2026 read #10: In Lands That Never Were, edited by Gordon Van Gelder.

In Lands That Never Were: Tales of Swords and Sorcery from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by Gordon Van Gelder

395 pages

Published 2004

Read from February 15 to February 22

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Much like Colin Meloy’s Wildwood, I repeatedly checked this book out of the library in the early years of this blog, but never actually read it. It’s an anthology of sword & sorcery tales first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Back in those days, when I still had an unreasonably starstruck idea of the magazine, that seemed like an irresistible intersection of my interests.

Why didn’t I read it back then? Well, Van Gelder’s slapdash introduction, which doesn’t have much to say and isn’t properly formatted for printing (utilizing hyphens in place of em dashes, for instance), didn’t help lure me in. And the book’s formatting—12 point Times New Roman, copy-and-pasted without regard for the finer details of typesetting—was weirdly off-putting. Which is a shame; my first real introduction to sword & sorcery came instead from Lin Carter’s Year’s Best anthologies, which I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

I want to make a point in the coming months of reading as much S&S, classic and new. (I have my reasons.) So now’s a good time to push through and finally check this one off.

—

“The Hall of the Dead” by Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp (1967). I have longstanding issues with Howard, but at least the dude knew how to create impeccable atmosphere. This imitation, built by de Camp from Howard’s brief outline, is fine, but lacks the gallop and fire of classic Conan. It feels plotted by rote, checking off boxes, a product rather than a story. That said, I do enjoy a giant slug patrolling a cursed, ruined city, and that’s just the prelude to a fun dungeon crawl. C

“A Hedge Against Alchemy” by John Morressy (1981). First of the Kedrigern stories, which I’ve never particularly cared for. “Fantasy cliches, but played for laughs” is iffy terrain for me, and this one is no different. I suppose this first run feels a tiny bit fresher than Morressey’s subsequent iterations on the same theme. C-?

“Ill-Met in Lankhmar” by Fritz Leiber (1970). My first exposure to Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser was “Scylla’s Daughter” (read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Fantasy). I found it corny but entertaining. Each subsequent encounter with them has led to diminishing returns. This entry is no exception. The tale of how the twain first met already feels like the leering self-parody that defines their stories from the 1970s. It isn’t as bad as, say, “Under the Thumbs of the Gods” (read and reviewed in The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 2), but it reinforces my general disinterest in further Fafhrd and Grey Mouser outings. And it’s inordinately long. D-?

“Counting the Shapes” by Yoon Ha Lee (2001). It’s strange how Yoon Ha Lee’s early career trajectory matches what I once hoped for my own. Three years older than me, Lee got his first story published in F&SF in 1999, the same year I got my first personalized rejection from Van Gelder. If only I’d been able to study more short fiction and apply myself to my writing, I could have been Lee’s close contemporary, instead of still struggling to make inroads against the current state of the market. Ah well. The point is, I should read more of Lee’s writing. This one is a particularly good start, weaving poetry, magic, and math into remorseless, heartbreaking logic. I would almost call this epic fantasy instead of Sword & Sorcery, flush as it is with politics and worldbuilding deepened with subtle details. A-

“Firebird” by R. Garcia y Robertson (2001). Long ago, my first exposure to Garcia y Robertson was the novel / fixup version of Firebird. Not familiar with his, ah, idiom, I was intrigued by its Eastern European setting: novel to me then, still somewhat rare in fantasy to this day. I even liked it for the first half or so. But Garcia y Robertson is who he is, which is a relentlessly horny straight guy who never stops asking, “Why don’t we have naively naked virgins in sci-fi anymore?” (and is adamant that lesbian sex doesn’t count against virginity). I have not been looking forward to this revisit. Fortunately, this novella is the strongest part of Firebird, rich with natural and cultural detail, and only somewhat leering. Plus, there’s a witch who lives in a hut made of mammoth bones, which will always win points from me. B-

“Dragon’s Gate” by Pat Murphy (2003). This story exudes atmosphere, expertly interweaving a tremendous sense of place with an analysis of how men use their power to control and take advantage of women. Outstanding. A-

“After the Gaud Chrysalis” by Charles Coleman Finlay (2004). This is my first time reading a story from Finlay, who would, of course, go on to succeed Van Gelder as F&SF’s editor, sending me encouraging rejections when I finally got back into submitting in the mid-2010s. I’m intrigued by the idea of what Finlay called “New Pulp,” and I like the depth of worldbuilding here, which crams a trilogy’s worth of factions and backstory into one novella. The dialogue, though, is too YA-adjacent for my tastes, packed with enough quips and nods and shrugs to make a 2010s-YA-boom fan feel right at home. And if I’m being honest, that very density of worldbuilding can make the pacing feel choppy at times. Still, all in all it’s a solid adventure, and the first story here I’d unhesitatingly label sword & sorcery since “Lankhmar.” B-

 

“The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death” by Ellen Kushner (1991). Even though it’s been years and years since I last read one of Kushner’s Riverside books, this story was like returning to a warm, familiar second home. The story itself is scarcely an anecdote, and it has absolutely no business being in a sword & sorcery collection. (A secondary world fantasy centering swords is not automatically S&S.) But I enjoyed it. B

“The Island in the Lake” by Phyllis Eisenstein (1998). I keep meaning to read more of Eisenstein’s Alaric stories. The first I ever read was 1977’s “The Land of Sorrow” (read and reviewed here); the most recent was 2019’s “The City of Lost Desire” (here). This one falls right in the middle of that extensive span. Like Alaric himself, Eisenstein’s stories are gentle, soft-spoken, and full of heart. This one (while once again having nothing to do with sword & sorcery; it’s courtly low fantasy with an implication of Pern-style space colonization) is charming, start to finish. A-

“Darkrose and Diamond” by Ursula K. Le Guin (1999). We return to Earthsea for a typically Le Guinian tale: sensitive, empathetic, emotionally deft, beautifully written, and emphatically not sword & sorcery. I loved it, of course. A-

“King Rainjoy’s Tears” by Chris Willrich (2002). Potentially fascinating spin on the “two rogues” template: Persimmon Gaunt and Imago Bone go through a series of encounters in order to kidnap three beings made from the tears of a king. The story has a solid opening, but the narrative tends toward the scattershot, and too much of its emotional background relies on having read the previous Persimmon and Imago story, which I have not. Still, it’s closer to sword & sorcery than most of the stories in this book. C+

“The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant” by Jeffrey Ford (2000). Turn of the millennium metafiction satirizing the excesses of 1970s grognard fantasy (or, rather, the cultural impression that 1970s grognard fantasy left on wider culture). The story grew from an unpromising beginning; Jeffrey Ford is a sure hand. But humorous fantasy will never be my favorite. C+

—

Some excellent stories I’m happy to have finally read, mixed with some disappointments. And a whole lot of tales that had nothing to do with sword & sorcery as I understand it. Expanding the subgenre is fine; watering down the definition to include something like “Darkrose and Diamond” renders the term meaningless.

2026 read #2: A Horse Came Running by Meindert DeJong.*

A Horse Came Running by Meindert DeJong*

Illustrated by Paul Sagsoorian

147 pages

Published 1970

Read January 3

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

So far as I recall, this was the very first chapter book I ever read. It was in my older brother’s English textbook for 6th grade, the same textbook that introduced me to The War of the Worlds (via an account of the 1938 radio drama), and had chapters from Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH and Sweetwater, as well. The full text of A Horse Came Running was included at the end of the textbook, presumably for a capstone unit or something along those lines.

I ate it up as an 8 year old. I assumed it was set in Kentucky (which, as the old family home we returned to for summers in my youth, had been a major scene in my life), and the plot revolved around a tornado (one of my earliest fears and fixations). I’d never particularly been into horses, but I was a big-hearted child, and immediately loved the horses in the story. I felt very smart and accomplished, reading a book for 6th graders all on my own.

It took some time (and way too much money) to track down a copy on eBay. But it was nice to revisit it. It’s a solidly done children’s book, capturing the magical thinking and mental bargains that make up childhood thought. It creaks with age, unfortunately, emphasizing obedience as a virtue, and dropping some casual misogyny in a boy’s-life sort of way. There’s also a lot more “the young horse is now the wife of the old horse” chatter than I remembered. I think the textbook version wasn’t as complete as I always assumed; I didn’t recall the inevitable death of one of the horses, at any rate.

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

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

589 pages

Published 1988

Read from January 7 to October 20

Rating: 2 out of 5 (being generous)

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

2025 read #65: Quag Keep by Andre Norton.

Quag Keep by Andre Norton

192 pages

Published 1978

Read from September 12 to September 13

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

I learned about this book the other day in a fantasy-themed chat channel. It has the distinction of being what appears to be the very first Dungeons & Dragons novel ever published, so early in the evolution of D&D (and the TTRPG genre) that Norton describes it as a “war game” throughout the book.

We begin with a scene to remind us that dorks have been dorks for at least fifty years: Eckstern, the war game’s “referee,” dramatically unboxes a painted miniature, much to the fascination of his friends. Norton attempts to introduce the then-esoteric concepts of miniature gaming and collecting to the normies, while also not talking down to aficionados. She fails at both. It’s an awkward way to open a novel.

If you guessed that perhaps the weirdly detailed miniatures might enchant our everyday dweebs into the strange realm of Greyhawk, you win, uh. Not much. Because it’s pretty obvious. If you guessed that mystical dice would be built into the costumes of the characters the lads inhabit, that’s a weirder choice, so good job foreseeing that. (“They are like gamers’ dice,” our warrior helpfully explains, “save that there are too many shapes among them to be ordinary.”)

I think the way Norton consistently shoves game-manual concepts into her story is both a bad storytelling choice and a fascinating look into how fantasy and gaming, two musty old subcultures on the precipice of terrific evolution over the ensuing decades, overlapped and fed into each other at this early juncture. Witness this totally natural bit of exposition from page 14:

He had no fear of the berserker even though the huge man might well be deliberately working himself into one of those rages that transcended intelligence and made such a fighter impervious to weapons and some spells.

It’s the “some spells” that sets it over the edge for me.

Quag Keep is the original and archetypal “I turned my campaign into a novel” book, and perhaps it just wouldn’t have been the same without magical dice bracelets and two warriors compelled to chat when they meet in a shady tavern. Contrast it with a much more recent D&D isekai, Perception Check by Astrid Knight, which has decades of genre familiarity behind it and doesn’t need to integrate game mechanics into its descriptions (and is much better as a result).

While this would probably work better as someone’s meta game campaign than as a novel, and nothing here is particularly good, it isn’t wholly unenjoyable, in a masticated, regurgitated pulp sort of way. A fight against undead in a dust-swallowed ship would be a solid D&D encounter to this day. However, this being Norton, we cannot escape without some “women are as alien as the thoughts of a dragon” bullshit. 

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.

2025 read #39: Gateway by Frederik Pohl.

Gateway by Frederik Pohl

313 pages

Published 1977

Read from April 21 to April 29

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Does it get any more standard-issue masculine sci-fi than this? Robinette “Bob” Broadhead, a man with psychological issues he can’t bring himself to discuss with a therapy-bot, has longed his whole life to become a prospector, manfully manning his way through space to win manly riches with his masculine prowess. Luckily for him, a new frontier opens through the titular Gateway, a hollowed-out asteroid full of ancient alien spacecraft aimed at the universe, permitting manly colonialist-minded men the opportunity to make men of themselves manhandling the cosmos for fun and profit.

There’s deliberate irony to this, though, because so much of the story hinges on Bob’s cowardice and self-scorn. That said, it’s sometimes hard to tell what’s satire and what’s just 1970s masculinity. I feel I’m on safer footing when I parse the brutal, environmentally catastrophic corporatism of Pohl’s setting as a burlesque of contemporary capitalism, akin to his earlier The Space Merchants.

I only read Gateway for two reasons: I want to return to my old habit of reading classic SFF novels, and I happened to have a copy on hand from a used bookstore I visited years ago. My copy has, in fact, been sitting on my immediate to-read pile for an embarrassing length of time (since at least last summer).

The opening, which features our narrator refusing to open up to his Jungian therapy-bot, put me off reading it several times before now; the recurring therapy chapters of the book remain, to my eyes, its least essential aspect, tacked on to add some semblance of narrative complexity and emotional heft to a genre that had only just begun thinking about such things.

Recalling With the Night Mail, supplementary in-universe materials—classifieds, trip reports, extracts from lectures—are used to flesh out the setting and its perils and peccadillos.

Gateway is noteworthy for how normalized queerness is in its future society. Our narrator, however, is an unreconstructed homophobe, to the point where he (cw: partner violence) tries to kill his girlfriend for sleeping with a bi man, and later masturbates thinking about said bi man, which feels extremely 1970s. It rather blunts any modern appreciation for the setting.

Also extremely 1970s is the obsession with Freud. Pop psychosexuality pretending to be gritty depth: that’s what Gateway means to me.

2024 read #155: And Chaos Died by Joanna Russ.

And Chaos Died by Joanna Russ

189 pages

Published 1970

Read from December 18 to December 20

Rating: 2-ish out of 5

This book is a strange, often off-putting experiment of a sophomore novel. What opens as a fairly standard space opera gets filtered through the literary affectations of the New Wave. The text revolves from impression to impression with all the logic of an acid trip. An old man eating plums in the moonlight leaps into somersaults at the lightest touch, flames at his heels. Russ’s prose is sweeping and ambitious, but even after I’ve read the whole thing, I’m still not sure whether it was supposed to make sense or not, or if it was meant as a suite of vibes.

I momentarily got excited when Russ revealed that main character Jai Vedh is gay — rarity of rarities in 1970 sci-fi! — but then on page 23 he muses, “I wish I knew what it feels like to be a man who loves a woman,” and by page 51 he’s dream-fucking one of the women from a putative “lost colony.” Later, “homosex” is lumped in with the “exports” of a decadent, sickly dystopia, while Jai ruts through various heterosexual encounters, many of dubious consent. All of which is in keeping with the mores of this era, but it feels like a particular letdown. (You mean to tell me this is the same Russ who would later publish We Who Are About to…?) There are also some deeply uncomfortable passages that I assume (or rather, that I hope) are a feminist critique of the pedophilia at the root of patriarchal heterosexuality.

If you persevere through Chaos’ deliberate opacity and its unfortunately antique construction of sexuality and gender, it turns out to be just another Social Statement sci-fi novel making a contrast between the “natural,” vaguely Taoist society of the colony’s outer space telepaths, and the polluted, listless, technocratic dystopia of future Earth. The book’s main effect was to make me wish I were rereading The Dispossessed instead. Every now and then, though, Russ turned a phrase that made me concede it was worth reading:

Evne, like a woman of salt, fled into the walls in metal crystalhood, where he followed her, turned into a bee (all eyes), a fountain (all mouth), wrapped herself around her own bones inside out, spread herself one molecule thick along all the lines in the ship: the two of them, pulsing miles across, breathing with the lungs of incurious strangers, seeing through other eyes, petrifying in flashes, pursuing each other in the shapes of walls, floors, volumes of contained air. He followed her.

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 #108: Gathering the Tribes by Carolyn Forché.

Gathering the Tribes by Carolyn Forché

Foreword by Stanley Kunitz

63 pages

Published 1976

Read September 11

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

My main exposure to poetry is contemporary (published within the last ten years or so), with a definite lean toward SFF poetry. I want to expand my poetry education, so when someone I follow shared a poem from this book, it was a quick purchase.

I don’t have the education, or the vocabulary, to pinpoint the differences between 2020s poetry and 1970s poetry. Forché returns again and again to evergreen topics: family, ethnic heritage, displacement, childhood, trauma, loss, sexuality, the intimacy of food, the land. She unspools gorgeous images, and breathes out heartbreak like frost on a Michigan morning. Her poems are often lovely, delicate things, grounded unshakably in the Midwestern earth. Yet something about her cadence, perhaps, or her word choice, feels unfamiliar, the dialect of the past.

Inevitably, I’m reminded of the only other 1970s poetry collection I’ve read, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Wild Angels — not that they have much in common, otherwise, beyond a similar ineffable resonance with their decade, and how they demand a slower reading pace, sounding out connections between lines: “Seventeen years of solitude is seventeen / years. Quiet.”

Another difference: in our age of poetry-as-memoir, of confessional CNF with line breaks, Forché’s well of third-person character studies feels oddly uncomfortable. There’s an edge of concern for a modern reader, a wincing Wait, you’re construing someone else’s story? Forché gravitates toward portraits of impoverished Indigenous folks, which adds an extra frisson of possible exploitation. Perhaps it isn’t necessarily unethical, no more so than writing fiction based on the people you meet, but it’s an adjustment.

The book finishes strong with the section titled “The Place That Is Feared I Inhabit,” especially the poem “Kalaloch.”

2024 read #107: Red Moon and Black Mountain by Joy Chant.

Red Moon and Black Mountain by Joy Chant

244 pages

Published 1970

Read from September 8 to September 11

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I don’t know if I’ve ever read anything that so perfectly distills the early 1970s “adult fantasy” movement as this book. Three English children, lured off the path in the Essex countryside, find themselves transported to a world of swords and sorcery, noble mounted warriors and antiquated gender norms, martial eagles and a war of darkness against light. It’s Narnia meets the Hyborian Age.

The best part of this book is Chant’s prose, which would still be solid for a fantasy novel today, and would’ve seemed astonishing in 1970. In Chant’s hands, the rote phrases typical of Seventies fantasy — your “grim sable crags,” your “shimmering silver aureole,” and so forth — mostly add charm rather than gumming up the works. It’s a tricky balancing act, one not even Patricia A. McKillip landed on her first try. I’m impressed.

Charming in a different way, the worldbuilding, which Chant refined over the years from a childhood game of make-believe, feels like true outsider art, a dash of Henry Darger to season the mash of Tolkien and Howard. The world of Vanderei feels lived in, its corners well-thumbed, despite its reliance on archetypes. There’s even a very 1970 attempt to ground the setting’s gratuitous misogyny in something like anthropology, which — while I didn’t care much for it — is very in keeping with the spirit of the enterprise.

The plot is less interesting. It’s the kind of book where one of the siblings is already proclaimed the Chosen One by page 38. Generously, one could say it’s the junior reader prototype of the Fionavar Tapestry, complete with climactic human sacrifice. If it had been published ten years earlier, or ten years later, it would have been marketed as juvenile fiction, but Ballantine was determined to create “adult fantasy” as a genre, and if the main characters are kids who’ve gone through a portal into a fantasy world to meet princesses and unicorns, well, that’s just what adult fantasy is in 1970, and it’s all very grown up, thank you.

Altogether, I felt this was more of a curiosity than a lost classic. And as the story went on, Chant’s female characters — even the badass princess skilled in star magic, who gives up her powers for her man — became much too meek and submissive. Still, if you’re interested in the evolution of modern fantasy as a genre, this one’s worth a read.

2024 read #58: We Who Are About to… by Joanna Russ.

We Who Are About to… by Joanna Russ

170 pages

Published 1977

Read from May 22 to May 24

Rating: 4 out of 5

CW: thoughts on death and sui 

What sold me on this book was a summary from Samuel R. Delany, quoted in its Wikipedia entry: “‘[We Who Are About to… is] a damningly fine analysis of the mechanics of political and social decay,’ offering the interpretation that ‘Russ suggests that the quality of life is the purpose of living, and reproduction only a reparative process to extend that quality—and not the point of life at all... only feudal societies can really believe wholly that reproduction... is life’s real point.’” Given today’s Christofascist social and political pressures to leverage their breeding kink into public policy, this is horrifically timely.

A subtle miscalculation has thrown an interstellar craft off course. It crashes on an unknown planet, ejecting a handful of survivors. Within a matter of days, the men begin to itemize the women as breeding stock, and employ their physical strength to reinvent the patriarchy, assaulting the women while claiming to protect them. 

Our narrator, who from the start has been pragmatic about the impossibility (and undesirability) of survival, watches with an angry cynicism so restrained it seems like detachment, arming herself with whatever small thing comes to hand. But dissenters, even dissenters who just want to be left alone, cannot be tolerated when people become obsessed with control: "anybody who doesn't agree has to be shut up somehow because it's too terrifying."

One is reminded of how little it took — a couple terrorist attacks, a touch of economic uncertainty, a pandemic — to turn the 21st century into a speed run of the 20th.

I've often thought about the supposed desire for survival that writers like to trot out, even in books as bleak as The Road. Looking at the future ahead of us — uncertain, but trending grimmer by the year — I've been skeptical of the conceit that survival is paramount. Faced with a Christofascist culture that wants to eradicate all human joy, even as capitalism speeds our civilization toward collapse and mass death, I have to wonder: How much of this do I want to live to see?

The narrator’s clear understanding of that choice made this book especially poignant. She doesn't want to die, but there are many things worse than death, and a return to patriarchal control is one of them. We Who is as important to read now as when it was first written. It is the lesbian godmother of our contemporary “burn the world down” queer fiction.

2024 read #38: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

280 pages

Published 1974

Read from March 13 to March 28

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Classics of nature writing are haunted by the outlines of everything we’ve destroyed.

In the fifty years since Pilgrim was published, we’ve lost uncountable numbers of birds; insect populations have been in free fall; amphibians have collapsed. The very soil has become sterile, quenched by herbicides and pesticides. Where Dillard pondered the vastness of divinity and the cruel beauty of nature under troublesome clouds of starlings, you might be lucky to see a scatter of sparrows today. Most of Tinker Creek itself, Dillard’s “one great giver,” today seems a ghost watershed, squeezed between the culs-de-sac and fulfillment centers that sprawl out from Roanoke and the I-81 corridor.

The spirit of intellectual Christianity lurking throughout this book is also pretty much extinct. At least it is in America, where the loudest elements of the faith champion a skin-deep literalism, fully commercialized and dead inside. Atheism and Christlike Christianity alike are capable of transcendence, the ecstatic revelations of humility before the infinite; the greatest exaltation an American evangelist can know is browbeating a waitress on a Sunday afternoon.

At its heart, Pilgrim is a book-length consideration of the cruelty within nature’s beauty, a rumination on how any conception of a creator god must incorporate the blood-spill as well as the birdsong, the parasite alongside the petals:

For if God is in one sense the igniter, a fireball that spins over the ground of continents, God is also the destroyer, lightning, blind power, impartial as the atmosphere. 

From an atheist’s point of view, of course, the matter is much clearer, though no less awe-making. We are intelligent animals reliant on our deeply enmeshed social bonds; beauty (or rather the appreciation of it) is the newcomer, yet vital to us nonetheless, as vital as the sometimes bloody workings of mere survival. We are part of nature, inseparable, and that is glory.

I can respect intellectual Christianity, but it has died back faster than the insects have, these last fifty years. In contrast to either atheism or intellectual Christianity, contemporary evangelicalism presents a pop-up picture book understanding of the world, a paper cutout universe merely six thousand years deep, reducing us all to children play-acting for our abusive sky-dad’s jollies. Animals, plants, nature as a whole — all of it recedes into the background art from a Dick & Jane book. I can only imagine how many contemporary Southern Baptists in Dillard’s western Virginia would decry her spiritual masterpiece as evolutionist sacrilege.

I’m pretty sure Robert Macfarlane name-dropped this book in one or more of his tributes to the titans of nature writing past. It’s more than worthy of such notice. Every line jolts or shimmers with the mystery of language, scintillating or concealing in intricate patterns like cloud-shadow tumbling ahead of the wind. At least once a page, this book takes my breath away:

Some trees sink taproots to rock; some spread wide mats of roots clutching at acres. They will not be blown. We run around under these obelisk-creatures, teetering on our soft, small feet. We are out on a jaunt, picnicking, fattening like puppies for our deaths. Shall I carve a name on this trunk? What if I fell in a forest: Would a tree hear?

Like the best nature writing, Pilgrim is about learning to see; and, having seen, sensing how much else exists beyond our awareness. The present is elusive, recursive, a revelation quickly lost in other stimulation. I’m reminded of The Anthropology of Turquoise or A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A magnificent book.

2024 read #26: Wild Angels by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Wild Angels by Ursula K. Le Guin

52 pages

Published 1975

Read February 20

Rating: 4 out of 5

Sometimes, browsing online archives of dubious provenance, you stumble upon lost curiosities. This is a chapbook released by Capra Press, a highbrow indie press that seemingly specialized in limited edition books from startlingly famous authors. (They also released titles by Anaïs Nin and Raymond Carver, among others.) I never expected to read a chapbook of poetry from Le Guin, but I’d never be able to pass up the opportunity after learning of it.

It’s strange encountering Le Guin’s poetry after reading so much of her long-form prose work. It’s also strange, having read almost exclusively poetry from the last five years (plus a sprinkling of Romantic and Victorian pieces), reading poetry from nearly fifty years ago. Wild Angels is neither as formally antiquated as Goblin Market, nor as pulsing and gristly as The Thirteen Scorned Wives of La Nuit.

In the extensive narrative of “Coming of Age,” Le Guin writes:

Call to me here and I will come,

knowing my name and the game's rules

and all the rest I've learnt.

But I will not call their names

nor name them to you, those,

the children playing in the ruined fort,

the little falcons, the inheritors.

It’s good, a compelling poem full of meaning, but it shows a touch of midcentury stiffness, of reserve packed into all those commas. Or rather, the rhythm is just something I’m not used to. Clearly, I need to expand my poetry readings beyond the contemporary vibes. Poetry, more so than other formats, demands effort from its readers to open its inner timelessness.

This chapbook, once I adjust my expectations to the meter of ’70s poetry, feels consummately Le Guinian. She glides without apparent effort from the inaccessibility of nostalgia to  how women are used by society to the easy answers of bigotry, from the smallness of childhood to the limitations of adult wisdom to an atheist’s conversation with God, all within the same poem.

The rest of the poems, while briefer than the sprawling “Coming of Age,” circle around the same motifs and build upon its imagery, revisiting falcons and oat grass, what culture consigns to femininity and everything in the world that gets neglected by God. But Le Guin’s interests gyre wider, into creation, into dreams, into myth. Death looms everywhere; birth is a fate little better.

2024 read #17: Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, October 1979 issue.

Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, October 1979 issue (3:10)

Edited by George H. Scithers

192 pages

Published 1979

Read February 1

Rating: 2 out of 5

Of all the modern sci-fi magazines still on newsstands, Asimov’s has always seemed the least ashamed to put dinosaurs on its covers. They featured a tyrannosaur as recently as the September 2012 issue, long after every other mainstream magazine had put dinos away in the box of ’90s embarrassment, alongside their pastel windbreakers and whimsigoth bedspreads. Like pastel windbreakers and whimsigoth bedspreads, dinosaur fiction never stopped being cool in my opinion, so I appreciate that in a publication.

This issue here, on the other end of the spectrum — released in the magazine’s third calendar year — was Asimov’s first dino cover. Super-intelligent space-faring theropods returning to Earth in dapper little spacesuits, in 1979?? You know I gotta read that. But first, we have a whole lot of dubious ’70s sci-fi to get through.

—

“Mandalay” by John M. Ford. I was unexpectedly impressed with Ford’s “Green Is the Color,” which I read and reviewed in Masterpieces of Fantasy and Wonder. Likewise, I was initially skeptical of “Mandalay,” a military march through alternate timelines, but the worldbuilding, at any rate, proved an unexpected delight.

Alternities Corporation offered people the opportunity to adventure, fight, and fornicate across different realities, but then came the Fracture, severing their gates from “Homeline.” Charlie Brunner, once a security guard for Alternities, assumes leadership over the surviving men (because of course they’re almost all men); only Charlie Brunner has the Key that can open the sealed gates. He leads the survivors on a years-long march through the tube ring connecting the various physical gates, each gate a hundred kilometers from the last. Sometimes they collect fresh survivors, sometimes they lose men who decide to stay in a particular “alternity.” Sometimes men die. The setting is one part WestWorld, one part Greg Bear’s Eon, with just a touch of rail-shooter video game mechanics. (Each section of tube has convenient packs of food and medicine.) The survivors march in a mix of period costumes and futuristic gear. Ford’s prose is crisp, better than what you’d expect for 1979.

Now for the negatives: It’s inevitable at this point in time (or really, any era of sci-fi between the 1960s and the early 2000s) that the characters would include Nazi and Confederate sympathizers who came to vacation in timelines where their kind won. That shit doesn’t add anything to the story beyond “gritty realism.” None of the characters are deeper than the motley items they wear. And despite its bravura setup — with its promise of endless alternate histories contaminating one another in the Fracture, and the survivors visiting them in their mismatched costumes afterward to find home — we don’t get that much out of it. Just one Barsoom-esque encounter, and one almost-but-not-quite Colorado. Feels like squandered potential.

Still, between the concept, the prose, and a solid ending, I’d say that “Mandalay” earns an adequate C+

 —

“A Day in Mallworld” by Somtow Sucharitkul. S. P. Somtow’s first story in Asimov’s, and the beginning of his popular Mallworld series. Like any hip and edgy male sci-fi writer between the years of 1975 and 2000, Somtow has his adolescent narrator mention 1) her virginity and 2) her “budding little breasts” on the first page. Combine that with the splash page art depicting her all but naked, and you can imagine my reluctance to proceed.

Conceptually, the setting was brilliant: The alien Selespridar have locked down the solar system until humanity might prove itself worthy. Mallworld, an outer space shopping center sprawling across thirty kilometers of habitats, is the one place humans might run into visiting Selespridar, the one place a runaway teen from the asteroidal Bible Belt might conceivably get away. It’s a clever way to literalize teen wanderlust, the romance of the mall, the need to get out of this small town scaled up to humanity as a species.

The plot of “A Day” does not live up to its setting. Our narrator Zoe, naive runaway that she is, runs into a high-ranking Selespridar, Zhangif, who’s on a quest to discover the meaning of life. She shows him Earthly religion, but it doesn’t satisfy him, so he tries acid, which almost poisons him. Then (spoilers) she discovers that the aliens can’t read, so she gets a dictionary at a decrepit bookstore and reads him the definition of “life.” It’s very silly. At least they don’t fuck (though it’s a close call). D+

—

A poem by Peter Payack, “The Mover,” is a humorous science-meets-religion piece about a mover who does both local furniture moves and galactic jobs. The central conceit is that Jesus (“The Prime Mover was his ‘Old Man’”) is recontextualized as an outer space trucker. Otherwise this one is forgettable.

—

“Through Time & Space with Ferdinand Feghoot!!!!!” by Grendel Briarton. As you might have guessed, “Grendel Briarton” is a pseudonym. This flash fic is actually by Reginald Bretnor, who wrote two actively distasteful stories I’ve had the misfortune to read in F&SF. It’s an elaborate setup (involving the wandering Children of Israel and a time traveling robot named Yewtoo Artoo) for an awkward pun on ferrous oxide. Bleh. How would one even rate this? Maybe F+

—

“Iron Man, Plastic Ships” by L. E. Modesitt, Jr. Not my cup of tea. Where “Mandalay” felt like a precursor to ’90s sci-fi, this military spacer reads like a throwback to the early ’60s. The prose is stiff and uninteresting. We have a no-nonsense space captain, also stiff and uninteresting, who refuses to sign off on some sketchy space tugs, and sets out to test them all personally. We get terms like flexiplast and chewball. The author seems to have a particular axe to grind with plastic. (Here in the era of universal microplastic contamination, I can’t say I disagree.) Maybe D-?

—

A limerick by Stephanie K. Lang, “Rebuttal to $tar War$,” is squeezed in at the bottom of a page. It critiques Princess Leia’s lack of characterization, ending with “She triumphs by being a shrew.” Meh.

—

“Degraded!” by Jean S. Moore. This tale of a 22nd century professor straining to teach Joyce’s Ulysses to a particular know-it-all manchild succeeded at infuriating me against the student, and also made me more intrigued to attempt Joyce than anything else has. So I suppose it works on those levels. The rest of it — a thinking-computer assigns a distributed network of humans to analyze one word apiece from Ulysses, a twenty-one-year global effort culminating in an easy-to-digest comic book — is almost charmingly 1970s, like something from Tom Baker’s era of Doctor Who. I’d probably appreciate it more if I’d read Ulysses at any point. Still, a solid enough C

—

A couple limericks pad out the rest of this page: “Blasterfight at the P.U. Corral” by Barry B. Longyear, which is a snooty protest at the bad writing of the original Battlestar Galactica; and “Where a Star Is a Ship or When Is a Micron a Parsec? or When Is TV Going to Start Hiring Science Fiction Writers?” by Tol E. Rant (which is a pen name for, uh, Barry B. Longyear), which is also a snooty protest at the bad writing of the original Battlestar Galactica.

Clearly, there was a call for writers to submit limericks attacking TV and movie sci-fi for this issue. And Barry B. Longyear was personally affronted by Battlestar Galactica.

—

“Homecoming” by Barry B. Longyear. Finally, the main attraction! Hundreds of ships full of intelligent dinosaurs have been waiting in suspended animation for 70 million years, but at last the time has come for them to return to Nitola, the homeworld. Unfortunately for everyone involved, Nitola is now Earth, the homeworld of humanity. The American Air Force selects Captain Baxter, a pilot with PR credentials, to head to space to meet with them. But the Russians want to send up their own man, and warn the Nitolans not to listen to Captain Baxter. Likewise, the dinosaurs have divided opinions on how to handle the humans.

The sections from the dinosaurs’ perspective are quite good. Maybe not as alien as they could be, but Longyear does a fair job of making them seem just alien enough. Plus, just look at these handsome fellows:

They’re never referred to as “dromaeosaurs” or “deinonychuses” or anything like that, but I think the Nitolans predate even Time Safari as the earliest appearance of “raptor” dinosaurs in fiction. At least in what I’ve read.

Unfortunately for us, most of “Homecoming” is told from the human perspective, specifically Baxter's. His sections have a banal military sci-fi vibe that doesn’t do it for me. Plus, Longyear somehow manages to squeeze in some weird racism in the brief time before Baxter leaves Earth. It wouldn’t be the 1970s without it.

In the end, I’d say “Homecoming” works in more ways than it doesn’t, and is more interesting than it is off-putting. It probably gets a C+

—

Lastly, one more limerick to pad out a page: “How True,” by Henry Clark, which is a metacommentary on using limericks as fillers at the bottom of a page.

—

And that’s it! All in all, it could have been much worse.