2026 read #43: Crawling Horror: Creeping Tales of the Insect Weird, edited by Daisy Butcher and Janette Leaf.

Crawling Horror: Creeping Tales of the Insect Weird, edited by Daisy Butcher and Janette Leaf

317 pages

Published 2021

Read from August 3 to August 25

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

We’re anhedonic as fuck but we’re gonna keep reading, baby! Back at it again with another British Library Tales of the Weird volume, this time one I bought at retail price at Barnes & Noble right after a breakup just to feel something.

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“The Sphinx” by Edgar Allan Poe (1846). As a precocious reader at the turn of the 1990s, I was excited to find a dusty collection of Poe when I stayed in my family’s ancestral farmhouse one summer. Countless Looney Tunes had primed me to expect macabre frights in its pages. The actual experience of reading Poe, of course, disappointed me even then. I remember tearing through this brief anecdote, growing excited by the appearance of the ominous beast, and correspondingly let down by the denouement. A faintly comic bauble, only a classic thanks to inertia.

“The Blue Beetle: A Confession” by A. G. Gray, Jun. (1857). Basically Frankenstein, except shorter, less poetic, and about a guy who inadvertently makes a beetle. The most interesting thing about it to me was the narrator’s search for a singular “germ” of life, two years before the publication of On the Origin of Species. We tend to forget how the common origin of life and its subsequent diversification was already in the popular European zeitgeist even before Darwin.

“The Mummy’s Soul” by Anonymous (1862). The editors’ introduction to this story positions it as the earliest “mummy curse” story as we know it in English literature. I was excited to read it. Alas, it’s amateurish and plodding, and peppered with little nuggets of racism. I will say the story’s second half prefigures the Weird Tales vibe in the narrator’s feverish visions.

“After Three Thousand Years” by Jane G. Austin (1868). Rather rote Victorian romantic melodrama that happens to include a scarab necklace. I know I’m depressed right now, but I could not sustain any interest in this piece.

“A Dream of Wild Bees” by Olive Schreiner (1895). Brief moral fable with just a touch of eeriness about it. Moderately interesting.

“The Moth” by H. G. Wells (1895). An especially Wellsian ghost story, in which a quarrelsome entomologist is troubled by a moth that resembles his recently deceased rival. It’s fine enough.

“The Captivity of the Professor” by A. Lincoln Green (1901). This is more like it: an early weird fic about cerebral ants who Ratatouille various animals to perform functions and use them to construct ant civilization in the remote Amazon. The story, unfortunately, resides in the catalog of “white slave” narratives, but the pseudonymous Green doesn’t get especially egregious with the theme. In general weirdness and interest, this might be my favorite story so far.

“The Dream of Akinosuke” and “Butterflies” by Lafcadio Hearn (1904). Two fables from the exoticized East, in classic Nineteen-Oughts fashion. Hearn had an interesting life that landed him in Japan, where he married and became a citizen. These two entries purport to be examples of Japanese folktales. They’re fine enough, especially the myrmecological pageantry of the first, albeit filtered through the customary Orientalist norms of Western publishing of their time.

“Caterpillars” by E. F. Benson (1912). There’s an interesting occult story somewhere in this tale of supernaturally carcinogenic caterpillars infesting an Italian villa, but it’s buried under anachronistically stiff, comma-laden prose.

“An Egyptian Hornet” by Algernon Blackwood (1915). A cheeky Man vs Nature affair, as an Anglican reverend confronts a big hornet in a hotel bathroom. Doesn’t really qualify as a weird fic story at all, despite the editors’ insistence that the reverend’s point of view magnifies the insect’s malignity into something diabolical. I will say the character’s puritanical anxiety over the bug’s snatched waist made it a worthwhile read.

“The Blue Cockroach” by Christopher Blayre (1921). A trifle about the bite of a blue cockroach momentarily dissipating habitual English reserve. Had that annoying prose trick from this time where Random Words are capitalized for humorous Emphasis.

“The Wicked Flea” by J. U. Giesy (1925). We finally reach the era of Weird Tales proper, the original venue for this silly mad science caper. There’s a modest quantity of pulp entertainment value to be found in the tale of Xenophon Xerxes Zapt and his experiments with hypertrophied fleas, but the story goes on much too long.

“The Miracle of the Lily” by Clare Winger Harris (1928). Self-serious scientifiction in the early Amazing Stories style, which feels like an inevitability given the chokehold “man vs insects” had on the first years of that magazine. It tries to be an epic account of two thousand years of future history, but just reads as silly today. Harris offers a criticism of modernism and the destruction of beauty and sentiment in the name of “efficiency,” but inevitably, the usual modernist concerns (“struggle is essential for the race!”) crop up as well.

“Warning Wings” by Arlton Eadie (1929). Inoffensive little tale about a moth transmitting an SOS to an ocean liner.

“Beyond the Star Curtain” by Garth Bentley (1931). One of the things that keeps me coming back to old SFFH stories is encountering the standard tropes much earlier than I expect. This is a space-faring time dilation tale that sees our square-jawed adventurers landing on a far-future Earth after a trip into a parallel universe. They find themselves in a man’s-life wonderland: a planet overrun with giant insects, fungal jungles, and the occasional damsel in distress. It’s silly pulp fun.

“Leiningen Versus the Ants” by Carl Stephenson (1937; English translation published 1938). A more quotidian man’s-life affair in the Amazon, pitting a cocksure colonial planter (and his four hundred indigenous workers) against a rampaging migration of ants. It has all the casual bigotry one might expect, and is much too long. Bum note to end on.

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So yeah. I don’t know if it’s the depression talking, or if this was just an unusually disappointing entry in the Library of the Weird series.

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

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

418 pages

Published 1947

Read from December 9 to December 14

Rating: 3 out of 5

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

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

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

Anonymous traditional ballads

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

1780s-1790s

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

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

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

1800s

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

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

1810s

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

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

1820s

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

1830s

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

1840s

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

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

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

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

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

1850s

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

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

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

1860s

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

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

1870s

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

As I came through the desert thus it was,

As I came through the desert: Hell is mild

And piteous matched with that accursèd wild

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

1880s

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

1890s

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

God slays Himself with every leaf that flies,

And hell is more than half of paradise

1900s

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

1910s

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

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

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

1920s

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

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

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

The terrible, blind grass, feeling its way

With little patting hands. Feeling its way

Slowly, horribly, over all mankind.

There is no safety anywhere at all

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

…And I read,

Upon the tongue of a forgotten sphinx,

The annulling word a spiteful demon wrote

With gall of slain chimeras; and I know

What pentacles the lunar wizards use…

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

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

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

1930s

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

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

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

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

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

1940s

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

Flower Fables by Louisa May Alcott 

Illustrator unknown

182 pages

Published 1854

Read from December 6 to December 8

Rating: 2 out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

2025 read #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.

2025 read #59: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Summer 1950 issue.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Summer 1950 issue (1:3)

Edited by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas

128 pages

Published 1950

Read August 29

Rating: 2 out of 5

To commemorate F&SF possibly resuming publication in the coming weeks, why not get back into my sporadic project of reading my way through the magazine’s back catalogue? I doubt I’ll ever have the patience (or the access) to read every issue, but I’ve read the first two, so let’s move on to issue number three.

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“Friday, the Nineteenth” by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. A chronicle of bitter suburban heterosexuality that turns into something much more interesting. (If you care about seventy-five year old spoilers, look away now: It’s a time-loop story, quite reminiscent of Groundhog Day.) I truly didn’t expect to enjoy this piece as much as I did. Maybe B-

“Huge Beast” by Cleve Cartmill. Ably written but (to modern eyes) rather formulaic story of suspiciously cuddly alien contact. No doubt it was more groundbreaking in 1950. A respectable enough C+

“The Hat in the Hall” by Jack Iams. A suburban ghost story, mildly amusing. C-

“The War Against the Moon” by André Maurois (1927; English translation 1928). Purporting to be a chapter from a history book of 1992, this satire has some fascinatingly prescient touches, such as the rich buying up newspapers to control public opinion (and thus subvert democracy). Of course, this backroom dictatorship of the billionaires is depicted as a net good that the restive public ignores at its peril. Ah well. Straining to find a cause to unite a bored world and avert war, newspaper owners collude to pull a Watchmen, concocting a lunar invasion (which echoes uncomfortably with how right-wing media invented the trans panic, and the gay panic before that, and the Muslim panic before that, and the Satanic panic before that, and the urban crime panic before that, and…). Not my favorite kind of story, but historical interest and perceptive prognostication merits at least a C

“Dumb Supper” by Henderson Starke. This is actually by Kris Neville, writing not just under a pseudonym but also as a character: a supposed elderly folklorist in the Ozarks. If this is based on actual folklore, it’s modestly interesting, I suppose. C-?

“Ounce of Prevention” by Philip Carter. An extremely 1950s piece, which features global nuclear annihilation, a mission to Mars, a helpful Martian, and time travel. Ends with a typical 1950s twist. Maybe D+

An excerpt from the poem “Death’s Jest Book” by Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1850). It’s fine. Too abbreviated to make much of it.

“The Case of Summerfield” by W. H. Rhodes (1871). Originally published as a newspaper hoax in the Sacramento Union, this proves to be an ancient prototype of the “mad scientist threatens to destroy the world unless his demands are met” trope. Like Dr. Evil himself, Mr. Summerfield even demands the sum of one million dollars. While dense and slow-paced in accordance with the tastes of the time, and continuing well after the logical end of the story, it’s astonishingly creative in Summerfield’s central threat. C

“Divine Right” by Betsy Curtis. A fascinating blend of aesthetics, mixing suburban paperboys on bikes with space colonization and telepaths with greedy royalty. It’s almost like a whisper of Samuel R. Delany’s later working-class space stories. It’s a bit clumsy as a story, but the aesthetic carries it far. B-

“Born of Man and Woman” by Richard Matheson. Matheson’s very first published story. Pretty typical midcentury “freak kept chained in the cellar” material, little more than a character study, but effective. B-

“Professor Pownall’s Oversight” by H. R. Wakefield (1928). An early prototype of the “evil genius obsessed with his brilliant and charming classmate” trope. The editors’ introduction refers to this as a “chess fantasy,” but it’s really a ghost story centering around chess. Surprisingly enjoyable. B-

“Haunt” by A. Bertram Chandler. Brief but rambling anecdote about a seance with a ghost from the future. The punning twist ending must have felt terribly clever in 1950. C-

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So now I’ve read the first three issues of F&SF, in addition to the most recent eight and a scattering of others in between. This is the first halfway okay issue you reach reading forward. Nowhere near what it would become in more recent years, but still enjoyable.

2024 read #15: The Magazine of Fantasy, Fall 1949 issue.

The Magazine of Fantasy, Fall 1949 issue (1:1)

Edited by Anthony Boucher & J. Francis McComas

128 pages

Published 1949

Read from January 28 to January 29

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

It’s the 75th anniversary year for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Despite recent troubles and controversies, it’s still my favorite fiction magazine. Under the editorship of Sheree Renée Thomas, F&SF has been the best it’s ever been, consistently brilliant and innovative.

I’d hoped to continue reading each new issue when it comes out, as I did for most of 2023. To my knowledge, though, the January / February 2024 issue still hasn’t gone to press, which suggests concerning developments on the business and publishing end of the magazine. Fingers crossed it’s able to weather the current problems and endure into whatever future we face.

Thanks once again to online archives, I was able to read this: the very first issue of what would become our beloved F&SF. Founded purely as a fantasy magazine, this, like many periodicals of its era, padded its pages with reprints, and at least one story penned pseudonymously by an editor. Also, horror was lumped in with fantasy in this era; much of this issue is horror or horror-adjacent. 

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“Bells on His Toes” by Cleve Cartmill. Fairly standard humorous 1940s urban fantasy number. A cop checks up on Dr. Swaam, a would-be guru, to make sure he isn’t defrauding people, and discovers that the good doctor’s “believe it and make it real” self-actualization works a bit too well. The story is unremarkable. It’s fine. C-

“Thurnley Abbey” by Perceval Landon (1907). Even in 1907 this would have been a touch old fashioned. Our framing device narrator goes through the trouble of familiarizing us with his Continental routine before introducing our actual narrator, Colvin, a stranger on the train who begs to sleep in the first narrator’s cabin so he doesn’t have to sleep alone. To explain why, Colvin slogs through an implausibly detailed and rigidly chronological account of a cadaverous night he spent at his friend’s manor house. The skeletal being that Colvin encounters is depicted vividly, but the tale peters out and then just… ends, feeling half finished. What there is of it feels like a C

“Private — Keep Out!” by Philip MacDonald. This existential horror piece reads more hokey than horrific nowadays, but it’s an interesting variation on the classic forbidden knowledge trope, one grounded in the quotidian routines of Hollywood. As a reader, I think my expectations for a story are higher, thanks to the depth and imagination of modern day fantasy; I kept expecting “Keep Out!” to have something more, a deeper element, an unexpected twist that would feel like a revelation, perhaps a Siren Queen-esque connection to Hollywood myth. But no, once you figure it out, that’s pretty much all there is to it. C

“The Lost Room” by Fitz-James O’Brien (1858). This one is little more than a mood piece. It goes like this: Our narrator looks around his lodging room on a sweltering evening and recalls all the objects in it, with a paragraph or two of how each came into his possession. When his cigar burns down, he flings it out the window, and he decides he’ll go sit in the garden where it’s cooler. He proceeds to describe the vast and gloomy house around his room, then the cypress-grown garden. There he meets a strange little man in the dark, who tells him his fellow lodgers are enchanters, ghouls, and cannibals, before disappearing. Our narrator rushes back to his room and finds everything changed into a bacchanalian chamber, and all his familiar belongings transformed into exotica. Six lascivious strangers lounge around a table laden with delicacies; he must gamble with them for the use of his room. The story is slightly less boring than it sounds — O’Brien sustains a note of doomed melancholy that is moderately engrossing — but inevitably, there’s more than a little bit of Orientalism in the decadence of the transformed room. (There’s plenty of anti-Black racism, too.) It’s hard to rate a story so far removed from my own contemporary standards of storytelling, but the racism does it in. Maybe F+

“The Hurkle Is a Happy Beast” by Theodore Sturgeon. This one is a thoroughly 1940s science fantasy, of the sort that tosses in terms and names like gwik and Hvov before admitting that none of it matters. It’s supposed to be cheeky, playing with the expectations of early sci-fi worldbuilding, but it feels clumsy and lazy nowadays. (Like, you know you can just write your horny fable in an interesting way instead, right?) Anyway, a hurkle is a blue, six-legged alien kitten. One blunders its adorable way into a teleporter and shows up on Earth, which it finds as alien as we would find Lihrt. The first man to see it sprays it with DDT. If I’m parsing the ending correctly, the hurkle then gives birth to 200 female kittens, which in turn breed with humans and end up pacifying Earth (or at least male humans) with their happy sexual purrs. A weird horny twist condensed in vague, can’t-offend-the-censors language — how very 1940s. Maybe D+?

“Review Copy” by H. H. Holmes. The ever helpful ISFDB (Internet Science-Fiction Database) informs me that this was written by editor Anthony Boucher, which makes it odder that he chose a prolific real life serial killer for his supernatural murder-mystery pen name. (A cynical ploy for name recognition, presumably.) Here we find a vengeful writer, his book killed by a bad review, enlisting the services of a Black Magic user to kill the reviewer. The weapon? A book sent for review to the newspaper office. The story never rises above its banal “writers vs reviewers, am I right?” underpinnings. D

“Men of Iron” by Guy Endore (1940). A fable of automation and redundancy that’s still all too relevant in our current era of capitalist bullshit. (I typed out a whole rant about “AI” and the coordinated tech bro attack on labor, but we all know about it and it wasn’t necessary to include in this review.) The continued applicability is this story’s main point of interest; “Men” is forgettable, aside from its ending, in which (spoilers!) the newly automated machine lathe places a tarpaulin over its former operator and goes home to his wife. D+

“A Bride for the Devil” by Stuart Palmer. This one opens with several paragraphs describing the “full breasts” and “ample femininity” of its doomed heroine, with her youth treatments and multiple divorces and knack for spending the money of whichever husband is current. It would be a feat for any story to recover from such a beginning, and “Bride” doesn’t make the effort. Rote “occultists getting more than they bargained for” fluff, built on an unshakable foundation of misogyny. F

“Rooum” by Oliver Onions (1910). In much the way that “Bride” was built on misogyny, “Rooum” is built on racism, its opening paragraphs belaboring the fact that there was something not quite white about the titular character. Rooum’s tale of an invisible “Runner” catching up with him and running through him, the supernatural osmosis more painful each time, was interesting in a strange and half-formed way, but that wasn’t enough to redeem this story. F

“Perseus Had a Helmet” by Richard Sale (1938). Homicide procedural meets a touch of Greek legend. That makes this pulpy number sound way more interesting than it actually is. An office dweeb named Perseus loves an office dame named Ruby, but she’s playing him off the office Bluto, who beats Perseus up to keep him off her. Perseus subsequently acquires a helmet that, as in his namesake’s mythology, gives him powers of invisibility. He immediately launches into a life of crime, culminating in offing his rival. Clearly, “weenie becomes a tyrant when he gets a little taste of power” was a popular pulp trope; I was reminded of “The Weakling” in the February 1961 Analog. Maybe D-?

“In the Days of Our Fathers” by Winona McClintic. Imagine having your first published story printed in the first issue of what would become F&SF. Obviously no one knew what this little magazine would become, or how long it would last, or what masterpieces would appear in its pages. But in retrospect, it seems like quite an achievement. The story is a pretty standard midcentury affair: a child in the heavily regularized and perfected far future sneaks into the attic and, after reading a book penned by her uncle, discovers the “unsane atavism” called poetry, stirring feelings long since smoothed out of society. Unremarkable overall, but McClintic’s writing had actual character to it, which makes it a standout here. C+

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And that’s it for the first issue of what would become F&SF! Somewhat disappointing, though unsurprising. Still, it’s better than many issues I’ve read from the 1980s and ’90s.

2023 read #109: Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder, edited by David G. Hartwell.

Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder, edited by David G. Hartwell with the assistance of Kathryn Cramer

660 pages

Published 1989

Read from June 29 to October 1

Rating: 3 out of 5

It took me seven and a half years to persevere through Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment, the preceding volume in this anthology series. Hopefully this one won’t take me quite so long, though I do intend to read it piecemeal over the summer, likely into autumn. [Edit: Definitely into autumn.]

Everything about these two volumes is emblematic of the 1980s “adult fantasy” boom. You have the New Romantic cover art by Thomas Canty. You have the disdain for contemporary trilogies of Tolkien pastiches marketed in “bright colors.” You have the insistence (correct, but perhaps sounding a little desperate) that fantasy is and has always been an integral aspect of the world’s important literature, extending beyond the handful of tropes that happened to get thrown together under the commercial fantasy label in the 1970s. You can feel their urgency to legitimize the genre. This is art, you guys! It’s meaningful!

The introduction to 1988’s The Year’s Best Fantasy: First Annual Collection hits almost identical talking points. Clearly the genre’s luminaries were in a mood to be taken seriously at the end of the ’80s.

Onward to the stories!

“Green Is the Color” by John M. Ford (1987). I had been excited for this one until I realized that I was thinking of Jeffrey Ford, 21st century darling of short fantasy fiction. John M. Ford, by contrast, has Star Trek novels on his CV. Surprisingly, this is a solid (albeit sprawling) tale, interweaving a languid mystery of magical deaths with the story of a healer who is just trying to find a cure for her young charge’s nightmares. The character of Quard Toymaker — catty, queer-coded, all-knowing yet deliberately unhelpful until he decides to do exactly what needs to be done — is memorable, one of my new favorite characters from ’80s fantasy (or at least he is before his inevitable destiny catches up with him). Not everything works here, but it earns my appreciation.

“Wooden Tony” by Lucy Clifford (1892). This falls securely into what TikTok might term the “Oh no, little German boy!” school of fabulism, even though our particular little German boy here is actually Swiss. Spoilers: Tony, who reads to modern ears like a kid with autism and ADHD, dreams through his days and sings a song he possibly learned from the clouds; he no longer participates in his village’s tourism-based economy. For this he is scorned as “Wooden-head!” When a trader comes and offers to take Tony to Geneva and send his song out to all the world, his song is (as is the way of “Oh no, little German boy!” stories) extracted from him; Tony, now tiny with distance and fully wooden, is mounted into a musical cuckoo clock alongside one of his father’s carvings. One could read into this tale a critique of extractive capitalism. For what it is, and when it was written, it’s pretty good.

“Lest Levitation Come Upon Us” by Suzette Haden Elgin (1982). If I had a nickel for every time I read a feminist parable by Suzette Haden Elgin in which a woman inadvertently worked miracles, only for the miracles to be twisted and disregarded by the patriarchal powers of the world, I’d have two nickels! (See “Lo, How an Oak E’er Blooming” in the February 1986 issue of F&SF.) Not that there’s anything wrong with a writer having a niche. This is a cutting satire of how patriarchal power forces women into conformity — the rewards of being number two in the hierarchy, after all, are the prerogatives of cis, het, white, Christian women who fall in line — and how unwilling such a woman might be, in the end, to abandon the power of conformity.

“Prince Bull: A Fairy Tale” by Charles Dickens (1855). A tiresome imperialist allegory about noble Prince Bull getting hampered and ensnared by his perfidious fairy godmother Red Tape, and how Prince Bull’s innumerable children and his ungrateful servants look the other way instead of supporting his war against Prince Bear. Basically, it’s saying: “That damn bureaucracy and those mediocre ministers made a mess of our gallant and just Crimean War!” There’s nothing to recommend in this story.

“The Triumph of Vice: A Fairy Tale” by W. S. Gilbert (1867). Before his iconic pairing with Sullivan, Gilbert was a dramatist who sometimes wrote fairy tales for adults. Two things raise this one above the level of Dickens’ fairy tale: it isn’t an allegory on behalf of imperialism, and the repartee between Count von Krappentrapp, romantically thwarted by the towering Bertha, and Prince Pooh, a shifty gnome who hires the Count to woo him up a wife, is mildly amusing. Placing this above “Prince Bull,” however, is faint praise indeed. It deserves little else.

Entering August now, for those keeping track of my pace. (It’s me. I’m the one curious about my pace.)

“Turandina” by Fyodor Sologub (1912, English translation 1915). This is a drily tongue-in-cheek satire about a promising young lawyer who, despite his skill at subverting justice and his regular stipend from his father, finds himself unhappy, affecting the Modern malaise of cynical ennui. Peter Antònovitch dramatically longs for a fairy tale to come along and disrupt the overly ordered cause-and-effect of modern life. When Turandina, a forest enchantress seeking shelter in the mortal world, manifests at the very climax of Peter’s longing, he — modern man that he is — doesn’t believe her, and the police demand to see her passport. A fine effort, though (as with so many stories of this time) it peters out at the end, no pun intended.

“The Princess and the Frog” by Robin McKinley (1981). Little surprise that this one is excellent. It's been a while since I've read McKinley, but I would expect nothing less from the author of Deerskin. This is an atmospheric courtly fantasy retelling that expands the standard fairy tale and offers an insight: enchantment and manipulation are the same litany in different registers.

“Darkness Box” by Ursula K. Le Guin (1963). Le Guin’s greatness as a storyteller — her quietly assured prose, her careful skill with character, her vivid scene-setting — elevates what seems at first to be merely an archetypal narrative into something ethereal, something vast, a melancholy and (literally) timeless meditation on holding the world still for fear of loss and change. Le Guin was writing twenty years ahead of her time in this one, as she so often did.

“Jack and the Beanstalk” by Osbert Sitwell (1959). Hard to believe this was published a mere four years before Le Guin’s effort above — they seem to date from different centuries. Sitwell draws out an essentially capitalist narrative in his “Beanstalk” retelling, meta-referencing Jack as “a sort of magical Sir Thomas Lipton.” Armed only with the pat aphorisms of the mercantile class, our Jack heads up the beanstalk and quickly learns to be an adept colonialist. Mostly a standard retread up until the cynical humor of Jack's post-beanstalk career.

Three chapters from The Little White Bird by J. M. Barrie (1902). Peter Pan made his first appearance in these chapters; the character’s popularity inspired the subsequent stage show and then his own book. Raised by television as I was, Peter Pan was always one of my personal icons, a rejection of the abusive adults in my life, but I hadn’t yet read anything Barrie wrote before now. The Peter mythos in these chapters is far different, and far stranger, than anything that made its way into an afternoon cartoon. Babies are hatched as birds and fly away to their human parents; Peter simply doesn’t realize he’s a boy, and flies back to Kensington Gardens. Birds raise him on an island there, where he learns his tragic fate as a Betwixt-and-Between, neither boy nor bird. As if all this weren’t enough to inspire a chapbook full of gender poetry, he escapes the island again with the assistance of a £5 bank note from Percy Bysshe Shelley. Good stuff.

“The Mouse Festival” by Johannes Bobrowski (1965, English translation 1989). I’m uncomfortable with the fact that Bobrowski was a German soldier in World War II. This delicate wisp of a tale addresses the German invasion of Poland from the mystic, moonlit perspective of a Jewish shopkeeper who shares a moment with a young German invader, watching mice celebrating a crust of bread in his shop. It is a thing of frail beauty, but I’m not happy that a German veteran is the one writing it.

“A Proper Santa Claus” by Anne McCaffrey (1973). Six year old Jeremy can paint and sculpt things into being, but his parents and his teacher don’t understand him, and the small neglects, disappointments, and adult expectations accumulate against the primitive magic of childhood. The ending feels inevitable. Not a classic, but not bad either. Hard to believe this is the same author who cranked out the dismal Dinosaur Planet.

It’s hard to read during the summer. It’s September now! Late September, in fact. I back-burnered this collection for a while.

“Inside Out” by Rudy Rucker (1987). This story is part of the reason I didn’t prioritize this book for the last month. I got stuck here for a bit, discouraged by Rucker’s opening depiction of suburban mediocrity rendered in all its damp, Pizza Hut-scented grotesquery. A potentially interesting tale of fractal pattern-people and nested possession gets gummed up by “take my wife — please!” heteronormativity. The strange vertiginous math-fantasy of multiple dimensions in string theory was good, the domestic disdain and sexual resentment was not.

“The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut” by Mark Twain (1876). Our narrator inadvertently renders his conscience perceptible, and proceeds to grill it about the whys and wherefores of the conscience business. Standard Twainian stuff, witty platitudes about human nature and so on from start to finish. It’s fine. Doesn’t live up to its excellent title. 

“The Woman Who Thought She Could Read” by Avram Davidson (1959). An urban fable about an Eastern European immigrant who was taught to read the future in beans. The story is a nice mix of pre-war small-city childhood vibes with a touch of eeriness and tragedy, reminiscent of Ray Bradbury (though not quite on Bradbury’s level of artistry). Solid.

“The Third Level” by Jack Finney (1950). I read and reviewed this story way back in 2014. Since it’s been a while, and my own tastes and perceptions have changed considerably since then, I decided to reread it instead of copying out what I wrote nine years ago. I’ve come to an appreciation for the use of urban spaces in fantasy, the sense that anything could be hidden away in an unfamiliar neighborhood, or at the end of the sidewalk — or, here, on a mysterious gaslit level of Grand Central Station. “Sometimes I think Grand Central is growing like a tree, pushing out new corridors and staircases like roots” — that’s a chef's-kiss image right there. Since I first read “The Third Level,” I’ve grown much more skeptical of this particular brand of “the old days were better” wistfulness, but the story still works, regardless.

“The Griffin and the Minor Canon” by Frank R. Stockton (1885). An otherwise satisfying fable that carries the stink of fear-based authoritarianism in its moral. A griffin, last of his kind, journeys to a town that features an excellent likeness of a griffin on its church. The only citizen brave enough to talk with him is the church’s minor canon; the griffin takes a liking to him, and follows him around the town on his daily labors. Seeing this, the cowardly citizens send the canon away into the wilds. Enraged at their cowardice, the griffin performs the charity work and teaching that had been done by the canon, and the fear of him makes the poor take up jobs and the “bad” children apply themselves to their lessons. That’s the part I didn’t like. But yeah, other than that, this tale works well enough.

“The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles” by Margaret St. Clair (1951). The first Masterpieces volume introduced me to St. Clair with her lovely vignette “The Goddess on the Street Corner.” Since then, I’ve read two of her novels — Message from the Eocene and The Games of Neith — neither of which lived up to that initial promise. This little tale is a perfectly serviceable darkly humorous fantasy about a thoroughly modern salesman who ventures to the edge of Terra Cognita to, well, sell rope to gnoles. (Lord Dunsany's gnoles, not modern D&D gnoles; the title has a touch of “selling coals to Newcastle” about it, what with the tentacles and all.) A fine fancy, though it doesn’t equal “Goddess.”

“The Dragons” by Murilo Rubião (original publication date unclear, English translation published 1965). A slim magical realism piece that draws an allegory for colonialism, displacement, and culture clash from its simple tale of dragons drifting into town. Lingers in the mind longer than its brevity would suggest.

“On the Downhill Side” by Harlan Ellison (1972). A typically solid and assured outing from Ellison, but also — typically — freighted with that “I’m just depicting the casual bigotries of my characters” vibe beloved by late 20th century white male authors. When your characters are ghosts — the ghost of a needy American architect, venting about his “shrike” of a bygone mother-in-law to the ghost of a nineteenth century New Orleans society girl — a lot of casual bigotry crops up. I did quite like this story, though. Even if I didn’t care for the people, the unicorn wrecked me. Ellison’s prose is, as always, evocative. It has a certain weighted inevitability that makes the “twist” obvious, but also makes it less of a twist and more of a fated outcome.

“The Parrot” by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1965, English translation published 1966). Vivid and immersive tale of a village horse dealer, the parrot he loves, and the grinding inexorable tragedy that lands him in prison. I haven’t read much literature from Eastern Europe, but this seems like a classic example of it.

“The Gray Wolf” by George MacDonald (1864). Fluently written for the time period, but ultimately this one is a by-the-numbers Victorian fable about a young man of the leisure class letting himself get beguiled by a toothy young woman in the wilds of the Shetlands.

“The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath” by Patricia A. McKillip (1982). Somehow I’ve never read any of McKillip’s short fiction, even though I picked up a collection of her stories, titled after this selfsame tale, and have had it sitting on a shelf for a couple years or so. “Harrowing” is a magnificent introduction to her short work, expertly sketching out a strange, lived-in world, and with deft details defining its two leads, a marvel of language and efficiency. Peka is one of my favorite point-of-view characters from McKillip now, a tough, no-nonsense girl who mines gold and makes wormspoor booze and loves her home. Ryd, who has returned to Hoarsbreath determined to harrow away the ice dragon that keeps the land frozen twelve out of the thirteen months of the year, is a sharply written foil for her: infuriatingly convinced, like any tech bro, that he knows what’s best for everyone, even though no one asked, even if it means disrupting the traditions and livelihoods (and very existence) of his homeland. This is the sort of story I read these old collections and magazines to find. My favorite story here so far.

“The Last of the Dragons” by Edith Nesbit (publication date uncertain, possibly 1899). This one is an unexpected delight, a precociously proto-feminist tale of a princess who refuses to let a prince fight the last dragon for her, wanting to tame (or fight, if it came down to it) the dragon herself. “The Prince drew his sword, and the Princess drew hers — the beautiful silver-handled one that the prince had brought in his motor-car.” I wish more fiction from this era were like this. (Though the class politics of it sucks.)

Halfway through this book, by page count! Only twelve more stories remain, though. Clearly this collection is back-loaded with longer pieces.

“Lila the Werewolf” by Peter S. Beagle (1969). This one is a flawed masterpiece, marred by its midcentury approximation (you can’t call it understanding) of gender and sexuality. Imagine an artsy and acclaimed end-of-the-'60s movie about New York City bohemians getting tangled up in an ill-fated liaison, full of trendy folk-revival music and sophisticated camerawork, but the girl is a werewolf. It has all the brilliance you’d expect, brimming with Beagle's sharply observed detail and the palpable energy of the ’60s city, but a lot of it hasn't aged well, particularly toward the end; Beagle's own afterword, presumably added in the '80s, admits as much.

“The Drowned Giant” by J. G. Ballard (1964). An exquisite exercise in tone, this description of a colossal corpse that washes ashore, and its steady putrefication, defilement, and dismemberment, is disturbingly clinical. Even the narrator, the only person in the city who seems to appreciate the scale and strangeness of its arrival, is bereft of any sense of wonder. What Ballard has to say about human nature is there between the lines, and it isn’t pretty. I do not recommend reading this while eating cold pizza, as I did.

“The Enchanted Buffalo” by L. Frank Baum (1905). The main point of interest here is watching the rote 1980s epic fantasy formula — the old king is slain by an evil interloper with powers granted by an evil magic-wielder, but the old king’s son vows to defeat the interloper and reclaim the throne — play out in a turn-of-the-century children’s story about bison. Yeah, yeah, it’s the Campbellian monomyth and all that, I get it. The Lion King does it too. But it shows how unsophisticated all those fantasy trilogies built from the mononyth really were all along.

“Narrow Valley” by R. A. Lafferty (1966). An oddly ubiquitous fixture of these SFF retrospectives, “Narrow Valley” has appeared twice before in collections I’ve read (this is the third), and popped up in the contents of several other anthologies I haven’t read (but plan to). I first read and reviewed it here. Rereading it now, I must echo my initial assessment — this story is pretty silly. It’s a topological fantasy, much like “Inside Out” earlier in this volume, crammed with cringy midcentury “humor” about contemporary would-be settlers vs. Indigenous people. I truly don’t get why it kept getting anthologized.

“Beyond the Dead Reef” by James Tiptree, Jr. (1983). Not quite of the revelatory quality I’ve come to expect from Tiptree, with some colonialist bits that haven’t aged well at all. Nonetheless this was a moderately entertaining ecological horror yarn, all about reef degradation and the sea’s revenge.

“The King’s Bride: A Fairy Tale After Nature” by E. T. A. Hoffman (1819, English translation published 1963). Here’s part of the reason the back half of the book has so much bulk but so few stories: this one alone is nearly 50 pages long. Despite its length, and its antiquity, this one passes relatively painlessly. (Perhaps we have the 1960s translation to thank? It’s certainly much more concise than a lot of English stories from this time period.) It’s standard German fairy tale stuff, faintly comic rather than murderous, toying with various stock characters: the father up in the tower playing at mysticism in his wizard hat, the earthly daughter who loves her vegetables, the betrothed young man who has become ethereal with poetry while away at university. I’m much less enthused about the “sly, malicious” gnome king, knowing the antisemitic influences underlying Germanic gnome folklore. It all wraps up in a predictable but still amusing fashion, involving pots and pans and bad poetry.

“Under the Garden” by Graham Greene (1963). This one is even longer, somehow. It begins as a lovely, melancholy meditation on mortality, on memory, on the lost wonder and possibilities and expanses of childhood. Dying man William Wilditch returns to the country house where he spent his childhood summers, with all their hidden magic, to find its estate is now cut up into council houses. “Now the dreaming child was dying of the same disease as the man. He was so different from the child that it was odd to think the child would not outlive him and go on to quite a different destiny.” The childhood adventure, or dream, that draws Wilditch back to Winton Hall is something like Lewis Carroll by way of John Waters, a grubby, subterranean realm where an old man with a nicotine-stained beard sits on a lavatory and demands young William read to him from old newspapers, has him piss in a chamber pot of gold, and shows him softcore pinup mags. Dream or not, it’s an unsettling but unique read, so I suppose Greene accomplished what he set out to do. A mix of creativity and rancidness that could only have come from the 1960s.

“The Things That Are Gods” by John Brunner (1979). I read and reviewed this one back in 2015. While not quite as lengthy as the previous two, it’s long enough. Brunner’s storytelling wallows in the decadent convolution of '70s fantasy. This time around, I felt that I understood far more of the story as it unfurled. The first time, I hadn't known that this was the last in a series of tales about the traveler; knowing it now, with a better grounding in the fantasy traditions of the '70s than I had eight years ago, I have a firmer handle on Brunner's layers of asides and flashbacks and the allusions to unseen events. (Maybe my reading comprehension is better than it used to be?) Essentially, the traveler is an ageless being who has existed since before time, bound by fate to grant the wishes of those around him. As the universe becomes more ordered, and the energies of chaos less pronounced (thanks in no small part to these granted wishes), the scope of wishes he can grant becomes circumscribed by what he's done before. The traveler grows disquieted at the way recent wishes have backfired, their ends unjust. All the while, he can't rid his thoughts of a distant town called Stanguray. For all its old-school fantasy worldbuilding and scale, “Things” is more humorous and tongue-in-cheek than I remembered. Overall, a bit sprawling and self-induglent, but a solid story for its time.

“The King of Nodland and His Dwarf” by Fitz-James O’Brien (1852). Boo. Another lengthy one. Another nineteenth century political satire. Another instance of an evil and deformed little person. It’s written in a sprightly enough manner for its time period, but has little else to recommend it. A tedious read, especially so near the end of the collection.

“The Seventeen Virgins” by Jack Vance (1974). I read and reviewed this tale of Cugel the Clever back in 2014. Cugel is basically a Bugs Bunny figure roaming a Dying Earth; he passes pebbles off as opals, outwits officious bureaucrats, expresses skepticism at social institutions, runs a side-hustle telling fortunes with the aid of a local lad, and skips town via caravan in the company of said virgins. We all know the fate of virgins in stories written by dudes; this one is no exception. Skeevy, like most ’70s male-gaze fantasy, but mildly entertaining.

“The Bagful of Dreams” by Jack Vance (1978). Two tales back to back might be a surfeit of Cugel the Clever. It’s more of the same: Cugel continues his travels through various misadventures, gets his way by flattering provincial egos, and relieves unhelpful strangers of their riches. It’s fine, but I had a distinct sense of diminishing returns.

“The Hollow Land” by William Morris (1856). Here we are on the first day of October, facing an overlong William Morris joint to conclude this volume. As with “Lindenborg Pool” (reviewed here), we find ourselves in a pseudo-medieval land, but this time we have a romance replete with perfidious ladies, mysterious maidens, kingly sons, bloody vengeance, and everyone out slewing this and that. It’s somewhat interesting as an ancient prototype of sword and sorcery (though one stuffy with biblical allusion). Plus it doesn’t have the whiff of antisemitism that marked “Lindenborg Pool.” Faint praise to end on, but here we are!

And that’s it! It took a mere three-ish months this time. In fact, I read the bulk of it (two-thirds of it by page count) in about eleven days.

All in all, I’m giving this volume a slight edge over the first. The best stories here (by McKinley, Le Guin, McKillip) are simply outstanding; while the worst stories (by Dickens, Gilbert, O’Brien) are bad, the overall quality of even the middling tales finds a higher baseline than in the first Masterpieces.

I’m sad that the series ended with this book. I crave more wide-ranging surveys of my favorite genre, collecting centuries of stories under one cover.

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.