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.

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

629 pages

Published 1985

Read from August 13 to September 26

Rating: 2 out of 5

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

Edited by Anthony Boucher & J. Francis McComas

128 pages

Published 1950

Read from August 10 to August 11

Rating: 1 out of 5

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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 #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 #74: Dinosaur Tales by Ray Bradbury.

Dinosaur Tales by Ray Bradbury

144 pages

Published 1983

Read June 27

Rating: 2 out of 5

The main draw of this book for me is the lovely illustrations from turn-of-the-1980s fantasy artists, including William Stout and Moebius. It feels like a black & white prototype of The Ultimate Dinosaur; Byron Priess was involved in publishing both books, so my feeling isn't far from the truth. I've read almost all the stories here, even reviewed half of them already on this blog. Bradbury’s dino poetry looks like a shrug. The illustrations, though, make Dinosaur Tales a keeper.

Clearly this book was put together to cash in on the Dinosaur Renaissance, which spawned a bubble of dino fic at the tail end of the 1970s and the early '80s. The full explosion of dinomania wouldn't hit until Jurassic Park and the early 1990s, but I for one assume Michael Crichton wouldn't have written Park if it hadn't been for the original wave, earlier in the '80s.

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“Besides a Dinosaur, Whatta Ya Wanna Be When You Grow Up?” (1983, illustrated by David Wiesner). I read and reviewed this one last year in The Ultimate Dinosaur. To quote that review: “It’s exactly as Bradburyan as you’d expect: Midwestern fabulism rooted in an idyll of white middle class 20th century childhood, full of the tender-sweet bruises of loss and that childhood summer night feeling that nothing is in your control.” B+

“A Sound of Thunder” (1952, illustrated by William Stout). I last read this one a long time ago, possibly during my teens. I was somewhat surprised to find I hadn’t read it at any point during the span of this blog. Bradbury’s main strength, I feel, is his prose: the mythic exuberance of it, the breathless repetition that makes everything the biggest and sharpest and most towering sensation experienced anywhere. Tyrannosaurus rex is an evil god just vast enough to pull down the moon. Bradbury’s prose carries this midcentury classic. The plot, which hinges on one man’s cowardice and another man’s need to punish his lapse of masculinity, certainly isn’t enough to sustain the story otherwise. B-

“Lo, the Dear, Daft Dinosaurs!” (1983, illustrated by Overton Loyd). This poem, with its lumpily humorous illustrations, feels like a children’s picture book squeezed into the middle of this volume. It’s fine, I guess, once you adjust to the shift in tone. Kind of like a mediocre Shel Silverstein number.

“The Fog Horn” (1951, illustrated by Steranko). I read and reviewed this one in Martin H. Greenberg’s Dinosaurs anthology. It’s just as forgettable now as it was then, a banal midcentury creature feature about a lonesome plesiosaur-sauropod pastiche drawn to the horn of a lighthouse. The drawings accompanying this time it were pretty cool, though. D+

“What If I Said: The Dinosaur’s Not Dead?” (1983, illustrated by Gahan Wilson). Another eh attempt at kid-lit poetry. I prefer it, slightly, over “Lo, the Dear, Daft Dinosaurs.”

“Tyrannosaurus Rex” (1962, originally published as “The Prehistoric Producer,” illustrated  by Moebius). Twenty-odd years before Tim Sullivan’s “Stop Motion” (which I read and reviewed in the August 1986 Asimov’s), we have a story of a stop-motion animator with a dinosaur sizzle reel getting stiffed by a greedy producer. Sullivan’s tale feels less original now that I’ve read this one, but I think it’s better than Bradbury’s humorous effort, which feels perfunctory at best. Even the artwork feels like a waste of Moebius’ talents. D

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Somehow, that’s it! Worthwhile as the illustrations are, they really pad out the length of this teeny little collection.

2024 read #37: The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff.

The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff

214 pages

Published 1954

Read from March 20 to March 25

Rating: 3 out of 5

As a precocious reader whose parent seldom let them access anything more recent than the Edwardian era, I’ve been something of an Anglophile my whole life, swooning over misty mornings on the downs and the ancient lines of hedgerows depicted by Doyle. And as a lifelong history nerd, Roman Britain was long a special interest of mine: an era of long-distance trade, culture contact, and people moving between continents long before any modern conception of “race” had been invented, with Britain itself a wooded land of fog and wolves at the edge of the world. It’s a shame that the definitive modern fantasy novel about Roman Britain (The Mists of Avalon) was written by one of those sex predators all too common in twentieth century SFF. I’ll certainly never make the effort to read it.

The Eagle of the Ninth got name-checked in one of the British histories I read in recent months, possibly In the Land of Giants. And for the most part, it delivers on what I’d want from an adventure novel set in Roman Britain. Its historical accuracy is debatable, but Sutcliff vividly depicts the culture and day to day life in Roman fort and town, from food to clothing to smells and sounds. The dialogue has a formal rhythm that makes the characters truly feel like they’re from a culture distinct from the reader’s. Sutcliff’s descriptions of nature beyond the walls are impeccable, poetic, worthy of any contemporary British nature writer:

He heard the bees zooming among the bell-heather of the clearing, smelled the warm aromatic scents of the sun-baked birch woods overlaying the cold saltiness of the sea; singled out one among the wheeling gulls and watched it until it became lost in a flickering cloud of sun-touched wings.

Most unexpectedly for 1954, there are distinct queer overtones to the companionship between disabled Centurion Marcus and manumitted Brit Esca. It’s no The Last of the Wine, but it’s far more emotionally tender and more intimately portrayed than I would have expected.

That said, Eagle absolutely shows its age. There’s the whole thing about Marcus purchasing Esca as a personal slave in the first place. (Accurate to the time period, but a dubious way for a writer to begin a relationship between two fictional characters, by modern standards.) There’s a line about how hereditary slaves, unlike those captured in battle, are simply used to slavery and don’t mind it. There's also a hugely uncomfortable age gap relationship between Marcus and a teenage girl named Cottia. Again, possibly accurate to the time period, but a questionable choice for a modern writer to make.

2024 read #14: The Big Jump by Leigh Brackett.

The Big Jump by Leigh Brackett

128 pages

Published 1955 (magazine version published 1953)

Read from January 27 to January 28

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

My partner R and I are moving to another state sometime this spring. Between us, we have somewhere around a thousand books. (Not an exaggeration.) I’d planned to read as many of my unread novels as I could before the move, so we could sell them back to the used bookstore and not have to pack them, but then I got distracted. The Luminist Archive, where I was able to read the February 1961 issue of Analog, has so many books. Thousands of them, ranging from weird arcane texts from the 1600s to 20th century sci-fi, all free in PDF. Not to mention all the pulp magazines. I want to read them all. (Or at least the ones relevant to my interests.)

I bookmarked a number of them to read later, but today I’m reading my first Leigh Brackett novel since the fine-but-not-impressive The Secret of Sinharat and People of the Talisman. I wasn’t expecting anything as good as her masterpiece, The Long Tomorrow, but I was a little bit disappointed.

For the majority of its run, The Big Jump is middling midcentury sci-fi, with just enough unexpected touches to keep it from being uninteresting. It’s a corporate space novel, almost like a working class perspective on The Space Merchants. A handful of megacorporations control space flight throughout the solar system. They’re competing to make “the Big Jump” to interstellar flight. A ship limps back to Pluto after successfully tripping to Barnard’s Star; Ballantyne, its sole survivor, is comatose when he isn’t raving about transuranics and desolation and darkness. Our POV Comyn bluffs his way into the Cochrane Company’s facility on Mars to discover the fate of his friend on the expedition, and ends up hearing Ballantyne’s seemingly final words. But the dead Ballantyne still moves, and even the powerful Cochranes are alarmed.

Some unlikely pulp plotting — a quick application of fists and the inexplicable interest of a Cochrane family femme fatale — wins Comyn a seat on the next ship to Barnard’s Star, hoping to learn the fate of his friend whatever it takes. But someone in the Cochrane family wants him dead, and the strange physics of the star drive are enough to drive anyone mad.

It’s when Comyn arrives on Barnard II that The Big Jump truly shines. Spoilers: Brackett shifts genres to something far more wondrous and strange, somewhat reminiscent of the 1930s Pan trope. The way I read it, the climax offers wry commentary on how modern capitalist man will reject Eden itself because it lacks “meaning” without manly effort. It isn’t enough to turn Jump into a classic, but it certainly made this slim little novel worth reading.

2024 read #3: Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip Volume Three by Tove Jansson.

Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip Volume Three by Tove Jansson

108 pages

Collection published 2008; original comic strips published 1956 and 1957

Read January 5

Rating: 4 out of 5

Thanks to a lovely holiday gift from my partner R, I’m continuing my read-through of Tove Jansson's collected Moomin comic strips. Those began, naturally, with Volume One and Volume Two.

This time the reprinted stories include:

“Moomin in Love,” another Janssonian burlesque of midcentury heteroromantic norms, in which the most sensible character is (as she so often is) Little My;

“Moominvalley Turns Jungle,” in which a heatwave allows a crate full of tropical seeds to proliferate, and Stinky sets the residents of a zoo free in the valley;

“Moomin and the Martians,” in which various hijinks ensue when the Moomins find a machine from a crashed flying saucer;

“Moomin and the Sea,” in which Moominpappa pursues his ambition to be a lighthouse keeper, and the family meets a ghostly new friend;

and lastly, “Club Life in Moominvalley,” which sees Moominmamma — excluded from Moominpappa’s Rebel Fathers Club — joining both a criminal syndicate and a volunteer constabulary with Moomin.

I loved how “Jungle” gave Jansson so many opportunities to show off her outsider art style with all the plants and animals, and I adored the ACAB energy that pervaded “Martians.” Overall, this was another solid volume. Too bad this book was, essentially, the last batch of strips written solely by Tove.

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

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

660 pages

Published 1989

Read from June 29 to October 1

Rating: 3 out of 5

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

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

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

Onward to the stories!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2023 read #94: Rivers of Time by L. Sprague de Camp.

Rivers of Time by L. Sprague de Camp

259 pages

Published 1993

Read from September 7 to September 8

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

This is a sequence of stories narrated by Reginald Rivers, time-traveling big game hunter and guide, a character best known from “A Gun for Dinosaur.” The series was revived at the start of the ’90s thanks to the anthology / coffee table book combo The Ultimate Dinosaur, a strange beast that I’ll be reviewing soon.

Rivers begins with a poem de Camp published in 1968, “Faunas.” It’s possibly a sonnet, definitely rhyming, and about what you’d expect from 1960s sci-fi poetry. I can’t tell if it’s meant as epigraph or part of this collection, but I’ll treat it as part of the collection.

“A Gun for Dinosaur” (1956, revised version published 1993). One of the classic dinosaur safari tales, which I read and reviewed a geological era ago in the Martin H. Greenberg Dinosaurs anthology. Because it’s been almost a decade since I last read it, I went ahead and read it afresh. It’s fine, I guess? All the casual sexism and low-key racism you’d expect from a midcentury de Camp joint. There are more thorough descriptions of guns than of the Cretaceous fauna. But it’s crisply written and goes down with minimal fuss. That's de Camp's main selling-point as an aithor: his baseline is reliably readable and (usually) mildly entertaining.

“The Cayuse” (1993). Almost four decades after writing the original Reginald Rivers tale, de Camp comes back with somehow even more casual racism and sexism, which immediately soured me on this one. The “Cayuse” of the title is a new off-road vehicle (appropriating the name of the people) that Rivers’ new client, an automobile magnate, insists they bring with them into the Cretaceous, resulting in predictable mishaps. Aside from that, and a Parasaurolophus phallus, this story is more of the same, even returning to the same time period as “A Gun for Dinosaur.” Kind of blurs together with the first one. Shrug?

“Crocamander Quest” (1992). I first read this story about three decades ago, in the previously mentioned Ultimate Dinosaur book. On one hand, I always had a soft spot for this story because it’s one of the few time-tourist narratives that takes us before the classic “Age of Dinosaurs”: Reggie and Chandra Aiyar bring their charges to the Triassic, when early dinos were just one burgeoning group of archosaurs among many. On the other hand, this is the tale of their firm’s first and only time safari with a “mixed” company of women and men, which reads just about as badly as you might guess.

“Miocene Romance” (1993). To follow up on that note, here we have a young woman who’s an “animal rights fanatic” stowing away to be a nuisance on a hunt. She ends up seducing the son of the Texas oil magnate bankrolling the trip. I’d had high hopes for this one — how often do you ever read a Cenozoic time safari? — but it was my least favorite so far. So many lecherous comments, so much oozy misogyny, and at one point the n-word gets tossed into the mix. Blech all around.

“The Synthetic Barbarian” (1992). That last piece disgruntled me, and this one — in which Rivers takes two well-heeled ignoramuses to trophy-hunt in the Oligocene — does nothing to improve the vibe. Both clients are quietly racist, and one wants to live his “Viking barbarian” fantasies by bow-hunting brontothere. De Camp adds a pinch of homophobia, because why wouldn’t he? 

“The Satanic Illusion” (1992). A smug pair of fundamentalists pay Rivers to hop them through time to help them “disprove” evolution; as is the way of fundies, they refuse to see what’s in front of them and continue to insist on their particular interpretation of Genesis. This story is a slight improvement, in that I’m mad at the characters and not at de Camp. Still, I’d rather just read fun time adventures with neither fundies nor musty weird 20th century bigotry. Is that too much to ask here?

“The Big Splash” (1992). A coterie of scientists hires our guides to take them to the end of the Cretaceous to settle the extinction debate once and for all. This could have been a step up for this book — the terminal Cretaceous extinction is rote material for fiction, but at least it’s straightforward enough to discourage de Camp’s casual bigotry — but of course we can’t have nice things. (The time safari’s head camp boss, a Black man named — wait for it — Beauregard Black, refuses to accompany them on this mission, and de Camp burdens him with an especially Twainian dialect. Ugh.) I’m just speeding through these at this point to get to the end and be done.

“The Mislaid Mastodon” (1993). An indigenous non-profit wants to repopulate modern times with Pleistocene megafauna, and hires Rivers to help capture a mastodon. De Camp gives us the usual ’90s white author treatment of an indigenous character, naming him Norman Blackelk and repeatedly emphasizing the color of his skin at every opportunity. Inevitably, Blackelk gets talked into performing a “ghost dance” in a last-ditch effort to bring a suitable mastodon close to the time chamber. Otherwise this is another unremarkable tale in a book of quite repetitive stories.

“The Honeymoon Dragon” (1993). Oh, hey, with that title, wanna bet which ethnicity de Camp broadly pantomimes in this story? I expected Japanese, but de Camp keeps us on our toes by introducing an indigenous Australian scientist. (If you wondered if Dr. Algernon Mulgaru would bring along a hand-whittled boomerang, he does, because what else would a white author have him do?) This time Rivers and his wife Brenda are the tourists, popping into the Australian Pleistocene via the time chamber newly opened down under. I appreciate some good Diprotodon and Megalania action, but like all too many stories in this collection, the narration barely gives us any immersion in Deep Time.

And that’s that. Overall, disappointing but not especially surprising. Somehow the story published in the 1950s was one of the least casually bigoted entries of the lot. 

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.