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.

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“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+?

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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 #116: Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic, edited by Daisy Butcher.

Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic, edited by Daisy Butcher

285 pages

Published 2019

Read from September 28 to October 2

Rating: 2 out of 5

Can we take a moment to appreciate how the editor of an anthology of killer plant stories is named Daisy Butcher?

I’ve gotten hooked on these anthologies from British Library. They were behind the Weird Woods collection I read last year; it could have been weirder and woodsier, but was still an interesting read. In need of dopamine the other day, I splurged on several more volumes. My bank account is unhappy, but it would’ve been unhappy anyway, and now I have books!

Evil Roots differentiates its theme from that of Weird Woods with an emphasis on specific killer plants, often exotic (thus foreign, and threatening), rather than the familiar (though still dangerous) English woods. Butcher’s introduction proposes that Charles Darwin’s studies on carnivorous plants fed (heh) into Victorian and Edwardian fears of nature, of Man (I would specify White, English, Male, Upper Class, Imperialist Man) losing his supposed place in the great ladder of creation. My perspective? I’m just hoping for some tentacle vines and lowbrow cheesiness.

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“Rappaccini’s Daughter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1844). Long-winded and repetitive, this story takes an ungodly number of pages to spell out quite a simple idea: In early modern Padua, Doctor Rappaccini, ruthless mind of botanical science, has cultivated a poisonous daughter through vaguely defined arts of mithradatism, and a young medical student is losing his mind over her. For all its antique storytelling choices, though, I didn’t really hate it. Maybe C-?

“The American’s Tale” by Arthur Conan Doyle (1880). This tall tale of a man-eating flytrap in the Arizona wilderness is remarkable for two things: its astonishingly forced “Western” dialect, and its equally shaky grasp of North American biogeography. Predictable action, broad stereotypes instead of characters, and not much to it beyond that. As was so often the case during this time period, the climax happens “off screen.” D

“Carnivorine” by Lucy H. Hooper (1889). Late Victorian stiffness can’t fully obscure the gloriously absurd spirit of this story, which brings us to rural Campania to witness a giant, betentacled sundew, coaxed into locomotion by an obsessive young scientist. Once again, we don’t get to see the actual climax of the story, just (spoilers!) our narrator bursting in after the fact to dispatch poor Carnivorine with a single bullet, because surely that is how plants work. Still, this was exactly the sort of thing I hoped to read in this book. Maybe, by the standards of its time, I can give this a C

“The Giant Wistaria” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1891). A brief number, and basically just vibes, but I enjoyed it. It’s constructed around the delightful contrast between its New England Gothic overture, set in colonial times, and the idle young holidayers who rent the manse for a lark in the present day. C+

“The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” by H. G. Wells (1894). Another ironic narrative juxtaposition, this time between the protagonist’s dull suburban mediocrity and the febrile “romance” (in the 1890s sense) of colonialist exploration. I’m sure Wells intended social satire on both ends of the orchid collection pipeline, but after reading The Sleeper Awakes, I will never give Wells the benefit of the doubt about the racism his characters express. Maybe D+

“The Guardian of Mystery Island” by Edmond Nolcini (1896). This one feels like a hodgepodge of randomized plot elements. Annoyed by the locals’ superstitions, and intrigued by rumors of Captain Kidd’s treasure, a young man decides to venture to an isolated island off the coast of Maine. He lands in a storm, and gets led by a dog to a dilapidated mansion, where he finds an ancient woman rambling about the French Revolution. When she dies, he goes in search of treasure, and gets attacked by a plant. He goes back to get help from the locals, only to find the woman (and the dog) have disappeared. I presume it’s meant as a sort of ghost story, the woman’s death replaying whenever someone new sets foot on the island, but honestly, it’s just a mess. D

“The Ash Tree” by M. R. James (1904). An Edwardian prototype, perhaps, of the true crime narrative style. It's a rambling and uninteresting fictional history of an aristocratic family’s fortunes after their forebear testifies against a witch. The most interesting aspect is how James lampoons (or at least references) the Early Modern well-to-do's phobia of nature. “It can hardly be wholesome,” says a bishop, “to have the air you breathe strained, as it were, through all that leafage.” That was the only spot of enjoyment I got from this dull piece. D

“A Vine on a House” by Ambrose Bierce (1905). Another disappointment, a brief and fairly pointless anecdote. D

“Professor Jonkin’s Cannibal Plant” by Howard R. Garis (1905). Something approximating an actual story, with the titular Professor Jonkin feeding the titular pitcher plant on beefsteaks until it towers to the peak of the greenhouse, leading to an unsurprising outcome. It isn’t a good story, but it’s a slight step forward. Still D

“The Voice in the Night” by William Hope Hodgson (1907). The story I’ve looked forward to the most, ever since I saw Hodgson’s name on the table of contents. Hodgson’s novel The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” may not have been “good” by modern standards, but it was memorable, lingering in my mind long afterward. I’ve wanted to read more by Hodgson ever since. “Voice” is a fungal tale, rather than botanical, but it’s the best story in the book so far, so I’ll forgive the editor for that. Deliciously creepy. In comparison to everything else that came before it in this collection, I’d say it earns a solid B-

“The Pavilion” by Edith Nesbit (1915). Mildly entertaining piece deconstructing gentlemanly hubris. It’s set during the 1860s but was written with full wartime irony. Two gentlemen, competing for the affections of one young lady, make a bet to spend the night in a supposedly haunted pavilion. Her plain friend Amelia, whom everyone ignores, has misgivings. This story has an awesome moment where Amelia — the real protagonist of the tale — reveals a dagger she had concealed in her muslin flounces, quite possibly the earliest example I’ve ever encountered of that particular trope. I can’t take humble Virginia creeper seriously as a bloodthirsty plant, but still, this story deserves at least C+

“The Green Death” by H. C. MacNeil (1920). Perfectly serviceable, if overlong, mystery novelette about an apparent murder at a society soirée. The story’s inclusion in this volume robs us of any suspense over the solution. Even though murder mysteries will never be my thing, I can recognize this as an ably written and effectively structured entry. C

“The Woman of the Wood” by Abraham Merritt (1926). In my limited exposure to A. Merritt, I’ve felt that his stories would have had promise, if only he had been coaxed away from his vile racism. This tale of a Great War vet, recuperating from his PTSD at a serene lake in the Vosges, who gets beckoned into a fight between the trees and some axe-happy landowners, doesn’t fix my issues with Merritt, but it demonstrates his potential. The prose is lovely without being overwrought, evocative, breathing life into the familiar yet alien personifications of the forest. With the exception of the era’s gender norms, “Wood” functions as one of the better faerie stories I’ve read in some time. A respectable B-

“The Moaning Lily” by Emma Vane (1935). It’s almost a shame this story comes at the end, because, while the plot is another spin on the same old formula — botanist collects a vampiric flower, is determined to show it off even at the cost of his life — Vane’s prose is crisp, and this is one of the better variations in the book. It’s also much creepier than many of the earlier iterations on the theme. But it’s fighting an uphill battle for my interest here at the end. I’ll give it a C

—

As is often the case with these collections of older stories, I had a better time with Evil Roots than my rating would suggest. The individual stories might not be great shakes, but it’s always fun to read weird old pulp.

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.

2014 read #71: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Notes by Michael Mason
533 pages
Published 1847
Read from July 23 to July 27
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Several years ago I had the misfortune of trying to read Don Quixote. Don't get me wrong, I loved the portions of the book that dealt with Quixote and Sancho Panza. But maybe a little over a third of the way through the thing, Quixote and Sancho Panza disappear off the stage, their boisterous and preposterous adventures forgotten for a passel of uninteresting paragons of Christian morality, who swap tales in between ejaculations over God's goodness and mercy. The experience put me off the classics canon for quite a while.

So it was a welcome surprise that the first two-thirds or so of Jane Eyre was thoroughly, even briskly readable. The chapters of her childhood neglect and emotional abuse resonated with me; I think that part of the book would have been a favorite and fixture of my developing sensibilities had I read it at, say, age 13. The romance with Rochester was surprisingly affecting, for all its stiffness, and the Gothic touches -- while predictable and inevitably tainted with Victorian ideas of race -- were mildly entertaining. It wasn't until the final third of the book that the dreaded expostulations on God and Providence, not to mention fortuitous bequests and surprise cousins and clairvoyant encounters, sank in and made a muck of the story's momentum and readability.

There's plenty of room to write intelligent thoughts on Jane Eyre as a primordial feminist character (or not), but I'm sure that's been done to death in undergraduate English dissertations and so on.

2014 read #42: Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life by Herman Melville.

Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life by Herman Melville
315 pages
Published 1846
Read from May 5 to May 7
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

I would have eaten up this sort of book as a kid. I loved the 19th century adventure narrative back then, and the questions of authenticity, culturally filtered expectations, and massaging the narrative to move copies wouldn't have bothered me at that age. As it is, with no way to determine how much of the book is fiction, and how thoroughly the "true" parts were caricatured to suit the worldview of author and reader, the book's only commendation would be Melville's prose -- yet here, in his first book, he had yet to fully master the wry, ironic tone that elevated Moby-Dick to the short list of my favorite books. Typee is a historical curiosity, but useless as an anthropological document.