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

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

238 pages

Published 2023

Read from August 24 to August 26

Rating: 3 out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024 read #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?

—

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

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

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

629 pages

Published 1985

Read from August 13 to September 26

Rating: 2 out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

Edited by Anthony Boucher & J. Francis McComas

128 pages

Published 1950

Read from August 10 to August 11

Rating: 1 out of 5

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024 read #87: The Sorcerer’s Ship by Hannes Bok.

The Sorcerer’s Ship by Hannes Bok

205 pages

Published 1942

Read from July 24 to July 25

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

If I had a nickel for every 1940s novel I’d read about an amnesiac man getting shunted from our world to a fantastic realm, I’d have two nickels, etc. With that in mind, how does The Sorcerer’s Ship compare to Henry Kuttner’s The Dark World?

To set the tone, let me summarize the first couple chapters. Our hero Gene finds himself adrift on a raft, with no memories and no supplies. Eventually he gets rescued by a passing ship, but passes out from dehydration and exhaustion. He wakes up to find a dude who is clearly evil-councilor-coded watching over him; this dude orders Gene to murder another man on the boat. When Gene demurs, saying he isn’t sure he’s a killer, the evil guy puts a green liquid in Gene’s wine and tells him it improves the flavor. Gene obediently drinks it. His mouth goes numb! The evil guy keeps bullying him to drink more, drink more, drink it all. Shockingly, it’s poison!

That’s the storytelling caliber we’re dealing with on The Sorcerer’s Ship. It’s a period-standard fantasy pulper without much to set it apart from its contemporaries, unless you count the office clerk passivity of its hero. If you squint, there’s a pro-socialist message in the conflict between poor-but-egalitarian Nanich and rich-but-stratified Koph. At one point Gene says, “The more rich people, the less money to go around,” which shows us that a pulp protagonist can have a sharper grasp of economic realities than any American politician of the last four decades.

The political plot runs out of steam not even halfway through, leading to an abrupt genre shift as the boat lands on an unknown island, its crew finds a monolithic city, and everyone gets mixed up in the business of an ancient extradimensional being and his fish-man apprentice. This second plot is marginally more interesting than the first, but the timeless being is more of a corny old wizard than an unfathomable cosmic horror, and the shift doesn’t break the tedium for long.

I had hoped that Bok’s own queerness would have left more of a mark on the narrative, but sadly, Ship sticks to the cis-het script of its time, complete with an 18 year old princess whom Gene is ordered to woo.

So, all in all, Ship was nowhere near as interesting as The Dark World. Considering how much of an unexpected delight that book was, this one is perhaps closer to what I would expect from a 1940s isekai novel.

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

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

Edited by Anthony Boucher & J. Francis McComas

128 pages

Published 1951

Read July 2

Rating: 2 out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2024 read #44: Earth’s Last Citadel by C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner.

Earth’s Last Citadel by C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner

128 pages

Published 1943

Read from April 11 to April 17

Rating: 1 out of 5

American intelligence officer Alan Drake has been sent to Tunisia to keep Sir Colin, a scientist important to the war effort, safe from the Nazis. Two Nazi agents, femme fatale Karen and American muscle Mike, stand in Alan’s way. But then all four of them enter a sphere that takes them far into the future, where they find a dying Earth, wormlike monsters, and an immense spire like gossamer glass. They run afoul of an immortal being named Flande, who isn’t too happy to have them on his doorstep. And Alan unknowingly plays host to an alien intelligence that wants to feed on what’s left of humanity.

After reading Kuttner’s own Dying Earth-esque novel, The Dark World, and knowing of Moore’s contributions to classic sword & sorcery thanks to the reputation of her Jirel of Joiry stories, I had moderately high hopes for this book. Sadly, Citadel doesn’t have much of interest to offer. It’s a standard ’40s pulper with a blue-eyed hero who applies his gun and his fists to the problems of space and time, and immediately makes out with the first future babe he finds. This iteration adds nothing to the formula.

My impression was (perhaps) soured by the fact that my partner and I performed an arduous 700 mile move this week. Rarely have I been this comprehensively exhausted. I had hoped this book would be a light and colorful trifle to read whenever I had a spare moment, but it just never clicked. Maybe it was me.

Or maybe it was the way Citadel has Nazi collaborators help blonde barbarians steal the life-source of a race of effete and decadent spire-dwellers in order to establish a new human homeland. Maybe that was it.

2024 read #19: Action Stories, December 1940 issue.

Action Stories, December 1940 issue (16:1)

Edited by Malcolm Reiss 

132 pages

Published 1940

Read February 5

Rating: 1 out of 5

I’m reading this for one reason and one reason only: the cover art for “Exiles of the Dawn World.” I have no illusions that anything here will live up to the pure pulp silliness promised by that cover. You can pretty much guarantee that the cover will be the best part of a magazine like this, anyway.

—

“Ghost-Brand Maverick” by Jay Karth. The title is the best thing about this paint-by-numbers western, which has nothing to do with ghosts. Our hero, Ed Flane, has “opaque” blue eyes and no personality beyond stoic manliness. He arrives in town, supposedly fresh out of prison on a governor’s pardon; Ed had been locked up for killing his own father, but was let go on “insufficient evidence.” Naturally, the moment he sets foot in town, manly honor demands he fistfight a dude named Rick, who promptly dies. Ed Flane knows it’s a setup by local bigwigs hoping to take over his ranch and cover up who actually killed Ed’s dad (and not, like, Ed’s responsibility whatsoever for fighting Rick or anything). There’s also a gray-eyed waif who’s in love with Ed, but her father wants to shoot him; then her father ends up dead, etc. There’s even a twist reveal of lookalikes, assumed identities, and a second Ed Flane. It feels like a pressed and shaped chicken patty of a story, a product squirted out for rapid consumption and immediate digestion. I suppose it could have been worse? If I had to say something positive about it, “Maverick” does a decent job at escalation, adding fresh complications to Ed Flane’s situation. D

“Exiles of the Dawn World” by Nelson S. Bond. Stage magician and sometime ghost-exorcist Jeff thinks he’s investigating a standard haunted house in upstate New York; city reporter Beth thinks she’s exposing Jeff as the con he is. Instead, through a hidden passageway in a bookshelf, they discover Dr. Franz von Torp and his secret time-travel laboratory. Von Torp, to preserve his secrets, orders them into his time-machine; in the struggle, all three end up “a million years ago,” which turns out to be a pulpy mishmash of cavemen times and dinosaur swamps. Jeff’s magician coat comes in handy when befriending the local Cro-Magnons. Most of the fauna is a smattering of Cenozoic beasties — Dinoceras and Coryphodon get name-checked — but dinosaurs finally appear in the climax, specifically tyrannosaurs ridden by war bands of Neanderthals under the mad scientist’s command. Like “Maverick” above, this story is a checklist of pulp tropes run through with abandon. Weirdly, “Exiles” shows its age worse than the western does, particularly in its general attitude toward women. Still, it has cavemen fighting tyrannosaurs with fire arrows, which is exactly what I came here for. D-

Content warning for two next stories: sui ideation.

“Boothill Bait” by Tom J. Hopkins. Back in the saddle with another western, this time following Joe Fergus, a steely, stoic man with an actual character trait: he wants to die, but can’t seem to make it happen, not even in shootouts with bandits. When Fergus finds a town, nicknamed The Graveyard, where marshaling is a sure ticket to six feet under, he rushes to volunteer. That’s the only interesting wrinkle to this dud. Despite that setup, Fergus lights out for an even deadlier town down in Mexico the moment someone tells him about it, chasing another man who just wants to die. “Boothill” is trying so hard to be brooding and fatalistic, but it’s just silly. (And ultimately racist.) F

“The Devil’s Sink Hole” by Albert Richard Wetjen. I was premature when I said a suicidal hero was an interesting wrinkle, because we got another one: Stinger Seave, a former South Seas “trader” who has gone back to ruthless adventuring in his old age, after a bank collapse erases most of his colonialist wealth. Seave is frail, his mustache white, and he’s clean out of fucks to give. So the governor of colonial New Guinea offers to make him a magistrate on the frontier. Stinger could have been an interesting character, but this story is an exercise in colonialist bullshit. It’s just an especially vile western with palm trees. F

Clearly we peaked with the first two stories. We’ve long since  reached the point of diminishing returns.

“The Rider of Lost Range” by Bart Cassidy. Another western. Two bygone “pards,” Buck and Rooney, grew up and got ranches next to each other, but now they suspect each other of rustling their calves, because it’s manlier to stew in unfounded suspicion than to have an open and honest communication. You’d never guess, but a third man is behind it all, putting them against each another while he steals their cattle! (I sussed out the twist by page two.) The one redeeming feature of this tale is its depiction of high park and mountain scenery. There’s also a secret cave behind a thundering waterfall, leading to a grassy range open to the air, which is implausible but fun. Maybe F+

“Murder Sands” by John Starr. A tale of two men in the French Foreign Legion: a standup American sergeant, and a vicious bully of a Dutch lieutenant. The American noncom punches the Dutch officer, gets only light punishment due to past heroism, and now the Dutchman plots vengeance. Consistently uninteresting tale from the desert frontiers of colonialism. F

“Tejano!” by Harry F. Olmsted. All about some “loco” white dudes cow-punching in the Big Bend country. Murders and rustling and revenge get rattled off at breakneck pace, with all the standard racist western tropes. I almost wonder if this was some awkward attempt at a satire of pulpy westerns. No thanks, either way. F

“Fate Fans a .45” by Walt Coburn. Jack Badger, cowpoke turned investigator, traipses down to Mexico about a train robbery, following a hunch it was set up by someone on the inside. (Turns out Jack’s dad was killed in the robbery. It’s a vengeance story, because of course it is.) Insipid stuff, and excessively long, to boot. Didn’t expect much from this one, but what a flat way to end this issue. F

—

For a moment there at the start, I had thought this magazine might have been more than meets the eye — only a little, maybe 5%, but still, more interesting than it would seem. But no, they merely front-loaded it with the best stories, and even those two were marginal at best. The rest was pure pulp filler. Not surprising, just disappointing.

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

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

Edited by Anthony Boucher & J. Francis McComas

128 pages

Published 1949

Read from January 28 to January 29

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

2023 read #111: The Women of Weird Tales.

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

Introduction by Melanie R. Anderson

278 pages

Published 2020

Read from October 2 to October 5

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2023 read #72: Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment, compiled by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.

Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment, compiled by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
628 pages
Published 1988
Read from January 1, 2016 to June 22, 2023
Rating: 2.5 out of 5

First, a preamble from here in 2023: I started reading this book a long ass time ago. Seven and a half years, in fact, or approximately three subjective lifetimes ago — before Trumpism, before I got into a relationship that proved shitty, before I made the mistake of moving to Ohio, before I moved again to the Piedmont. I was still reading it when Trump “won” the 2016 election. I was picking away at it in the rural Ohio trailer home where I lived in early 2019. I got rid of my original copy at some point in all the moves, remembered I never finished it, found another copy for cheap on eBay, and here we are. I won’t start over, but I will finish the damn thing this time. Luckily I wrote reviews for each story as I went along, and saved it in my drafts.

Here’s my original preamble from way back in January 2016:

Way back in 2014, I think it was, I went through a binge of buying up fantasy and science fiction anthologies whenever I could find them. Modern Classics of Fantasy inspired this splurge: the historical cross-section of classic fantasy stories, from 1938 all the way through to the mid-1990s, was exactly what I had always wanted without ever knowing it, and that volume left me craving more. Unfortunately, while sci-fi has an extensive and well-curated catalog of best-ofs and annual anthologies dating back into the 1960s, fantasy seems to have been largely a backwater genre until the very close of the 1970s — or, at any rate, it seems much more difficult to obtain a good selection of short fantasy fiction before the New Romantic era. This current volume is one of the very few exclusively fantasy compilations which takes the historical approach, and was one of the first I ordered in that spending spree. But I kept putting off the reading part of the transaction, partly because my reading record and attention span was so scant last year. I'm hoping to do better this year. [Spoiler: I did not do better.]

A glance through the contents shows some familiar tales, some exciting names, and some antiquarian relics that could prove either fascinating or tremendously dull. My plan is to read it a story or two at a time, in between other works, so I don't get bogged down in a boring stretch and can maintain my reading momentum. [Spoiler: I did not stick with this plan.]

“The Rule of Names” by Ursula K. Le Guin (1964). This charming, bucolic little fable is an early glimpse into what would become Earthsea, published four years before A Wizard of Earthsea. It is pleasant but predictable for the most part, perhaps a bit too condensed and just-so for my tastes, but ends on a satisfying note of horror and bloodshed to come. I kind of regret rushing through the Earthsea novels back in 2013; I think the world Le Guin created is best explored at leisure, with time to reflect upon and appreciate its small revelations.

“The Magic Fishbone” by Charles Dickens (1867). The subtitle — “Romance. From the Pen of Miss Alice Rainbird.* (*Aged seven.)” — gives an accurate forecast of the amount of preciousness globbed and slathered all over this little fairy tale. In Miss Alice’s putative tale, the industrious and worthy Princess Alicia labors to hold her family and household together as her mother the Queen falls ill, the cook runs off with a drunk soldier, and her father King Watkins the First struggles against penury and a quarterly pay schedule at the distant Office. In classic Dickensian fashion, all the superficial whimsy serves to illustrate the awful living conditions and financial stresses of the Victorian working class. I liked it rather more than I had expected to. Certain lines (e.g., “Prince Certainpersonio was sitting by himself, eating barley-sugar and waiting to be ninety”) reminded me of the appeal of Catherynne M. Valente’s early Fairyland books (which is getting the chronology all reversed, but no matter — you know what I mean).

“The Goddess on the Street Corner” by Margaret St. Clair (1953). A beautiful, delicately heartbreaking vignette about a down-and-out alcoholic struggling to nurse an even more down-and-out Aphrodite. A solid entry.

“Feathertop: A Moralized Legend” by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1852). A quaint and charmingly innocent allegory of a scarecrow given life on the whim of a New England witch and sent out into the wide world of “coxcombs and charlatans... made up of just such a jumble of worn-out, forgotten, and good-for-nothing trash as he was” — only to encounter the tragedy of seeing himself for what he really is. Fortuitous timing, reading this so soon after an extended primer on New England witchcraft.

“The Root and the Ring” by Wyman Guin (1954). Except for a certain Leave It to Beaver-esque reek to the family and workplace dynamics, this is a startlingly modern story of math, magic, and insecurity — and even the white-bread family dynamic gets a little tweak as the magic of the mathematical ring works its way up from the roots of the backyard apple tree: “[The boy] had a bunch of ‘art-photo’ and ‘girlie’ magazines scattered across his desk. The blonde nude he had before him hit me right in the midriff, but he sat there, calm as a cucumber, measuring the distance from her navel to her chin with calipers.” The man-is-the-head-of-the-household business soured the ending; otherwise this was an excellent (and humorous) mood piece.

“The Green Magician” by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt (1953). I’ve mentioned somewhere before, in one of these short story anthology reviews, how unsatisfying it can be to land upon a serial adventure story that comes at the end of a long and built-up sequence of canon. The first two pages here are spent getting us up to speed with what I assume are our hero Harold Shea’s most recent published exploits, rather like some breathless radio show announcer's table-setting spiel for the benefit of first-time listeners. The general conceit of a guy traveling from magical world to magical world, figuring out the laws of magic in each realm in order to escape to the next adventure, accompanied by a wife acquired in The Faery Queen and a detective straight out of a pulp magazine, is definitively (and appealingly) de Camp (and Pratt for all I know). Indeed, after the shaky start, this becomes a crackerjack (if rather long) pulp adventure, with scheming druids, a quick trip to the land of the Sidhe, and (perhaps inevitably, given de Camp’s paleo proclivities) a battle with an Irish relative of the Loch Ness Monster.

“Our Fair City” by Robert A. Heinlein (1948). A charming little urban fantasy pulper about a sentient whirlwind, a cynical reporter, dirty cops, and a corrupt city administration. Entertaining, albeit a tad too pat and shallow.

“The Man Who Could Not See Devils” by Joanna Russ (1970). After the forgettable fluff of “Nobody's Home” (read and reviewed here) and the bold mess of The Female Man, I'm as surprised as anyone to find a Joanna Russ story I dig without reservations. I did not experience the concluding "jolt of wonder" Hartwell (or Cramer) promised in his introduction to this tale — the ending felt, if anything, obvious from the first page — but that didn't lessen my liking for the story as a whole.

“Hieroglyphic Tales” by Horace Walpole (1785). I knew nothing of Walpole before reading Hartwell's introduction here, which sent me on a Google hunt that only intrigues me more. Writer, apparently, of the first Gothic novel (The Castle of Otranto), Walpole in these seven “Tales” (only seven copies of which were printed in his lifetime, none of them escaping his possession) concocts surreal fables reminiscent of Swift's absurdist allegories, without Swift's satirical bite. Occasionally there are glimpses of otherworldly opulence and voluptuous mysticism presaging Catherynne M. Valente's Dirge for Prester John novels, such as the luxurious opening of “The Bird’s Nest,” but such moments of transcendence are rare. The “Tales” are more interesting within their historical context as precocious efforts at surreal fiction than as stories per se. I'm glad I read them, but they had the feel of a coursework assignment, rather than something I'd ever seek out for my own enjoyment.

“Bird of Prey” by John Collier (1941). A brief sketch of insidious doubt and poisonous jealousy. Too succinct to have much of an impact; had this been drawn out longer, the characters given more substance, I think it would have been a good example of psychological horror.

“The Detective of Dreams” by Gene Wolfe (1980). Clever supernatural detective story in the atmospheric mode of Poe, rich with character and sense of place despite its relative brevity, with an unexpected but (in retrospect) apposite conclusion.

“The Bee-man of Orn” by Frank R. Stockton (1887). I'm not sure whether to categorize this as a just-so story, a shaggy dog story, or a fable. Sweet, charming, wryly humorous — a delightful little tale.

“The Red Hawk” by Elizabeth A. Lynn (1983). A charming mythopoeic tale of a dutiful astronomer entrusted with command of the winds, the bored trickster god who beguiles her, and the twin girls born to them. It reminded me foremost of the better stories to be found in Lin Carter's Year's Best Fantasy anthologies — it carries within it something of that 1970s mythic fantasy tradition, reminiscent of C. J. Cherryh's mythological fairy tale “The Dark King” from 1979 (reviewed here), perhaps unsurprising given its close chronological proximity. Yet it also felt a bit more modern, perhaps reminding me of the godlings in N. K. Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy. This isn't an all time classic, but it's a promising first exposure to the work of Lynn, whose Chronicles of Tornor trilogy has been on my to-read list for some time now. [Note from 2023: Years after writing this, I finally read Lynn’s Watchtower.]

“The Canvasser’s Tale” by Mark Twain (1876). I read this long ago, in a purportedly complete edition of Twain's short works, and even after the passage of almost two decades, the text was familiar. Familiarity does not breed monotony in this case; indeed, Twain's humorous inflections and ironic sensibilities probably make more sense to me now than they did in my teens. I was amused by it then, and cannot be any less amused by it now.

Here we are now, mid-November [2016]; the election has happened, spray-tan fascism is poised to take over Washington, and the optimistic New Year's Day when I began this book feels quite far off. After all these months, I'm not even half done with this volume. Nihilistic thoughts hang over me. Yet finish this book this year I shall — which means actually sitting down to read the damn thing. [Note: I did no such thing.]

“The Silken-swift...” by Theodore Sturgeon (1953). And what should be the first tale I read from this tome in this brave new world? A prettily written morality play of a spiteful, man-hating temptress who so arouses and tantalizes some poor fellow that he goes out and, in his witchery-induced blindness, rapes an innocent girl, thinking her to be the very “devil” who tormented him. “There has never been a woman so foul,” he hisses at the temptress, after discovering the mistaken identity — as if he had no control over his own actions. In the end, when the unicorn arrives and chooses the violated girl over the (still virginal) temptress, I think it was intended to be something of a progressive, subversive statement for the time — literal virginity is not to be valued over purity of spirit — but now, of all times, this tale hits a sour note. I can't bring myself to feel much more than distaste for this story.

“The New Mother” by Lucy Clifford (1882, or possibly earlier). This, by contrast, is delightful — a strange fairy tale that, aside from some distinct Victorian moral overtones that no steampunk throwback could quite match, feels as if it could have been published in an anthology sometime in the last couple decades.

“Mr. Lupescu” by Anthony Boucher (1945). I'm not sure how to describe this little slip of a narrative without spoiling it entirely, so here's a warning: I'm spoiling it entirely. A boy thinks a little demon man is his playmate, but it turns out to be his mother's former suitor, who convinces the boy to shoot his negligent father — all very eye-rolling and obvious stuff, even if it pre-dates the 1980s (when this sort of thing really flourished) by some thirty-five years. But then, in the final stinger, it turns out there is some sort of demonic presence involved — and it's coming for the suitor. That last bit also feels totally '80s, but it helped elevate this tale (slightly) from mediocrity (however precocious that mediocrity might be).

“The King of the Cats” by Stephen Vincent Benét (1929). Kind of unremarkable relocation of a fairy tale to the dining rooms of New York high society; the strain of social satire praised in the introduction to this story was lost on me.

“Uncle Einar” by Ray Bradbury (1947). A precious little fancy about a winged man despondent about being grounded. Slight but sweet.

“Space-Time for Springers” by Fritz Leiber (1958). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Fantasy. There I called it “a character study at turns hilarious and strangely affecting.”

“Great Is Diana” by Avram Davidson (1958). Yet another “ancient myths intrude upon the modern world” tale, one which by no means can compare to “The Goddess on the Street Corner” in this selfsame volume. I normally dig Davidson stories, but the framing device he employs here — a few bluff old pals sharing cocktails away from the womenfolk — diminishes to the point of nonexistence any impact the tale might have had, reducing it to an anecdotal punchline about polymastia and breast fetishism. Which is, likely, the point. A weak effort overall.

“The Last of the Huggermuggers: A Giant Story” by Christopher Pearse Cranch (1855). Hartwell (or Cramer) goes to some length setting up this tale as a lost classic, languishing in its undeserved obscurity, reporting almost breathlessly, “This is the first time in a century that ‘The Last of the Huggermuggers’ has been reprinted.” The story is adequate enough, I suppose — obviously a children-friendly reprise of Gulliver among the Brobdingnagians, with a plucky young American adventure-seeker as its hero — but the editors’ excitement at bringing it back into print seems a little bit excessive.

“Tobermory” by Saki (1909). Mildly amusing little comedy of manners arising when a talking cat offers most unmannerly observations it has gleaned from its household’s social and sexual peccadilloes.

“The King of the Elves” by Philip K. Dick (1953). This is, to my recollection, my first out-and-out fantasy story from Dick, and it's more or less exactly what one would expect. Shadrach Jones, who runs a gas station in a town forgotten by the highway, becomes King of the Elves one rainy night, and must lead their armies against the destructive advance of the Trolls — or has his brain merely been disordered by escapist urges and the frustrations and loneliness of his quotidian life? Dick doesn't sustain that note of ambiguity for long, but this remains a charming little number, well worth a read.

Four “American Fairy Tales” by L. Frank Baum (1901). I haven't read anything of Baum’s beyond the original Wizard of Oz, and that I read well over two decades ago. So these four tales (selections from a larger work, which contained twelve “American Fairy Tales” all told) were a welcome delight. They are, of course, a bit on the old-fashioned-moralizing side, but they're breezy and amusing, far more so than many of the older stories in this volume. The world could do well with more sorcerers on the top floors of tenements and high-kicking professors in the thrall of magical bonbons.

Here’s where I left off, once again, two-thirds of the way through, in April or May 2019. Little did I know that a year and a half later my original copy would be sold for pennies to a used bookstore and I’d be once again starting my life over from scratch. Ah well.

There this review remained in my drafts until a stubborn completionist streak caught up with me in June 2023 and convinced me to obtain another cheap copy and resume right where I left off. 

“The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers” by Samuel R. Delany (1979). One of the first books I ever bought in my first flush of disposable income, age 19, was Delany’s Dhalgren. I carted that copy with me through sixteen years and six moves and never managed to get beyond the first page. Eventually I conceded and gave it away to a thrift store. Clearly, Delany’s dense, oblique style, redolent of 20th century philosophy treatises, never clicked with me, no matter how much I’ve wanted it to. I’m pretty sure this story is the reason why I never finished this book in 2019, funnily enough. It is one of the titular tales from Tales of Nevèrÿon (another Delany book I bought at one point, never read, and discarded). There’s something about Delany’s refusal to play along with fantasy’s central tradition of artifice, making no attempt to suspend your disbelief — the way his characters openly discuss the metaphorical meanings and uses of dragons, or the economic ripple effects of barbarians freeing slaves, in between vast expository dumps of dialogue — that takes some adjustment. This is sociology behind a construction-paper mask that says “fantasy” on it. Telling a mere story seems Delany’s second priority, well behind dissecting social mores of race, aristocracy, slavery, power, sex, and the way these constructs condition our behavior. That said, it isn’t all dry social commentary: when Delany’s prose hits, it hits. In the end, this — the story that stymied me in the past, by the author I’ve just never been able to get into — proved to be one of the best in this collection. (Not that I can say I remember a damn thing about any of the stories I read all those years ago. Oh well.)

Excerpt from Phantasmion by Sara Coleridge (1837). The opening chapters of what the editors call “The first novel set in fairyland in the English language.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, these chapters sketch the title character’s quick turn from joyful childhood to an adolescence beset by mortality, as mother, childhood friend, father, and young adult companion all perish in turn around him, causing him to seek the aid promised to him by the fairy Potentilla, queen of the insect realm. Her gift of wings just happens to carry him to a crash-landing on a beach where he just happens to overhear two fairy women plotting against one even more beautiful, whom he had just happened to see in a vision before he crashed, etc. So Phantasmion returns to Potentilla and asks her for the wall-walking abilities of a fly. Thoroughly of its time, at least from what I can tell here.

“The Sapphire Necklace” (1930), “The Regent of the North” (1915), and “The Eyeless Dragons: A Chinese Story” (1915) by Kenneth Morris. Also of their time: these three pieces. They have a modernist flavor reminiscent of Olaf Stapledon, mixing myth with the newly understood grandeur of the scientific cosmos. The entire universe in “Necklace,” for example, is a vast mountainous country where stars are the various regents and princes of constellations, a planet is little more than a dim hideaway with a cellar for a jewel-thieving god named Ghuggg, and King Arthur and Taliesin get involved in retrieving the jewelry, riding their war-steeds across space. “Necklace” is the best by far of the three. “Regent,” sadly, dredges up masculine fantasies of Viking manly men, “honorable and vigorous,” abandoning the newly effete world of Christian Sweden for the vast beautiful cruelties of the mythical North (never a good vibe when you look back upon this particular era). “Dragons” is definitively Orientalist but, perhaps, is less egregious than one might fear, though as a moralistic fable it feels a tad ham-handed and predictable.

“Elric at the End of Time” by Michael Moorcock (1981). I thought I’d read (and despised) an Elric story in the past, but it turns out that I had Moorcock mixed up with Stephen R. Donaldson. Unfortunately, Moorcock’s Elric seems to draw from the same grim and gritty antihero aesthetic I associate with Donaldson’s writing, so it works out much the same in the end. This is an overlong mess of time travel, intersecting planes, demon bargains, a sentient sword fed by blood — the usual testosterone-fantasy glurge. Worst of all, it spills into wacky fish-out-of-water shenanigans as Elric tumbles into a nest of immortal aesthetes, runs afoul of the bureaucracy of time travel, and compares the relative doom-ladenness of their respective doom-laden destinies with the Last Romantic. Still, this was better than the one Donaldson story I’ve read (“Reave the Just” in the After the King anthology). Definitely not something I’d seek out again, but hey, it could have been worse?

“Lindenborg Pool” by William Morris (1856). I know William Morris for his textile and wallpaper designs, so I was surprised to learn his antiquarian bent had contributed much to the early evolution of English fantasy, as well. This might be the most Victorian thing (derogatory) I’ve ever read. We begin, of course, with the necessity of a framing device to beg the reader’s indulgence — basically “I read some Norse mythology and got inspired and wrote this through the night, hope you don’t mind!” Next, our narrator is afflicted with “cold, chill horror” at the sight of what sounds to modern ears like a quite pleasant spring-fed pool in the moors. Then, naturally, we transition into the old Oh good heavens, what’s this? Are mine senses deceiving me? What? Am I dreaming? Or does it seem that I am a priest in black robes riding a horse through a young wood? Heavens! routine. And finally we reach the marrow of the tale, the horror upon which everything hangs: a group of men and women in which the women dress like the men! and everybody dances a polka! I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a reek of Victorian antisemitism in all of it. William Morris should have stuck with wallpaper.

“The Moon Pool” by A. Merritt (1918). Pulp adventure with all the racist baggage of its time. Merritt attempts to wring cosmic horror from the, uh, existence of Papua and Australia, here positioned as remnants of a vast, primeval, malevolent lost continent: “I am the ancient of days…. You and I ought not be in the same world; yet I am and I shall be!” It’s the Art Deco era equivalent of hyperventilating about a spring-fed pool, I suppose. White colonialists arrive to excavate Nan Madol and uncover its “lost continent” mysteries, but inevitably fuck around and find out in a strange temple activated by moonlight. I’d be willing to call it a prototype of a dungeon crawl, except that, despite all the buildup, we barely spend any narrative time inside the temple. An interesting but overlong antique, emblematic of its time and genre.

“The Sword of Welleran” by Lord Dunsany (1908). Standard Dunsany fare (or so it would seem to me, having read only this story and The King of Elfland’s Daughter). Stately heroic fantasy, all noble heroes and mighty forebears and bloody deeds, redeemed solely through its mellifluous descriptions: “Then night came up, huge and holy, out of the waste marshes to the eastwards and low lands and the sea…” 

“Operation Afreet” by Poul Anderson (1956). Past brushes with Poul Anderson’s short stories have left me unimpressed. This one had all the midcentury spank-the-dame masculinity you’d expect from a Poul Anderson military fantasy, plus a war against the perfidious Saracen Caliphate to supply the requisite quota of ’50s racism. But I will admit to being entertained by how Anderson mingled magic with the bureaucratic structure of the US armed forces. From the various corps insignia (crystal ball for Signal, Sleipnir for Cavalry) to small things like how cremation was made illegal to ensure ample cemeteries for moonlit herb-gathering, the delight is in the details. The mix of magic and mundane extends even into civilian life: top-notch cigarettes include smoke sprites that can make you a drink. This isn't saying much, but this is easily my favorite Anderson piece, and one of the best post-war fantasy shorts.

And that's it! Seven and a half years. Easily the longest it's ever taken me to finish a book. Perhaps I should have reread the first two-thirds for a fresher perspective, but eh. It's time to take this one out of drafts.