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.

2025 read #41: The Greatest Adventure by John Taine.

The Greatest Adventure by John Taine

256 pages

Published 1929

Read from May 2 to May 5

Rating: 1ish out of 5

The period between 1912 (when Doyle’s The Lost World was published) and somewhere around the end of WWII (when the subgenre appears to have been discarded in the postwar reshuffle of sci-fi) was the heyday of the lost world story. They ranged from the horribly written and horribly racist (The Land that Time Forgot) to the still racist but at least somewhat interesting (The Face in the Abyss). The ’20s and ’30s, in particular, seem to have been rife with lost worlds now forgotten.

The unpromisingly titled The Greatest Adventure is one such novel, a book (and author) I’d never heard of until I happened upon a pulp reprint from the 1960s. With its simple, direct prose, bubblegum-wrapper approximations of humor, and telling-not-showing exposition, it reminds me of a 1930s boy’s adventure novel I read a long time ago.

I’m not wholly convinced that Adventure was intended for an adult audience, though I acknowledge that boy’s-life and man’s-life adventure stories had considerable overlap at the time. An odd beast, the book has neither the just-like-you sidekick of a boy’s-life, nor the horniness and cynicism I’ve come to expect of a man’s-life.

Regardless of its intended audience, this book is not that good. The same character beats / punchlines keep repeating, failing to enliven a rote adventure narrative. (If you took a drink every time Ole Hansen says “I have a theory,” you’d be dead.)

The “dinosaurs” here are some of the least interesting I’ve ever encountered in fiction. It’s as if Taine overheard someone in another room say the word “dinosaur,” and he winged it from there. The monstrous saurians that populate his Antarctic are torpid masses of armored flesh “three hundred feet long.” We’re a long way from Doyle’s active (and relatively well-researched) dinosaurs, which leapt off the page a mere seventeen years earlier.

The discrepancy does get explained in the text (spoilers: they aren’t really dinosaurs). I suppose it’s interesting enough on a history-of-sci-fi level that this is more of a prototype of a genetic engineering story, but I’d have much preferred another retread of The Lost World over what we get here. If anything, with its climactic twist, Adventure turns out to be closer to The Andromeda Strain than to Jurassic Park.

The book’s sole redeeming feature is Edith, a modern young woman who learns to fly airplanes and stabs a pseudo-dinosaur in the eye.

2025 read #30: The Quarry Wood by Nan Shepherd.

The Quarry Wood by Nan Shepherd

213 pages

Published 1928

Read from March 19 to March 24

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Nan Shepherd came to my awareness thanks to the writings of Robert Macfarlane. I read the book Macfarlane positioned as her outdoorsy opus, The Living Mountain, and enjoyed it enough to look into her novels, beginning with The Quarry Wood. It stymied me for a long time, however; that early 20th century approximation of Scots English dialect takes some adjustment.

But what really kept me from getting into this book for so long, I have to confess, is a worsening aversion to literary fiction. The last mundane novel I read was back in December; before that, last April. The contemporary dystopia we have to deal with makes it difficult to get invested in a story that consists of “Look at these eccentric characters!” Give me some dinosaurs or magic or something, sheesh. I’m trying to survive fascism out here.

In my own writing, though, I still struggle with characterization, so I should probably make more of an effort to see how literary authors sketch it in. It’s always good practice to read as widely as possible if you wish to pursue writing.

The Quarry Wood is a coming-of-age novel following Martha as she grows from solemn, wide-eyed girl in rural Scotland, to young woman pushing against social norms and parental resistance to attend university. There, she develops a crush on her foster-sister’s husband, which turns into something of an obsession. The book, sadly, is less about Martha going to university when such a thing was rarely done, and more about her mooning after some married dude. (Repeat the evergreen TikTok audio with me here: “He’s just a guy! Hit him with your car!”)

This skeletal framework of a story is padded out with character sketches, rambling for a page or two at a time to illustrate the peculiarities of a secondary character’s husband or sister, usually someone who isn’t even in the scene. Shepherd’s prose is solid, and even sparkles at times — her descriptions of nature (which Macfarlane especially praised) can be magnificent. But these brilliancies occur too sparsely to light up the rest of the novel.

2025 read #28: Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees.

Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees

23 pages

Published 1920

Read March 19

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

According to Wikipedia, which I had to consult before reading this 600 line poem, Paris is a “lost masterpiece of modernism” depicting a walk through the post-war city. Mirrlees, whom I know as the author of Lud-in-the-Mist, employs concrete poetry, overheard fragments of conversation, advertisements, musical notes, and a cacophony of imagery to submerge the reader in a sensorium, bursting with sound and startling glimmers of texture:

Little boys in black overalls whose hands, sticky with play, are like the newly furled leaves of the horse-chestnuts ride round and round on wooden horses till their heads turn.

Not everything holds up, and some of the contemporary terms used are regrettable. (Seriously, you couldn’t go 600 lines without dropping the N-word?) Dated elements aside, for a poem written in 1919 and published in 1920, it was impressive, or at least worth a read.

2025 read #6: In the Morning of Time by Charles G. D. Roberts.

In the Morning of Time by Charles G. D. Roberts 

311 pages

Published 1922

Read from January 18 to January 19

Rating: 1 out of 5

I’d never heard about this novel until I browsed through the digital holdings of the Merril Collection, attached to the Toronto Public Library. Another excellent resource to bookmark! Too bad I chose this book as my first download, because yikes.

Morning is one of those “pageantry of life through time” confabulations that seemed to peak around the ’20s through ’50s. It opens with an amphibious sauropod observing Jurassic slaughter from the relative safety of an estuary. It’s all downhill from there, bearing us down through epochs of bullshit to a 1920s conception of Man. Specifically, White Man.

Along the way, we get red-in-tooth-and-claw vignettes of dubious scientific accuracy; chapter two brings us a Cretaceous Triceratops battling an Eocene Dinoceras, their fight witnessed by both a Jurassic Archaeopteryx and a Pliocene hominid, compressing about 145 million years into one moment. After that, the bulk of the narrative focuses on Grôm, a strangely Caucasian caveman who masters fire, figures out the bow and arrow, and invents love. True to the tastes of its readers, Grôm’s primary foe is miscegenation.

Everything is suffused with masculine rage and violence (and copious racist coding). This, inevitably, becomes tedious, trite, and ridiculous. The ape-man’s bride and child get fridged by some ceratopsians, for instance, which motivates him to single-handedly hasten the dinosaurs’ extinction in revenge. This accomplished, he goes off into the woods, desiring a new mate to bear him sons. Because daughters, even back in Missing Link days, lack inquisitiveness and resourcefulness, you see.

If that weren’t grotesque enough, you can only imagine the racism and patronizing misogyny simmering through the subsequent Grôm chapters. There’s a stink of The Birth of a Nation to the battle that opens the chapter “The Finding of Fire.” It’s fucking vile.

I’m only giving this garbage a full star because at least it’s better written than The Land that Time Forgot. That’s an extremely generous metric, and more than Morning deserves. But hey, I suppose the first chapter, the one without any people, is okay, at least by the standards of 1920s sci-fi, and later on Grôm and his pals have a pulpy encounter with giant dragonflies that feels moderately creative. Not worth slogging through the rest of it, though, by any means.

2024 read #149: The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

133 pages

Published 1927

Read from December 2 to December 3

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Growing up a white child in the 1980s and ’90s, one with a particularly controlling and paranoid parent at that, I subsisted on a steady diet of “canon” classics. The authors were comprehensively white and overwhelmingly male, though one Shelley did sneak in among the Wellses, Vernes, Twains, and Doyles. I also had a clear sense that there was another layer of “classics” awaiting me in adulthood, a stodgier and more respectable “canon” from the early twentieth century, books that might get referenced or parodied enough in cartoons for me to be aware of them, but with a vague sense that they weren’t “for” me.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey fits into this category. As a kid, I knew of it by name, but I had no inkling of its plot — or its length, which is one reason I decided to check it out — until I found it the other day while browsing the library. If you didn't know it either, Bridge is a series of interconnected character sketches that converge upon the titular footbridge and its fatal collapse. A Franciscan monk who happened to witness the collapse investigates the lives of the victims, seeking to prove the justice of his god in their fates.

The theological detective angle turns out to be little more than a framing device. The individual stories are about what you'd expect for a lauded 1920s literary outing, delicately teasing apart the victims' obsessions and unhealthy attachments, with a moderate amount of ethnic stereotyping (though less than one might expect). The prose is crisply modernist, detached and faintly ironic. On the whole, I’d say Bridge holds up pretty well. Unlike a certain bridge.

2024 read #120: Polar Horrors: Strange Tales from the World's Ends, edited by John Miller.

Polar Horrors: Strange Tales from the World's Ends, edited by John Miller

350 pages

Published 2022

Read from October 8 to October 21

Rating: 2 out of 5

As autumn cools (however reluctantly, in our age of global climate change), it seems fitting that my next British Library collection should be a chilly one. (It’s also the last one I own that I haven’t read. Technicalities.)

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“The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon” by James Hogg (1837). A novella of some 80 pages, yet in spite of its early date, I found it engagingly readable. (There is excellent English prose dating much further back, of course, but when writing from this era is bad, it’s bad.) Hogg’s narrative voice has a cheeky thread of satire woven through it. His rustic sailor recounts the scientific bent of his captain with irony and indifference, and the story generally spoofs the tropes of the shipwrecked survivor genre, particularly the castaway’s newfound piety and trust in Providence. Allan praises his God and the Bible, yet remains an awful and unrepentant cad. His first impulse after the shipwreck is cannibalism; only his inability to access his late crewmates redirects his focus to the ship’s supplies instead. Once he gets into the wreck, he drinks a hogshead of brandy in a closet for a whole month, waking with a beard. Allan proceeds to orphan, then tame, a polar bear cub he dubs Nancy. The two of them go on a whirlwind tour of the Arctic, riding in comfort on a mountainous iceberg. When they find a lost settlement of Norwegians, Allan earnestly tries to become a bigamist, then abandons his children to polar bears when he gets a chance to escape, all while praising his Lord. They story would have been a classic at a quarter of the length, but even as it is, I’d give it a solid C+

“The Moonstone Mass” by Harriet Prescott Spofford (1868). There isn’t much substance to this tale about a man who, desirous of fortune, heads out in search of the Northwest Passage, gets stranded on a block of ice, and is tantalized by an unobtainable lump of moonstone. Spofford tries to turn it into a prose poem of the far north, but the tastes of the era make it seem stuffy rather than evocative to modern eyes (or to my eyes, at any rate). D+?

“The Captain of the ‘Polestar’” by Arthur Conan Doyle (1883). The least offensive Doyle story I’ve read as an adult, though he still pulls his characters from his catalogue of racial stereotypes and physiognomic bullshit. At its heart this is a ghost story, though one that doesn’t make a lick of sense if you think about it for a minute (why would a young woman murdered in Devonshire lure her sweetheart to his death in the Arctic?). Unsurprising coming from the pen of the Spiritualist evangelist who would later inflict The Land of Mist upon the living. Overlong, but it could have been worse? D+

“Skule Skerry” by John Buchan (1928). It's a stretch to include this tale of a liminal isle in the Orkneys in a collection of Arctic fiction, but I'm glad to have the chance to read it. This feels like the sort of story Robert Macfarlane would weave an essay around, linking it to, say, the work of some 1980s woodcarver, the back to the land movement, and the impact of overfishing and plastic pollution on shorebirds. But that's enough Robert Macfarlane fanfic for this review. “Skule Skerry” is, when you boil it down, the story of a comfortably well-off man who gets nervous on an island, yet it's so beguilingly described that I can't complain about it. C+?

“The Third Interne” by Idwal Jones (1938). Of all the stories of the Far North that found their way into Weird Tales, surely some of them would have been more apt for this anthology than this “mad science in a Siberian prison” number. Seemingly inspired by the supposed experiments of Sergei Brukhonenko, this piece certainly fits the bill for a lurid Weird Tales page-filler, but wasn’t what I wanted here. At least it was written serviceably well. C-

“Iqsinaqtutalik Piqtuq: The Haunted Blizzard” by Aviaq Johnston (2019). Brief but good modern day yarn about a supernatural shadow lurking inside a blizzard. B

At this point, poised between the Arctic and Antarctic sections of the collection, I spent another week (hopefully the last) attending to a family crisis on Long Island. I couldn’t find the book, and assumed I left it at home. I tried to interest myself in other books, but nothing stuck. While packing for my trip home, I found I’d brought Polar Horrors after all. So I didn’t read for a week for no good reason.

Anyway. At least I’m home now.

“A Secret of the South Pole” by Hamilton Drummond (1901). I struggled to get into this one, in part because it always takes a while to get back into reading after an extended pause, in part because of the narration, which is filtered through the dialect-heavy speech of an old salt. I did enjoy it as an early precursor of weird fic. Three sailors find a drifting derelict, centuries old, with a mystery — and death — in its hold. Maybe C-

“In Amundsen’s Tent” by John Martin Leahy (1928). In the right hands, pulp can be an amazing aesthetic. But then you get stories like this one, which remind you why pulp was a term of dismissal for so long. I wanted to enjoy this early prototype of polar creature horror (published a decade before Who Goes There?), but the framing device yammers on at length, dropping character names like Bond McQuestion and Captain Stanley Livingstone. The meat of the story was equally amateurish, with awkward dialogue and repetitive, antiquated rhetoric. Leahy strains toward cosmic melodrama, but lands in the vicinity of silly: “It would mean horror and perhaps madness!” Still, there’s a kernel of a cool idea in here, buried under Leahy’s unpracticed efforts. Maybe D

“Creatures of the Light” by Sophie Wenzel Ellis (1930). Tediously overlong novella that reads like a paint-by-numbers of 1930s sci-fi: Life Rays! Eugenics! Psychic powers! An electric super-plane! A secret facility in a verdant Antarctic valley! A hunchbacked super-scientist breeding the Adam of a new age! Replacing placental gestation with Leyden jar mothers! At least, I’m pretty sure it was all meant as a broad criticism of the contemporary scientific eugenics movement, though Ellis never extricates herself from the more casual layman’s eugenics of her time, with physically perfect modern man Northwood growing disillusioned and disgusted with the methods (though not the ideals) of the disfigured Dr. Mundson. There's some faint entertainment value in how ludicrously au courant this story is, but it's a lot of eugenicist garbage and internalized misogyny to slog through. D

“Bride of the Antarctic” by Mordred Weir (1939). Refreshingly competent prose and storytelling elevate this Antarctic ghost story. Predictable but enjoyable. C+

“Ghost” by Henry Kuttner (1943). Charming techno-ghost story set in an Antarctic supercomputer complex (though Kuttner employs the delightful term “radioatom brains”). The story’s reliance on outmoded psychology theory dampens my enthusiasm a bit, but I’ll still give it a respectable C

“The Polar Vortex” by Malcolm M. Ferguson (1946). After his death, Lemming, a multimillionaire who dabbled in science, is revealed to have orchestrated a sadistic “experiment” at the bottom of the world, exposing an unsuspecting layman to the immensity of the night sky. It’s certainly a concept, I suppose, but this story left me flat. A shrug. D?

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And that’s all for this collection! Somewhat disappointing, especially considering how many stories could have fit the bill for this anthology. But there were several okay stories, and I’m not sorry I read it.

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.

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

629 pages

Published 1985

Read from August 13 to September 26

Rating: 2 out of 5

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

2024 read #77: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 1951 issue.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 1951 issue (2:6)

Edited by Anthony Boucher & J. Francis McComas

128 pages

Published 1951

Read July 2

Rating: 2 out of 5

As I mentioned in my review of its first issue, F&SF is in its 75th year. Under the editorial leadership of Sheree Renée Thomas, the magazine’s quality is better and more consistent than it’s ever been. Unfortunately, a number of missteps and accidents on the publishing end of things has left the venerable publication’s future uncertain. It’s July now, and F&SF has only published one issue so far in 2024. This lone issue seems have had a limited print run, perhaps solely for subscribers; rumors suggest the company’s printer broke, a major problem when cash flow is as sparse as it is for modern magazines. In any case, I still haven’t been able to get my hands on a copy, and I’m waiting to see if production issues get resolved before I splurge on a subscription.

My project to read each issue of F&SF as it’s current has been derailed. In its place, I’m proposing to read back and forth across the various decades of its existence. I’ve already finished the only issue from the 1940s, so it’s time to read my first full issue from the 1950s.

There’s nothing special about this issue. I picked it because the TOC offers what looks to be a nice mix of authors and titles. As was the magazine’s style at the time, the contents hop between new stories and selections from earlier publications. 

—

“When the Last Gods Die” by Fritz Leiber. I’m not normally a fan of the “dispassionate, omniscient author records events from the outside with no emotional attachment” style of first-person perspective; it feels hackneyed at best. Yet Leiber mostly makes it work in this Dying Earth mood piece. In the far future, the titanic figures of pseudo-Greek gods recline motionless in the ruddy light of the aged sun, waiting for their end. A sentient Machine arrives to make one final plea for the gods to reconsider their own demise. Not bad at all. B-

“The Haunted Ticker” by Percival Wilde (1923). A thoroughly Twenties tale about a miser who works out a system to exactly predict the stock market in his last months of life, and then comes back as a ghost orchestrating purchases and sales over the stock ticker. Not exactly thrilling, and rather overlong, but certainly not like anything else I’ve read. C-

“O Ugly Bird!” by Manly Wade Wellman. The first tale of John the Balladeer. It’s a mildly diverting yarn about a holler plagued by a bully who always gets what he wants from his neighbors, and the big ugly bird who may or may not be his familiar. C+

“The Rats” by Arthur Porges. This story is a reprint, yet it was first published in 1951, the same year as this issue. Quick turnaround! Maybe it’s good, right? Alas, as you might guess from its original home in Man’s World, it’s amateurish, stiffly written pulp. A doomsday prepper hides out in the desert near an abandoned atomic testing facility, but the rats are learning and adapting to thwart his defensive measures. There’s some mileage in how banal the threat is; the rats aren’t ravenous mutants, just somewhat smarter than your average rodent. I’m reminded of Elisabeth Melartre’s “Evolution Never Sleeps,” in the July 1999 issue of Asimov’s. D?

“Built Down Logically” by Howard Schoenfeld. Hillburt Hooper Aspasia is an infant prodigy, a genius Harvard lecturer still in a baby buggy. That’s the starting point for this silly little number, which toys with logic and how you can logic away the facts in front of you. I’m reminded of “Hog-Belly Honey” by R. A. Lafferty, which I read and reviewed here. Like that humorous piece, this one doesn’t do anything for me, though I did enjoy its nasty cynicism about midcentury scientists and their role as decorated weapons manufacturers. D

“The Earlier Service” by Margaret Irwin (1935). An early example of a time-slip story, not quite folk horror but perhaps somewhere along the road to it, full of church gargoyles, grinning cherubs, and shadowy presences around the altar. Excellent atmosphere, though like most stories I’ve read from this era, more is hinted at than shown. Enjoyable. B-

“The Universe Broke Down” by Robert Arthur (1941). Humorous eccentric inventor piece, very much of its time. Jeremiah Jupiter uses strange matter found in a meteorite to invent a device that folds space. His reluctant friend, our narrator Lucius, is on hand to discover that the device works perhaps too well. Literal cats-and-dogs humor. A shrug. D+

“Come on, Wagon!” by Zenna Henderson. Henderson’s first adult story, a prototype of the standard “kids can do magic because they don’t know the limits of reality” trope. It doesn’t quite have the deep well of heart and precisely depicted feeling that her best later stories have, but it’s more emotionally authentic than most SFF of this era. B-

“The House in Arbor Lane” by James S. Hart. Spoilers for this one. It wouldn’t be my first choice, but I have to admit that it’s pretty clever — especially at this early date in the genre — to take a tale of a witch, her attempt to sacrifice her niece, and the witch’s defeat, and narrate it in the form of a murder trial in a small New England town. Maybe a shade overlong, but still a respectable C+

“Skiametric Morphology and Behaviorism of Ganymedeus Sapiens: A Summary of Neoteric Hypotheses” by Kenneth R. Deardorf. Now that’s a title ahead of its time! The story, if it can be called that, lives up to that promised postmodern slant, giving us a faux research paper examining cartoonish diagrams as observed through a multidimensional scanner. It’s cute, though I can’t really rate it as a story.

“The Hyperspherical Basketball” by H. Nearing, Jr. Overlong humor piece about a professor who invents a fourth-dimensional basketball. I gotta admit, my eyes kind of glazed through this one. Geometry and midcentury “clever” dialog joined forces to make me snooze. A flat note to end on. D?

—

And that’s my first full issue of F&SF from the ’50s! It could have been a lot worse, that’s for sure.

2024 read #10: The Land of Mist by Arthur Conan Doyle.*

The Land of Mist by Arthur Conan Doyle*

172 pages

Published 1926

Read from January 18 to January 19

Rating: 1 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

Keeping with this month's theme (at first accidental, now a bit deliberate), The Land of Mist is the third book in its series, coming after The Lost World and The Poison Belt. It is a shameless document of religious proselytizing, taking Doyle's beloved characters Professor Challenger, Lord John Roxton, and so forth, and pressing them into the service of Spiritualism. I never thought I'd read it again. But it's bundled in the same volume with the other Challenger stories, and I felt a certain resigned momentum after I finished The Poison Belt.

I was maybe 12 years old when I first got my hands on the collected Challenger stories. Naturally, I wanted the volume for The Lost World, but I didn't have access to many books growing up, so I was almost as eager for the other stories packaged alongside it. The title of The Land of Mist intrigued me. With all the brooding angst of a '90s adolescent, I imagined it would be a darker, more serious followup to The Lost World (which ends, after all, with hunter Roxton and narrator Edward Malone planning a return visit to the plateau). Would our friends get trapped in a remote realm of ensorcelled weather patterns? Or would London itself become mired in an apocalyptic miasma?

Instead, we get an evangelical Doyle in full-on “Ghosts are totally real, you guys, as was proven to me by my very good friends, the mediums, who only took a little of my money for the privilege” mode. Every Spiritualist character is noble, self-sacrificing, and decent, if not an outright martyr; everyone against them is a discount Dickensian villain, squalid and evil. There’s a protracted subplot about a saintly medium who has a villainous brother who thinks it’s all a trick for money; we get extended sequences of this brother abusing his wife and children after getting warned out of the fake medium business. Because that’s the kind of book this is.

I lost count of the number of times that a character’s phrenology was used to attest to their “solidity” or “honesty.” Perhaps that’s how Doyle, major league racist, was duped into Spiritualist belief in his own life. His racism certainly shows up here. To modern readers, many of the séance scenes read like goddamn minstrel shows. Blackface, Redface, Yellowface, you name it — Doyle’s mediums do it all.

Doyle’s usual ability to spin a good yarn is lost, crushed by the heavy-handedness of his evangelism. He even retcons Challenger with wild abandon. His daughter Enid has been here all this time! The Lost World and The Poison Belt, the only reasons we'd ever cared about Challenger, were fictions from a “daring” author! It feels like Doyle was assassinating his own characters, dangling them to get eyeballs on his religious shit while also downplaying their fantastic prior adventures to make sure everyone knew Spiritualism was totally grounded and legit. Maybe he knew people would riot if he wrote a novel where Sherlock Holmes deduces that psychic research is the one true path. (Maybe there was a story like that, actually, late in the canon. I haven’t read Holmes since I was a teen.)

Not everything was terrible. I enjoyed the character of Enid Challenger — smart modern girl in a flapper dress, writing articles for Fleet Street, all the while a latent medium — but she only appears in 25% of the story. The chapter in which Malone and Roxton investigate a malevolent haunting was mildly entertaining. But it wasn’t enough to bump up my opinion of the book.

On an abstract level, it’s interesting to compare Mist’s postwar preoccupation with spiritual evolution with New Wave sci-fi’s obsession with drugs and psychic powers: both seem to grow from modernist anxieties of scientific progress and spiritual decay. Just another way that the 1920s seemed to prefigure the 1960s. That’s grounds for an essay, if anyone wanted to get into it.

The Land of Mist itself, though? Not worth the time.

2023 read #111: The Women of Weird Tales.

The Women of Weird Tales: Stories by Everil Worrell, Eli Colter, Mary Elizabeth Counselman, and Greye La Spina

Introduction by Melanie R. Anderson

278 pages

Published 2020

Read from October 2 to October 5

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I picked this one up from the same specialty bookshop where I got the Weird Woods anthology. This volume collects stories from four women who contributed to Weird Tales magazine. I’ve long been drawn to this 1920s through 1940s era of fantasy — it’s a fascinating, sometimes awkward time of growth and evolution in the genre, one often overlooked or at best summed up with a reprint or two from Unknown. I’m always hoping to read more, fully expecting that it won’t be very good, just interesting. Plus, the selections in this volume (so the introduction says) seem to trend toward weird pulpy horror, which fits the October vibe I want to cultivate.

“The Remorse of Professor Panebianco” by Greye La Spina (1925). Lurid stuff straight out of an early talkie mad-science thriller. Passionately Italian Professor Filippo Panebianco plots to trap a dying human’s soul in a crystal bell — for science! — while his passionately Italian bride Elena yearns for his approval (and his kisses). Elena harbors jealousy at the thought that anyone else’s soul could get trapped in Filippo’s precious crystal bell. You’ll never guess what happens next! Unintentionally amusing, in an MST3K sort of way, but otherwise meh.

“Leonora” by Everil Worrell (1927). I love when early automobiles are featured in genre pieces. (I know dieselpunk is already a thing, but I want to figure out how to make flivverpunk into its own thing.) This is a nicely atmospheric study in which teen girl Leonora meets a mysterious man in his beautiful silent car at the moonlit crossroads. The spell was broken for me when it was revealed what the stranger’s car looked like, but otherwise — for its time — this worked well enough.

“The Dead-Wagon” by Greye La Spina (1927). Virile American Kenneth has come to England all the way from New York because a girl smiled at him. Wanting to woo Arline, he hobnobs with her father, Lord Melverson. But there’s a curse over Melverson Abbey, and a spectral plague-cart that trundles up in the dead of night for the curse’s victims. Years later, married, with a firstborn of his own to save from the curse, Kenneth hears the dreaded wheels of the cart once more as midnight draws near. Picturesque gothic number, turgid and overwrought pulp — whichever way you want to phrase it, it’s exactly what I expected from this collection.

“The Canal” by Everil Worrell (1927). Aloof, morbid modern man Morton, numb to fear and love alike, enjoys long walks along the canal at midnight. He encounters an ethereal, heart-faced woman living on a decrepit old canal boat and immediately falls in love; inevitably, he also learns the meaning of fear when he figures out why his beloved can’t cross the flowing water of the canal. There are interesting hints of self-destructive eroticism here, amid the usual overheated fluff of this era.

“The Curse of a Song” by Eli Colter (1928). While the preceding stories have been goofy, lurid fun, this one is just kind of flat, narrated implausibly over after-dinner tobacco in a rusty turn-of-the-century style. The tale of Uncle Thad’s vengeful ghost punishing his young niece Rose to the tune of an old popular song is overlong, notable mainly for its Portland, Oregon setting, with a weekend roadster excursion up to Mount Hood and its summer cabins, and other little glimpses into bygone things. It does have some gothic charm toward the end, especially the climactic piano battle against the forces of darkness Uncle Thad.

“Vulture Crag” by Everil Worrell (1928). That title primed me to anticipate a weird western. Instead we start with a nicely atmospheric excursion to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, as the mysterious Count Zolani drives his roadster through piney backroads to the titular crag — which Zolani proposes to convert into a lab for his theories of ethereal vibration and space travel. The end goal is to literally vibe across the cosmos, because that’s the era of science fiction we’re dealing with here. (One is reminded of Olaf Stapledon’s “I traveled through space and time with the power of imagination!”) Manly POV Donald gets roped in by Zolani to supply the bankroll; Donald’s concerned love-interest Dorothy doesn’t understand all these big manly words, but fakes a romantic attachment to Zolani to get the Count to let her accompany her man. And oh dear, Zolani is unhappy about this! This story feels more dated than the others, in terms of shitty little touches of racism and sexism; the plot is a mix of appealingly hokey and eye-rollingly obvious, shading into just plain distasteful at the end. After all that buildup, we don’t even get to mind-trip across the universe. Disappointing.

“The Rays of the Moon” by Everil Worrell (1928). Here we reach the full sleaziness of 1920s pulp: our narrator, yet another Morton, is a callous, morphine-addicted medical student stealing fresh cadavers to further his reanimation experiments. It’s like a prototype of grimy 1980s horror. “Rays” reminds you that it’s very much of its time, however, when Morton — and the whole cemetery’s worth of bodies — gets “magnetized” upward by the full moon. He comes to, in fact, on the dusty, bone-white surface of the moon, and realizes he is a ghost. Was it possible that audiences ever took this pulpy stuff seriously, or was it always intended as campy and ridiculous entertainment? This story is basically Frankenstein meets A Christmas Carol in space. It might be the most gloriously absurd pulp mishmash I’ve ever read. Which isn’t to say that it’s good, of course, merely that this is exactly what I came here to read.

“The Gray Killer” by Everil Worrell (1929). Medical horror in which our narrator, Miss Wheaton, hospitalized for blood poisoning as a result of a nail through her foot, receives a nocturnal visit from a gray being who calls himself Dr. Zingler, who offers to take away her pain. Any patient who accepts his treatment is found brutally murdered, or else disappears. And the other doctors seem to be in cahoots with the sinister gray killer, gaslighting and sedating Miss Wheaton. There’s a subplot with another doctor trying to flirt with her, because of course there is. Way overlong for what it is, a tedious buildup to a bit of throwaway eldritch horror, without enough interest to sustain its length.

“The Black Stone Statue” by Mary Elizabeth Counselman (1937). Between the title and the first three paragraphs, I had this one pretty much sussed out: unscrupulous sculptor, tired of penury, finds some nefarious means to turn human beings into stone statues. The middle portion, which relates the experience of the cracked-up aviator who finds a petrified black forest in Brazil, and a large alien amoeba at its heart, is some fine pulp weirdness. It was more interesting than the venal sculptor’s predictable side of the tale. Still, for its time, this is a solid, self-contained little story.

“The Web of Silence” by Mary Elizabeth Counselman (1939). Mad scientist Dr. Ubique demands a ransom from the mayor of Blankville; ignored, he deadens all sound in the town (or does he??). A corny supervillainy caper (or is it??) related in quasi-journalistic style, this was mildly amusing but outlasted its welcome. The ending was silly.

“The Deadly Theory” by Greye La Spina (1942). Alchemy is worked in the Maine woods as a bereaved mystic uncle attempts to bring his niece back to life from her ashes. This one also didn’t grab me as a story, though I do like the idea of alchemical fantasy in the modern day.

“Great Pan Is Here” by Greye La Spina (1943). Early fantasists just loved Pan, didn’t they? This one begins memorably (and modernly) enough, with our narrator, driving five cocktails deep, spotting a set of seven-reed pipes on the side of the suburban road. Like any rich white man of the era, Craig wants time alone with his lovely cousin Cecily, but his new fixation on the Pan-pipes (which no one else saw) leads to exchange of words and a solitary evening for him, with only a cigarette and a couple highballs for company. But what is that shadowy figure playing the pipes in his garden? The rest of the story proceeds much like you’d expect a Pan story to go when you have a cast of bored young socialites suddenly awakened to the appetites of “nature.” Craig was an annoying narrator, and the story ends somewhat abruptly, as if a more graphic ending were edited away; otherwise it worked well enough.

“The Antimacassar” by Greye La Spina (1949). Bucks County gothic, with young lodger Lucy discovering what became of her disappeared colleague who vacationed at a Pennsylvania Dutch farmhouse. Spoilers: the landlady’s daughter is a hungry hungry vampire, and the only thing protecting Lucy is a vase of fresh honeysuckle. This one was stiffly written in comparison to most of the other La Spina pieces here, cramming exposition in with overheard conversations and awkward amateur detective work. But I enjoyed the element of loom-weaving; the hidden message in the antimacassar was an interesting touch that deserved a better story.

That’s it! I’ve discovered an appetite for old Weird Tales stories thanks to this collection, and have been pricing other best-of volumes. (You can even buy reprints of individual issues, which is pretty cool.) However, given the preponderance of male writers, I’m not certain I’d enjoy them nearly as much.

2023 read #73: Weird Woods: Tales from the Haunted Forests of Britain, edited by John Miller.

Weird Woods: Tales from the Haunted Forests of Britain, edited by John Miller

238 pages

Published 2020

Read from June 23 to June 28

Rating: 2 out of 5

I never lost my taste for reading weird old nuggets of fantasy from bygone eras. I picked this book up from a horror-centric bookshop relatively recently, excited mainly about the “weird woods” conceit but also about the years these stories were published. It's true that I haven’t been reading many anthologies like this, though. Finishing Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment (at long last) left me with a heightened craving for musty old fantasy, on top of my standard level of interest, so this seems like a good time to start this one.

Oh, Britain and its woods. Devouring Sherlock Holmes books at an impressionable age left me with lifelong anglophilia. Learning about the horrors of English colonialism and racism in my teens and adulthood narrowed my love of things British to the archipelago’s scenery and natural environment, nurtured by the writings of Helen Macdonald, Robert Macfarlane, and Roger Deakin. (Or, more recently, Peter Fiennes.) But even my appreciation for rolling green fields and remnants of the ancient wood has been rotted by the contemporary UK’s headlong rush into fascism, environmental destruction, and bigotry. I love the wildwood, the Neolithic wood, the primordial wood, the fairy wood, and I always will — but I don’t like England all that much right now.

“The Whisper in the Wood” by Anon (1880). This was originally published in All the Year Round, one of those journals from the heyday of short fiction readership, albeit one that kept its contributors strictly anonymous. (Maybe its founder, Charles Dickens, didn’t want to share the limelight?) We might tactfully describe this story’s prose as unsophisticated: “‘Why, it is not a fortnight ago since he gave [his will] to me, poor old fellow!’ and, as the excitement of the explanation he has given subsides, his blue eyes moisten.” The plot is rote and the characters essentially made of cardboard. Still, there’s a certain naïve charm to be found, if you can indulge the Victorian taste for categorizing harmless woodland creatures like foxes and snakes as “objects in a nightmare,” and I have no complaints about the story’s moorland setting (though it takes half the yarn to get us there). Ultimately a silly, insubstantial gothic adventure, but I emerged unscathed.

“Man-Size in Marble” by Edith Nesbit (1887). This tale is mostly vibes. Newlyweds find an oddly cheap cottage near a wood and a church, and spend three months in Arcadian bliss before All Hallow’s Eve comes along and the marble effigies of two Catholic marauders (the most Victorian thing to fear) reanimate in the chancel. This story’s strengths lie in its bucolic descriptions and the (for its time) sweet depiction of wedded happiness. The supernatural horror element is little more than a shrug.

“The Striding Place” by Gertrude Atherton (1896). I couldn’t muster up much enthusiasm for this brief sketch of a sporting aristocrat who muses on the disappearance of his bosom friend (also a sporting aristocrat) as he walks through the woods, his steps inadvertently directing him to the spot that claimed his friend. Ends with a campfire story jump-scare.

“The Man Who Went Too Far” by E. F. Benson (1904). While it carries a whiff of Edwardian mustiness, this tale of man seeking apotheosis from Pan in a Hampshire wood crackles just beneath the surface with queer eroticism and animistic sensitivity. The denouement isn’t much of anything, as seems typical of this time, but it’s the best story here so far.

“An Old Thorn” by W. H. Hudson (1911). I’m indifferent about this one, a tale of a tree’s slow revenge and the tragedy of the English court system. It’s a nested series of framing devices: the narrator is trying to learn about an old hawthorn all alone on a hill, which he describes at length; he finally pries out a tale about a laborer hung for poaching, and in the middle of that tale goes into an extended flashback about the laborer’s childhood and ardent young love, showing how he inadvertently earned the tree’s ire and didn’t beg forgiveness in time. A nested structure of flashbacks can work sometimes, but it feels ramshackle here. Also, in the throes of his love, our laborer refers to his new wife’s “breasties,” which — while boldly sensual for 1911 — might be the most unappealing term I’ve read in some time.

“The White Lady of Rownam Avenue, Near Stirling” by Elliott O’Donnell (1911). A “true” ghost story from the pre-war heyday of ghost obsession. (I almost said the final heyday of Spiritualism, which would have made for a better sentence, but apparently O’Donnell claimed not to be a Spiritualist, merely a self-appointed expert on the supernatural.) Brief, unremarkable; it feels questionable to include it in an anthology of weird woods tales.

“Ancient Lights” by Algernon Blackwood (1914). Now this is more like it. There’s a wood, and it’s weird, and it certainly doesn’t want some surveyors’ clerk eyeing it for destruction in order to clear the view from someone’s dining room window. This wouldn’t appear on any all-time-greats list, but this is exactly the sort of story I’d want in a collection like this. Plus, it’s good to see we’re in a more contemporary era of storytelling at last. Not a single framing device or appeal to the reader’s belief — just a character introduced in the middle of his business, and what befalls him afterward. However, the twist at the end didn’t really feel like a twist so much as a punchline to a Goosebumps book. (Spoilers: the note which says “use the shortcut if you care to” seems to read “use the shortcut if you dare to”!!)

“The Name-Tree” by Mary Webb (1921). I haven’t read much stream-of-consciousness prose. Heck, I haven’t read enough to even say for certain that this piece is written in a stream-of-consciousness style. I can say it’s a short, ugly story about a woman passionately protective of a cherry grove (in which her name-tree grows), and the rich new landowner who strains to impose his crude sexual will upon her with bribes and blackmail. We drift from her perspective into his, one scene jumbled with the next, with a whole lotta innuendo about flowers and ripening fruit, and then it ends with an inadvertently comic turn of modernist abruptness. Groundbreaking and important at the time, I’m sure — a necessary but awkward step in the evolution of both feminist and modernist literature. I didn’t really enjoy it, though.

“The Tree” by Walter de la Mare (1922). A rigidly insular fruit merchant, unable to conceptualize anything unrelated to making money, fumes and fulminates at his artistic half-brother’s infatuation with an exotic tree slowly transforming the latter's garden and life. It’s an unsubtle metaphor for how imperialism brings change to the “home country,” told from the perspective of one of the stuffy and unimaginatively commerce-minded cogs of empire, his face purple with indignation and high blood pressure. This story is, if nothing else, determined to be descriptive. At times it successfully transcends descriptive to become atmospheric, almost in spite of itself: “A half-empty jam-pot buzzing with bees was no more appetising an object because the insects were not of the usual variety.” It’s far too long for what it is, though.

“‘He Made a Woman—’” by Marjorie Bowen (1923). Modern man Charnock — unsettled by a surfeit of civilization, no longer sure what reality might be — wants a vacation to avoid a thoroughly modern attack of nerves. He reluctantly accompanies his old tutor Blantyre into Wales, knowing that the history-laden landscape won’t soothe his modern mind. Most vexing to his search for true himbo serenity: there’s a young woman in the house! And Blantyre tells Charnock not to fall in love with her! This brief tale succeeds at conveying an atmosphere, though little else. I’ll be honest, I couldn’t stop thinking of the Futurama episode in which the moon farmer warns Bender, “Don’t you be touchin’ my robot daughters!”

“A Neighbour’s Landmark” by M. R. James (1924). A deliberate stylistic throwback — there’s even an interjection chiding the primary storyteller about his Victorian manner — which works better than most actual Victorian stories. It’s a fairly conventional ghost story (a curse bound to a wrongfully moved property boundary or something like that) that sustains a nice flow almost until the end, where the narrative just… peters out. That seems to be a common complaint with this anthology.

“N” by Arthur Machen (1936). As someone who grew up a city kid, I’ve always been drawn to the trope that a city can contain anything, that the next neighborhood over — or where the sidewalk ends — might be a realm of mystery and strangeness, a land as mythically remote as the wildwood. I’m partially certain (though I’m not invested enough to verify it) that Peter Ackroyd may have quoted this very story to illustrate that magical urbanism vibe in his London: The Biography. I liked the general outline of this one more than I enjoyed the story itself, which — despite being a contemporary of Unknown and thus the first recognizable iteration of urban fantasy fiction — eschews stakes or rising action. Machen putters in a desultory way from old-timers reminiscing about old times, to antiquarian musings on alchemy and reclaiming the lost, pre-Edenic malleability of reality, and on back to a different set of old-timers conversing in a tavern. Machen’s primary interest here appears to be the art of reproducing rambly conversations between older men. All of which is a roundabout path to not much in particular. Only the last page hints at the story this could have been, had Machen been inclined to tell it instead of what we got.

And that’s it! All in all, a shade disappointing, given the anthology’s promising title and evocative cover art. Could have used more woods and much more weird. Still, I enjoyed myself.