Barry N. Malzberg: "The Appeal," "Another Burnt-Out Case," "I'm Going Through the Door," and "Cornell"

I'm not Malzberged out yet, so let's continue reading the 1980 collection The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady.  Stories nine through thirteen (pages 70 to 100--I'm not exactly pushing myself here) are "The Appeal," "Yahrzeit," "Another Burnt-Out Case," "I'm Going Through the Door," and "Cornell" and we will dispose of them today.

"The Appeal" (1979)

"The Appeal" first saw print in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.  This is a good little story about unhealthy family relationships and selfish people who make disastrous choices and refuse to accept responsibility for the catastrophes that follow, instead blaming other people and outside forces.  The dialogue is quite good, sometimes reminding me of the fun elevated dialogue of a Jack Vance story.  Malzberg cagily leaves the story open to interpretation, allowing commies to think the story is about how capitalism and consumerism ruin people, and others to think the characters' faults are not in their stars, but in themselves, that they are the masters of their own fates and have steered themselves into dangerous waters.

"The Appeal" begins at the race track and then proceeds to a New Jersey casino--as I've told you many times in the past, Malzberg uses the horses and gambling in general as a symbol of how we try to understand the universe and control our lives by studying patterns and making calculations but it all seems random anyway and we often come to disaster.  The twenty-nine-year-old narrator loses all his money and has to beg a loan shark for more time to pay off the thousands and thousands of dollars he owes.  The loan shark has already given the narrator plenty of extensions and warns him that he has until tomorrow morning to pay up, implying that if he doesn't get his money then that the narrator will be tortured and/or killed.  The narrator is estranged from his family but as a last resort he goes to see his mother, whom he knows has lots of cash hidden in the house somewhere.  

Mom, who divorced the narrator's father and is now married to a man she is also unhappy with, refuses to give the narrator the money he needs to preserve his health and life.  The narrator blames his mother's poor mothering skills for his own criminal nature and unhealthy attitudes about money.  As the story ends we don't know exactly what is going to happen, but it certainly seems possible that the narrator is going to assault and rob, maybe murder, his own mother.

Thumbs up!     

In his afterword to "Appeal," Malzberg, whom in my last blog post I characterized as an expert on literary fiction and a man who wished he had had a big career in mainstream literary fiction, goes to bat for genre fiction, saying that genre fiction is "about something; the so-called literary short story is more often than not about nothing at all."  Malzberg is adept enough to work both sides of the street!  

"Yahrzeit" (1979)

We tackled this one in 2022 when we read Roger Elwood's Ten Tomorrows.  I liked it--in fact, I thought "Yahrzeit" was the best story in Ten Tomorrows!  High five, Barry! 

"Another Burnt-Out Case" (with Bill Pronzini) (1978)

This collaboration with the critically acclaimed mystery novelist Bill Pronzini appeared in Ted White's Fantastic.  Pronzini's name doesn't appear on the cover or the table of contents of the magazine, but on the title page of "Another Burnt-Out Case" Pronzini's name precedes Malzberg's.  Wild.

"Another Burnt-Out Case" is a joke crime story that is actually very funny and I laughed numerous times while reading it.  Again bringing to mind Jack Vance, the dialogue is very clever, and it is very much in keeping with Malzbergian themes.

"People are severely disturbed these days; they feel they have lost essential control of their lives.  Perhaps watching a little person consumed by flame along with a Human Pyromaniac will cheer them."

I recommend this one for its hilarious style and characterizations, though I have some reservations about the ending.

The narrator runs a pathetic little circus that is losing money.  Some of his employees come up with a radical insurance fraud scheme, having looked at the paperwork and realized that should one of the narrator's employees be burned alive during one of the Human Pyromaniac's performances all the survivors stand to receive a huge payout that will permit them to retire in style.  The circus freaks develop an elaborate ruse to fake the fiery death of one of their number, but there turn out to be wheels turning within wheels, as one of the characters monstrously engineers an accident meant to truly burn to death the individual whose death is meant to be faked!    

The twist ending has multiple facets, and one of these facets--the revelation of the nature of a character's insanity--is not very believable and not terribly funny, and I found it something of a letdown, though of course we have to expect insanity to rear its ugly head in most any story with Malzberg's name on it  The ten-page journey to that final eleventh page, however, is a blast.

Malzberg and Pronzini are proud of this one, justly so, and it has appeared in two different volumes of their collaborations, one printed in 2003 and the second in 2004.  Flood the zone!

"I'm Going Through the Door" (1976)

This is a sequel to 1967's "We're Coming Through the Window," Malzberg's first SF sale and a story I wasn't crazy about when I read it in 2020.  That story took the form of a letter written to Galaxy editor Fred Pohl and this sequel is similarly epistolary, a letter written to Galaxy editor Jim Baen.  "I'm Going Through the Door" is even worse than its predecessor, which was about a guy whose time machine created duplicates of himself.  In this sequel we learn that the duplicates were eliminated but that they haunt the letter writer's dreams; they bitterly assert that their destruction was somehow linked to their creator's letter to Pohl, and this has spurred the inventor's letter to Baen--none of this is very clear to me and I am not going to reread the story to puzzle it out, as it is neither fun nor funny.  Thumbs down.

"Cornell" (1972)

"Cornell" debuted in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.  There are like a hundred names on the cover of this magazine, but Malzberg's is not one of them--no respect!

"Cornell" is a self-indulgent literary experiment, an effort to encapsulate metaphorically the horror of being a writer, named after Cornell Woolrich, a man Malzberg reveres as one of the greatest of American writers and whom Malzberg considers the unhappiest writer he ever knew.  

The story is two pages long here in this 1980 book and consists of ten numbered paragraphs.  These are the dreams of a dancer, dreams about death, about people watching his performances and either not noticing his mistakes or pretending to not notice his mistakes, about people saying they want his autograph but then leaving before he can sign something for him, about people lying about having seen him dance, etc.

Thumbs down.  I respect that Malzberg, an intelligent, sensitive, and well-read man, has deep feelings about Woolrich and his work, but this story fails to convey these feelings in a compelling or entertaining or even interesting way.  It is like Malzberg is making sure the very thing he laments will happen to him. 

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"The Appeal" and "Another Burnt-Out Case" are quite successful stories that are true to Malzberg's themes of life, the world, and people's minds as mired in chaos, as beyond human control, but also offer the reader concrete literary and entertainment value: clever dialogue, vivid images and real human emotion embedded in a comprehensible plot that can surprise or at least engage you.  "I'm Going Through the Door" and "Cornell" are gimmicky experiments perhaps directed at a tiny professional audience that lack almost entirely the components I just listed that make fiction fun or otherwise moving for most readers.

We'll put aside The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady for a space, but you can expect more short stories next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log.