Just a few days ago we read Richard Matheson's "Mute," a story which debuted in Charles Beaumont's 1962 anthology
The Fiend in You. "Mute" was about Germans running a ruthless experiment to foster children's psychic powers by isolating them from society and making sure they never learned to read or talk. Despite the fact that psychic powers are the center of that story,
The Fiend in You is advertised as containing sixteen stories "that could really happen." (Obviously nobody would question the "merciless German who fucking loves science" component of the story.) In his brief intro to the book, Beaumont says that vampires and werewolves have lost their ability to scare, and the most terrifying monster of all is called "The Mind," and that that monster is what
The Fiend in You is all about.
We've already read two stories from The Fiend in You, the aforementioned "Mute" and Robert Bloch's "Lucy Comes to Stay." Now let's read five (count 'em--five!) more stories that (supposedly) are about the monster that is your mind and which might actually happen, stories by people whose work we have already written about here at MPorcius Fiction Log. For this purpose I will be using a PDF of the book readily available online for free.
"The Women" by Ray Bradbury (1948)
We start with a story from a man who by some measures is probably America's most successful writer of speculative fiction. "The Women" debuted in an issue of
Famous Fantastic Mysteries full of full-page illos by Virgil Finlay and including a tribute to the 73-year-old Edgar Rice Burroughs and a story by Theodore Sturgeon. Wow, looks like a good issue. There are so many awesome SF magazines out there, I will die before I can read them all.
Woah, this is a story for you to read for your gender studies class! You know how in Howard Wandrei's "Danger: Quicksand" and in Donald Wollheim's "The Rag Thing" a blob monster sort of spontaneously appeared via chemical reaction among just the right randomly assembled ingredients? Well, this is Bradbury's take on this theme, but with a difference:
It was of the sea. And being of the sea it was--feminine.
It in no way resembled man or woman. But it had a woman's ways, the silken, sly, and hidden ways. It moved with a woman's grace. It was all the evil things of vain women.
An evil phosphorescence comes to life in the ocean, drifts close to a beach where are reclining a married couple, a handsome man and his wife, who wears a black swimsuit. The wife subconsciously perceives that the ocean wants to take her husband, and, as the phosphorescence uses its psychic powers to draw the man into the water, she comes up with all kinds of stratagems to keep her husband from going for a swim, like asking him to go buy her hot dogs, then making him eat the hot dogs, and then telling him he can't swim because he has just eaten. Who will win custody of the hunk, the wife or the blob monster?
This is a good monster story, with some real suspense and with heavy doses of Ray Bradbury's poetic style that tries to give you a strong sense of place with loads of images and metaphors as well as Bradbury's typical focus on ordinary folks suddenly confronted by inexplicable weirdness. This is also a story about women and how jealous they are and how they ruthlessly compete with each other; "The Women" would be a good specimen if you were writing your dissertation on how popular literature penned by men exposes men's fear of women.
Thumbs up! There is a reason Bradbury was such a success!
(Like "Mute," however, there is no way this crazy story about a blob monster "could really happen." Is it about "The Mind?" Well, there are psychic powers, so, maybe a wee bit?)
"The Women" is one of the stories included in the collection I Sing the Body Electric!, which has been reprinted a million times.
"Perchance to Dream" by Charles Beaumont (1958)
In the afterword to his story
"A Flourish of Strumpets" in
Collected Stories: Volume 2, Richard Matheson mentions Charles Beaumont, how Beaumont was selling stories to
Playboy long before Matheson himself would, and says
Playboy would pay over ten times as much for a story as would a fantasy or science fiction magazine. Here is a story Beaumont sold to our most prestigious skin rag two years after Matheson sold them "A Flourish of Strumpets." (I guess the
Playboy people liked the stories they printed to have Shakespearean titles.)
Beaumont's intro to the Bradbury story here in The Fiend in You was a pointless joke. His intro to his own story explains how the images in "Perchance to Dream" are autobiographical and, in the process, spoils the images. (I may write a blog full of spoilers, but I hate spoilers myself and found this a little irritating.)
The main character of "Perchance to Dream" has a weak heart and had a wacky mother. (Good grief, is this turning into "MPorcius Misogyny Blog?") Mom died of a psychosomatic illness, and had encouraged her son to push his imagination to the limit by telling him if he concentrated as he stared at a tapestry depicting cavalrymen that he could make them move. He achieved this feat, though the mounted soldiers returned to their original position when he looked away. He used this ability on all kinds of books and magazines, until one day the picture of a knight and a dragon in a coloring book didn't change back!
The weak heart guy explains this to a shrink, and other episodes of extreme imagination. These include recent dreams of going to an amusement park where an attractive woman tempts him to get on a rollercoaster. In real life this guy can't ride roller coasters, as the excitement will give him a heart attack. Every night, the dream continues, our narrator riding the first car on the roller coaster, the woman sitting next to him, flirting and kissing him, each night the coaster getting closer to the top of the first peak. (I think maybe we are supposed to think this woman is a version of his mother.) He knows that if the roller coaster starts its descent he will die of a heart attack, so he has striven to stay awake, using drugs and now finally coming to the psychiatrist to seek help.
The twist ending is that his conversation with the psychiatrist is part of the dream; he has actually fallen asleep in the head shrinker's office before even beginning to describe his problems to the man. He dies in his sleep from a heart attack when the dream comes to its horrifying climax.
Acceptable. "Perchance to Dream" has been a success, serving as the title story for a Beaumont collection and being turned into another Twilight Zone episode I don't remember. The Twilight Zone is like Monty Python, something I was into as a kid that I revisited as an adult and found was not nearly as impressive as a young MPorcius thought. (I still liked "Scott of the Sahara" and the one in which William Shatner becomes obsessed with a cheesy fortune-telling device, but in general watching these TV shows felt like a waste of time.)
"One of Those Days" by William F. Nolan (1962)
(
Meddle is so good, isn't it?)
"One of Those Days" is another success featured in The Fiend in You; first published in F&SF it would go on to reappear in one of Judith Merril's critically revered Year's Best series of anthologies. Editor Avram Davidson's odd and jokey intro to "One of Those Days" in F&SF gushes over Nolan, informing us that the man is prominent in the world of automotive journalism. Beaumont's intro in The Fiend in You warns you the story is confusing and you will have to reread it--luckily it is only like four pages of text.
"One of Those Days" is just a list of surreal images. The narrator is doing some gardening when a butterfly floats by singing a song from a famous opera so he decides to make an unannounced visit to his psychoanalyst. While walking there he sees a bipedal cat, witnesses a friend transforming into a camel, is accosted by a cop and tricks a bystander into murdering the officer, and finally meets the shrink who transforms into a dog.
Total junk, just random goop vomited onto the page--rereading it would be like putting your finger back in the light socket. Why did Davidson, Beaumont and Merril inflict this emperor-has-no-clothes chicanery on the SF community? Wikipedia reminds us that Nolan was close friends with Beaumont, Bradbury, Bloch and Matheson, so I guess this story's success is all about connections and you-scratch-my-back networking. Very annoying; this affront has diminished my opinions of Nolan, Davidson, Beaumont, and Merril, Merril least painfully because you expect her to promote this sort of thing as part of her project to expand the limits of SF to include everything and Davidson most painfully because I was so impressed recently by "Revolver." Et tu Brute?
"The Thirteenth Step" by Fritz Leiber (1962)
This looks like a rare, lost or minor Leiber story; it wouldn't be reprinted in English until 2000, though our
amis over in Gaul seem to have liked it--it was in a 1980s French anthology that went through at least two editions.
When we read Leiber's
"The Wolf Pair" AKA "Night of the Long Knives" back in June I noted that Leiber is purported to have had a close relationship with Alcoholics Anonymous and that that story, which was about murderers in a post-apocalyptic world, felt like an endorsement of AA. Well, "The Thirteenth Step," as perhaps I should have guessed from the title, is all about an AA meeting. (I feel dumb now for having expected the story to be about an unlucky staircase or something.)
A twenty-year-old woman gets up to give her "My name is Sue and I am an alcoholic" speech at an AA meeting. She describes how since she was a kid she has been a drunk and been obsessed with murder. Again and again she uses the image of a big black car, ridden by the Fifth Horseman, as a metaphor for her desire to murder--this car has often waited outside her home, beckoning her, and Sue has had to resist going to it, because, if she does, it will lead to the murder of her family and who knows who else.
A woman with hennaed hair in the audience finds Sue's story self-aggrandizing and her car metaphor tiresome and heckles the young woman. Sue hurries out to the street in response to this criticism. The twist ending is that (apparently) the big black car and the Fifth Horseman are not metaphors, but real phenomena and they are going to kill everyone at the AA meeting.
Like Bradbury's "The Women," "The Thirteenth Step" is about how women are vain and always in conflict with each other and includes a monster that is absolutely incredible.* But whereas Bradbury's poetical stylings work, and he generates real suspense, and offers readers lots of clever machinations on the parts of the contesting women, Leiber's metaphors are lame, the story is tedious, and the women are fighting over nothing and do nothing interesting, much less clever, in the course of the fight. "The Thirteenth Step" is mercifully short, however, which saves it from a thumbs down.
Barely acceptable.
*By "is absolutely incredible" I mean "simply cannot be believed," of course.
"Finger Prints" by Richard Matheson (1962)
Matheson has two stories in this book. "Mute" was good; let's hope "Finger Prints" is as well.
We are in luck. "Finger Prints" is quite good, and carries on the unexpected theme of this blog post (and apparently the unannounced theme of The Fiend in You) that women are scary and dangerous! It is short, Matheson employs very evocative, very effective descriptions, and the whole story is a powerful depiction of human relationships that are all too terrible and sad, but all too believable. "Finger Prints" actually fulfills the anthology's mandate that its stories be "horror that could really happen" and about "The Mind."
The narrator is on a long bus trip. He sits near two ugly women, one a deaf mute who incessantly speaks to the other via sign language. Our narrator learns all about the women's crushing co-dependent relationship in the most intimate way possible! After most everybody on the bus is asleep, the deaf mute, a domineering figure, bullies the narrator awake and out of his seat, which she takes. The narrator has to sit with the deaf mute's paid companion, and she relates to him her sorry state. This hideous wretch of a woman is trapped by a need for money as well as psychological tricks into staying in the employ of the deaf woman's father--the deaf woman threatens to kill herself if she should leave her, for example. So she can't leave the deaf woman even though she never gets a quiet moment to herself and is at the same time losing contact with normal society. This gaunt woman with a mouth like a "dark gaping wound" and "dark-rimmed eyes" has normal desires--and she uses her own bullying and psychological tricks to get the narrator to temporarily satisfy those desires, right there on the moving bus as the deaf mute watches!
Besides being about how men can find women's sexuality fearsome and disgusting, "Finger Prints" is about how those who are strong and healthy can be dominated and manipulated by those who are weak and sick. One could even see it as an allegory of our woke welfare state society, in which "marginalized" demographics--women, the poor, ethnic and sexual minorities--seek concessions from the rest of the population by arousing guilt and pity.
Thumbs up! "Finger Prints" was never again anthologized in English, but appeared in some European anthologies, and various Matheson collections, among them the fourth entry in the Shock series, Shock Waves AKA Shock 4.
**********
The Bradbury and Matheson stories we've read today are first rank horror tales that feature good writing and derive their power from how they depict fears we can all recognize from our lives, the fears that arise from the human relationships that give our lives meaning, the good relationships we seek and strive to preserve should we be fortunate enough to secure them, and the exploitative or combative relationships we endeavor to avoid, escape, or endure. The Beaumont and Leiber stories feel like filler, but their autobiographical content perhaps provides value to the student of the history of the speculative fiction genre. As for the Nolan, it is an insult, but maybe it also provides insight into the publishing world, exposing something we maybe do not want to know.
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