2026 read #44: The Adventures of Tom Bombadil by J. R. R. Tolkien.

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and other Verses from the Red Book by J. R. R. Tolkien

Illustrated by Pauline Baynes

Editorial material by Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond

290 pages

Published 1962; expanded version with commentary published 2014

Read from August 25 to August 27

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

After reading The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarilion, this is my first foray into the dregs of Middle-earth material, the real cash-in type shit that fills whole shelves of the fantasy section to this day. The third and final Middle-earth book published in Tolkien’s lifetime, Adventures scrapes together the titular poem (originally published in 1934), some poems pulled from Lord of the Rings, and some more or less random material the Professor had lying around. This edition bundles the rather slim text with a much longer body of commentary to make it seem like a real book worth buying.

Tolkien studies are a big and profitable line — perhaps less so now than in their 1970s-2000s heyday, but they still drain so much oxygen from the contemporary fantasy scene and its innovative but impoverished authors. I almost hate to admit that it’s kinda interesting to read the commentary, which traces the origins of texts and cross-references the legendarium. No way in hell I’ll ever be famous enough that anyone would give a shit about my notes and scraps of manuscripts, but it’s fascinating to see the creative process from the outside like this.

I also enjoyed the poems more than I expected to. The way Tolkien plays with rhythm and assonance is like a polished, Oxfordian elevation of my own poetic aspirations. Tolkien’s signature tone of whimsy underlain with deep sadness is one that would suit the collection I’m supposed to be working on. I’m honestly glad I purchased a copy so that I’m able to highlight and dog-ear it (should I ever bring myself to do that to a book).

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

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

317 pages

Published 2021

Read from August 3 to August 25

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2026 read #5: Queens of the Abyss, edited by Mike Ashley.

Queens of the Abyss: Lost Stories from the Women of the Weird, edited by Mike Ashley

350 pages

Published 2020

Read from January 25 to January 29

Rating: 2 out of 5

I collect old magazines. I have a lot of them. I want to make a point of reading some of them this year, especially as I make progress on my current novel project and hope to focus my energies back on short story writing later this year. So I plan to read short stories, ideally in the form of old magazines I own, for at least 20% of the reviews I write this year—the collapse of my nation, of course, permitting.

Naturally, I’m beginning this pattern with an anthology instead of a magazine.

This is another entry in the British Library Tales of the Weird series, featuring a selection of women authors from the heyday of pulp short fiction. I’ve read just one of these stories before, which is unusual after all the anthologies I’ve encountered in recent years. My partner R got it for me for the holidays, and I’ve been looking forward to it. Or as much as one can look forward to anything days, I suppose.

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“A Revelation” by Mary E. Braddon (1888). The author’s life is more interesting than this story, which is a rote gothic ghost number featuring clumsy descriptions, amateurish exposition, racist caricatures, and a see-through plot. It ends with an absurdly convenient twist and a middle aged man marrying his dead friend’s teenage child. It’s very much 1880s magazine fare. Not a promising start. F

“The Sculptor’s Angel” by Marie Corelli (1913). This medieval tale of an artistic monk who takes advantage of a poor young woman, only to be visited with dramatic irony after her death, is at least a step up from the previous story. We get some ever-relevant commentary on “the pitiless egotism of men,” though I think the narrative lets the sculptor off too easily. Perhaps a solid D

“From the Dead” by Edith Nesbit (1892). After his new wife confesses a past deception to him, our narrator, against his own conscience, gives her the cold shoulder. She disappears, only to summon him to her deathbed some months later. This being the type of story it is, he arrives too late. Macabre melodrama though it may be, it serves as an empowerment fantasy: maybe, somehow, even if by paranormal means, men might be made to suffer the consequences of their actions. I think we all can vibe with that right now. C-

“The Christmas in the Fog” by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1914). This quasi-autobiographical anecdote begins with about seven pages of justification (almost a third of the essay) for why a quasi-autobiographical anecdote is worth writing down and being read. The incident itself sees the author, referring to herself in the third person as the Romantick Lady, stuck for three days in an unusually Londonish smog on the Mersey. She decides to scrape together some kind of Christmas gift for each of the 150 immigrant children down in steerage. It ends with her musing whether her self-appointed charity might have “planted the seeds of pauperism” in the poor children. Horrors! All in all, you couldn’t get more pre-war 1910s than this.

“The Haunted Flat” by Marie Belloc Lowndes (1920). Banal self-improvement-aided-by-a-spirit yarn. I liked the small domestic details of a young working woman setting herself up in a rental flat. The identity of the helpful spirit is an absurd coincidental twist of the sort beloved by religious revivalists (including, in this instance, Spiritualists). D?

“A Modern Circe” by Alicia Ramsey (1919). Ramsey lays it on a bit thick with Italian stereotypes, up to and including labeling Italians a “primitive race,” but otherwise her writing is quick and modern, her descriptions evocative, and the titular “Mad Virgin” is positively delightful after a slog through generic ghost tales. Possibly C-

“The Nature of the Evidence” by May Sinclair (1923). Another piece inclined to Spiritualism, this time an account of well-to-do heterosexual unhappiness involving the man’s late first wife. Well-written, and interesting for hinting at ghost-fucking at such an early date, but otherwise forgettable. D+

“The Bishop of Hell” by Marjorie Bowen (1925). This story begins with more promise and unique vibes than anything else in this anthology so far. A defrocked priest in the late 18th century, so dissipated that his intimates give him the nickname in the title, hatches a desire to corrupt the bride of his generous cousin and benefactor. The story is twenty shades of purple, but enjoyably so. C

“The Antimacassar” by Greye La Spina (1949). I read and reviewed this story in Women of Weird Tales. There, I said, “I enjoyed the element of loom-weaving; the hidden message in the antimacassar was an interesting touch that deserved a better story.”

“White Lady” by Sophie Wenzel Ellis (1933). Brought down by clumsy prose and absurd dialogue (“Now, as always, you prefer your unnatural flowers to me”), this story of a woman competing with an anthropomorphic flower for the affections of her fiancée gets points for embracing its own pulpy ridiculousness. C

“The Laughing Thing” by G. G. Pendraves (1929). The prose and atmosphere of this Hudson Valley-set haunting were fine. Pendraves’ dialogue was another matter, hammering obvious plot points into the ground; it takes the better part of two pages for an old man, fleeced on a land deal, to fully articulate just how hard he’s going to haunt the place once he’s dead. (“Wha-a-a-at?” responds the swindler.) Still, a solid example of its type. C-

“Candlelight” by Lady Eleanor Smith (1931). I believe this tale of middle class philandering is meant to be humorous, or at least ironic. An awkward dinner party is interrupted by the arrival of a Romani girl from the woods, who gets goaded into telling their fortunes (and spilling all their tawdry secrets). Altogether on the wrong side of 1930s pulp, and felt interminable to boot. D-

“The Wonderful Tune” by Jessie Douglas Kerruish (1931). Snowed in at a Swiss inn, the narrator and his companions find themselves in the company of a master violinist, who plays elf music that compels all things to dance—including the avalanche-crushed corpses stashed in the other room. Somewhat ridiculous in the way all the “OooOooh, watch out, a corpse!” stories were, but not painfully bad. D+?

“Island of the Hands” by Margaret St. Clair (1952). Out of every story on the TOC, I’d been looking forward to this one the most. Immediately, we find ourselves in the hands (hehe) of a storytelling professional. Garth is a watery planet that feels remarkably like a midcentury floatplane-and-cabana getaway. That’s just set-dressing for a standard (but well-written) Weird Island story. Aside from the inevitable skeeviness of midcentury heterosexuality, I enjoyed this one quite a bit. If only more of the anthology had been like this! B-

“The Unwanted” by Mary Elizabeth Counselman (1951). Our narrator is climbing Alabama hills for the census when she happens upon a broad Appalachian stereotype (because boy howdy did midcentury writers love Appalachian stereotypes). The mountain man points a gun at her and tells her to leave. But the woman of the house invites her up to chat, and we quickly find ourselves in a gentle, sad, unclassifiable tale of motherhood and lost children. Just as quickly, this story went from forgettable page-filler to a minor wonder (however dated and iffy it might be for modern readers). B-

“The Seventh Horse” by Leonora Carrington (1943). A surreal little fable about a horse (or a woman?) in a garden. One of the best (and weirdest) stories I’ve ever read from the 1940s. B+

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And that’s it! After slogging through so many forgettable ghost stories, the last few entries were an unexpected delight.

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

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

418 pages

Published 1947

Read from December 9 to December 14

Rating: 3 out of 5

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

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

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

Anonymous traditional ballads

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

1780s-1790s

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

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

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

1800s

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

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

1810s

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

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

1820s

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

1830s

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

1840s

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

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

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

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

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

1850s

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

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

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

1860s

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

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

1870s

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

As I came through the desert thus it was,

As I came through the desert: Hell is mild

And piteous matched with that accursèd wild

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

1880s

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

1890s

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

God slays Himself with every leaf that flies,

And hell is more than half of paradise

1900s

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

1910s

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

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

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

1920s

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

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

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

The terrible, blind grass, feeling its way

With little patting hands. Feeling its way

Slowly, horribly, over all mankind.

There is no safety anywhere at all

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

…And I read,

Upon the tongue of a forgotten sphinx,

The annulling word a spiteful demon wrote

With gall of slain chimeras; and I know

What pentacles the lunar wizards use…

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

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

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

1930s

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

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

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

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

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

1940s

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

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

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

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

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

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

2025 read #76: Weird Tales: The Magazine that Never Dies, edited by Marvin Kaye.

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

589 pages

Published 1988

Read from January 7 to October 20

Rating: 2 out of 5 (being generous)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2025 read #72: The Skylark of Space by Edward E. “Doc” Smith.

The Skylark of Space by Edward E. “Doc” Smith

159 pages

Originally serialized 1928; first book publication 1946; revised 1958

Read from September 25 to September 26

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

A foundational text of what would become space opera, Skylark begins as an edisonade, with athletic, handsome, motorcycle-riding chemist Richard “Dick” Seaton discovering a stable transuranic metal with strange catalytic properties. “But wait, that’s basically Wells’ First Men in the Moon,” you might say. And you’d be right.

But “Doc” Smith takes us well beyond the moon. We accompany Dick into interstellar space, along with his fiancée, sensible and musically talented Dorothy “Dottie” Vaneman, and his best friend, wealthy explorer, archaeologist, sportsman, engineer, and confirmed bachelor M. Reynolds “Mart” Crane. They are dogged every step of the way by coldblooded, greedy, stick-at-nothing rival scientist Marc DuQuesne. He too has a nickname, but it feels next door to a slur here, given the swarthiness inevitably assigned to a 1920s villain. There’s also Margaret “Peggy” Spencer, secretary, who doesn’t really get any characterization beyond “kidnapped damsel.”

Skylark is, shall we say, not a sophisticated narrative.

It is plotted and paced exactly like a pulp film serial, the sort where we spend more time with kidnappings and private eyes and industrial sabotage than we do with spaceborne adventure. Hell, the first flight of the Skylark happens off-screen. I don’t know what floated readers’ boats in the Twenties, but I can assure you, I would rather read about adventures in space travel than about some millionaire heir commissioning out steelworks.

Once we do get into space, Skylark is a mixed bag. A desperate rescue from the orbit of a dead star is a thrilling read to this day. An encounter with a noncoporeal alien who takes the form of Dick and threatens to dematerialize our heroes, on the other hand, feels stale, a perfunctory first draft of some lesser Star Trek script. Speaking of Star Trek, we get some nearly naked green humanoids who traffic in slaves. This latter plotline is tedious enough to make me miss the terrestrial crime fiction (and is stuffed full of eugenics, besides).

Here’s where I say I’m glad I read it, history of the genre, and so on. Which is true. But sometimes I ask myself why I bother with books like this.

2025 read #67: The Box-Car Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner.

The Box-Car Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner

Illustrated by Dorothy Lake Gregory

146 pages

Published 1924

Read September 17

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

One of the great contemporary British nature writers, probably Roger Deakin (though it might have been Robert Macfarlane), first piqued my interest about this series. It sounds right up my alley: Abruptly orphaned, refusing to be sent to their grandfather, four young siblings learn to subsist on their own, avoiding the clutches of meddlesome adults. For shelter, they luck into an old boxcar on an abandoned logging spur in the woods.

Children’s literature of this era lacks depth. The characters are little more than outlines, the plot only a series of incidents culminating, inevitably, in a fortune. But I grew up on fantasies of Mississippi River islands and running away on a raft, so the concept is immensely appealing. And small but skillful touches of natural beauty (not to mention the comforting descriptions of food) add to its appeal. I would have loved the hell out of this book had I read it when I was 8.

2025 read #66: Into the London Fog: Eerie Tales from the Weird City, edited by Elizabeth Dearnley.

Into the London Fog: Eerie Tales from the Weird City, edited by Elizabeth Dearnley

319 pages

Published 2020

Read from September 13 to September 17

Rating: 3 out of 5

Another installment of the British Library Tales of the Weird anthology series, this one naturally centers stories set in London. Dearnley’s introduction is especially interesting, evoking the danger and weirdness of befogged London, a shifting terrain of social anxieties amid tumultuous change. Her story introductions also provide vital context to the authors and the topics they addressed.

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“The Telegram” by Violet Hunt (1911). This story was a bit of a speed bump right at the start of the anthology. I went into it expecting a specific vibe from these Tales of the Weird collections, which this literary character study of a woman who just wants to enjoy her own life and flirt with men without settling for any of them did not meet. It’s a good story, a fascinating document from a leading writer of the New Woman era, and its eventual ghostly turn plays well with the story’s examination of women’s autonomy. But I had to get into the right headspace for it, and the story itself sure takes its time. B-

“In the Séance Room” by Lettice Galbraith (1893). Sociopathic men and patriarchy are the horrors of this piece, which portrays both with a frankness all too rare even today. More so now than ever, I understand the fantasy of supernatural justice depicted here. Heavy-handed and melodramatic as fiction of this era often was, it still works. Kinda. C+

“The Demon Lover” by Elizabeth Bowen (1941). Wartime retelling of the namesake ballad, brief but atmospheric. C+

“The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth” by Rhoda Broughton (1868). Suspiciously cheap apartments in Mayfair lead to supernatural death. Mildly entertaining, ends rather abruptly. C+

“War,” an extract from London in My Time by Thomas Burke (1934). Fascinating essay on London’s attitudes during the Great War. It’s an eccentric choice for an anthology of London Weird, with the surreality of zeppelin raids and dimmed streetlights supplying the weird, but it’s not entirely misplaced.

“Street Haunting” by Virginia Woolf (1927). Another creative non-fiction piece, a sensorium of walking and daydreaming through interwar streets, rather reminiscent of Hope Mirrlees’ Paris: A Poem. Dreamlike and mostly enjoyable. Like Mirrlees, however, Woolf can’t resist throwing in some riff on marginalized populations, here making a spectacle of the disabled segment of society for several paragraphs. 

“Pugilist vs. Poet,” an extract from A Long Way from Home by Claude McKay (1937). My first exposure to McKay’s writing, a too-brief extract on his experiences in London in 1919. Scintillating. I want more!

“N” by Arthur Machen (1936). I read and reviewed this story in the British Library’s Weird Woods anthology. There I wrote: “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.”

“The Lodger” by Marie Belloc Lowndes (1911). An early novelette treatment of what, a couple years later, this author would turn into the very first novel about Jack the Ripper. Working-class protagonist Mrs. Bunting, onetime foundling and former maid, wants to avoid the obvious conclusions after her lucrative new lodger proves suspicious. The story is less of a murder mystery and more of a complex psychological study in how financial insecurity leads to complicity. B

“My Girl and the City” by Sam Selvon (1957). An absolutely stunning mood piece about the fluctuating city. Again, not sure why it’s in a Tales of the Weird collection, but it’s lovely. A

“The Mystery of the Semi-Detached” by Edith Nesbit (1893?). Quite brief but well-written mood piece of suburban unease. B-?

“The Old House in Vauxhall Walk” by Charlotte Riddell (1882). A disinherited young gentleman, kicked out by his father that morning, shelters for the night in the antique grandeur of a Vauxhall house lately turned into a rental. The hauntings of the house pervade his dreams, and he decides to stay and find the late miser’s treasure. Interesting mainly as a document of how useless the upper classes are without working folk to take care of them. C+

“The Chippendale Mirror” by E. F. Benson (1915). A more conventional eerie tale, in which a secondhand mirror discloses glimpses of the murder it witnessed. Perfectly adequate. C

“Spring-Heeled Jack” by Anonymous (1884). Straightforward write-up of the titular urban legend, detailing alleged exploits then fifty years in the past.

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And that’s it for London Fog! A major departure from other Tales of the Weird volumes, which all tended to feature tales of the, well, weird. Not much eeriness to speak of, but a good collection all the same, if you ignore its title and the vibe of the rest of the series.

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

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

Edited by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas

128 pages

Published 1950

Read August 29

Rating: 2 out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2025 read #58: More Voices from the Radium Age, edited by Joshua Glenn.

More Voices from the Radium Age, edited and introduced by Joshua Glenn

239 pages

Published 2023

Read from August 27 to August 29

Rating: 3 out of 5

In the bookstore, I was more interested in this volume’s table of contents, but I couldn’t just skip the first book. (One reason that trip was so expensive!) Hopefully this installment lives up to the (mostly) excellent selections of the original Voices. Editor Glenn’s introduction states this volume is a look at the varied genres that fed into the soup of what would become SF. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s somewhat more hit-or-miss than the first.

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“The Last Days of Earth: Being the Story of the Launching of the ‘Red Sphere’” by George C. Wallis (1901). It is thirteen million years from now. The sun’s heat wanes and the Earth enters its final frozen age. And yet we cannot escape Edwardian gender norms. Ah well. It’s fascinating how social change has always been harder for white male authors to imagine than technological or even astronomical change. Also interesting: the way the last humans’ “spacecraft that’s a sphere of unknown red metal” prefigures Jack London’s “The Red One” in 1918 (reviewed here). The story itself is a collection of memorable images conveyed in juiceless prose and “As you know…” exposition. It’s fine? C-

“The Land Ironclads” by H. G. Wells (1903). Wartime sci-fi written before the Great War. Parts of it were prescient (technocracy making slaughter impersonal) and parts of it were almost incomprehensible relics of a pre-war worldview (the dichotomy between the rugged, manly, “uncivilized” regular army and the over-civilized army of button-pushing clerks fielded by the opponent). There’s also a touch of eugenics in the final “degradation” of the victorious army of clerks. An interesting historical artifact that somehow gave us a prototype of drone pilots in 1903. C+

“The Republic of the Southern Cross” by Valery Bryusov (1907; translated 1918). Barely a story, this social satire adopts the form of a historical description of an efficient utopian city at the South Pole, the authoritarian control hidden just under its surface, and the outbreak of “contradiction” that brings its downfall. Interesting as a snapshot of 1907’s concerns about modern life. C?

“The Third Drug” by E. Nesbit (1908). A story in the mad scientist tradition. A Paris doctor patches up a man who comes to his door, but gives him a sequence of three drugs intended to turn him into a superman. Well-written as far as these things go; mildly diverting. C

“A Victim of Higher Space” by Algernon Blackwood (1914). I was gonna make a comment about this era’s quaint overlap between mysticism and higher mathematics, but then I realized the conflation never went away; modern woo dresses itself in theoretical physics to this day. In this story, psychic investigator Dr. Silence takes the case of a man who has fallen victim to multidimensional misfortune. Interesting in a way that Flatland never managed to be. C+

“The People of the Pit” by A. Merritt (1918). I always feel a mix of emotions seeing A. Merritt’s name on a TOC. Excitement, because he wrote some of the strangest, most lurid weird adventure fiction I’ve ever encountered, obviously a direct inspiration for many core D&D vibes. Disgust, because he almost invariably would force in some of the most heinous racism I’ve ever read. This tale takes us deep into Alaska to the mysterious Hand Mountain, where gold flows like putty and luminescent “devils” reign. Miraculously, “Pit” packs in the weird but goes light on the bigotry. It was an unexpected pleasure. More Merritt should’ve been like this. B

“The Thing from—‘Outside’” by George Allen England (1923). I knew that the movie The Thing was based on Campbell’s story “Who Goes There?” However, I hadn’t known (until this collection) that “Who Goes There?” was inspired by this even earlier story, which sees a band of five bickering explorers troubled in the Canadian wilderness by a preternatural “Thing” from “outside the universe.” The character work is stiff, but not every story from this era even bothers with details like “character,” so it’s better than it could be. The plot is a slow, inevitable creep into disorienting horror. A solid B-

“The Finding of the Absolute” by May Sinclair (1923). Well-written afterlife fantasy heavily daubed with philosophy and mathematical mysticism. You can imagine it as a missing link situated halfway between Mark Twain’s “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” and The Good Place. It didn’t have the grounding in sympathetic character that the better afterlife fantasies from present day authors give you, but all in all it was surprisingly solid. B-

“The Veiled Feminists of Atlantis” by Booth Tarkington (1927). Satirical take on women’s suffrage in which the rule of women leads to the destruction of Atlantis. I’ll go with Joanna Russ’ assessment, as quoted in Glenn’s introduction, and say that this stinks of smug misogyny. D

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And that’s it! All in all, a much more mediocre volume than the first, but it still had some delightful stories to enjoy.

2025 read #57: Voices from the Radium Age, edited by Joshua Glenn.

Voices from the Radium Age, edited and introduced by Joshua Glenn

213 pages

Published 2022

Read from August 26 to August 27

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

You ever go to a bookstore in a new city and feel the inhibitions of penury lift enough that you spend way more than you should on shiny new books? That’s what happened when my partner R and I took a roadtrip to Rhode Island last weekend. Part of that overspend: this volume and its follow-up, two anthologies devoted to the forgotten period of sci-fi, the era between the scientific romances and the start of the “golden age,” which editor Glenn dubs the Radium Age.

Spoiled by the contextualization provided by the British Library Tales of the Weird series, I was pleasantly surprised by the historical and biographical detail in Glenn’s introduction. More historical anthologies should make the effort.

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“Sultana’s Dream” by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1905). Bengali feminist Hossain pens the utopia of Ladyland, where women walk freely in the city while men are shut away and secluded for the public good. Ladyland’s other benefits include solar power, flying cars, and a two hour workday, all thanks to the efforts of its lady scientists. As with most classical utopias, the story is little more than a guided tour of Ladyland and its wonders, with some words about how it originated. Still, it was a pleasant read. B-

“The Voice in the Night” by William Hope Hodgson (1907). When I picked up this book, I was excited for another Hodgson story, but alas, I forgot I’d already read and reviewed this one in the British Library’s Evil Roots anthology. There, I called it “Deliciously creepy.”

“The Machine Stops” by E. M. Forster (1909). A hugely influential story about a distant future where everyone lives in identical hexagonal compartments, having their needs met and their social interactions mediated through the Machine. It’s an early example of “ease makes the race weak” sci-fi, which is unfortunate, but it also seems to have eerily prefigured aspects of our current era. The Machine doesn’t display video when people call each other, it displays a “good enough for practical purposes” simulacrum. Likewise, food and other necessities rendered by the Machine are “good enough.” Given the way countless contemporary people have settled for allowing GenAI — an elaborate, wasteful version of autocomplete fed by theft — do their fact-finding, their socializing, their writing, even their thinking for them, and don’t seem to understand why that’s bad, “Machine” has an uncomfortable resonance today. It’s also an especially apt metaphor for life under technofeudalist capitalism: “The Machine develops — but not on our lines. The Machine proceeds — but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die.” B+

“The Horror of the Heights” by Arthur Conan Doyle (1913). Bearing in mind his many faults, I have to admit that Doyle was a consummate yarn-spinner. In his hands, even a “These are the facts of the case”-style framing device somehow works. I was immediately absorbed by this airborne thriller, in which a daring pilot becomes convinced that an invisible menace inhabits the unexplored “jungles” of the upper atmosphere, and sets out to confront it. Entertaining! B

“The Red One” by Jack London (1918). Archetypal man’s-life weird adventure pulp, unfortunately with all the horrific racism and sexism that comes with it. Fever-crazed Bennett, fleeing across Guadalcanal from cannibals, chases a distant unearthly sound. Would’ve been a much cooler story if London had been able to contain his throbbing bigotry-boner for even a moment. If I had to guess, I’d say this was a major inspiration for Sphere. F+

“The Comet” by W. E. B. Du Bois (1920). A Black bank messenger appears to be the only survivor after Earth passes through the tail of a comet. Superb use of science fiction as social commentary. Grim and beautiful. A-

“The Jameson Satellite” by Neil R. Jones (1931). The namesake Jameson, hoping to preserve his mortal remains for the lifetime of the Earth, designs an orbiting satellite as his coffin. Forty million years later, a shipful of robots, their metal bodies controlled by organic brains, happens upon the Jameson Satellite and revives Jameson, placing his brain inside a machine. The quaint early sci-fi conceit comes out half-baked thanks to dull writing and stiff dialogue. Maybe C-?

—

And that’s it! All in all, one of the better anthologies of old stories I’ve ever encountered. I’m excited to read the next volume!

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

—

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.