2025 read #56: Circles of Stone: Weird Tales of Pagan Sites and Ancient Rites, edited by Katy Soar.

Circles of Stone: Weird Tales of Pagan Sites and Ancient Rites, edited by Katy Soar

238 pages

Published 2023

Read from August 24 to August 26

Rating: 3 out of 5

This is the first British Library Tales of the Weird anthology I’ve picked up since Polar Horrors last October. My partner R gifted me Circles of Stone during the holidays; I’ve intended to read it this whole time, even having it in my perennial to-read stack since December. But do you ever have books sit in your TBR pile so long that you start to feel avoidant of them? No? Just me?

Anyway, now that my teen is back with his other parent for the school year, I’m excited to get back into reading with more regularity. And Circles’ table of contents looks like it could be a lot of fun.

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Extract from Ringstones by Sarban (1951). Excerpting this from a novella, editor Soar deploys it almost as an extension of her introduction, singling out a brief lecture from one character on the folkloric associations of standing stones. Well-written enough, but not really reviewable as a story.

“The Temple” by E. F. Benson (1924). This predictable but competent piece about two friends who rent a cottage near a ring of standing stones in Cornwall is invigorated by crisp prose and evocative descriptions. The ending is the weakest part. A solid start all the same. B-

“The Spirit of Stonehenge” by Jasper John (1930). Brief anecdote about a young archaeologist becoming possessed by the Druidic evil of Stonehenge. Painless, but not much to it. C

“The First Sheaf” by H. R. Wakefield (1940). Soar’s editorial introduction cites this tale of an isolated Essex village as “an early example of folk horror.” The inbred villagers here certainly return to propitiating the Old Gods in order to alleviate a drought the Christian God won’t break. The story is interesting as a prototype, but otherwise I found it middling. C

“The Tarn of Sacrifice” by Algernon Blackwood (1921). John Holt is a hiker on holiday, haunted by physical and emotional wounds from the War to End All Wars. Repulsed by modern man’s hypocrisy, and unable to shake the realization that he enjoyed killing on the battlefield, he finds himself drawn to the (imagined) manly simplicity and stoicism of the ancient pagan Romans. At the titular tarn, he meets a young woman and her father, who quickly convince him he’s the reincarnation of her lover from Roman times. Maybe it’s because I read this story perched on a rock shelf above a lake, but I quite enjoyed it. Reminded me of a gentrified take on Robert E. Howard’s masculinity-fetish tales. B

“The Shadow on the Moor” by Stuart Strauss (1928). This belongs in the category of “an amateur author lucked into a Weird Tales publication.” A dude trying to write horror stories at a Cornwall inn is chilled to see the shadow of a woman walking all alone on the midnight moors — no woman, just her shadow — and inevitably he must follow it to a sinister ring of stones. This is conveyed in correct but lifeless prose: “It was uncanny. Impossible. Yet his eyes told him that the impossible was fact.” The first dud of this collection, which is rather impressive for stories of this era. D

“Lisheen” by Frederick Cowles (1948). Another one not to my taste, affecting a faux-historical style that offers only the driest outline of a folk horror story. A girl is born of the devil (and/or Pan) in a Cornwall village; the vicar entrusted with her care soon loses his faith for lust of her. You could imagine a low budget 1970s flick built from that skeleton, full of latex and nudity, but the text at hand doesn’t amount to much. D?

“The Ceremony” by Arthur Machen (1897). An evocative vignette centering a stone still venerated in the wood. Brief but vivid. B-

“The Dark Land” by Mary Williams (1975). An unexpectedly late variation on the Edwardian formula of “narrator’s artist friends have an uncanny experience on the moors, here related at secondhand.” There’s potential here, but the narrative distance (and the primly Christian ending) works against it. C-

“The Man Who Could Talk with the Birds: A Tale Told by the Fireside” by J. H. Pearce (1893). Ah, the chokehold that phonetic dialect had on the nineteenth century. This brief number is related entirely in a roughly transcribed Cornish accent. It was fine otherwise, I suppose. C-

“The Stone that Liked Company” by A. L. Rowse (1945). Another tale told by fireside, this one is more substantial and interesting, with the dean of a college rambling out a yarn about an over-excitable young man fixating on a standing stone during a Cornwall rest-cure. A solid enough C+

“Minuke” by Nigel Kneale (1949). A house in a new ribbon development is afflicted with preternatural activity in an anecdote related by a letting agent. Nothing especially interesting in itself (was it supposed to feel more slapstick than scary?); nonetheless I enjoyed it as a glimpse of suburban history, something that seldom crops up in stories older than this. Maybe C

“New Corner” by L. T. C. Rolt (1937). One of the best qualities of this particular volume has been its diversity of subjects. Sure, there’s been a surfeit of Cornish standing stones luring the innocent to devilish doom, but there’s also been items like this one, which brings us to the world of 1930s auto racing. As a story, it doesn’t offer much, and at times feels patronizing in a boy’s-own magazine sort of way, but it’s a fascinating glimpse into a bygone subculture. C-?

“Where the Stones Grow” by Lisa Tuttle (1980). A thoroughly 1980s spin on the subject, in which a man wrestles with traumatic childhood memories of seeing his father crushed by standing stones. Well-written but just a tiny bit silly, as 1980s horror frequently was. C

“The Suppell Stone” by Elsa Wallace (2018). Well-written, as befits so recent a story, but disappointingly bland. I suppose I’ll give it a C

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And that’s it! The second half didn’t hit as well as the first, but overall, I’d say this was the most satisfying British Library Tales of the Weird volume I’ve read so far.

2024 read #119: From the Depths and Other Strange Tales of the Sea, edited by Mike Ashley.

From the Depths and Other Strange Tales of the Sea, edited by Mike Ashley

317 pages

Published 2018

Read from October 4 to October 8

Rating: 2 out of 5

Back at it again with another themed volume of public domain tales from British Library. With life stuff continuing out of my control, I want escapism, but can only manage bite-size morsels. Short stories are the obvious choice, and these collections are often more fun than strict reference to quality would suggest.

This volume differs from the other BL books I’ve read by presenting its stories out of chronological order. I suppose some thematic structure might emerge as I read.

Into the briny deeps!

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“The Ship of Silence” by Albert R. Wetjen (1932). This is an ably-written and winningly atmospheric tale of a derelict ship found adrift, Mary Celeste-style, the sole clue to the crew’s fate found in the screams mimicked by a parrot. Gets surprisingly good mileage out of never actually solving the mystery of the disappearance, and never showing us the monster (which is heavily implied to be prehistoric). A respectable B-

“From the Darkness and the Depths” by Morgan Robertson (1913). Another solid entry, hailing from that early period of modern physics when “Röntgen rays” were cutting edge, and the possibilities of other rays seemed endless. Talk of rays (and the applications of ultraviolet photography) is only a prologue to a yarn about an invisible creature shaken loose from the seabed by the eruption of Krakatoa, and the capsized mariners who must contend with it. “Darkness” isn't at the same level of pulp storytelling as “Ship of Silence,” but for what amounts to a man's-life adventure with a high body count, it's creative and atmospheric. C+

“Sargasso” by Ward Muir (1908). Ah, the peril of the Sargasso! It’s right up there with quicksand and the Bermuda Triangle on the list of childhood anxieties. This story’s diary format puts us at some remove from the action, but otherwise it’s a deliciously pulpy tale of seaweed that seems to have a mind of its own, and the creatures that prowl its surface. Could easily be a seafaring D&D encounter, which I count as a recommendation. C

“Held by the Sargasso Sea” by Frank H. Shaw (1908). Published the very same month as Muir’s story above. Clearly, the Sargasso was a pressing concern in 1908. A persistent anti-union, anti-working class vibe clouds this piece, which is about the bond between a ship and her captain, and what the ship does after its worthless layabout crew mutinies. The narrative mocks the mutineers for wanting to get rich without labor, as if the capitalist class didn’t have a monopoly on that endeavor. Even aside from its distasteful classism, this just isn’t an interesting story. D-

“The Floating Forest” by Herman Scheffauer (1909). Mediocre old melodrama about insurance fraud (and its comeuppance) on the high seas. Overwrought, disjointed, and not especially interesting, although I did enjoy the concept of a floating wreck accumulating vegetation before drifting into the open ocean. D?

“Tracked: A Mystery of the Sea” by C. N. Barham (1891). The turn of the century fad for the occult manifests in this soggy story of a "clairvoyante" locating a lost ship. Barham's phraseology reads like an early 2000s forums dork straining to emulate Victorian diction: "The narrative will be unquestionably denounced as an utterly unreliable romance. It will be accepted as a positive proof that the writer is wholly destitute of the critical faculty. Nay, more: not a few will from henceforth conclude that I am facile princeps in the reprehensible art of lying." This, mind you, arrives four pages into a preamble on clairvoyance and somnabulism. Just a bad time all around. Maybe F+

“The Mystery of the Water-Logged Ship” by William Hope Hodgson (1911). Not as engagingly weird as the other Hodgson pieces I've read; in fact, it gets a trifle repetitive. Nonetheless, this tale of a drifting derelict, and the surprisingly populous yacht that tries to salvage her, is welcome after the last few stories. Vague spoilers: the mystery’s denouement is in the idiom of Jules Verne. C-

“From the Depths” F. Britten Austin (1920). A German officer, formerly a submarine commander during the Great War, passes himself off as a Swedish captain, commissioned for an operation to salvage ships sunk by U-Boats in the war. Inevitably, we get vengeful ghosts communicating in Morse code. The melodrama of it all almost works. Characterization is next to nonexistent, but I’ll be generous and say C-

“The Murdered Ships” by James Francis Dwyer (1918). A scuttled ship seeks vengeance on the crew that did her in. Nothing especially interesting to me. D

“The Ship That Died” by John Gilbert (1917). Continuing the Great War preoccupation with “dying ships,” this one is kind of a pointless yarn, enlivened only by the imagery of a ship rotting and sloughing away (which is, inevitably, explained by a throwaway reference to an unknown ray). Not much else here. D?

“Devereux’s Last Smoke” by Izola Forrester (1907). The ghost of a Broadway man haunts his young widow when, on her way to remarry, she takes the selfsame steamer he died on. A strain of internalized misogyny sours this one, which felt rote even without it. D

“The Black Bell Buoy” by Rupert Chesterton (1907). A tedious affair about a haunted buoy that, once again, becomes an instrument of vengeance. D

“The High Seas” by Elinor Mordaunt (1918). One brother bullies the other from childhood into long-standing murderous rage, then they happen to ship together on the same crew. Incredibly tedious and unnecessary retelling of Cain and Abel. Nothing of interest to it whatsoever. Maybe F+

“The Soul-Saver” by Morgan Burke (1926). Finally, a touch of strangeness that isn’t just a vengeful spirit or some such. Captain Morbond is a violent bully of a man who, over the course of his career, beat two people to death, and he insists that their souls came into his keeping as little white mice. Well, I guess the souls do get a taste of vengeance in the end. Maybe C-

“No Ships Pass” by Lady Eleanor Smith (1932). An astonishingly modern story that, as editor Ashley notes, could have served as the inspiration for Lost. Shipwrecked mariners over the centuries have found themselves within swimming distance of a magical island. Saved, they soon discover it to be inescapable, a limbo where they can never leave, never age, and never die. I could easily see this getting published sometime in the 1990s, antique gender norms and all. Not perfect, but a solid enough B-

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And that’s it for this collection! It began so strongly, yet Ashley’s selections quickly veered out of my own personal sweet spot for old pulp. Ah well. 

2024 read #116: Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic, edited by Daisy Butcher.

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

285 pages

Published 2019

Read from September 28 to October 2

Rating: 2 out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

629 pages

Published 1985

Read from August 13 to September 26

Rating: 2 out of 5

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

2024 read #93: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Winter-Spring 1950 issue.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Winter-Spring 1950 issue (1:2)

Edited by Anthony Boucher & J. Francis McComas

128 pages

Published 1950

Read from August 10 to August 11

Rating: 1 out of 5

So, I had this plan to read an issue of F&SF from each decade of its existence, double back when I got to the 2020s, and do it again going the other way. I only made it as far as the 1960s before losing what little focus I had. Instead, today we’re hopping back to the 1950s for this, the second-ever issue of the magazine.

It would take me so many years to read through every single issue of F&SF, especially since I would need to buy hundreds more issues (some of them at collector’s prices) to make it happen. As much as I’ve thought about it, I probably won’t attempt it. But I might try to read through every issue I have access to, which happily includes its first full decade, thanks to online archives.

I don’t have high hopes for this issue. I’m choosing to read it because of the Ray Bradbury and Margaret St. Clair pieces, and also because the Coleridge reprint technically lets me add another item to my 1800s decade tag.

—

“The Gnurrs Come From the Voodvork Out” by R. Bretnor. The vast majority of 1950s humor hasn’t aged well. I’ve also never been impressed with any of Bretnor’s efforts. The  editorial blurb above this story hyperventilates: “[A]ny mention of gnurrs tends to reduce both editors to a quivering state of helplessness which has been authoritatively diagnosed as hysteria bretnorica.” What exactly is so hysterical, you ask? We have a kook inventor named Papa Schimmelhorn, a hidebound military officer who still yearns for cavalry, a WAC secretary who’s miffed by the lack of sexual harassment from her commander, and the gnurrs, who swarm out of the wainscoting to eat everyone’s clothes. It reads like something finely tuned to the sensibilities of midcentury 10 year old boys — maybe like old Bugs Bunny cartoons, but not funny. F

“The Return of the Gods” by Robert M. Coates (1948). This reprint, a tale of Greek gods (and various associated creatures) appearing to unsuspecting WWII veterans throughout the Northeast, originally appeared in The New Yorker. The prose has an oddly antique cadence, with news-magazine “the facts of the case” narration. The story itself feels like a throwback, as well, hearkening back to the Pan fad of the 1890s through 1930s. Yet it also has a whisper of the midcentury apocalypse genre within it, perhaps the earliest such expression of atomic anxiety I’ve encountered. I didn’t dislike it, aside from a sprinkling of the typical “women love sexual harassment, actually” bullshit. C-?

“Every Work Into Judgment” by Kris Neville. Dull, bible-thumping drivel that’s thoroughly impressed with itself, this one is a would-be philosophical ramble about a building on a future college campus. The building slowly gains sentience and telekinesis, and gets religion. Neville’s prose strains to attain poetry and meaning, but only gets in its own way. Maybe F+

A Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem, “Time, Real and Imaginary” (1803), has been inserted to fill half a page. First ever poem in F&SF! It might also be my first exposure to Romantic poetry, at least for the purposes of this blog. I liked it, but probably wouldn’t want an entire book of it.

“A Rope for Lucifer” by Walt Sheldon. An early example of a fantasy western, unsurprisingly freighted with racist caricature. If you’re like me, you probably imagined some bronco-busting variation on “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” but no: our epistolary narrator is the one named Lucifer, and the tale centers on how he received a sacred rope from mysterious India. The story never develops any degree of pizazz. D?

“The Last Generation?” by Miriam Allen deFord (1946). Another postwar atomic anxiety tale, originally published in Collier’s, pre-dating Coates’ effort by two years (though it employs the same news-magazine format). This time a testing accident in New Mexico renders all mammals sterile, all over the globe. The outcomes deFord lays out are equal parts creative and hopelessly optimistic; universal infertility leads to world peace and cooperation, for example, while the world’s rich men are happy to have their now uninheritable wealth taxed for the greater good. However, even within a global utopia, deFord couldn’t resist casting the usual white writer’s aspersions on China, India, and Africa. Maybe D+

“Postpaid to Paradise” by Robert Arthur (1940). I can safely say this is my very first philatelist fantasy. Magic stamps that transport the recipient to El Dorado are a neat conceit. Since this was 1940, alas, the narrator has to emphasize that one of the stamps depicts a teenage girl, before he promptly leers at her. Meh. D-

“The Exiles” by Ray Bradbury (1949). It’s hard to describe this piece without spoiling it, so here are the spoilers: All the canonical literary fantasists of the past (Shakespeare, Poe, Dickens, Baum, Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, etc.), kept alive thanks to those who read their books, have exiled themselves to Mars to escape the relentless pragmatism of science and progress. With the first astronauts approaching Mars, the fantasists use the magic of their creations (the witches of Macbeth, etc.) to kill or frighten them away. But the astronauts have an unexpected weapon: the last copies of their books, banned long ago. It’s a shallow business, and very much in the thrall of the white man canon, but it’s cute. I could see this as a Doctor Who serial. C+

“My Astral Body” by Anthony Hope (1895). The “mystical East” meets Edwardian social comedy in this tale from the 1890s. An unnamed “rajah” teaches a well-to-do Oxford student how to project an astral body. The student promptly sends his astral body to attend church and to get trousers measured for him. All this casual employment gives the astral body big ideas, and soon our Oxford student has regrets. A shrug. D

“Gavagan’s Bar” by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt. Actually a pair of stories: “Elephas Frumenti,” which sees bar patrons discuss selectively breeding elephants down to whiskey-drinking house pets, and “The Gift of God,” in which a Christian poet doesn’t know what to do when a miracle happens to her. This pair of flash stories launched the long-running Gavagan’s Bar series, which proved popular for some years in F&SF. I don’t get the appeal. Maybe D?

“World of Arlesia” by Margaret St. Clair. This author is hit or miss, and unfortunately, this one falls in the miss category. The plot — an immersive movie is used to pull people into a Matrix-like work camp — is interesting, and the narration dabbles with second-person, but the pieces don’t quite gel together. D+

“The Volcanic Valve” by W. L. Alden (1897). A supposedly humorous yarn about a scientist who, hoping to perfect a means of controlling volcanoes for profit, inadvertently triggers the explosion of Krakatoa. Full of the horrid racism of contemporary English authors, the entire punchline seems to be “our plan blew up our Chinese workmen.” F

“Not with a Bang” by Damon Knight. A supposedly humorous last-man-on-Earth tale. The “humor” derives from the fact that last woman on Earth is a prim Protestant who can’t wrap her head around the changed circumstances and just give the man some kids already. Gross as fuck. Something worse than F

—

Even with low expectations, this issue managed to disappoint me. The last two stories, in particular, were horrendous. I’ve read worse issues from the 1980s, but this one was a marked step down from the dubious charms of the first issue.

2024 read #46: The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells.*

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells*

249 pages

Published 1896

Read from April 18 to April 19

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

Like The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau was another tweenage favorite, read during the years when I lived in a car with my paranoid, abusive father (who seldom let me read anything more recent than the Edwardian era). I’ve been drawn to reread it ever since I read Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s excellent The Daughter of Doctor Moreau. Lacking access to my home library thanks to the move, and not yet having settled in enough to get a proper library card, I felt this was as good a time as any to give it a go.

Making the comparisons with Daughter is pretty much the only reason to read the original. Right from its conception, Wells’ Island is rancid with Victorian race theory, that bastard progeny of white supremacist theology and an early approximation of natural selection. The proverbial road from “beast” to “man” interested Victorians extremely, not least because the Christian conceit of the Great Chain of Being, dating back to medieval Neoplatonism, could be draped over their tentative glimpses of the evolutionary past, thus creating an ideological Frankenstein, a cobbled-together abomination to uphold their preconceived notions of superiority, with the Englishman just a couple steps below God. Even atheists of the day were enmeshed in this worldview, despite its theological origins. It was the foundation for late Victorian thought.

More succinctly, Island reeks of racism. Just absolutely foul with it. Racist imagery and racist implications cut through every depiction of Moreau’s creations; all the standard Victorian racial descriptors are in play.

Wells’ proto-technothriller style is far from its best here, burdened with clumsy description and awkward action. I will admit to some lingering wry fondness for Wells’ theological satire — God is a white-haired vivisectionist, indifferent to the pain and fear of his subjects — but even that is little more than a baby step toward religious deconstruction. The ending cribs more or less wholesale from Gulliver’s departure from the Houyhnhnms.

The few bits of the story worth salvaging found fresh life in Moreno-Garcia’s reimagining, so really, there just isn’t much point in revisiting Island, unless you plan to reinterpret and recontextualize it your own way.

2024 read #32: The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen.

The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen

156 pages

Published 1894

Read March 4

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

I don’t know why turn-of-the-century horror and fantasy authors became so fixated on Pan. Clearly it fit into the social reaction against the speed of technological change and social “progress” (we must use that term loosely for this era). There’s a distinct through-line of sexual anxiety as well, of fragile men losing their wits over the possibility of women having sexual agency. Modernism encompasses both the progress and the reaction against it, after all, balanced in uneasy tension. But why Pan?

My best guess is a lingering Victorian fetish for classical Greece, repudiating local British fae lore and nature spirits in favor of the “civilized” myths of a completely different culture.

(Which in turn brings us back to the ideological underpinnings of white supremacy, the myths of a great heritage of classical civilization that Western Europe invented for itself during the Medieval and Renaissance eras, myths which the English honed in the Victorian age. The cultural “heirs” of Greece and Rome — in as much as cultures can have “heirs,” which is a dubious proposition at best — were the Abbasid Caliphate and the Ottomans. Western Europe was always a cultural fringe and economic backwater, dressing up its indigenous systems of kin strife and feudal obligation with Roman trappings after the Western Empire collapsed and left behind a power vacuum. Victorians excelled at editing away actual history in favor of tidy hierarchies that always happened to place themselves at the top. But I digress.)

Whatever the reason, Pan was everywhere, from approximately the 1890s through the 1930s. One of the earliest manifestations of the Pan obsession, and certainly the most famous to this day, Machen’s The Great God Pan has been on my list for a few years now.

For such an influential story, Pan isn’t that good. Machen’s prose is stiff, almost amateurish to modern eyes. As in his story “N” (which I read and reviewed here), much of his narrative is laid out in smoking-room dialogue between gentlemen who witnessed different aspects of the story. After depicting a street-corner encounter in one chapter, he has one character summarize it all over again to another man in the next. At one point, two characters summarize the plot up to this point, then stop to look at the house of one Mrs. Beaumont, “an oddish sort of woman,” who just happens to serve a thousand-year-old vintage of claret to her guests; the two men make no connection between the two strands, and continue their walk. It’s almost comical.

Machen builds his novella’s horrors upon the unrestrained appetites of its femme fatale: “[T]hat woman, if I can call her woman, corrupted my soul.” Helen emerges from an event of horrible misogyny in the first chapter: her teenage mother Mary’s brain was operated upon by a man who regarded Mary as essentially his property, opening Mary’s mind to the horrors beyond human conception, and thence conceiving Helen through presumably metaphysical means (though this is never specified, so maybe I'm being naive). The book, in that light, could be understood as a violated woman’s vengeance upon the rich and titled men of London. I’d certainly love to see this retold as a queer revenge fantasy to highlight that element more. As it is, though, Machen’s story is far more interested in men putting a stop to Helen’s supernatural crimes that it is in her justification.

2024 read #30: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.*

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells*

216 pages

Published 1895

Read March 2

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

Tim Sullivan’s story “Dinosaur on a Bicycle” (which I read and reviewed in the March 1987 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction) was an effective and affectionate pastiche of Wells’ The Time Machine, so much so that I decided to revisit that classic novel immediately after wrapping up that review. It was a childhood favorite of mine, which I first read not long after The War of the Worlds. It’s a short and vivid book that left an outsize impression on my adolescent imagination. I know it won’t hold up to modern standards, but I haven’t reread it as an adult, so why not check it out again? At least it's a quick read.

Seemingly every entry-level commentary on The Time Machine picks up on Wells’ socialist class conflict narrative. What interests me more nowadays, as a would-be student of the evolution of science fiction and its ideological underpinnings, is how central a role the Victorian conceit of social evolution plays here. “Struggle improves the race” was the Victorian aristocracy’s way of incorporating Darwinian theory without upsetting their own social myths of racial, gender, and religious superiority. Even socialist Wells was unable to conceptualize that humanity evolved intelligence hand in hand with social systems and cooperation, enmeshed as he was in the mores of empire.

What’s most remarkable about this self-serving ideological gloss is not that it appeared this early — the entire rickety structure has Victorian roots, after all — but that it persisted so late. It pervades the Campbellian sci-fi of the 20th century, and was taken as accepted wisdom well into the 1990s. Hell, you’ll still find “comfort leads to decadence” ideology lurking around corners of SFF to this day. Clearly, it survived so long because science fiction’s primary audience (comfortably well-off heterosexual white men) was still served by it. (It’s the ideology of empire and hierarchy, after all.)

On its own merits, The Time Machine is a crisp adventure tale, efficiently structured, doling out each piece of the puzzle of 802,701 AD exactly when it’s needed. It’s better written and more effectively plotted than most scientific romances or tales of scientifiction would manage to be well into the 1940s. (Wells himself only wrote a handful of novels as good as this one, for that matter.) It isn’t particularly deep fiction, unless you’re reading it at 10 years old, but it’s entertaining and manages to do exactly what it sets out to do. If only more stories from the ensuing fifty years of pulp could say the same.

2023 read #146: Wanted — A King by Maggie Browne.

Wanted — A King, or How Merle Set the Nursery Rhymes to Rights by Maggie Browne

Illustrated by Harry Furniss

89 pages

Published 1890

Read December 4

Rating: 2 out of 5

Like Goblin Market, this novella was a mostly forgotten Victorian children’s fantasy, anthologized in the 1973 collection Beyond the Looking Glass. It’s an obvious imitation of the Alice books, but with centralized executive authority at its heart rather than chaos.

Our heroine Merle, abed for months after a bad fall, drifts off and finds herself at the turnstile into Endom, the land of nursery rhymes. The turnstile is manned by Grunter Grim, an irascible old man / evil spirit who hates children and refuses to give her a ticket, insisting she must leave her body behind before she can enter. Topleaf — a friendly leaf who used to wave at Merle from the top of a lime tree — curls around her and smuggles her in. Merle quickly discovers that the odious Grunter Grim has given the fairy who tells fairy tales all the wrong details, making the nursery rhymes ever so mean, so it falls to Merle to fix the mixed up nursery rhymes by selecting a king.

“Fixing” here entails making the nursery rhymes all proper and mannerly, undoing all the naughty changes introduced by Grunter Grim. Jack Horner, you see, tries to be a good boy, instead of boasting that he is. And so on. It’s the most Victorian thing imaginable — Victorians had such a passion for editing out all the disreputable details of history, folktales, ballads, etc. Bold of Browne to make that the stated reason our heroine quests into the land of fairy tales.

But in the midst of the monarchical bowdlerizing, there was one detail that fascinated me. When children arrive at Endom and Grunter Grim takes their bodies, he doesn’t return their proper bodies back. Merle meets a ten year old girl who was given the body of a three year old boy, who explains: “every one is astonished because… some girls [are] more like boys, and some boys more like girls.” A basic sense of gender expression in 1890! There isn’t much of interest in A King beyond that, but it was something. (Well, some of the art was pretty cool too.)

2023 read #144: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

133 pages

Published 1898

Read from December 3 to December 4

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I have a vague memory of attempting this one much too young, maybe 8 or 9 years old — young enough that, when our narrator gets a ride on “a commodious fly,” I pictured giant insects — and neither understanding nor liking it. I’m pretty sure I didn’t make it beyond the second chapter.

The opening certainly has its share of Victorian clutter. It drops us into a framing device full of unnamed interlocutors and half-spoken inferences, delaying the telling of the tale over several nights, a tale which was committed to paper twenty years before and relates events many decades prior. Presumably, to late Victorian tastes, this drew out the tension and increased the anticipation for its promised “uncanny ugliness and horror and pain,” but it hit my modern attention span like a speed bump. At least Dracula provided chicken recipes.

The ghosts of the sinister valet and the “almost shabby” ex-governess aren’t exactly on the same level as Count Dracula, and James’ prose often (in my opinion) trips over its own janky clauses, but it’s a fair sample of Victorian sensationalism, full of meanings either hinted at or actively concealed. Where we today might use horror to explore the loss of bodily autonomy or the violence of bigotry, the taste of James’ contemporaries seems to have dwelled on “corruption.” The threat of the ghosts seems rooted in the excess of their “familiarity” — the transgression of class distinctions, both with the children and with each other. It’s a sexualized caste anxiety, expressed with the same “Protect the Children!” hyperventilation that modern regressives deploy in defense of their own myriad bigotries, equating the transgression of social norms to predation, the willful corruption of the young.

The fact that James himself may have been homoromantic and potentially asexual adds further layers of repressed meaning. Some days you just wish Victorians would say what they mean.

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.