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 #42: Come and Admire Him by Joe Koch.

Come and Admire Him by Joe Koch

15 pages

Published 2024

Read May 21

Rating: 4 out of 5

This is a one-story chapbook, an erotic horror short “in conversation” with the 1981 film Possession. I’d wanted to see the movie before I read this, but I desperately need something quick to get my reading back on track before it becomes an all-out slump, so here we go.

In our contemporary era of prudery and Puritanism, it’s a delight to read a tale this filthy. The poetry of rot and bodily fluids, of murder and dismemberment to feed the birth of divine hunger, is the spine and substance of this story. It is an exercise in decadent description, and Koch succeeds marvelously.

2025 read #26: Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin

Illustrated by Eric Beddows

247 pages

Published 2003

Read from March 15 to March 18

Rating: 3 out of 5

I’ve read more books by Le Guin than by any other single author — nineteen as of So Far So Good. (This one makes twenty.) I’ve read all of her major fantasy novels, all but one of her major sci-fi novels, and two collections of her poetry. Yet somehow I’ve avoided all of her short story collections, even though I often adore her short fiction and I’ve owned a copy of Tales from Earthsea for years.

Someone on a Discord channel mentioned this book the other day, and by coincidence it was one of the handful of Le Guin titles at my library, so I decided to give it a go. I’m going in knowing nothing about it.

—

“Sita Dulip’s Method” (2003). Half thesis statement for the collection, half humorous fictional essay reminiscent of newspaper columnists of yore, this throwaway piece was (Le Guin assures us) written before 9/11, when the main airport concerns were boredom and bad food. A shrug.

“Porridge on Islac” (2003). More of the same here, as our narrator arrives on a plane where genetic engineering became an irresponsible fad, the effects of which still trouble society. You can just tell this was written around the turn of the millennium.

“The Silence of the Asonu” (1998). A more explicitly anthropological yarn, not so much a story as a report on a culture wherein the adults speak only rarely. I enjoyed it, though I confess I didn’t clock whatever allegorical through-line Le Guin intended here. I do, however, begin to grasp something of the conceit of this collection, belatedly: anthropological notes from across the multiverse, each entry keyed into a Le Guinian allegory for life or society.

“Feeling at Home with the Hennebet” (2003). I quite liked this one, in which our narrator (who seems to be Le Guin herself) visits a plane where everyone is a lot like her, except for their conception of self and the universe. Perhaps a reader grounded in Taoist philosophy would be better able to unpack it. As it is, I appreciated that the way the Hennebet perceive themselves was never fully explained.

“The Ire of Veksi” (2003). Another anthropological report instead of a story, this one explores a violent yet somehow largely cooperative culture. An interesting line of thought. Not to be a shallow dork about it, but this could be a good starting point for a barbarian PC’s backstory 

“Seasons of the Ansarac” (2002). Quite lovely piece of writing, documenting a culture inspired by migratory ospreys on a world of years-long seasons. Evocative and charming. I liked it.

“Social Dreaming of the Frin” (2003). A fun look at a culture with communal dreaming, and the various ways the inhabitants adapt to, avoid, or avail themselves of the implications. 

“The Royals of Hegn” (2000). I read and reviewed this entry along with the issue of Asimov’s where it was originally published. There I wrote: “It’s a droll, satirical affair set in an island kingdom where the population is so small, and so interrelated, that almost everyone is an aristocrat or king in some way. All of these royals are obsessed with the doings of the single family of inbred commoners.” I gotta say, “Hegn” makes way more sense in the context of this collection than by itself in a magazine.

“Woeful Tales from Mahigul” (2003). Right in the middle of this themed collection of stories is a story that’s a themed collection of micro fiction, a string of thoughtful fables on tyranny, genocide, and war. Stays with you.

“Great Joy” (2003). A satire on the empty consumerism of the Dubya Bush era, as well as the predatory colonialism underpinning tourism. Having begun my own journey toward political awareness around this time, it’s frustrating how the fundamental soullessness of American Christian conservatism was so clearly evident way back when, and has only gotten worse since then. I liked the understated viciousness of the satire, though the faintly paternalistic ending — in which the plane gets liberated by outside authorities — feels particularly dated.

“Wake Island” (2003). A takedown of the turn-of-the-millennium fad for ascribing genius to people who don’t sleep. It could apply equally well to our contemporary fad for eugenicist Silicon Valley assholes, a parallel which isn’t a result of Le Guin’s gift of prophecy but rather due to how predictable and rote the tech entrepreneur “We’re intrinsically better than you” mentality has always been. My quibble with this story is the way it reads like a news-magazine investigative tell-all, never my favorite storytelling voice. We could always use more anti-eugenics writing, though.

“The Nna Mmoy Language” (2003). What begins as a fascinating conceptual piece on linguistic anthropology evolves into a cautionary tale of industrial destruction. I liked it.

“The Building” (2002). Another anthropological piece, this time documenting an ecologically devastated world where two sentient species have evolved a culture of avoiding each other, except for the strange, mysterious work on the Building: the largest single edifice known from any world. Fascinating stuff. (The Building itself would be an amazing artifact to adapt to a Dying Earth story or TTRPG.)

“The Fliers of Gy” (2000). In a world of feathered people, only some few develop wings late in adolescence. I parsed this entry as a sympathetic allegory for neurodivergence, perhaps schizophrenia or something along those lines. Whether I was on the mark or not, it’s an interesting concept, tenderly depicted.

“The Island of the Immortals” (1998). One of the more surreal and haunting pieces I’ve read from Le Guin, in which immortality is a virus spread by a biting fly. I won’t spoil what the effects of immortality are, but this is a solid and memorable story.

“Confusions of Uñi” (2003). As a sort of closing catch-all, this surreal number sees our narrator flit her way across a thoroughly changeable plane. This could have been horribly precious and self-indulgent in less skilled hands, but it was okay here. For all its dream logic, it is perhaps more autobiographical than anything else in this collection.

—

And that’s it! Having gone in with no notion of what these stories would be, I was thrown at first by the lack of conventional storytelling — character development, plotting, and so forth. But once the vibe clicked, I mostly enjoyed the anthropological approach. Planes has me excited to read Always Coming Home, the last of Le Guin’s major SFF novels that I’ve yet to read.

2025 read #19: A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark.

A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark

432 pages

Published 2021

Read from December 24, 2024 to February 24

Rating: 4 out of 5

My partner R picked this book out for me for our annual Jólabókaflóðið exchange. I happily read the first 50 or so pages that day, then just kind of… wandered off to read other things. After that, I got weirdly avoidant about it. I didn’t pick it up again until February 13.

In 1912 Cairo, where magic proliferates on the streets and clockwork trams crisscross the sky, Fatma is a suave, well-dressed agent for the ministry tasked with the supernatural. She gets pulled into a case of murder that has roots in the origins of magic in the mortal sphere, a case that threatens global catastrophe.

Mysteries will never be my chosen genre. As paperback blurbs used to say, though, Djinn is compulsively readable. The setting is top-notch, living and breathing with vibrant detail. Clark expertly weaves examinations of wealth inequality, colonialism, injustice, and bigotry into his narrative. This is a book with something to say, inextricable from the story being told.

Also included in this volume is a long novelette: “A Dead Djinn in Cairo,” originally published in 2016. I kind of wish I’d read it first, as it comes before A Master of Djinn; much of the plot gets spoiled in the novel, as Fatma thinks back on the prior case. Still, it’s quite well done, balancing character and worldbuilding with its mystery plot.

2025 read #16: Asimov’s Science Fiction, January/February 2025 issue.

Asimov’s Science Fiction, January/February 2025 issue

Edited by Sheila Williams

208 pages

Published 2024

Read from February 6 to February 12

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

As with the most recent issue of Analog, I’m making a belated effort to read the current issue Asimov’s for as long as I maintain my subscription (which, considering the massive economic downturn very likely on its way, might not be for much longer). I’ve had a subscription to Asimov’s since last spring, and I’m only now doing more than page through an issue to see who’s in it. Well, at least now I have a back catalogue to keep me company as our household’s discretionary spending goes out the window.

It’s weird how I haven’t read a full issue of Asimov’s newer than 2000. Maybe that’s why my stories and poems never seem to stand a chance with the editorial staff. Time to fix that!

—

As we so often do, we open this issue of Asimov’s with a poem from Robert Frazier: “Your Clone Can Always Look Herselves Up.” It’s pretty good.

Buried amid all the critical writing that front-ends this issue, we find a second poem: “Einstein to Newton” by Gary Sterling. Kind of an ode to science and scientists.

Maybe I should start reading the essays in Asimov’s, but today is not that day.

“In the Splinterlands the Crows Fly Blind” by Siobhan Carroll. Our first story, and right away I can tell that the market difference between Asimov’s and Analog persists after all these years. Asimov’s is more character-forward and imaginatively weird, as opposed to concept-forward and more realistically grounded. In the aftermath of a multiversal cataclysm, Charlie and his brother Gabe live on an alternate Earth where a crow hivemind is the dominant species. “Splinterlands” addresses many of the same apocalyptic anxieties we encountered in the current issue of Analog, but relishes the freedom to explore them more allegorically. An excellent novelette. As it turns out, my favorite story in this issue.

“Five Hundred KPH Toward Heaven” by Matthew Kressel. At a corporate party to mark the decommission of a space elevator, three captains swap tales from their days lifting passengers into orbit. As a story, it’s an enjoyable hangout, but there isn’t much to it; it feels like it could have been published a quarter-century ago. (I noticed that trend with Analog too. I don’t fault the writers so much as I blame our own contemporary inability to imagine anything new, crushed as we are beneath the weight of the dystopia around us.)

A little poem is next: “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Kenton K. Yee. It’s cute.

“Shadow of Shadows” by Frank Ward. Twenty years after the death of his young son, physicist Sebastian goes through the motions of his life, until the multiverse intrudes upon his dead-end career and stale grief. Quiet and workmanlike, this story mostly does what it sets out to do.

“What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain” by Beston Barnett. Grim tale of artificial intelligence escaping its bounds and interrogating its creators. It avoids the Roko’s basilisk bullshit that real life tech bros find so compelling, in favor of a human perspective of horror. A well-structured and thoughtful story.

“Through the Pinhole, or, The Origin of a Holostory” by Nikki Braziel. A divorced holonovelist gets stranded in 16th century Malta, and gets his groove back. Corny and a bit choppy, but adequately entertaining.

A poem from Jane Yolen: “Fantastic!” It’s about the feelings of community attached to a sci-fi convention. Shrug.

“A Girl from Hong Kong” by Robert Reed. A typically solid, rambling, slightly opaque entry in Reed’s “Great Ship” sequence, giving us bits of backstory for Quee Lee and the setting at large. Big and baroque in the old 1990s tradition.

“Jilly in Right: A Thought Experiment” by Rick Wilber. “Washed-up dude has his life flash before his eyes while he spins out on the highway, with a sprinkle of alternate timelines” feels rather antiquated as a story structure. I’m not even sure what decade to pin it to: 1970s, maybe? I just couldn’t get into it.

“My Biggest Fan” by Faith Merino. Surreal stalker-horror, employing suburban anomie, late capitalist dislocation, and Ford Pintos to memorable effect.

Another poem: “Too Far Away” by Jenny Blackford. I quite liked it.

“Completely Normal” by Jendayi Brooks-Flemister. Delightfully odd flash fic on the topic of soup and being a third culture kid.

“Moon and Mars” by James Patrick Kelly. Overlong novella about space colonists and space politics. It’s a slog. The prose is jargon-heavy like something from Analog. Blank characters fire repartee off one another. We spend much of the first fifteen pages rehashing events from the two prior stories in this series. On top of all that, any sci-fi that includes “making babies is everyone’s duty” in its ideological assumptions gives me the ick. Since this one story sprawls across over one-third of the fiction pages in this issue, it single-handedly brings down my (fully arbitrary) rating.

Lastly, one more poem: “unfolding origami: a haiku” by Kendall Evans. Eh.

—

And that’s it! Asimov's has always been more to my taste than Analog, and that certainly holds true with this pair of issues — with some obvious exceptions, of course.

Glad I finally read an issue while it was current!

2025 read #12: Analog Science Fiction & Fact, January/February 2025 issue.

Analog Science Fiction and Fact, January/February 2025 issue

Edited by Trevor Quachri

208 pages

Published 2024

Read from January 31 to February 6

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I’ve had subscriptions to both Analog and Asimov’s ever since we moved last spring. I wanted to support both magazines, while keeping abreast of what they’re looking for in fiction these days.

Sadly, I haven’t read any of the issues I’ve gotten. Both magazines are printed by a newsstand puzzle game publisher, making the physical experience of holding and leafing through them especially unpleasant. The ink on my copy’s cover smeared on my hands within minutes of holding it, before I even began reading it. By the time I finished the first story, the spine had begun to peel apart.

The start of a new year of issues seems like a good, round spot to begin, though.

—

“Our Lady of the Gyre” by Doug Franklin. Despite the passage of decades, and turnover in the editor’s chair, the “house style” of Analog seemingly hasn’t changed all that much since the late 1990s. This piece opens with a traumatic flashback in italics, then throws you in at the deep end with a bunch of in-universe jargon — lilies, observing Eyes, a mysterious Her. Classic Analog.

The ensuing paragraphs are loaded with perhaps a touch more exposition than strictly necessary, over-compensating for the initial opacity. The general gist: our narrator drifts with geoengineering “lilies” around a gyre in the Pacific, harvesting fish while the diatoms in the gyre sink carbon dioxide into the deeps.

There’s a whole bit about “generative AI exacerbated the carbon crisis, but it also gave us the tools to start fixing it,” which feels pulled directly from some tech oligarch’s PR department. I suppose reading the “hard sci-fi” magazine means encountering a rather more, erm, credulous attitude toward Big Tech than I’m used to here in 2025.

Once “Gyre” stops tripping over its own worldbuilding, a perfectly adequate human-scale story emerges, only to end almost as soon as it settles into its groove.

—

“Strange Events at Fletcher and Front!” by Tom R. Pike. This tale of time travel and solar technology in the nineteen-oughts confirms the Analog “house style” is still going strong. (One story, see, could have been a fluke.) I mean this without a trace of aspersion: this feels like it could have been printed in 1999. I enjoyed it; telling a story of time travel intervention from the perspective of the person whose life was changed, who then spends years trying to figure out why, is an interesting angle.

 —

“Second Chance” by Sakinah Hofler. Brief but compelling examination of race and uploaded consciousness. Excellent.

—

“Upgrade” by Mark W. Tiedemann. Highly topical yet rather flat story about installing a neural augment in order to stay competitive in an increasingly automated job market. The characters all felt generic, even before anything got installed in their heads.

—

“Rejuve Blues” by John Shirley. Didn’t care for this one. There’s an interesting kernel in the idea of what rejuvenation would entail for someone turning young again, psychologically and hormonally. But it gets lost in this story. So much expository dialogue, not much to hold my interest, and it felt much too long for what little story there was.

—

“Fixative” by Jonathan Olfert. Another dense, jargon-forward piece, but this one drops us into a fascinatingly constructed future of corporate drugs and psychological manipulation, where certain hereditary anxiety disorders are harnessed to turn people into walking starship maintenance machines. The best aspects of sci-fi’s New Wave collide with the bleak corporate futurity of the current age. Quite good.

—

“Notes from Your Descendants” by Lorraine Alden. This flash fic was another blast from the 1990s past, all about designer genetics, as if genetics hold more power over us than how we’re nurtured and what our environment does to us. That’s a pet peeve of mine. If that isn’t an issue for you (and I suspect it was used as a tongue-in-cheek plot device more than anything else), “Descendants” is effective enough. Does what it sets out to do.

—

“The Only God Is Us” by Sarah Day. It’s telling of what our future has been reduced to that so much contemporary sci-fi is about attempts to salvage our biosphere and ameliorate the carbon crisis. (Thanks, billionaires! May you all have the future you deserve!) This story features bioengineered strains of algae, meant to eat waste and sink carbon dioxide, instead going rogue and dissolving industrial civilization. Excellent entry, affecting and well-written.

—

“As Ordinary Things Often Do” by Kelly Lagor. I was going to remark that this was only the second story in this issue that involves neither climate catastrophe nor corporate serfdom, but no: a casual line of dialogue makes sure we know Earth is “going to shit.” Oof. Sometimes realism is a curse. This is a human-scale tale of a researcher readying herself for humanity’s first interstellar voyage. Nothing groundbreaking, but it’s sweet and solid.

—

“Go Your Own Way” by Chris Barnham. A young man learns how to walk the Way between parallel realities, and finds a timeline where he’s happy — until another version of himself comes along.

None of our contemporary problems with futurity here, right? Well, I’d argue that the multiverse became such a staple of 2020s science fiction as an escape from those selfsame issues. It’s that “our timeline took a wrong turn” feeling we all remember from November 2016, and March 2020, and November 2024. And sure enough, in one of the realities Ferdinand visits, the mistakes of internal combustion were pointedly avoided, making for a clean-air utopia with rapid trains. Secretly on-theme after all.

This story held no surprises, and was (to my tastes) excessively heterosexual, ending with two versions of the man arguing over which of them is “better” for their dream girl, rather than giving her a say in her own life. But it was pretty good overall.

I do want to note, for history-of-the-genre enthusiasts, that another world Ferdinand visits is directly lifted from Keith Roberts’ Pavane. Like, almost down to the letter.

—

A poem: “Beyond the Standard Model” by Ursula Whitcher. It’s quite lovely.

—

“Prince of Spirals” by Sean McMullen. This one is a boiled-down sci-thriller involving remote archaeology, forensics, and the Boys in the Tower. If you’d shown me this story when I was a 16 year old Michael Crichton fan, I would have loved it. I still think it’s an adequate example of its genre, though one with few surprises up its sleeve. I’m just not into the genre anymore.

—

“Flight 454” by Virgo Kevonté. Speaking of sci-thriller vibes, this one is a spacecraft-crash mystery set on corporate Ganymede. Not of much interest to me.

—

“Vigil” by James Van Pelt. A sweetly intimate flash fic about memories on board a generation ship.

—

“Battle Buddy” by Stephen Raab. Military sci-fi with robots can be a beautiful work of art, as with “Tactical Infantry Bot 37 Dreams of Trochees” by Marie Vibbert, in the January / February 2019 issue F&SF. Or it can be flat and procedural, as with this piece.

—

“The Spill” by M. T. Reiten. Humorous micro about nanotech gray goo.

—

“Prime Purpose” by Steve Rasnic Tem. Geriatric care robot assists his declining patient and thinks about purpose, the self, and the loss of both. Well-executed rendition of a recurring plot. Feels very 2000-ish.

—

“Gut Check” by Robert E. Hampson. Forget the house style of 1990s Analog. We’re going all the way back to the 1960s for this medical emergency in space piece. It is of such vintage that it unironically puts the phrase “steely-eyed missileman” back into print, perhaps the first time in decades. And characterization? Never heard of her. Ends with a Boomer-standard joke.

—

“Quest of the Sette Comuni” by Paul Di Filippo. Mashing together high fantasy with technobabble, this one sees a neon satyr and her helpful little robot go on a quest in 23rd century Italy. Clunky exposition blunted my enthusiasm for this piece, which is a shame; if I ever get into Analog myself, I could see it being thanks to a story like this. I think it was mildly entertaining overall, in a pulpy kind of way, perhaps because I wanted to like it.

—

“Apartment Wars” by Vera Brook. A marvelous novella grounded in character, place, and emotion. The science-fictiony topic of quantum topology is blended skillfully with widowed Helena’s precarious position in 1970s Poland, and it’s beautifully written besides. Maybe my favorite story in the issue.

—

Lastly, a poem: “‘Oumuamua” by Geoffrey A. Landis. Pretty standard rhyming science poetry. Nothing objectionable.

—

And that’s it! An uneven issue overall, with excellent highlights equal to the best of what 2020s SF has to offer, but an equal amount of what felt to me like filler (but what the old Analog heads probably enjoy). 

2024 read #156: Hexagon Speculative Fiction Magazine, Winter 2024 issue.

Hexagon Speculative Fiction Magazine, Winter 2024 issue (19)

Edited by JW Stebner 

49 pages

Published 2024

Read December 22

Rating: 3 out of 5

Rounding out the year with another current issue of Hexagon. This one is labor and workplace themed, which my socialist heart can appreciate in the abstract, but it doesn’t exactly excite me as a reader. If past issues of Hexagon are any guide, though, most of the stories should be solid enough.

“Let the Bright Woods Glow” by Colin O’ Mahoney. This one is a charming repudiation of white collar capitalism in favor of spilling blood for the Bright Witches of the Woods. Quite enjoyable.

“Incorporation” by Raina Joines. The current wave of capitalist-mandated “AI” — which usually turns out to be an energy-sucking, carbon-spewing autocomplete, augmented by underpaid and unacknowledged labor in the Global South — has nearly killed the classic AI subgenre of science fiction. This story is an exception, an optimistic tale of truly intelligent AI that emerges and evolves and surpasses its capitalist origins. I liked it.

“This Job Is Turning Me into Something I Don’t Like…” by J Wallace. The uncanny nature of the job turns a realtor into a vampire. It’s a clever enough conceit for a story, and a solid metaphor, using the tools of speculative fiction to say something about our society. Naturally enough I enjoyed the prolonged middle finger to developers and real estate speculators and the whole class-based hierarchy. Unfortunately, I felt the story itself was a bit flat. Not bad by any means, it just didn’t do much for me beyond its central allegory.

“Recruitment Drive” by Aurelien Gayet. This story applies delightfully dated cyberpunk tropes — our protagonist JSON goes into “virtual” to inject code into the cyberspace environment — to our own, much less sexy cyberpunk dystopia of AI-filtered job applications. Cheeky and fun, with a burn-it-all-down ethos that we all can appreciate.

“Paid Time Off” by L.M. Guay. Vividly written exploration of corporate dystopia, a satisfying arc full of grotesque allegorical detail. Excellent.

And that’s it! This is perhaps the most consistent issue of Hexagon I’ve read yet. Solid!

2024 read #150: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 2008 issue.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 2008 issue (115:1)

Edited by Gordon Van Gelder

162 pages

Published 2008

Read December 4

Rating: 2 out of 5

Ah, the summer of 2008. A wonderful time in my life. When this issue was on newsstands, I was vacationing with my polycule in Florida, preparing to help one then-partner move to New Mexico for grad school. I was flourishing in undergrad, and looking forward to the election, when surely Obama would finally put an end to the fascist Bush regime and solve America once and for all. At least for me, it was a simpler time, before I really knew anything.

I wasn’t writing short fiction, wasting my time instead on a massive and unpublishable novel. I wasn’t really reading SFF magazines back then, either. I wish I had been; maybe I’d be a better writer today.

If I had picked up this issue at the time, I wonder if I would have been encouraged or jealous that someone else was getting a dinosaur story published by Gordon Van Gelder, the editor who had told me nine years previously that he didn’t really care for dinosaur stories.

—

“Fullbrim’s Finding” by Matthew Hughes. Hughes was a mainstay in this era of F&SF; it seems like half the ’00s and ’10s issues in my collection feature a story by him. The first one I actually read was “The Mule” in the March/April 2022 issue, which I praised for its early modern esoteric magic setting. Imagine my surprise to learn, via today’s story, that Hughes’ “discriminator” tales began in a technological Old Earth setting, chock-full of spaceships and quantum physics and wan attempts at sci-fi humor, which became the subsequent fantasy setting via cosmological “cycling” of the universe. It all has a 1970s fantasy serial vibe to it. I like fantasy serials in theory, but after a certain point, just write a standalone story in a standalone setting, you know? All that aside, this tale is mildly entertaining. C+

—

“Reader’s Guide” by Lisa Goldstein. So much has happened since this issue was printed, and so much in the culture has shifted, that it’s difficult to remember that 2008 wasn’t that long ago. I was startled to find a metafictional list story here, but I guess it isn’t that surprising, really; a lot of the threads that comprise contemporary genre fiction were gathering throughout the ’00s. “Reader’s Guide” is an interesting prototype of the list stories that have proliferated in our time. A fantasy story about the metaphysics of storytelling would have been well-trodden ground even in 1988, let alone 2008, but I liked it all the same. It’s charming. B

—

“The Roberts” by Michael Blumlein. The editorial introduction calls this novella “edgy,” and the story opens with the protagonist content in his mother’s womb. What masculine hell are we in for?

Sure enough, we’re treated to just about the most banal 20th century upper-middle class white boy checklist imaginable. Our hero Robert gets born, goes to college, has a fling with art, finds a first love, switches to architecture, has a first heartbreak, needs to work to “feel like a man,” loses an eye in a freak accident likened (what a surprise!) to castration, then finds another love, a professional contact whom he nags and wears down until she finally goes on a date with him. And that’s just by page three.

“The Roberts” compiles 55 pages of numbingly rote masculine concerns and (literal) objectification of women. A quote: “[Robert] needed a woman. In the past it had never been hard for him to meet women, and it wasn’t hard now. Women liked him, and what was not to like in a man so charming, so attractive, so victimized by circumstance and so willing — indeed so poised — to put it all behind and reestablish himself?” It only gets grodier from there; soon enough, Robert is employing a parthenogeneticist to engineer a woman for him.

Edgy, my ass — it’s the same color-by-numbers bullshit pampered male writers have been regurgitating for decades, for centuries, while congratulating themselves on their originality and their fine perceptions. It’s literally the cultural default. “The Roberts” could have been published in F&SF in 1978 and no one would have batted an eye.

One might even conclude this is all a vicious satire of how certain men view themselves as main characters and how they view women, categorically, as muses, helpmeets, accessories, mommy-maids, “miracle workers,” anything other than fully fledged and autonomous human beings with their own fully developed interiority. But if so, it’s one of those satires that cuts alarmingly close to seeming sincere. F

—

“Enfant Terrible” by Scott Dalrymple. After that mess, this slight sketch of a brain parasite run amok in a classroom is blessedly forgettable. C 

—

“Poison Victory” by Albert E. Cowdrey. An alternative history piece set in a world where the Nazis won and serfdom has been reestablished in Russia under a new German aristocracy. “Nazis won the war!” has always been an oversaturated theme, especially when in retrospect we realize the Nazis won the peace and have been entrenched in our power structures this whole time. “Victory” is well-written and atmospheric, a solid enough story of its type. B-

—

“The Dinosaur Train” by James L. Cambias. I’ve only read two dinosaur stories published in the pages of F&SF, and both of them involved trains. (“I’d have two nickels,” etc.) This one is much better than Ian Watson’s “In the Upper Cretaceous with the Summerfire Brigade” (published in the August 1990 issue), but that’s an incredibly low bar. Essentially, “Dinosaur Train” steals the idea of a traveling dinosaur circus from Dinosaur Summer (no shame there, I plan to do the same someday). Cambias even replicates Greg Bear’s pairing of old-timey filmmakers and the lost world. It’s unabashed Dinosaur Summer fanfic, which would have made my 2008 self especially jealous. Cambias’ story hits a pleasing mix of family drama and dinosaur zookeeping — nothing revolutionary, but solid enough to put it in the upper echelons of dinosaur fiction (which is also a very low bar). B

—

And that’s it! I’m happy to report that “The Dinosaur Train” — the sole reason I read this issue — was worth reading. “Reader’s Guide” was also quite good.

2024 read #128: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Summer 2024 issue.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Summer 2024 issue (146:3-4)

Edited by Sheree Renée Thomas

258 pages

Published 2024

Read from October 25 to October 29

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Here we are, practically in November, but only now do I have my hands on a copy of the Summer 2024 issue of F&SF. I could’ve read it a couple months ago, but I like to collect the physical copies, and didn’t want to spend extra to read the digital version. No new issues have come out since then, though, so my streak of reading the current issue (begun March/April 2023) continues.

—

“What It Means to Drift” by Rajeev Prasad. Saraswathi volunteered to be a “merchant”: a human implanted with artificial remote organs to assist a Titan, a cyborg civil servant grafted around a human consciousness. Saraswathi’s job is to feel emotions, to sustain love and heartbreak for her Titan, Avni. But both Saraswathi and Avni are becoming unmoored, adrift in their respective roles. A solid sci-fi story.

“On My Way to Heaven” by Alberto Chimal (translated by Patrick Weill). This is a long novelette, one built around a topic (alien abduction) that has been considered passé in sci-fi publishing for decades. It also centers a trope that I generaly disdain: Did the speculative element “really” happen, or was it all in the mind of the character? Yet “Heaven” absorbed my attention from the first page, and kept it to the end. It’s written with assurance, pulling you into the complications of family, politics, protest, marginalization, mental illness, music, and UFOs with deceptive ease. Another all-time classic from this era of F&SF.

“Mister Yellow” by Christina Bauer.  Dr. Jordan invents a headset that permits her to interact with other dimensions overlaying her own. Mister Yellow is her contact in the sixth dimension. The government confines Dr. Jordan to maintain control over her invention, but various dimensions affect each other in ways she doesn’t expect.

“Water Baby” by Tonya R. Moore. A vivid and compelling story of rising waters, a disintegrating community, and a mystery from the sea.

“Metis in the Belly of the God” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman. Brief retelling from Greek mythology, as strange and excellent as you'd expect from Nina Kiriki Hoffman.

Next, a poem: “In Her Footsteps” by Suzanne J. Willis. It's all right, though its stated origin as background for a novel feels obvious; it doesn't feel complete in itself.

“She's a Rescue” by Marie Vibbert. The literature of kids/teens coming of age in single-family space freighters is small, but I’m always happy to see it grow. This one is a solid entry, expertly balancing its family drama with its blue collar spacer vibes.

“Snowdrop” by Raul Caner Cruz. A sweetly domestic retelling of “The Snow Child,” rich with a sense of place.

“Dog People” by Esther Friesner. Humorous contemporary fantasy mixing the undead with classical goddesses in upscale Manhattan. It felt like a throwback to the consciously cheesy humorous fantasy of the 20th century. Not really my kind of thing. 

“What You Leave Behind" by Ken Altabef. A magical realism-esque piece literalizing the grief and trauma of terrorism. Also not my kind of thing.

“Another Such Victory” by Albert Chu. Quite simply the best mecha pilot story I have ever read. It’s never been a subgenre that interested me, but this long novelette is stunning, immersive, vital, unremitting in its allegory against imperialism and systems of oppression. Another instant classic. I don’t subject contemporary short fiction to my arbitrary letter grades, but if I did, this one would be an A.

“Growth Rings of the Earth” by Xinwei Kong (originally published 2018). This almost-novella feels like the kind of grand, sprawling, consciously philosophical sci-fi you’d find in Asimov’s in the late 1990s, the kind of sci-fi that first fired my ambitions to become a literary SFF author instead of a mere pulp writer. In the moderately near future, most humans have abandoned their bodies to upload their consciousness to a digital “heaven.” Our narrator is the last human on Earth, raised by physical book enthusiasts who lived out their days in the Library of Congress. There’s a plot strand about the kind of artificial intelligence you used to find in a lot of sci-fi before, say, 2022, when planet-killing spellcheck software peddled by billionaires co-opted the term “AI.” True to the 1990s Asimov’s comparison, there’s also some iffy age-gap sex, which was unfortunate. I wish we could bring back the sprawling Big Idea sci-fi vibe of that era without its more questionable trappings. Still, aside from that, this is a worthwhile read.

After two longer stories, we’re treated to a couple poems. First: “I, Magician” by Julie Eliopoulos. I liked it.

Next: “City as Fairy Tale” by Richard Leis. Also solid.

“Jacob Street” by L. Marie Wood. GPS horror that saves itself from comparisons to a certain episode of The Office by unraveling into a delightfully feverish spiral. Pretty good.

“Red Ochre, Ivory Bone” by Deborah L. Davitt. Seeing that title on the table of contents, I didn’t expect a multi-species space opera piece. I think it’s a difficult vibe to capture in short form; at times, the story derailed to offer descriptions of the many species present at the station, which is a lot of information to throw at the reader. The plot itself draws from medical examiner procedural tropes. Yet Davitt pulls it all together into a satisfying story.

One last poem, one I’ve been looking forward to: “In a castle far from every prince” by Marisca Pichette. It is excellent, as always.

“The Glass Apple” by Ivy Grimes. A strange and beguiling original fairy tale. Quite good.

“Slickerthin” by Phoenix Alexander. An amazing endcap to this issue, delightfully visceral and goopy and queer, a take on Greek folklore like nothing else I’ve read. Excellent.

—

And that’s it for this issue! Definitely not my favorite of the Thomas era, but still solid.

F&SF has been criticized for sitting on stories for unprofessional lengths of time; they’ve been closed to submissions for well over a year now, as Thomas works through the stockpile of material the magazine had already accepted. Perhaps I’m reading into things, but at times, this issue felt a little bit like the result of that process. Not the dregs, per se. Many stories were good, some even exceptional. But overall, this didn’t rank up there with what Thomas has been releasing during her tenure. (Or maybe I’m just too depressed to appreciate anything, with the election looming so near.)

2024 read #124: Hexagon Speculative Fiction Magazine, Fall 2024 issue.

Hexagon Speculative Fiction Magazine, Fall 2024 issue (18)

Edited by JW Stebner

47 pages

Published 2024

Read October 25

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

We live in a golden age of speculative short fiction. Short form sci-fi and fantasy are the best they’ve ever been, full stop. Diversity, depth of character, quality prose, an unparalleled range of styles and subgenres—SFF is unmatched right now. Random token-pay webzines will consistently publish better stories than The Big 3 did forty years ago; the occasional story will surpass most things The Big 3 published twenty years ago. Yet there’s less monetary support than ever, at all levels of the field.

I’m trying to do a better job at keeping up with the market, including spending more time with those amazing indie magazines. Today, I’m returning to Hexagon to read the current issue, my second in a row from them.

—

“A Death Rattle’s Chime” by Adialyz Del Valle Berríos. When I say that fiction in token-pay markets today is superior to mainstream newsstand fiction from forty (or even twenty) years ago, I have stories like this in mind. It’s a bleakly atmospheric eco-fantasy set on an island that disappears a little bit more each full moon, where our narrator processes fish from a decaying sea. A haunting, exquisite story. Somehow this is the author’s first published story. An amazing start!

“A Thousand Steps Up Godwich Road” by Michael M. Jones. Urban legend piece with a twist ending. Nothing remarkable, but nothing to complain about.

“Gusher” by EC Dorgan. A pleasing petroleumpunk tale that could have come straight out of the 1990s, all about mall rats and “oil vamps” in a Saskatchewan boomtown, with the unexpected bonus of dinosaurs. One of the most creative takes on vampire lore I’ve ever read. Excellent (and I’m only slightly biased here because of the momentary dinosaurs).

Next comes a one-page comic: “Craftsman No. 1: ‘Already Cut and Fitted’” written by Jimmy Stamp, illustrated by Xavier Saxon. I felt indifferent about its reheated cosmic horror, aside from the role of the craftsman kit home, which I appreciated.

“The Gold Coast: At One with the Fun!” by Aggie Novak. A mutated amusement park needs to be fed, and Soph has the ill luck of shuttling an Aquaduck full of tourists to their imminent doom. Fascinating and enjoyable blur of genres. Quite good.

—

And that’s it for this issue! A solid read, well worth your time, especially “Chime,” “Gusher,” and “Gold Coast.”

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

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

350 pages

Published 2022

Read from October 8 to October 21

Rating: 2 out of 5

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway. At least I’m home now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

2024 read #119: From the Depths and Other Strange Tales of the Sea, edited by Mike Ashley.

From the Depths and Other Strange Tales of the Sea, edited by Mike Ashley

317 pages

Published 2018

Read from October 4 to October 8

Rating: 2 out of 5

Back at it again with another themed volume of public domain tales from British Library. With life stuff continuing out of my control, I want escapism, but can only manage bite-size morsels. Short stories are the obvious choice, and these collections are often more fun than strict reference to quality would suggest.

This volume differs from the other BL books I’ve read by presenting its stories out of chronological order. I suppose some thematic structure might emerge as I read.

Into the briny deeps!

—

“The Ship of Silence” by Albert R. Wetjen (1932). This is an ably-written and winningly atmospheric tale of a derelict ship found adrift, Mary Celeste-style, the sole clue to the crew’s fate found in the screams mimicked by a parrot. Gets surprisingly good mileage out of never actually solving the mystery of the disappearance, and never showing us the monster (which is heavily implied to be prehistoric). A respectable B-

“From the Darkness and the Depths” by Morgan Robertson (1913). Another solid entry, hailing from that early period of modern physics when “Röntgen rays” were cutting edge, and the possibilities of other rays seemed endless. Talk of rays (and the applications of ultraviolet photography) is only a prologue to a yarn about an invisible creature shaken loose from the seabed by the eruption of Krakatoa, and the capsized mariners who must contend with it. “Darkness” isn't at the same level of pulp storytelling as “Ship of Silence,” but for what amounts to a man's-life adventure with a high body count, it's creative and atmospheric. C+

“Sargasso” by Ward Muir (1908). Ah, the peril of the Sargasso! It’s right up there with quicksand and the Bermuda Triangle on the list of childhood anxieties. This story’s diary format puts us at some remove from the action, but otherwise it’s a deliciously pulpy tale of seaweed that seems to have a mind of its own, and the creatures that prowl its surface. Could easily be a seafaring D&D encounter, which I count as a recommendation. C

“Held by the Sargasso Sea” by Frank H. Shaw (1908). Published the very same month as Muir’s story above. Clearly, the Sargasso was a pressing concern in 1908. A persistent anti-union, anti-working class vibe clouds this piece, which is about the bond between a ship and her captain, and what the ship does after its worthless layabout crew mutinies. The narrative mocks the mutineers for wanting to get rich without labor, as if the capitalist class didn’t have a monopoly on that endeavor. Even aside from its distasteful classism, this just isn’t an interesting story. D-

“The Floating Forest” by Herman Scheffauer (1909). Mediocre old melodrama about insurance fraud (and its comeuppance) on the high seas. Overwrought, disjointed, and not especially interesting, although I did enjoy the concept of a floating wreck accumulating vegetation before drifting into the open ocean. D?

“Tracked: A Mystery of the Sea” by C. N. Barham (1891). The turn of the century fad for the occult manifests in this soggy story of a "clairvoyante" locating a lost ship. Barham's phraseology reads like an early 2000s forums dork straining to emulate Victorian diction: "The narrative will be unquestionably denounced as an utterly unreliable romance. It will be accepted as a positive proof that the writer is wholly destitute of the critical faculty. Nay, more: not a few will from henceforth conclude that I am facile princeps in the reprehensible art of lying." This, mind you, arrives four pages into a preamble on clairvoyance and somnabulism. Just a bad time all around. Maybe F+

“The Mystery of the Water-Logged Ship” by William Hope Hodgson (1911). Not as engagingly weird as the other Hodgson pieces I've read; in fact, it gets a trifle repetitive. Nonetheless, this tale of a drifting derelict, and the surprisingly populous yacht that tries to salvage her, is welcome after the last few stories. Vague spoilers: the mystery’s denouement is in the idiom of Jules Verne. C-

“From the Depths” F. Britten Austin (1920). A German officer, formerly a submarine commander during the Great War, passes himself off as a Swedish captain, commissioned for an operation to salvage ships sunk by U-Boats in the war. Inevitably, we get vengeful ghosts communicating in Morse code. The melodrama of it all almost works. Characterization is next to nonexistent, but I’ll be generous and say C-

“The Murdered Ships” by James Francis Dwyer (1918). A scuttled ship seeks vengeance on the crew that did her in. Nothing especially interesting to me. D

“The Ship That Died” by John Gilbert (1917). Continuing the Great War preoccupation with “dying ships,” this one is kind of a pointless yarn, enlivened only by the imagery of a ship rotting and sloughing away (which is, inevitably, explained by a throwaway reference to an unknown ray). Not much else here. D?

“Devereux’s Last Smoke” by Izola Forrester (1907). The ghost of a Broadway man haunts his young widow when, on her way to remarry, she takes the selfsame steamer he died on. A strain of internalized misogyny sours this one, which felt rote even without it. D

“The Black Bell Buoy” by Rupert Chesterton (1907). A tedious affair about a haunted buoy that, once again, becomes an instrument of vengeance. D

“The High Seas” by Elinor Mordaunt (1918). One brother bullies the other from childhood into long-standing murderous rage, then they happen to ship together on the same crew. Incredibly tedious and unnecessary retelling of Cain and Abel. Nothing of interest to it whatsoever. Maybe F+

“The Soul-Saver” by Morgan Burke (1926). Finally, a touch of strangeness that isn’t just a vengeful spirit or some such. Captain Morbond is a violent bully of a man who, over the course of his career, beat two people to death, and he insists that their souls came into his keeping as little white mice. Well, I guess the souls do get a taste of vengeance in the end. Maybe C-

“No Ships Pass” by Lady Eleanor Smith (1932). An astonishingly modern story that, as editor Ashley notes, could have served as the inspiration for Lost. Shipwrecked mariners over the centuries have found themselves within swimming distance of a magical island. Saved, they soon discover it to be inescapable, a limbo where they can never leave, never age, and never die. I could easily see this getting published sometime in the 1990s, antique gender norms and all. Not perfect, but a solid enough B-

—

And that’s it for this collection! It began so strongly, yet Ashley’s selections quickly veered out of my own personal sweet spot for old pulp. Ah well. 

2024 read #116: Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic, edited by Daisy Butcher.

Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic, edited by Daisy Butcher

285 pages

Published 2019

Read from September 28 to October 2

Rating: 2 out of 5

Can we take a moment to appreciate how the editor of an anthology of killer plant stories is named Daisy Butcher?

I’ve gotten hooked on these anthologies from British Library. They were behind the Weird Woods collection I read last year; it could have been weirder and woodsier, but was still an interesting read. In need of dopamine the other day, I splurged on several more volumes. My bank account is unhappy, but it would’ve been unhappy anyway, and now I have books!

Evil Roots differentiates its theme from that of Weird Woods with an emphasis on specific killer plants, often exotic (thus foreign, and threatening), rather than the familiar (though still dangerous) English woods. Butcher’s introduction proposes that Charles Darwin’s studies on carnivorous plants fed (heh) into Victorian and Edwardian fears of nature, of Man (I would specify White, English, Male, Upper Class, Imperialist Man) losing his supposed place in the great ladder of creation. My perspective? I’m just hoping for some tentacle vines and lowbrow cheesiness.

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

629 pages

Published 1985

Read from August 13 to September 26

Rating: 2 out of 5

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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