Eric Frank Russell: "Rhythm of the Rats," "Me and My Shadow" and "Bitter End"

It is time for a final freak out!  Back in February, we started the 1962 collection of stories by Eric Frank Russell entitled Dark Tides, a volume advertised as being your one stop source for stories about both slithering and crawling, and natural and supernatural, freaks!  Our exploration of Dark Tides was interrupted by five-blog-post-long sojourn in the year 1960, during which we read over twenty critically-acclaimed SF stories from that year (well, at least Judith Merril acclaimed them!) but now we return to Russell's collection to read and assess its last three stories before we put the volume back on the SF shelves of the MPorcius Library.

"Rhythm of the Rats" (1950)

"Rhythm of the Rats" debuted in Weird Tales, and it certainly has a Weird Tales feel, with lots of evocative descriptions of a wretchedly sad and creepy village and of the narrator's feelings of dread.

That narrator is the only survivor of a plane crash near an isolated village in an evergreen forest in Northern Europe; there are no cats, dogs, or children in the village, the women look at him with hunger but also fear, and the only way out of the village is to walk eighteen miles--there is no road capable of carrying an automobile.  

I was pretty disappointed when, while the narrator was locked into a house, looking out the window, it became evident this story was about the Pied Piper of Hamelin.  I guess I should have guessed this from the title, but somehow I had expected the village to be attacked by an army of rats, or the villagers to be revealed to be worshippers of a rat god, or something cool like that.

My initial disappointment that "Rhythm of the Rats" wasn't a bit of the ol' Yog-Sothery or some sort of Conan thing was overcome because Russell does a good job with the end of the story, ably describing the piper and his origins and his horrifying effect on the narrator; there is also a good twist at the end--the narrator in the last line reveals he was only nine years old at the time of this adventure, so readers like me who thought the women's desirous but sad stares were erotic realize with a jolt that those looks  in fact express the heartbreaking longing of women who want children but are afraid to have them, or have had children but lost them to the monstrous piper. 

A good weird story, effective in style and structure; I think this is the best story in Dark Tides so far.  "Rhythm of the Rats" has been reprinted quite a number of times in anthologies and in Russell collections in English, Dutch, German and Italian.

"Me and My Shadow" (1940)

Clues are indicating that this is likely a joke story, so it is with grim determination that I begin "Me and My Shadow"'s fifteen (!) pages.

Trimble is a short fat man with a loud and domineering wife who has been nagging him for years to demand a raise from his boss.  We observe Trimble as everybody in town--work colleagues, strangers on public transit and elsewhere--join his spouse in humiliating him.  Then a weird little guy appears and gives Trimble a vial that promises to give hm courage before vanishing.

Drinking the potion puts Trimble in vocal communication with his shadow.  Trimble's shadow, which identifies itself as "Clarence," is a tough guy, and urges Trimble to pick fights with people who earlier had stolen from him, to aggressively demand a big raise from the boss, and to dominate his wife.  Somehow, Clarence adds his strength to Trimble's blows, and even helps Trimble duck and dodge attacks, and all of Trimble's endeavors, which put at risk his physical safety, his employment status, and his marriage, pay off in spades--Trimble becomes a hero who has the respect of both the police and the rough clientele at a bar, gets a huge raise and the respect of his peers at the office, and his wife becomes more affectionate and less nagging.  I was expecting a twist and a sad ending, with the sun setting or the electricity failing and Trimble being unable to achieve one or more of his goals because his shadowy supporter was gone, but everything ends up just peachy keen for Trimble.

Pretty lame, with its simple plot and weak (really, almost nonexistent) jokes.  Helen Hoke and Barbara Ireson reprinted "Me and My Shadow" anyway in anthologies of ghost stories, even though Clarence is not what we would conventionally think of as a ghost.  "Me and My Shadow" was first printed in Strange Stories, in an issue with stories by Ray Cummings, August Derleth, Thorp McClusky and John Wyndham; one hopes those stories were better than Russell's.       

"Bitter End" (1953)

The appropriately titled "Bitter End" is the last story in Dark Tides.  It was first printed in Hugo Gernsback's Science-Fiction Plus, a magazine billed as offering a "preview of the future."  Publisher and editor Gernsback writes an editorial in which he worries that science fiction is in decline because the stories in the magazines are becoming too "esoteric and sophisticated" to appeal to a broad popular audience.  There's also a little bio of Russell which highlights his "outstanding sense of humor," four pages of science news (the people at Oak Ridge are getting a new computer that can multiply 999,999,999,999 by 999,999,999,999 faster than you can blink your eye, while the U. S. Air Force is testing a new 10 million candlepower magnesium flare called "The Hell Roarer"), a page of science questions from readers and answers from the editor (if you drive a nail into a tree five feet from the ground, twenty years later the nail will still be five feet from the ground, no matter how much the tree grows, because a plant grows from the terminal ends of its branches, or so we are told), illustrations by Virgil Finlay and others, and stories by James H. Schmitz, Murray Leinster and Frank M. Robinson, among others.

The Fantasy Press volume referred to in the bio must be Deep Space

A rocket ship lands in the desert in the American Southwest, and the skinny exhausted man who emerges immediately goes on the lam.  He hitchhikes, he takes jobs and apartments for brief periods using false names, moving from job to job, from state to state.  Most of the text of "Bitter End" is a narrative of life on the run and a description of its psychological effects on the protagonist.  We do learn that he was one of the two men who crewed the first Earth ship to Mars, and that in the rocket ship he left in the desert he left behind are entire books full of notes about his visit to Mars and a whole library of geological and biological samples from the Red Planet.  This dude should be one of the world's heroes, so why did he land secretly and why is he now on the run?  Eventually we learn the tragic truth.  The rocket was damaged, and it took such a long time to repair that the explorers' rations ran out while they were still on Mars.  Determined that their invaluable data get to Earth, the staring spacemen made a terrible sacrifice--so he would have enough strength to pilot the rocket to Earth, our protagonist ate his comrade!

Acceptable.  

"Bitter End" would be reprinted later in the 1950s in the Scottish magazine Nebula (we've actually read another story that appears in this issue of Nebula, William F. Temple's "The Undiscovered Country") and the Australian magazine Science-Fiction Monthly.  isfdb helpfully points out that the cover of that issue of Science-Fiction Monthly was lifted from the September 1953 issue of the American magazine Cosmos (the Aussies substituted their own flag for the Stars and Stripes.)

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Dark Tides reprints twelve stories, and we just finished reading all of them.  Of the dozen, three I judged good, three bad, and six acceptable--looks like one of those bell curves people who know about math are always talking about.  I guess I can give a sort of lukewarm endorsement to Dark Tides as a whole, but I don't feel the need to tell my fellow Americans to dash on over to ebay and pay the exorbitant shipping rates to get a their hands on a copy of this UK-only collection tout suite.  

We'll looking at more short stories in the next thrilling installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.