this mix of just-so stories and Islamophobic screeds is the realization that, over 700 years later, a substantial number of my compatriots still literally believe in this “wicked Saracen” shit. It’s a lot like understanding that modern antisemitism is rooted in medieval economic politics. People are just that gullible, eager to believe made-up bullshit from the men in charge, whether those men be kings who owe money or trillionaire failsons who have an apartheid axe to grind. (The medieval sexism and colorism is just as awful.)

The gazetteer format makes it all the more jarring when a stray biographical detail — “Marco Polo was totally made a baron of this city, and the elder brothers Polo totally helped the Khan take this other city” — appear without any context. It’s pretty funny, in a way.

There are nuggets of potential world-building material here and there, like the rolling porcupines of Ishkasham, the palace of gilded reeds (bamboo?) at Xanadu, the lodging-houses for travelers of every nationality (including Lombards and Germans) at Khan-balik, mounted couriers and their post-houses, unmounted couriers with belts of bells, magic anti-beheading stones in Japan, and so on. How accurate any of it might be as anthropology is, of course, debatable. But we’re here to find inspiration for Sword & Sorcery, not history.

I want to reiterate my frustration with this particular edition: no effort was made to link the names Polo reported to any kind of historic location. I had to search online every time I wanted to know what, say, Kinsai relates to on the map of today. It would’ve been so easy to add a glossary, or even some footnotes.

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 #76: Weird Tales: The Magazine that Never Dies, edited by Marvin Kaye.

Weird Tales: The Magazine that Never Dies, edited by Marvin Kaye

589 pages

Published 1988

Read from January 7 to October 20

Rating: 2 out of 5 (being generous)

When classic stories from Weird Tales land for me, they hit a certain sweet spot of musty pulp entertainment that’s hard to replicate. The memorable ones, “good” to my tastes or not, keep me coming back for more, despite how they’re invariably outnumbered by formulaic, turgid, or outright racist schlock.

This collection, compiled by the anthologist behind Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural, commemorated one of the magazine’s many short-lived relaunchings. Kaye describes his editorial process here as a sampling of each of Weird Tales’ eras, avoiding its most-reprinted highlights in favor of lesser known stories, and selecting only one piece per author. I’d be happier with an anthology of the best stories, well-known or not, from the magazine’s first era alone, but I’ll take what I can get.

—

“Interim” by Ray Bradbury (1947). An effective flash fic about unquiet dead sharing some good news. B-

“The House of Ecstasy” by Ralph Milne Farley (1938). Well, we made it all the way to second story before we got a disgusting convergence of Orientalist stereotypes with sexual assault as a plot point. I’d say that the second person narration is an interesting touch, at least for a story this old; the way that it feeds into the ending is solid. But “Ecstasy” doesn’t deserve any positive notes from me. F

“The Stolen Body” by H. G. Wells (1898). Mildly diverting tale of astral projection gone wrong. A bit overlong for my tastes, considering how obvious the plot beats are to modern eyes, but Wells (when he wasn’t stuffing his future histories full of racist screeds) was one of the more capable genre storytellers of his time, so it still mostly works. Maybe C+

“The Scrawny One” by Anthony Boucher (1949). This brief tale of a man’s deal with a devil is thoroughly 1940s, which is to say, it takes a classic folktale motif, inserts it into Southern California, and adds exactly nothing else to the formula. Exactly what you’d expect from one of the founding editors of F&SF; it reads like the magazine’s first couple issues in miniature. D

“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” by Lucian (sometime in the 100s; translated by Thomas More, early 1500s). Brief fable, really just a barebones summary of the classic story, barely a couple paragraphs. Scarcely worth reviewing.

“Skulls in the Stars” by Robert E. Howard (1929). I believe this is my first Solomon Kane story, in which Howard’s perennial cold-eyed barbarian archetype gets packaged in the garments of a Puritan and sent to roam the tracks of the Early Modern era. This is also the first Howard story I read that was free of revolting racism, making it my favorite Howard story at the time I read it. (I have heard from others, however, that racism is central to other Kane stories, because that’s just Howard’s métier.) I enjoyed the almost-but-not-quite folk horror atmosphere of the piece, with its demon-haunted moors and its fungal-garden swamps. Perhaps a solid C

“Eena” by Manly Banister (1947). Aside from the grotesquely 1940s treatment of its title character, this is a somewhat adequate werewolf tale. The North Woods atmosphere was a nice touch. C-

“The Look” by Maurice Level (1909). Brief melodrama about a pair of illicit lovers who let the woman’s husband die so that they might be together. Meh. D

“Methought I Heard a Voice” by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt (1951). Pretty standard Gavagan’s Bar fare about a traveling Bible lecturer and the adherents who discover an ecstatic, zombie-like trance effect from his voice. It’s fine? Not really my thing. D+

“Off the Map” by Rex Dolphin (1954). Brigadoon but played for horror. Atmospheric, though it doesn’t really land; the denouement in particular felt like the author didn’t know what to do with it beyond the bare outline. Maybe C-

“The Last Train” by Fredric Brown (1950). Another tale that centers on a mediocre white dude at a bar. I did enjoy the ambiguity of its atmosphere: Is the denouement something supernatural, like Limbo, or have the bombs begun to fall? C-

“Ti Michel” by W. J. Stamper (1926). I’ve been dreading this one since the table of contents: a story set in Haiti, written in the 1920s and published in Weird Tales? Surely nothing good could come of that. To my surprise, this morbid little tale of vengeance centers on a sympathetic and dignified Black character. It certainly isn’t free of racist and colonialist vibes, but it’s much better than it could have been. D+

“In the X-Ray” by Fritz Leiber, Jr. (1949). Forgettable medical melodrama about an abusive sibling who refuses to let go, even after death. It’s fine. D+

“Speak” by Henry Slesar (1965). Extremely silly (though not actually funny) “humorous” bit about a dying man and his dog. Not worth the brief time it took to read. F

Didn’t read any of this book in February. It’s almost the middle of March now. I’m depressed and numb from the ongoing billionaires’ coup of the federal government. What will this country, or even my life, look like before I finish this book?

“The Pale Criminal” by C. Hall Thompson (1947). Turgidly macabre murder and mad science stuff in a German castle. Meh? At least it’s atmospheric. D

“The Sombrus Tower” by Tanith Lee (1980). Dreamlike and gorgeously haunting, this is pretty much the platonic ideal of a fantasy story from 1980, an exact midway point between the worn-out archetypal fantasy of the 1970s and the more immediate, grittier fantasy of the 1980s. It’s also pretty much a textbook Tanith Lee story (complimentary), with a knight riding on a quest toward his own doom, then masturbating into a fire. Best story in this book, by a wide margin. A-

“Mr. George” by August Derleth (1947). Five year old Priscilla, heir to a small fortune, is in the malign clutches of her late mother’s cousins. She receives supernatural assistance from Mr. George, another recently deceased former caregiver. This story is a bit overlong for my tastes, and a touch predictable, but it’s a solid and professionally-done streetcar gothic. Maybe C+

“The Terror of the Water-Tank” by William Hope Hodgson (1907). A typically aquatic tale from Hodgson. A man is strangled atop a suburban water-tank; his prospective son-in-law narrates the attempt to solve the mystery. Between the title and my own genre awareness, I had the solution pegged on the second page, but it’s still a solid outing for its time. C+

“The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller” by Gustave Flaubert (1877; English translation 1928). A cynical spin on hagiography, depicting the cruelty and lust for murder behind a “miracle.” It’s a fascinatingly modern document, halfway between a 19th century historical romance and a 20th century fantasy. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. C+

“The Hoax of the Spirit Lover” by Harry Houdini (1924). A famous essay exposing a case of Spiritualist fraud. Interesting as a historical document, but nothing particularly remarkable otherwise.

“Seed” by Jack Snow (1946). A botanical horror piece, somewhat predictable but competently written and atmospheric, with a whiff of A. Merritt about it. Interestingly, the archetypal “famous and dashing explorer” in this story is a woman. That doesn’t make her African adventures any less racist, of course. C-

“Masked Ball” by Seabury Quinn (1947). A typically ’40s number centering on the horniness of its white male protagonist. Some dude visiting New Orleans wanders the streets, and finds himself so hopelessly attracted to a ghost girl that he’s able to mingle with the dead at their ball. The atmosphere elevates what is otherwise a desperately heterosexual piece. D

“The Woman with the Velvet Collar” by Gaston Leroux (1924; English translation 1929). Sanguinary melodrama of Corsican revenge, mixing elements of the Terror and the trope of ribbon holding a woman’s head in place. It was fine? D+

I abandoned this book for several months. At first I was too focused on my own writing, then I was distracted by the state of the world on top of my usual summertime busyness. Love to review books during the downfall of civilization! Anyway, onward into October now.

“Mistress Sary” by William Tenn (1947). Much like “Ti Michel” above, I’ve been dreading this tale of voodoo and an albino child ever since I flipped through the TOC. Unlike “Ti Michel,” it’s as bad as I expected. Not a great reintroduction to this collection. F

“The Judge’s House” by Bram Stoker (1891). A young man, desiring quiet and solitude while he studies for exams, rents an isolated house with a local reputation. To quote one of my favorite old TikTok audios, it falls into the “scary castle with one hundred rats” category. Mildly amusing, though not particularly well-written. Maybe D+

“The Bagheeta” by Val Lewton (1930). Overlong yarn of a virgin boy sent to kill a supposed were-leopard in the Caucasus. There’s a weak attempt at an anti-establishment message, depicting masculinity as a game in which men repeat other men’s lies to gain status, which was mildly interesting. Still not an especially good or enjoyable story, though. D-

“Ghost Hunt” by H. R. Wakefield (1948). The most charming aspect of this brief, rather silly supernatural bauble is its narrative conceit: ghost hunters with a live radio program. The story doesn’t do much of note beyond that. D

“Funeral in the Fog” by Edward D. Hoch (1973). Weirdly antiquated (and tediously long) Christian bullshit that felt straight out of the 1930s (derogatory). Simon Ark, a priest who’s battled the minions of Satan for hundreds of years but comes across as a direct-to-video Christian alternative to Sherlock Holmes, takes up the case of some white dude who stumbles into an evangelical fever dream of Satanic Peril in Java. One twist—that the instigating death has a mundane explanation—is obvious a mile away, and does nothing to undo the shitty religious trappings at the heart of the story. Just a crummy read all around. F

“The Damp Man” by Allison V. Harding (1947). Editor Kaye introduces this one as “purplish” but praises it for “one of the most compellingly original villains in all fantasy literature.” Said villain, an obsessive stalker with the funds and privilege to pursue a young woman at will, isn’t original at all; any woman would be familiar with him and his activities. The story is much too long for what it is, well over thirty pages; ten probably would have sufficed. But far from being purple, Harding’s prose is actually more vibrant and interesting than most of Kaye’s other selections here. C

“The Lost Club” by Arthur Machen (1890). Pleasantly surreal little mood piece. C+

“Wet Straw” by Richard Matheson (1953). Thoroughly Mathesonian, thoroughly midcentury, thoroughly heterosexual ghost story. Not exactly bad, but I can’t scrape together more than a C-

“Mysteries of the Faceless King” by Darrell Schweitzer (1988). This anthology was meant to commemorate one of the many revivals of the Weird Tales magazine. This story is from the 1988 relaunch issue, penned by one of the revival’s editors. With that pedigree, I didn’t expect much. Surprisingly, this is a perfectly solid late ’80s fantasy, a tale of fathers and brothers that wouldn’t be out of place, stylistically speaking, in a 1988 issue of Asimov’s. Something about this story (quite possibly the massive bandit armed with an equally substantial hammer) even reminded me of Fable 2. Maybe B?

“More Than Shadow” by Dorothy Quick (1954). Thoroughly silly business about a fae poodle. D-

“The Dead Smile” by F. Marion Crawford (1899). Turgid gothic production about a dying man’s buried secrets, which were so obvious by the second page that the whole affair felt trite and ridiculous. F

“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” by Robert Bloch (1949). Midcentury slop about a developmentally disabled young man who falls in with a touring stage magician, his cheating wife, and their sordid affairs. Because it’s written passably well, I’ll give it a generous F+

“Chicken Soup” by Katherine MacLean and Mary Kornbluth (1973). Flimsy little humor piece about cooking and witchcraft. It was fine. I think I’m at the stage where I resent any additional story this book is making me read. D

“The Haunted Burglar” by W. C. Morrow (1897). Nothing objectionable, strictly speaking, but this tale of a burglar whose left arm is possessed with a murderous spirit seems destined for the silly pile. D?

Another family emergency—the second along the same lines in twelve months—has gotten in the way of my plan to finish these stories by mid-October. I was reading another Marvin Kaye collection last time this happened, too.

“Never Bet the Devil Your Head: A Tale with a Moral” by Edgar Allen Poe (1845). Antique “humorous” piece. The humor has two modes: mocking literary criticism, and describing trivial things in an absurdly grandiloquent style. Meh. D-

“He” by H. P. Lovecraft (1926). Lately there’s been a movement to rehabilitate Lovecraft’s image away from the internet’s “He saw an Italian and lost his mind” meme, positing that, later in life, he showed signs of growth and broadening horizons, cut short by his premature death. That could even be accurate for all I know; I haven’t delved much into his work, in large part due to its reputation for racism. But then you get a story like this, in which our blue-eyed narrator arrives in New York City hoping to absorb poetry, and instead collapses in horror because the streets are crowded with swarthy immigrants. The diverse and bustling city is, to our narrator, a corpse “infested with queer animate things.” You can’t get more “saw an Italian” than this story. We do get a tiny glimmer of the possibilities of early urban fantasy as our narrator gets drawn into labyrinthine alleyways and finds a rural manor house preserved, through eldritch means, in the urban heart of Greenwich. It’s interesting, just not interesting enough to overcome the rancid vibes. F+? 

“The Brotherhood of Blood” by Hugh B. Cave (1932). This otherwise rote vampire piece commits to being entertainingly pulpy, which is enough to make it a standout in this portion of the collection. C-?

“The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan” by Clark Ashton Smith (1932). A Hyperborean tale from Clark Ashton Smith, which means we have a pompous dickweed (in this case, a miserly usurer) getting punished for his transgressions (refusing a beggar) in an absurdly cosmic fashion (pursuing some runaway emeralds into the depths of the earth). “Weird” is much less creatively convoluted than Smith’s comparable “The Seven Geases” (reviewed here), but it’s still passably entertaining, and an early forerunner of D&D’s vibes. Let’s give it a C

“Men Who Walk Upon the Air” by Frank Belknap Long, Jr. (1925). Memorably strange historical fantasy, in which real life 15th century poet-rogue François Villon promises a woman he will rescue her revenant husband from a walking gibbet. The effect is somewhat spoiled for this modern reader when the rogue inevitably pressures the woman to give him more than a meal in payment, and then blames her in the aftermath. D-?

“A Child’s Dream of a Star” by Charles Dickens (1850). Treacly Victorian sentimentality, scarcely worth noticing (let alone republishing). D

“The Perfect Host” by Theodore Sturgeon (1948). Right when I’m most ready to wrap up this collection, the final story turns out to be a hefty novella written in a choppy midcentury “describe things but don’t actually say things” style. Sturgeon lays out the mystery of why a woman jumped from a hospital window, only to disappear when she hits the ground, in serial first-person reminiscent of interviews or perhaps oral history, which puts us at some remove from the story. That said, I did actually quite enjoy this. The breadth of different narrative voices was solid storytelling. We probably didn’t need every single POV Sturgeon could think of (his fourth-wall break feels particularly goofy by 21st century standards), but the variety of quotidian impressions helps build suburban reality around the self-described fantasy at its heart. C+?

—

And that’s it! No sword & sorcery, barely any sci-fi, no C. L. Moore or Greye La Spina—hardly what I’d call a thorough overview of Weird Tales. Clearly, Marvin Kaye and I had widely differing tastes. I think he should have tried anthologizing good stories, rather than lesser known ones. But that’s just me.

Kind of a bummer how much of a slog this turned out to be, much like the year I read it in.

2024 read #114: Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural, edited by Marvin Kaye.

Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural: A Treasury of Spellbinding Tales Old & New, edited by Marvin Kaye

629 pages

Published 1985

Read from August 13 to September 26

Rating: 2 out of 5

As far as I'm concerned, the prime selling-point for these 1980s Masterpieces anthologies is the spread of stories from two or more centuries of the genre. I had assumed Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment and Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder had been the full series, but somehow I just learned about this one here, which pre-dates both of them. Its contents sample so many decades that I ran out of blog tags struggling to mark them all.

I’m a bit wary of this book, having read more than enough shitty horror short stories from the 1980s for one lifetime. Clearly, it wasn’t the decade I’d pick for its taste in horror fiction, a concern underlined by the fact that, out of all these stories, only four were written by women. But maybe it will be worthwhile, who knows?

—

“Dracula’s Guest” by Bram Stoker (1914). A prologue to the original Dracula that got left on the editorial floor, then subsequently published in a posthumous Stoker collection. Cutting it was the right decision. This anecdote, which follows our oblivious himbo Jonathan Harker as he ignores his German coachman in order to wander through an abandoned vampire village, in a blizzard, on Walpurgis Nacht, is remarkably inessential, a jerky string of events rather than a story, yet not without a certain silly charm. Harker’s obstinate English cluelessness wobbles between annoying and inadvertently hilarious. Maybe D+

“The Professor’s Teddy Bear” by Theodore Sturgeon (1948). Fuzzy is a sadistic teddy bear who feeds by showing the boy Jeremy his future, then egging Jeremy on to cause accidents and deaths for Fuzzy’s delectation. What’s most remarkable about this story is how perfectly it prefigures the horror of the early 1980s at such an early date. So many of the stock shock elements of the eighties are there: the child laughing at the harm he creates, the demonic toy, the pleasure the narrative takes in harming women. I’m impressed by how ahead of its time this story is, without particularly liking what it does. D

“Bubnoff and the Devil” by Ivan Turgenev (1842; translated 1975). I should read more Russian stories. This tale of a second lieutenant who meets the Devil (and the Devil’s Grandma, and the Devil’s Granddaughter) feels fresher and more modern than just about anything I’ve read from such an early date. (Perhaps it’s all in the translation.) Considering that this story is from the 1840s, I think I’ll give it a solid B

“The Quest for Blank Claveringi” by Patricia Highsmith (1967). The plot reads like a satire of 1930s weird-adventure fiction: Professor Clavering, desperate to inscribe his name in the annals of binomial nomenclature, sets out to document giant man-eating snails on a remote Polynesian island. It’s slight and silly, yet oddly charming. A respectable B-

A translation of a poem by Johann Wolfgang Von Goëthe, “The Erl-King” (1782), wavers between nicely eerie imagery and silly early modern morbidity.

“The Bottle Imp” by Robert Louis Stevenson (1891). A Scottish colonialist gives us a South Seas-flavored retelling of a German folktale. More of a just-so story than a horror narrative. Starts off briskly enough, but it’s overlong for what it is, and full of the moralizing, and the shitty gender norms, of its day. D

“A Malady of Magicks” by Craig Shaw Gardner (1978). I first read this in Lin Carter’s The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 5. In that review, I opined, “Nothing to complain of here — a perfectly enjoyable, funny romp with a has-been wizard and his hapless apprentice.” Perhaps it scintillated against the backdrop of a Lin Carter anthology; I found it distinctly lackluster this time around. D?

Entering September now, after a long but rewarding summer. Hoping to finish this sometime in October, even though I haven’t reached the 100 page mark yet. 

“Lan Lung” by M. Lucie Chin (1980). A sprawling, absorbing, magnificent tale of a modern ghost adrift in ancient China, one of the best 1980s fantasies I've ever read. It reads like a couple chapters from a much longer work, as if it began a hundred pages before and could enthrall you for two hundred pages to come, yet it's perfectly self-contained. Outstanding, memorable, and seemingly well ahead of its time. A

Next is a poem that, as far as I can tell, was originally published in this book: “The Dragon Over Hackensack” by Richard L. Wexelblat (1985). It’s a pretty standard eighties urban fantasy piece, mixing an archetypal dragon with the banality of New Jersey and calling in the Air National Guard. It's more like chopped up prose than poetry. It's fine.

“The Transformation” by Mary W. Shelley (1831). Byron really did a number on poor Mary Shelley. Years after his death, here she is processing his domineering nature in a fable of a dissolute young man, consumed with pride, who agrees to swap his body with that of a demonic being. A solid enough story for its day. C+

“The Faceless Thing” by Edward D. Hoch (1963). Unobjectionable mood piece about childhood fears, aging, and letting go of survivor’s guilt. C

“The Anchor” by Jack Snow (1947). A shrug of a ghost story, horny in the Forties fashion, set on a supernally lovely lake. D+

“When the Clock Strikes” by Tanith Lee (1980). It's a lush, glossy retelling of "Cinderella" by Tanith Lee in her prime. Of course it's got vengeance and dark witchcraft and Satan-worship. No surprises, just a solid entry. B

“Oshidori” by Lafcadio Hearn (1904). Hearn, a British ex-pat, adapted or translated this tiny tale of a cruelly widowed duck, and didn't do a great job of it. D?

“Carmilla” by Sheridan Le Fanu (1872). I read and reviewed Carmilla as a standalone novella last year. Including it here in its entirety seems excessive. I didn't feel impelled to read it again.

Entering a new, unhappy phase here in the middle of September, feeling impossibly distant from the joys of summer. Family emergency stuff has unexpectedly brought me back to Long Island, a place where I’d hoped never to linger again. Things are strange and sad and anxious — and that isn’t even mentioning the dangerous election, and its associated right-wing terrorism, hanging over our heads.

“Eumenides in the Fourth Floor Lavatory” by Orson Scott Card (1979). One shouldn’t judge a writer for writing a piece of shit main character. Unless it’s a writer like Orson Scott Card, whom one should always judge, harshly, for any reason. I had little taste for this character study of a narcissistic, casually cruel office misogynist who gets afflicted by what he has done. It is firmly in the blood-shit-pus-and-exploitation school of early 1980s SFFH, that “look at what boundaries we can push!” white male self-indulgence that ultimately has little to say beyond the shock. I don’t mind a revolting horror piece, but I prefer more contemporary uses of the palette, using it to explore structures of power from the other side. Back in 1979, writers like Card were content to say “People do bad things — pretty shocking, right?” Thankfully, the genre has evolved since then. Maybe F+

“Lenore” by Gottfried August Bürger (1774; English adaptation by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ca. 1844). Influential, and thus academically interesting, old poem about a bereaved young woman, and the manner in which her sweet William comes back from war when she dares impugn Heaven. You can see the resemblance of its rhyme scheme to Poe’s “Raven,” and it shares certain phrases in common with old broadsides. I enjoyed it.

“The Black Wedding” by Isaac Bashevis Singer (ca. 1940s or 1950s; English translation 1958). An examination of the demonic horrors of heterosexual marriage and pregnancy that, sadly, verges on a list of the tortures inflicted upon a young woman. Another early entry in the “men writing about harming women” school of horror. Interesting from a cultural standpoint, but it will never be a favorite. D+

“Hop-Frog” by Edgar Allen Poe (1849). Thoroughly of its time, this is an ugly fable of a crippled court jester and his vengeance upon the king and his councilors. It did little to entertain me. Maybe D

“Sardonicus” by Ray Russell (1961). A solid pastiche of the Gothic genre. Russell does an admirable job capturing the rhythms and extravagance of Victorian prose, while retaining the fluency of a mid-century literary style. A bit long for what it is, and it could have benefitted from more Victorian reticence in place of its Swinging Sixties shock, but a good effort nonetheless. C+

“Graveyard Shift” by Richard Matheson (1960). Another Sixties shocker, and another tale (like “The Professor’s Teddy Bear”) that anticipates the direction of Eighties horror. Through a series of letters, we learn of how a widow in a remote cabin came to be murdered, and how her son came to be a broken, terrified thing. Unsurprising spoiler: This is the blueprint for all the “Mommy is the real monster” flicks of the coming decades. Maybe C

“Wake Not the Dead” by Ernst Raupach (1822; English translation 1823). Thoroughly morbid fluff about a dramatic man named Walter, who, though he’s happily remarried, insists that a sorcerer resurrect his first beloved. Spoilers: The undead Brunhilda is now a vampire! Oops! With that early translation date, it’s no wonder this is so overwrought and overwritten. Yet there are glints of pure Romantic excess that are delightful in their cheesiness, such as when part of the resurrection ritual requires the sorcerer to pour blood into the grave from a human skull. Iconic. Incidentally, this is the first piece from the 1820s I’ve ever reviewed on this blog, after almost twelve full years of reading. It’s alright. C

“Night and Silence” by Maurice Level (1906; English translation 1922). A blind man, and his deaf and mute brother, sit vigil for their dead sister. An able-bodied conception of the “terrors” of sensory disability. Meh. D

“Flies” by Isaac Asimov (1953). Apparently the ultimate horror is being able to see through people's polite social pretenses and recognize the somatic patterns of their deeper emotions, in which case, I live in a horror novel. Meh. D+

“The Night Wire” by H. F. Arnold (1926). This bauble is notable for centering its action on an outmoded technology I'd never thought about before: news-wire offices. It adds a modernist crispness to an eerie tale of fog and cosmic lights overwhelming a town. Brief but interesting. C+

“Last Respects” by Dick Baldwin (1975). Brief, fairly pointless narration of two orderlies removing a dead body from a hospital bed, ending with the equivalent of yelling "Boo!" after a campfire tale. D-

“The Pool of the Stone God” by A. Merritt (1923). If I had a nickel for every time I read a weirdly racist A. Merritt pulp tale of a South Seas island with megalithic ruins clustered around an otherworldly pool, I would have two nickels. This one is much briefer than "The Moon Pool" (which I read and reviewed in a different Masterpieces anthology), so slight as to be forgettable. Maybe D-

“A Tale of the Thirteenth Floor” by Ogden Nash (1955) is an oddly charming narrative poem, mixing metered rhyme with annals of noirish murder. Quite enjoyable.

“The Tree” by Dylan Thomas (1939). It’s funny that, after all Robert Macfarlane did to promote him and talk him up, my first exposure to Dylan Thomas should be a prose piece in a horror anthology. It isn’t strictly horror so much as an achingly lucid mood piece of a country child’s first pagan understanding of the world, and the tree at its center: “At last he came to the illuminated tree at the long gravel end, older even than the marvel of light, with the woodlice asleep under the bark, with the boughs standing out from the body like the frozen arms of a woman.” It’s fascinating to see that the trope of “the Savior was just a homeless madman who went where fate took him,” which feels so thoroughly 1960s to me, reached apotheosis this early. Outstanding. A-

“Stroke of Mercy” by Parke Godwin (1981). Somehow, this overheated period piece feels more dated than the Republican France it emulates. It may have come early in the decade, but this positively screams Eighties. Godwin attempts to mix an unstuck-in-time tour of the horrors of modern war and the death of God with a tale of a young student dueling for the honor of a Parisian actress, but the two elements don’t really congeal into a new whole, despite Godwin’s attempts to tie it all into a “dueling for honor was the last individual expression of violence before slaughter became mechanized and impersonal” bow. There’s potential here, somewhere, but Godwin’s prose felt stiff and difficult to get invested in. D+

“Lazarus” by Leonid Andreyev (1906). Miracles are prime grounds for existential horror, yet I’ve rarely encountered the religious horror genre — largely because so much of it is, well, religious. (At least until recently, with the surge of queer horror that pulls from religious imagery, but I haven’t read much of that, at least not yet.) “Lazarus” takes the familiar gospel tale and uncovers a uniquely cosmic vision of undeath, achieving a distinctive disquiet, all the more remarkable for how long ago it was published. B

“The Waxwork” by A. M. Burrage (1931). A down-on-his-luck reporter spends the night in a waxwork museum's exhibit of murderers, hoping to sell a sensation article. Little does he know what awaits him! This feels more suited for 1891 than 1931. It begins a section of stories that promise to be all in the characters' minds, truly my least favorite story trope. Meh. D

“The Silent Couple” by Pierre Courtois (1826; English translation 1985). A brief character study, little of interest to note beyond certain updates made in the translation (such as giving the wealthy woman a motor car, which would have been unusual in 1826). D-

“Moon-Face” by Jack London (1902). Editor Kaye’s introduction calls this story “a kind of rural ‘Cask of Amontillado,’” which is accurate enough, but wrongly implies there’s some sort of interesting story here. D-

“Death in the School-Room (A Fact)” by Walt Whitman (1841). Rustic Americana about a proud but sickly orphan boy who refuses to tell his abusive tyrant of a teacher what he was doing at a neighbor’s fence in the middle of the night, even upon threat of a beating. A morbid little shrug. D-

“The Upturned Face” by Stephen Crane (1900). A vignette about burying a body in the midst of war. Fleeting impressions and not much else. D+

“One Summer Night” by Ambrose Bierce (1906). A vignette about a man buried alive, and the grave robbers who quickly correct that error. Not loving this section of the anthology. D

“The Easter Egg” by H. H. Munro (Saki) (1930). Forgettable little tale of a coward’s instincts almost (but not quite) preventing an assassination. We’ve gotten quite far from any notions of “terror” or “supernatural” — or “masterpiece” for that matter. There isn’t even enough story here for me to truly dislike it. D

“The House in Goblin Wood” by John Dickson Carr (1947). The trend continues with this limp social comedy that morphs into something of a locked-room whodunnit. Not my kind of thing, but I could see it being enjoyable to someone else, which is more than I can say about a lot of these. D

“The Vengeance of Nitocris” by Tennessee Williams (1928). Tennessee Williams’ first publication, written when he was 16 and printed in Weird Tales. It certainly reads like something a 1920s teenager would have written for Weird Tales. Cribbing its substance from Herodotus, it’s a formulaic number about a pharaoh who profanes a temple, the priests who goad the public to attack him, and the vengeance the next pharaoh, his sister, exacts upon the people. At least it’s marginally more interesting (and significantly more lurid) than anything else in this section. D+

“The Informal Execution of Soupbone Pew” by Damon Runyon (1911). I have a weakness for good pulpy patter, and got drawn into this slangy old yarn about criminals, hobos, and railway men almost in spite of myself. This feels like it could have come from the febrile heyday of Prohibition mobster pulp, which is remarkable when you look at the publication date. Some brief but shitty racism brings it down to a C-

“His Unconquerable Enemy” by W. C. Morrow (1889). Orientalist garbage. Weird how the English tutted about “Eastern cruelty,” while writing outright torture porn for the delectation of their English audience. F

“Rizpah” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1880). Narrative poem that, in full Victorian fashion, takes the biblical imagery of Rizpah and applies it to a mother mourning her son, who had been hanged as a highwayman. I felt indifferent about it.

“The Question” by Stanley Ellin (1962). I parse this one as a biting satire on the cruelty and sadism innate within political and social conservatism. More likely, though, the author intended his narrator to be the ideal red-blooded American, and meant for the story to speak to the cruelty and sadism innate within even the most upstanding citizens. Still, how little has truly changed these last sixty years, aside from the mask of civility sipping away. What I liked best about this character study was that it was the final story in this slog of a section. C-

“The Flayed Hand” by Guy de Maupassant (1875; English translation 1904). We begin the anthology’s final section with an archetypal “preserved hand of a murderer kills again” fluff, nothing special. The translation isn’t especially fluent, which knocks it down a peg. D+

“The Hospice” by Robert Aickman (1975). This one starts slow, and is considerably overlong, but it proves to be a wonderfully surreal (and ineffably British) experience. Our protagonist gets lost driving through sprawling old housing estate, and winds up in what he initially imagines to be a dining hotel, but turns out to be a suffocatingly genteel, heavily upholstered limbo, where the hosts are unfailingly polite, solicitous, and patronizing, and are most concerned that he finish his food. The closest comparisons I can draw, in my admittedly limited experience, are music videos satirizing the English middle class, or perhaps indie horror games of the YouTube playthrough era. I adore the fact that nothing is actually explained; the Hospice just is, and the rest is vibes. Weird and effective. B

“The Christmas Banquet” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1843). Torpid and overlong blather about a holiday banquet set up, by bequest, to bring together the most miserable characters the executors can find. Absolutely nothing of interest here, yet it just keeps going. (It’s only 15 pages long, but it feels so much longer.) F

“The Hungry House” by Robert Bloch (1951). I was prepared to like (or at least not complain about) this straightforward “the house has a sinister presence” story; it has a neat motif of mirrors and things half-seen in reflections, and Bloch has a talent for building anxiety beneath a veneer of rationalization. Unfortunately, a midcentury writer with a mirror motif on his hands has to draw some weirdly gendered bullshit out of it: unlike sensible men, women spend their lives looking in mirrors, etc, etc. This could have been so much better. Oh well. C-

“The Demon of the Gibbet” by Fitz-James O’Brien (1881) is a perfectly serviceable poem about riding past a gallows tree. 

“The Owl” by Anatole Le Braz (1897). This story is nothing much, but it’s a fascinating glimpse at the old folk beliefs and traditions long since submerged under Christianity in Western Europe. Maybe C-

“No. 252 Rue M. Le Prince” by Ralph Adams Cram (1895). Mostly dull piece, going through the motions, with some gentlemen spending the night in a haunted and / or accursed house. Ends in goop, which was a nice swerve, but overall, just plain forgettable. D+

“The Music of Erich Zann” by H. P. Lovecraft (1922). I’m no fan of Lovecraft, but this brief entry is tolerable enough. No outright racism that I could see, though one wonders if his fevered imagination concocted this tale of menacing otherworldly music after hearing the Hungarian dance tune mentioned in the text. C

“Riddles in the Dark” by J. R. R. Tolkien (1938). The original Gollum chapter, edited out of subsequent editions of The Hobbit to better align with The Lord of the Rings. It’s a classic, of course, but I feel that the edited version — ever so slightly darkened by the malice of the One Ring — is better. B

—

Unexpectedly, I find myself at the end of this collection, and it isn’t even October yet. The last couple weeks have felt like several months, but nonetheless, this is a surprise.

All in all, while the selections in this book were often better than I had feared, they just weren’t on the same level as the stories in the two Hartwell-helmed Masterpieces. Still, a good handful of stories (“Lan Lung” prominently among them) were absolutely delightful, and made the whole thing worthwhile.

2024 read #39: Oroonoko by Aphra Behn.

Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave: A True History by Aphra Behn

Edited with introduction and notes by Janet Todd

133 pages

Published 1688

Read from March 28 to March 29

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

My partner R and I are in the midst of packing for a move up north. Almost all of my books are already boxed up. What’s left is a dwindling pile of books I’m unsure whether I want to pack or leave behind. This book, a Penguin Classics edition I got at a used bookstore for 75 cents, is part of this residue. Now that I've read it, I have no need to bring it!

I approached Oroonoko as a document from a transitional stage in the culture of Atlantic Europe. Recognizable concepts of race as a social hierarchy were gradually developing from the “Christian vs heathen” dichotomy, as a result of colonialism, plantation economies, and the slave trade, but these ideas were in their infancy, and far from universal. (See Nell Irvin Painter's The History of White People.) Class and rank were more pressing concerns to avowed royalist Behn. Traumatized as a youth by the English Civil War and the joyless years of the Commonwealth, Behn wrote Oroonoko toward the tumultuous end of James II's reign, when another Stuart sovereign was on the verge of capitulation. The true horror for Behn is not that Africans were enslaved, but rather that an African prince, a natural aristocrat who quotes Plutarch and praises England’s “great monarch” Charles I, could have been enslaved, like a mere commoner.

Which isn't to say that the book isn’t horridly racist. It’s an Early Modern English caricature of a West African couple, set in an early colonial Suriname. It’s all kinds of racist.

Oroonoko is also a document of literary transition. Some consider it one of the earliest novels in English; it predates Robinson Crusoe by three decades. As a book, it’s as awkward as a toddler’s steps. Behn’s background in drama is clear; much of the book reads like someone is summing up for you a play they attended, all the melodrama with none of the poetry of line or command of performance. (At a climactic death scene, Behn writes, “[It] is not to be doubted but the parting… must be very moving.”) Behn claims in her dedication to have penned the story in a matter of hours, which I can well believe. The result is a dud, only marginally worthwhile due to its interesting position in the evolution of the genre.

2023 read #72: Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment, compiled by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.

Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment, compiled by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
628 pages
Published 1988
Read from January 1, 2016 to June 22, 2023
Rating: 2.5 out of 5

First, a preamble from here in 2023: I started reading this book a long ass time ago. Seven and a half years, in fact, or approximately three subjective lifetimes ago — before Trumpism, before I got into a relationship that proved shitty, before I made the mistake of moving to Ohio, before I moved again to the Piedmont. I was still reading it when Trump “won” the 2016 election. I was picking away at it in the rural Ohio trailer home where I lived in early 2019. I got rid of my original copy at some point in all the moves, remembered I never finished it, found another copy for cheap on eBay, and here we are. I won’t start over, but I will finish the damn thing this time. Luckily I wrote reviews for each story as I went along, and saved it in my drafts.

Here’s my original preamble from way back in January 2016:

Way back in 2014, I think it was, I went through a binge of buying up fantasy and science fiction anthologies whenever I could find them. Modern Classics of Fantasy inspired this splurge: the historical cross-section of classic fantasy stories, from 1938 all the way through to the mid-1990s, was exactly what I had always wanted without ever knowing it, and that volume left me craving more. Unfortunately, while sci-fi has an extensive and well-curated catalog of best-ofs and annual anthologies dating back into the 1960s, fantasy seems to have been largely a backwater genre until the very close of the 1970s — or, at any rate, it seems much more difficult to obtain a good selection of short fantasy fiction before the New Romantic era. This current volume is one of the very few exclusively fantasy compilations which takes the historical approach, and was one of the first I ordered in that spending spree. But I kept putting off the reading part of the transaction, partly because my reading record and attention span was so scant last year. I'm hoping to do better this year. [Spoiler: I did not do better.]

A glance through the contents shows some familiar tales, some exciting names, and some antiquarian relics that could prove either fascinating or tremendously dull. My plan is to read it a story or two at a time, in between other works, so I don't get bogged down in a boring stretch and can maintain my reading momentum. [Spoiler: I did not stick with this plan.]

“The Rule of Names” by Ursula K. Le Guin (1964). This charming, bucolic little fable is an early glimpse into what would become Earthsea, published four years before A Wizard of Earthsea. It is pleasant but predictable for the most part, perhaps a bit too condensed and just-so for my tastes, but ends on a satisfying note of horror and bloodshed to come. I kind of regret rushing through the Earthsea novels back in 2013; I think the world Le Guin created is best explored at leisure, with time to reflect upon and appreciate its small revelations.

“The Magic Fishbone” by Charles Dickens (1867). The subtitle — “Romance. From the Pen of Miss Alice Rainbird.* (*Aged seven.)” — gives an accurate forecast of the amount of preciousness globbed and slathered all over this little fairy tale. In Miss Alice’s putative tale, the industrious and worthy Princess Alicia labors to hold her family and household together as her mother the Queen falls ill, the cook runs off with a drunk soldier, and her father King Watkins the First struggles against penury and a quarterly pay schedule at the distant Office. In classic Dickensian fashion, all the superficial whimsy serves to illustrate the awful living conditions and financial stresses of the Victorian working class. I liked it rather more than I had expected to. Certain lines (e.g., “Prince Certainpersonio was sitting by himself, eating barley-sugar and waiting to be ninety”) reminded me of the appeal of Catherynne M. Valente’s early Fairyland books (which is getting the chronology all reversed, but no matter — you know what I mean).

“The Goddess on the Street Corner” by Margaret St. Clair (1953). A beautiful, delicately heartbreaking vignette about a down-and-out alcoholic struggling to nurse an even more down-and-out Aphrodite. A solid entry.

“Feathertop: A Moralized Legend” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1852). A quaint and charmingly innocent allegory of a scarecrow given life on the whim of a New England witch and sent out into the wide world of “coxcombs and charlatans... made up of just such a jumble of worn-out, forgotten, and good-for-nothing trash as he was” — only to encounter the tragedy of seeing himself for what he really is. Fortuitous timing, reading this so soon after an extended primer on New England witchcraft.

“The Root and the Ring” by Wyman Guin (1954). Except for a certain Leave It to Beaver-esque reek to the family and workplace dynamics, this is a startlingly modern story of math, magic, and insecurity — and even the white-bread family dynamic gets a little tweak as the magic of the mathematical ring works its way up from the roots of the backyard apple tree: “[The boy] had a bunch of ‘art-photo’ and ‘girlie’ magazines scattered across his desk. The blonde nude he had before him hit me right in the midriff, but he sat there, calm as a cucumber, measuring the distance from her navel to her chin with calipers.” The man-is-the-head-of-the-household business soured the ending; otherwise this was an excellent (and humorous) mood piece.

“The Green Magician” by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt (1953). I’ve mentioned somewhere before, in one of these short story anthology reviews, how unsatisfying it can be to land upon a serial adventure story that comes at the end of a long and built-up sequence of canon. The first two pages here are spent getting us up to speed with what I assume are our hero Harold Shea’s most recent published exploits, rather like some breathless radio show announcer's table-setting spiel for the benefit of first-time listeners. The general conceit of a guy traveling from magical world to magical world, figuring out the laws of magic in each realm in order to escape to the next adventure, accompanied by a wife acquired in The Faery Queen and a detective straight out of a pulp magazine, is definitively (and appealingly) de Camp (and Pratt for all I know). Indeed, after the shaky start, this becomes a crackerjack (if rather long) pulp adventure, with scheming druids, a quick trip to the land of the Sidhe, and (perhaps inevitably, given de Camp’s paleo proclivities) a battle with an Irish relative of the Loch Ness Monster.

“Our Fair City” by Robert A. Heinlein (1948). A charming little urban fantasy pulper about a sentient whirlwind, a cynical reporter, dirty cops, and a corrupt city administration. Entertaining, albeit a tad too pat and shallow.

“The Man Who Could Not See Devils” by Joanna Russ (1970). After the forgettable fluff of “Nobody's Home” (read and reviewed here) and the bold mess of The Female Man, I'm as surprised as anyone to find a Joanna Russ story I dig without reservations. I did not experience the concluding "jolt of wonder" Hartwell (or Cramer) promised in his introduction to this tale — the ending felt, if anything, obvious from the first page — but that didn't lessen my liking for the story as a whole.

“Hieroglyphic Tales” by Horace Walpole (1785). I knew nothing of Walpole before reading Hartwell's introduction here, which sent me on a Google hunt that only intrigues me more. Writer, apparently, of the first Gothic novel (The Castle of Otranto), Walpole in these seven “Tales” (only seven copies of which were printed in his lifetime, none of them escaping his possession) concocts surreal fables reminiscent of Swift's absurdist allegories, without Swift's satirical bite. Occasionally there are glimpses of otherworldly opulence and voluptuous mysticism presaging Catherynne M. Valente's Dirge for Prester John novels, such as the luxurious opening of “The Bird’s Nest,” but such moments of transcendence are rare. The “Tales” are more interesting within their historical context as precocious efforts at surreal fiction than as stories per se. I'm glad I read them, but they had the feel of a coursework assignment, rather than something I'd ever seek out for my own enjoyment.

“Bird of Prey” by John Collier (1941). A brief sketch of insidious doubt and poisonous jealousy. Too succinct to have much of an impact; had this been drawn out longer, the characters given more substance, I think it would have been a good example of psychological horror.

“The Detective of Dreams” by Gene Wolfe (1980). Clever supernatural detective story in the atmospheric mode of Poe, rich with character and sense of place despite its relative brevity, with an unexpected but (in retrospect) apposite conclusion.

“The Bee-man of Orn” by Frank R. Stockton (1887). I'm not sure whether to categorize this as a just-so story, a shaggy dog story, or a fable. Sweet, charming, wryly humorous — a delightful little tale.

“The Red Hawk” by Elizabeth A. Lynn (1983). A charming mythopoeic tale of a dutiful astronomer entrusted with command of the winds, the bored trickster god who beguiles her, and the twin girls born to them. It reminded me foremost of the better stories to be found in Lin Carter's Year's Best Fantasy anthologies — it carries within it something of that 1970s mythic fantasy tradition, reminiscent of C. J. Cherryh's mythological fairy tale “The Dark King” from 1979 (reviewed here), perhaps unsurprising given its close chronological proximity. Yet it also felt a bit more modern, perhaps reminding me of the godlings in N. K. Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy. This isn't an all time classic, but it's a promising first exposure to the work of Lynn, whose Chronicles of Tornor trilogy has been on my to-read list for some time now. [Note from 2023: Years after writing this, I finally read Lynn’s Watchtower.]

“The Canvasser’s Tale” by Mark Twain (1876). I read this long ago, in a purportedly complete edition of Twain's short works, and even after the passage of almost two decades, the text was familiar. Familiarity does not breed monotony in this case; indeed, Twain's humorous inflections and ironic sensibilities probably make more sense to me now than they did in my teens. I was amused by it then, and cannot be any less amused by it now.

Here we are now, mid-November [2016]; the election has happened, spray-tan fascism is poised to take over Washington, and the optimistic New Year's Day when I began this book feels quite far off. After all these months, I'm not even half done with this volume. Nihilistic thoughts hang over me. Yet finish this book this year I shall — which means actually sitting down to read the damn thing. [Note: I did no such thing.]

“The Silken-swift...” by Theodore Sturgeon (1953). And what should be the first tale I read from this tome in this brave new world? A prettily written morality play of a spiteful, man-hating temptress who so arouses and tantalizes some poor fellow that he goes out and, in his witchery-induced blindness, rapes an innocent girl, thinking her to be the very “devil” who tormented him. “There has never been a woman so foul,” he hisses at the temptress, after discovering the mistaken identity — as if he had no control over his own actions. In the end, when the unicorn arrives and chooses the violated girl over the (still virginal) temptress, I think it was intended to be something of a progressive, subversive statement for the time — literal virginity is not to be valued over purity of spirit — but now, of all times, this tale hits a sour note. I can't bring myself to feel much more than distaste for this story.

“The New Mother” by Lucy Clifford (1882, or possibly earlier). This, by contrast, is delightful — a strange fairy tale that, aside from some distinct Victorian moral overtones that no steampunk throwback could quite match, feels as if it could have been published in an anthology sometime in the last couple decades.

“Mr. Lupescu” by Anthony Boucher (1945). I'm not sure how to describe this little slip of a narrative without spoiling it entirely, so here's a warning: I'm spoiling it entirely. A boy thinks a little demon man is his playmate, but it turns out to be his mother's former suitor, who convinces the boy to shoot his negligent father — all very eye-rolling and obvious stuff, even if it pre-dates the 1980s (when this sort of thing really flourished) by some thirty-five years. But then, in the final stinger, it turns out there is some sort of demonic presence involved — and it's coming for the suitor. That last bit also feels totally '80s, but it helped elevate this tale (slightly) from mediocrity (however precocious that mediocrity might be).

“The King of the Cats” by Stephen Vincent Benét (1929). Kind of unremarkable relocation of a fairy tale to the dining rooms of New York high society; the strain of social satire praised in the introduction to this story was lost on me.

“Uncle Einar” by Ray Bradbury (1947). A precious little fancy about a winged man despondent about being grounded. Slight but sweet.

“Space-Time for Springers” by Fritz Leiber (1958). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Fantasy. There I called it “a character study at turns hilarious and strangely affecting.”

“Great Is Diana” by Avram Davidson (1958). Yet another “ancient myths intrude upon the modern world” tale, one which by no means can compare to “The Goddess on the Street Corner” in this selfsame volume. I normally dig Davidson stories, but the framing device he employs here — a few bluff old pals sharing cocktails away from the womenfolk — diminishes to the point of nonexistence any impact the tale might have had, reducing it to an anecdotal punchline about polymastia and breast fetishism. Which is, likely, the point. A weak effort overall.

“The Last of the Huggermuggers: A Giant Story” by Christopher Pearse Cranch (1855). Hartwell (or Cramer) goes to some length setting up this tale as a lost classic, languishing in its undeserved obscurity, reporting almost breathlessly, “This is the first time in a century that ‘The Last of the Huggermuggers’ has been reprinted.” The story is adequate enough, I suppose — obviously a children-friendly reprise of Gulliver among the Brobdingnagians, with a plucky young American adventure-seeker as its hero — but the editors’ excitement at bringing it back into print seems a little bit excessive.

“Tobermory” by Saki (1909). Mildly amusing little comedy of manners arising when a talking cat offers most unmannerly observations it has gleaned from its household’s social and sexual peccadilloes.

“The King of the Elves” by Philip K. Dick (1953). This is, to my recollection, my first out-and-out fantasy story from Dick, and it's more or less exactly what one would expect. Shadrach Jones, who runs a gas station in a town forgotten by the highway, becomes King of the Elves one rainy night, and must lead their armies against the destructive advance of the Trolls — or has his brain merely been disordered by escapist urges and the frustrations and loneliness of his quotidian life? Dick doesn't sustain that note of ambiguity for long, but this remains a charming little number, well worth a read.

Four “American Fairy Tales” by L. Frank Baum (1901). I haven't read anything of Baum’s beyond the original Wizard of Oz, and that I read well over two decades ago. So these four tales (selections from a larger work, which contained twelve “American Fairy Tales” all told) were a welcome delight. They are, of course, a bit on the old-fashioned-moralizing side, but they're breezy and amusing, far more so than many of the older stories in this volume. The world could do well with more sorcerers on the top floors of tenements and high-kicking professors in the thrall of magical bonbons.

Here’s where I left off, once again, two-thirds of the way through, in April or May 2019. Little did I know that a year and a half later my original copy would be sold for pennies to a used bookstore and I’d be once again starting my life over from scratch. Ah well.

There this review remained in my drafts until a stubborn completionist streak caught up with me in June 2023 and convinced me to obtain another cheap copy and resume right where I left off. 

“The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers” by Samuel R. Delany (1979). One of the first books I ever bought in my first flush of disposable income, age 19, was Delany’s Dhalgren. I carted that copy with me through sixteen years and six moves and never managed to get beyond the first page. Eventually I conceded and gave it away to a thrift store. Clearly, Delany’s dense, oblique style, redolent of 20th century philosophy treatises, never clicked with me, no matter how much I’ve wanted it to. I’m pretty sure this story is the reason why I never finished this book in 2019, funnily enough. It is one of the titular tales from Tales of Nevèrÿon (another Delany book I bought at one point, never read, and discarded). There’s something about Delany’s refusal to play along with fantasy’s central tradition of artifice, making no attempt to suspend your disbelief — the way his characters openly discuss the metaphorical meanings and uses of dragons, or the economic ripple effects of barbarians freeing slaves, in between vast expository dumps of dialogue — that takes some adjustment. This is sociology behind a construction-paper mask that says “fantasy” on it. Telling a mere story seems Delany’s second priority, well behind dissecting social mores of race, aristocracy, slavery, power, sex, and the way these constructs condition our behavior. That said, it isn’t all dry social commentary: when Delany’s prose hits, it hits. In the end, this — the story that stymied me in the past, by the author I’ve just never been able to get into — proved to be one of the best in this collection. (Not that I can say I remember a damn thing about any of the stories I read all those years ago. Oh well.)

Excerpt from Phantasmion by Sara Coleridge (1837). The opening chapters of what the editors call “The first novel set in fairyland in the English language.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, these chapters sketch the title character’s quick turn from joyful childhood to an adolescence beset by mortality, as mother, childhood friend, father, and young adult companion all perish in turn around him, causing him to seek the aid promised to him by the fairy Potentilla, queen of the insect realm. Her gift of wings just happens to carry him to a crash-landing on a beach where he just happens to overhear two fairy women plotting against one even more beautiful, whom he had just happened to see in a vision before he crashed, etc. So Phantasmion returns to Potentilla and asks her for the wall-walking abilities of a fly. Thoroughly of its time, at least from what I can tell here.

“The Sapphire Necklace” (1930), “The Regent of the North” (1915), and “The Eyeless Dragons: A Chinese Story” (1915) by Kenneth Morris. Also of their time: these three pieces. They have a modernist flavor reminiscent of Olaf Stapledon, mixing myth with the newly understood grandeur of the scientific cosmos. The entire universe in “Necklace,” for example, is a vast mountainous country where stars are the various regents and princes of constellations, a planet is little more than a dim hideaway with a cellar for a jewel-thieving god named Ghuggg, and King Arthur and Taliesin get involved in retrieving the jewelry, riding their war-steeds across space. “Necklace” is the best by far of the three. “Regent,” sadly, dredges up masculine fantasies of Viking manly men, “honorable and vigorous,” abandoning the newly effete world of Christian Sweden for the vast beautiful cruelties of the mythical North (never a good vibe when you look back upon this particular era). “Dragons” is definitively Orientalist but, perhaps, is less egregious than one might fear, though as a moralistic fable it feels a tad ham-handed and predictable.

“Elric at the End of Time” by Michael Moorcock (1981). I thought I’d read (and despised) an Elric story in the past, but it turns out that I had Moorcock mixed up with Stephen R. Donaldson. Unfortunately, Moorcock’s Elric seems to draw from the same grim and gritty antihero aesthetic I associate with Donaldson’s writing, so it works out much the same in the end. This is an overlong mess of time travel, intersecting planes, demon bargains, a sentient sword fed by blood — the usual testosterone-fantasy glurge. Worst of all, it spills into wacky fish-out-of-water shenanigans as Elric tumbles into a nest of immortal aesthetes, runs afoul of the bureaucracy of time travel, and compares the relative doom-ladenness of their respective doom-laden destinies with the Last Romantic. Still, this was better than the one Donaldson story I’ve read (“Reave the Just” in the After the King anthology). Definitely not something I’d seek out again, but hey, it could have been worse?

“Lindenborg Pool” by William Morris (1856). I know William Morris for his textile and wallpaper designs, so I was surprised to learn his antiquarian bent had contributed much to the early evolution of English fantasy, as well. This might be the most Victorian thing (derogatory) I’ve ever read. We begin, of course, with the necessity of a framing device to beg the reader’s indulgence — basically “I read some Norse mythology and got inspired and wrote this through the night, hope you don’t mind!” Next, our narrator is afflicted with “cold, chill horror” at the sight of what sounds to modern ears like a quite pleasant spring-fed pool in the moors. Then, naturally, we transition into the old Oh good heavens, what’s this? Are mine senses deceiving me? What? Am I dreaming? Or does it seem that I am a priest in black robes riding a horse through a young wood? Heavens! routine. And finally we reach the marrow of the tale, the horror upon which everything hangs: a group of men and women in which the women dress like the men! and everybody dances a polka! I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a reek of Victorian antisemitism in all of it. William Morris should have stuck with wallpaper.

“The Moon Pool” by A. Merritt (1918). Pulp adventure with all the racist baggage of its time. Merritt attempts to wring cosmic horror from the, uh, existence of Papua and Australia, here positioned as remnants of a vast, primeval, malevolent lost continent: “I am the ancient of days…. You and I ought not be in the same world; yet I am and I shall be!” It’s the Art Deco era equivalent of hyperventilating about a spring-fed pool, I suppose. White colonialists arrive to excavate Nan Madol and uncover its “lost continent” mysteries, but inevitably fuck around and find out in a strange temple activated by moonlight. I’d be willing to call it a prototype of a dungeon crawl, except that, despite all the buildup, we barely spend any narrative time inside the temple. An interesting but overlong antique, emblematic of its time and genre.

“The Sword of Welleran” by Lord Dunsany (1908). Standard Dunsany fare (or so it would seem to me, having read only this story and The King of Elfland’s Daughter). Stately heroic fantasy, all noble heroes and mighty forebears and bloody deeds, redeemed solely through its mellifluous descriptions: “Then night came up, huge and holy, out of the waste marshes to the eastwards and low lands and the sea…” 

“Operation Afreet” by Poul Anderson (1956). Past brushes with Poul Anderson’s short stories have left me unimpressed. This one had all the midcentury spank-the-dame masculinity you’d expect from a Poul Anderson military fantasy, plus a war against the perfidious Saracen Caliphate to supply the requisite quota of ’50s racism. But I will admit to being entertained by how Anderson mingled magic with the bureaucratic structure of the US armed forces. From the various corps insignia (crystal ball for Signal, Sleipnir for Cavalry) to small things like how cremation was made illegal to ensure ample cemeteries for moonlit herb-gathering, the delight is in the details. The mix of magic and mundane extends even into civilian life: top-notch cigarettes include smoke sprites that can make you a drink. This isn't saying much, but this is easily my favorite Anderson piece, and one of the best post-war fantasy shorts.

And that's it! Seven and a half years. Easily the longest it's ever taken me to finish a book. Perhaps I should have reread the first two-thirds for a fresher perspective, but eh. It's time to take this one out of drafts. 

2014 read #23: The March Up Country: A Translation of Xenophon's Anabasis.

The March Up Country: A Translation of Xenophon's Anabasis
Translated by W. H. D. Rouse
214 pages
Written ca. 380 BC; translation published 1947
Read from March 1 to March 2
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

I intend to work my way through more of the ancient and medieval classics. One of these days I want to slap together something of a roughly chronological "course" for myself, beginning with rereads of The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Iliad and so forth, making progress into Greek comedies and histories and tragedies and such that I haven't yet read, but for now I'll content myself with picking up whatever comes to mind. When Roger Hill (who played Cyrus in The Warriors) died the other day, I figured it was time to get a copy of Xenophon's Anabasis.

Writers didn't develop the technique of leaving out irrelevant detail until well after the days of Daniel Defoe. My eyes glazed over the various marching stages early in Anabasis, and the battle descriptions weren't always clear (or, at any rate, I didn't take the time to parse out each actor and movement, because I can be lazy like that). I did enjoy the various speeches and dialogues, though I found myself amused by Xenophon's increasingly self-righteous defenses of how he'd led the mercenaries. The fact that Xenophon wrote of himself in the third person, and originally under a pseudonym, adds to my snickering. Someone didn't like how his leadership was being spun by some political enemy or other, I'm guessing.

I'm glad I took the time to read Anabasis for myself; when a work has been adapted and reinterpreted in a variety of genres, it's a good idea to read the source material. Now if only I'd get on with reading The Tempest...

2013 read #90: Candide, or Optimism by Voltaire.

Candide, or Optimism by Voltaire
166 pages
Published 1759
Read July 11
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

I love cynical, bleakly funny works written in the faux-naive voice of Enlightenment satire. Not that I've read many, mind you, but Gulliver's Travels -- once I was old enough to seek out and somewhat digest the unexpurgated version -- was an early favorite, and Candide turns out to be pretty darn good too. At least, the "actual" Candide was satisfyingly acerbic. My edition also had a "Part II," which according to Wikipedia is variously attributed to Thorel de Campigneulles or Henri Joseph Du Laurens. That extra bit of fan-fiction, the authenticity of which is never questioned in my copy, was noticeably inferior, blunting the edge of Voltaire's nasty hilarity and introducing an anti-Enlightenment message in the person of Zenoida, which even as I was reading it felt at odds with Voltaire's attitude in "Part I." I can't entirely despise the non-canon fan service, as the chapter "Candide Meditates Suicide" was one of the funniest portions of the entire book, but on the whole "Part II" was still an odd interlude that diminished the overall effect of the novella.