Nightmares from Fritz Leiber, Richard Matheson and Ramsey Campbell

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading from the 1993 anthology To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg and Martin H. Greenberg.  Today we'll sample nightmares penned by Fritz Leiber, inventor of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser; the man behind Vincent Price's best movie as well as Steven Spielberg's best movie, Richard Matheson; and Ramsey Campbell, a guy I don't actually know much about, though I think I have read fifteen or sixteen stories by him over the course of this blog's tumultuous tenure.  

"The Dreams of Albert Moreland" by Fritz Leiber (1945)

Here we have a story that takes seriously a theme we have seen Barry Malzberg use more than once in a ridiculous context.  "The Dreams of Albert Moreland" is also a story I can recommend with enthusiasm--in it Leiber marries Lovecraftian themes to real human drama via the medium of a strong and efficient writing style.

Our narrator is a guy living in a Manhattan boarding house during the early phases of World War II.  He has befriended another resident of the boarding house, Albert Moreland, a man who makes a bare living out of playing chess at an arcade; he plays customers, and they need only pay the arcade if they lose, which they generally do, as Moreland is a genius at the game and could be a famous master if he had any ambition.

Moreland tells the narrator that every night he has a vivid dream in which he is playing a game somewhat like chess, but far more complex, with a board of some 500 varicolored squares and pieces bizarrely stylized and universally repulsive, apparently representations of architecture and life forms with little in common with any to be found in real life, at least on Earth.  The dream fills him with a dreadful sense of anxiety and responsibility, as if the fate of the world or the universe might hinge on whether or not he will win the game, somehow it seems his and his unseen opponent's moves might be correlated with the events of the ongoing war in Europe.  

The game continues night after night, getting more and more tense, Moreland's health declining day by day, until we get the shocking cosmic horror final scene.

This is a very good story--Leiber does a terrific job with all the descriptions of the alien pieces and of the narrator's and the chess player's emotional and psychological states, offering well-crafted physical descriptions as well as evocative metaphors.  Leiber also does a good job depicting elements of big city life.  The structure and pacing of the tale are also great; things move forward, the tension escalating, at just the right speed, and the story is the perfect length.  

Lovecraft fans and Malzberg fans alike should certainly check out "The Dreams of Albert Moreland"--Leiber handles the themes and topics we expect to find in the work of the man from Providence and the sage of Teaneck in a way that is more accessible and more mature than often do those masters themselves.

"The Dreams of Albert Moreland" would be included in the Leiber collection Night's Black Agents and has been anthologized several times; strange to say for such an effective story, it first appeared not in one of the famous SF magazines but in the fanzine The Acolyte (though I think that the story may have been extensively revised for book publication.)  

"Lover, When You're Near Me" by Richard Matheson (1952)

Here we have a story about how women's thoughts and lives revolve around love, the expression of love and the winning of a man's love, and how men fear women's power over them, fear sex and find the typical smothering and nagging of women a distraction and an obstacle to their work and other interests.  "Lover, When You're Near Me" is also one of those SF stories that reminds me of W. Somerset Maugham's short fiction about Britons on the far reaches of the Empire administering lonely stations far from any other white people and having character-revealing and character-altering interactions with the natives over whom they have been given authority.

Lindell is an employee of a big firm that trades with primitive aliens all over the galaxy.  The company has stations managed by lone Earthmen on various planets, and today Lindell is dropped off on the planet of the Gnee for a sixth-month stint running the trading post there.  Lindell knows something must be odd about this planet because the tours of duty on most planets are much longer than sixth months--somehow the Gnee or their world must stress out Earthers, though it is clear the place and the natives are not actually physically dangerous.  In some ways "Lover, When You're Near Me" is structured as a detective story, with Lindell gradually figuring out, in part by poring over documents, what is so strange and dangerous about the planet.

The meat of the story is Lindell's relationship with the native woman who is his cook and housekeeper.  Gnee men are stupid, but Gnee women, Lindell quickly learns, are clever telepaths who dominate their men.  Lindell's housekeeper uses her telepathy to trick him into christening her "Lover," and then she uses means both conventional--like cooking him delicious meals and giving him flowers and expressing tender concern about his every move and utterance--and unconventional--like controlling his dreams with her telepathy--to get him to welcome her into his bed.  Because the Gnee are disgustingly ugly this is a nightmarish horror for Lindell, and her efforts to seduce him push him to the limits of his sanity and make it hard for him to focus on his job; his six-month term elapses mere hours--maybe minutes!--before he was about to resort to murder and/or suicide.  Lindell makes it home to Earth alive but can never forget his terrible experience.

It is easy to see "Lover, When You're Near Me" as an allegory for how men are oppressed by overbearing and manipulative women whose oppression is difficult to resist because it takes the form of expressions of and a yearning for love, but there are reasons to see it also--or instead--as an attack on how men treat women and how imperial powers treat "natives."  By looking at the records of previous station managers, Lindell realizes that Lover acts the way she does because the very first station administrator from Earth seduced her, giving her the name "Lover" and warping her mind so that she desired Earthmen--contact with the white man has polluted the peaceful natives!  It is also significant how peaceful the natives really are, and that Lover isn't a Shambleau-like vampire or whatever, the only reason Lover's pursuit of Lindell is horrifying is that she looks like a monster--presumably, if Lover looked like Marilyn Monroe or Sophia Loren, Lindell would welcome her attentions and this would be a story about a paradise and not a horror story; is Matheson commenting on how shallow men are?

"Lover, When You're Near Me" isn't bad but I am going to question the critical acumen of Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty, who put it in their anthology The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1953 and of Galaxy editor H. L. Gold, who put it in The Second Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction.  Personally, I judge the story to be merely acceptable.  I like the themes, and the plotting and pacing are fine, but at times Matheson's tale feels clumsily overwritten.  The biggest examples of this are Matheson's lengthy poetic descriptions of the landings and launchings of the rocket ships--these descriptions don't add anything to the story because "Lover, When You're Near Me" isn't about technology or travel, but about love and sex and ugliness, so that scenes aiming to get an emotional reaction from the reader with a description of a rocket ship landing are just a distraction, and even worse they aren't very good, being more confusing and boring than vivid or evocative.  

"Lover, When You're Near Me," the title of which has a comma in some printings and no comma in others, debuted in Galaxy; among the Matheson collections in which it can be found are Born of Man and Woman and its abridged version, Third from the Sun.

"The Depths" by Ramsey Campbell (1982)

It looks like "The Depths" made its premiere appearance in the collection Dark Companions.  Karl Edward Wagner liked it, including it in The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series XI and it seems Campbell himself was proud of it, as it appeared in Top Fantasy, an anthology of stories "selected and introduced by the authors themselves."  In 2010, Allyson Bird and Joel Lane reprinted it in their collection Never Again: Weird Fiction Against Racism and Fascism, so maybe we need to scrawl our pronouns on our name tags and steel ourselves for a 17-page diversity training.  (I may be forced to plead guilty to the charge that I "worship the written word"--the fifth (pink) element of white supremacy), but nobody who has read this typo-ridden blog would think of convicting me of the first pillar of white supremacy, "perfectionism.")

Well, I guess we need not have worried about being subjected to some kind of diversity lecture by Campbell; there are no references to race in "The Depths" that I could detect, and if it is an anti-fascist story, it isn't obnoxious, or even obvious, about it.  What "The Depths" is is one of those works of genre fiction that, as do so many TV crime dramas and tabloid newspapers, denounces those who make a living producing exploitative sex and violence content while itself being just such a piece of content, full of gore and perversity, serving as an example of the very thing it seems to be attacking. 

Our main character is Miles, a crime novelist popular enough that he gets interviewed for the TV.  In the start of the story he is renting a house in which a previous resident killed his wife with a knife, carving her up so she was "unrecognizable as a human being" and then committing suicide; Miles is staying in the house hoping to get inspiration for his next book.  Local people are unfriendly to him, thinking him some kind of sadist (at least some vandal paints the word "sadist" on the gate.)  

Maybe because the house is haunted or something, Miles starts having terrible dreams of horrific crimes, among them the cooking of a live baby in a microwave.  The story takes its time, shoveling at the reader many sentences about birds and trees doing their thing, trains clattering by and citizens walking around, but eventually Miles and we readers come to realize that the terror dreams Miles is having come true--in fact, Britain is suddenly in the midst of a record-breaking wave of violent crime!  The public begins demanding the reinstatement of the death penalty for murder!  (Maybe it is the common people's demand for law and order that led Bird and Lane to think "The Depths" appropriate for their themed anthology.)  If Miles writes down the content of a dream quickly enough, the crime it presages does not occur, but the dreams are coming fast and furious and Miles' feverish writing of them obviously interferes with the writing his agent and publisher are expecting from him (we get scenes with both these individuals.)

One of the themes of "The Depths" is the idea that the taste of the reading public is in decline, or at least changing, and that this is a reflection of societal change and/or decline.  The publisher guy says to Miles "I think the public is outgrowing fantasy, now that we're well and truly in the scientific age.  People want to feel informed."  Publisher guy urges Miles to pen material based on research into real crimes.  He also shows Miles the cover of a new magazine that he calls "the last gasp of fantasy," a painting of a woman "being simultaneously mutilated and raped."  Miles later sells his records of his horrendous dreams to this magazines.

The climax of the story suggests that Miles is a scapegoat, that all of the sins of Britain or the world have been loaded on to him, and his final dream turns out to be a prediction of his own torture and murder, which he does not realize until it is too late for him to write it down and prevent its coming to pass.

The central gimmicks (crime writer is somehow assigned responsibility for the criminal nature of his decaying society as well as the whole thing with his dreams and his writing being connected to real-life crimes) are not bad and the outline of the plot is alright, but the execution of "The Depths" obscures the virtues of the story's foundations and makes it hard to enjoy the story.  "The Depths" is kind of hard to read; for one thing, it is full of extraneous details and scenes which I suppose are intended to create a mood but which, for me at least, are so much chaff that just bulks up the story unprofitably and interferes with the reader's comprehension and enjoyment of the plot and themes.  (Leiber's "The Dreams of Albert Moreland" is a useful contrast to Campbell's "The Depths"--Leiber includes lots of details but each paints a vivid picture and adds to the atmosphere of the story.)  I also found that Campbell's transitions between, on the one hand, metaphors and Miles' dreams and visions, and on the other, what was happening in the real life of the story, were a little confusing, so that "The Depths" was not a smooth read.  The level of work required of the reader leaves him little energy left over for human feeling, and it is not like Campbell's themes of social decline and the writer suffering writer's block are so novel that they can on their own hold the readers' interest.

Gotta give this one a marginal thumbs down.

**********

The Leiber is a winner, but the Matheson earns no more than a pass and the Campbell, sadly, a failing grade.  Hopefully our next and final batch of stories from To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare will live up to the standard set by Leiber.