Important New Wave Stories by Thomas Disch, J. G. Ballard and Langdon Jones

When people talk about the New Wave, one of the things they often mention is Judith Merrill's anthology England Swings SF, first published in 1968.  Now, I don't actually own a copy of England Swings SF, but I do own anthologies by two of the most famous and prolific New Wave writers, Thomas M. Disch and J. G. Ballard, which include some of their stories from England Swings SF. Additionally, Joachim Boaz, indefatigable SF blogger and promoter of SF which has faded from memory and perhaps deserves to be more widely read, has generously provided me access to the story by Langdon Jones which was printed in England Swings SF. So, let's check them out and try to gain some kind of insight into the New Wave phenomenon!

"The Squirrel Cage" by Thomas Disch (1967)

I've already praised Tom Disch on this blog numerous times, but Disch has done work I'm not crazy about (when I read them in the aughts, I thought Genocides overwrought and mediocre and Echo Round His Bones and Mankind Under the Leash left me cold) so there's no guarantee I'm going to love this one. "The Squirrel Cage" first appeared in the issue of New Worlds with Charles Platt's The Garbage World.  I read Disch's tale in my 1980 Bantam edition of Fundamental Disch.

Don't tell my wife, but I have had a
crush on this garbage girl for quite a while

"The Squirrel Cage" is one of those stories in which a guy is trapped in a mysterious high tech prison and has no idea how he got there or who put him there.  For some psychological reason I am afraid to carefully dig into, I love stories in which a guy is in a prison and his cell constitutes his entire universe (Araminta Station by Jack Vance and Cage A Man by F. M. Busby come to mind at once as particularly effective SF examples), so "The Squirrel Cage" was right up my alley.  Disch uses the story as an allegory of life (of course), how we all are truly alone and can't know why we are here and have no real understanding of the universe because we cannot trust our senses.  It is also, more specifically, about the psychological reality of being a writer--the prisoner has access to a typewriter, and the text we are reading is things he has typed on his machine.  However, the narrator's typewriter neither admits nor produces paper--the narrator has no reason to believe anybody is even reading what he is writing! (He hopefully fantasizes that his words are being reproduced electronically somewhere and read by someone, maybe lots of people.)  On the last page of the story, when we learn the name of the narrator ("Disch"), he admits that even more terrifying than this lonely meaningless life in the antiseptic prison is the thought of being forced to leave it; a comment on our fear of death or perhaps Disch's own horror at the thought of having to make a living doing work more onerous than writing?

I think "The Squirrel Cage" also serves as a sort of satire of people who learn everything about the world via the New York Times--every day a new copy of the Times appears in the cell and the previous day's copy vanishes.  The newspaper is the only contact the prisoner has, apparently, ever had with any other living entity, and it is his only source of information.  One passage (in which the narrator wishes he could keep the papers and pile them up into walls and corridors) reminded me of the famous Collyer brothers, and perhaps the whole story is a sort of subtle reference or homage to them.

Both bleak and amusing, "The Squirrel Cage" is well-written (Disch has a smooth and engaging style) and compelling.  I liked the "New Yorkiness" of it, and there's also the sad frisson I get whenever I read references to suicide in a Disch story.  Worth a look!                

"The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" by J. G. Ballard (1966)

As with Disch, I have really liked some Ballard, but also been disappointed by him (I know Joachim loves it, but I found Drowned World tedious and silly.)

In this sexiest of blog posts there is even something for the ladies: it's every woman's dreamPTboat, JFK!

"The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" first appeared in the magazine Ambit, and in New Worlds the next year.  This is a two-page gimmick story, an imitation or pastiche of a similarly brief gimmick story by Alfred Jarry ("The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race"), larded with dumb jokes and lame puns.  I guess the story is supposed to say something about our society's obsession with celebrity and political violence, and also to suggest LBJ and/or the citizens of Dallas or the American people as a whole are somehow complicit in or responsible for the JFK murder. There are lots of people who like this sort of flashy cleverness and irreverence, but to me this kind of thing is hollow and a waste of my time--as I suppose I have said before online, I'm sick of absurdist humor in which any random shit can happen and of humor based on references to other works of fiction or to celebrities or historical events.

You gotta read this thing because it is "important," but I think it is a facile scam.

"Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy" by J. G. Ballard (1966)

Woah, maybe this post needs a
NSFW tag or a trigger warning!

Here we have a story in the same vein, a gimmicky JFK murder-related story about how people are sexually aroused by violence and by automobiles.  This one is in the form of a dry scientific report about therapy involving catering to the desires of mental patients to assassinate celebrities. Jokes include a clinical reference to a man inserting his penis into a car's exhaust. Presumably this was shocking in 1966, but we are now living in a permissive society in which some of us, me included, are almost entirely shocked out.

Like "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race," "Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy" first appeared in Ambit.  I read both of these stories in my copy of the 2001 edition of The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard.

While the Disch story deals with timeless issues, these Ballard stories are very time sensitive, very topical, very much focused on celebrities and events current in 1966.  I sometimes think including references to some "iconic" contemporary celebrity or event is an act of laziness on the part of the writer--instead of doing the work of inspiring the reader to feel by creating a character or a mood, the writer takes the shortcut of just invoking our ready-made feelings about, in this case, the bogus "Camelot" of the early '60s.  This maybe works on people who were old enough to pay attention to the news in 1963, but I was born in 1971, so the murder of JFK has no more emotional resonance with me than the murder of Julius Caesar or Cicero.

(If I am comparing them, Disch's story also has good writing, while these Ballard stories seem like loud jokes meant to dazzle you with their irreverence.)

"The Hall of Machines" by Langdon Jones (1968)

"The Hall of Machines" first appeared in New Worlds along with its two companion pieces, "The Coming of the Sun" and "The Eye of the Lens;" together, there three pieces form a triptych known as "The Eye of the Lens."  Joachim has shared with me all three of the components of "The Eye of the Lens," and I will discuss them all here, even though only the first appeared in England Swings SF.

(Check out Joachim's review of this triptych, and Langdon's entire collection of the same name; we actually cover different ground and have somewhat contesting and complementary views of the work.)

I guess Jones is one of the "etceteras."

"The Hall of Machines" consists of the notes of a scholar from some alternate universe (though see below) about an indescribably vast building which houses massive automatic machines of numerous types.  Most of the text is detailed description of various of the machines; one that consists of shiny blades making elaborate cuts (a "Death Machine"), one which extrudes tiny machines from a tube ("The Mother"), a colossal "Clock" made up of a huge spring and innumerable precise gears whose face is turned away from any possible viewer, and more.

I'm going to have to guess that the mysterious Hall of Machines represents the universe, and that the story is about how the laws that govern our lives seem mechanistic, predictable, and open to close inspection, but are so complex as to be practically indecipherable, and are bereft of any values or spiritual meaning.  Jones provides a clue, however, that this story does take place in our universe, and that he is making, or the reader is expected to make, some kind of ethical judgement: the word "Auschwitz" is inscribed on one of the three Death Machines.

"The Hall of Machines" reminded me of Herman Melville's 1855 "The Tartarus of Maids," which also includes detailed descriptions of allegorical machines.  It also reminded me of Thomas Ligotti's 1996 "The Red Tower," which, as I remember it, is just a description by an investigator of an old sinister factory, presumably in some alternate universe.

Jones presents vivid and exciting images, sets a powerful mood and gets the reader thinking.  Quite good.

"The Coming of the Sun" by Langdon Jones (1968)

"The Coming of the Sun" is a series of connected vignettes, spread over 22 pages, dealing with recurring themes that include insanity, fire, sex, religion, and the sun. The first of these 16 vignettes, a compelling character study of a pyromaniac imbecile, is very good, but after this very entertaining beginning the vignettes become increasingly tedious.  One, involving a grocer kicking a pair of mating dogs, is a shocking and memorable piece of "body horror," but some of the other little tableaus, like a one-and-a-half-page-long description of an elaborate clock burning, and a dream sequence about a guy on a motorcycle driving in circles around and then inside a cathedral, were so repetitive and boring I had trouble keeping my eyes open while I read them.  The last five pages of  "The Coming of the Sun" include poetry that is alternately mind-numbing ("Give me the red and the green of your love--my man, my woman, my child, my God") and groan-inducing ("...an old man masturbates his death-tool and spits white glory at the sun....")  Ugh.  The last page has a drawing of the sun, its flares like tentacles or petals, the words of the last poem jumbled all around it..

When tarbandu talks about the self-indulgence of the New Wave I guess this is the sort of thing he means.  I couldn't sincerely recommend "The Coming of the Sun" to anybody, though it is of academic interest and some might find it "so bad it's good" with its poetry about bloody semen and the cleansing venom of the "sun sun sun."

"The Eye of the Lens" by Langdon Jones (1966)

This one is a description of a film.  (I seem to recall Barry Malzberg resorting to this gag a few times; right now only The Men Inside is coming to mind.)  Jones starts by relating the type of film stock and filters used, and then describes the movie's two actors; all you feminists out there will be thrilled to learn Jones describes the female lead in precise detail over 27 lines, lingering on her breasts and body hair, while dispensing with the labor of describing the male lead in an efficient three lines, even though the man plays two parts.

Banned in Britain?

Then we get what amounts to a script, a description of the shots ("She passes out of the frame, kicking the statuettes idly as she walks") and of the soundtrack.  All you masochists out there will be thrilled to learn that the soundtrack includes just the kind of poetry about love that had us scrambling for cover like an 8.8 cm Flak had zeroed in on us back when we read "The Coming of the Sun"--"love me red with bloody arrows...love me brown, brown as leather..." etc.

The girl walks through a desert, encounters a statue that is crying, then men with flamethrowers who immolate any plants that appear on the desert surface.  (When I was in Denmark, the environmentalist capitol of the world, I saw how they killed weeds with a sort of scaled down flamethrower.  In Iowa I found that they spray Roundup on everything.) She visits a cathedral where a "psychedelic freak out" is taking place, and then comes upon Jesus on the cross. She gets into an argument with Christ, accusing him of being rude, stupid and shallow. In the final scene of the film the girl sits in a field of flowers.

I can't tell if this story is a sincere criticism of Christianity and our society or a parody of an art movie full of banal allegories. Either way it is a bore.

***************

Do these stories tell us anything about the New Wave?  (Let's pretend these stories are our first exposure to this New Wave we've been hearing people argue about.)  Well, they certainly lack many of the very things people tend to look for in conventional science fiction: there is no adventure plot (hell, there is no plot at all), there isn't really much science, and there isn't much speculation on what future societies or stuff in outer space might be like.  It is easy to see why casual SF readers looking for entertainment might be uninterested in the New Wave, and why committed members of the SF community who are into science and interested in what the future will bring might be exasperated by such work.

On the other hand, you can see how these stories would appeal to people who are interested in "serious mainstream literature" and think of themselves as free-thinking individuals or educated radicals.  The stories have the trappings of sophistication: they employ experimental literary techniques and/or abandon traditional literary elements like plot and character; they are pessimistic; they are irreverent or rebellious, implicitly or explicitly criticizing our society and traditional attitudes and beliefs; they include frank sexual content.  The Disch story and parts of the Jones stories are also well-written, and all the stories hope to say something about life or society.  The stories are also connected to long literary, artistic or philosophical traditions.  (And there's the fact that parts of the Jones pieces are difficult to read, and, as we see in academia, sometimes obscurity and tedium can pass for profundity.)

Disch, Ballard and Jones are all obviously thoughtful, well-educated, and capable of good writing--if anything good can come of the New Wave, these are guys who can make that happen--and in this selection I think we can see the golden opportunities presented by the New Wave to able writers, as well as the pitfalls for readers in the New Wave's excesses.  In the same way a quest story or a detective story or an alien invasion story, the kind of thing that has been done a billion times, can be emotionally and intellectually thrilling when it comes from the pen of a talented and dedicated writer, but predictable, shoddy and boring in the hands of the lazy or incompetent, we have to expect that there will be some fine New Wave stories, and some New Wave stories which are a waste of our time.  I think we have seen both kinds here today.

Late 20th-century Horror Stories by Thomas Ligotti, Kathe Koja & Dennis Etchison

I'm no Dinosaur Dracula, but, getting into the spirit of the season, I checked out 2010's Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror, an anthology full of illustrations of snakes, edited by Ellen Datlow.  Early this week I read three widely-admired and widely-anthologized horror stories from its pages.  Maybe these "modern" horror stories will provide a contrast to the Victorian and Edwardian horror stories I have been reading?

"The Greater Festival of Masks" by Thomas Ligotti (1985)

Written in the present tense and full of rich descriptions, but with its plot and point not all that easily discerned, "The Greater Festival of Masks" has the qualities of a dream or nightmare.  I had to read it twice to feel that I had much of an idea of what was really going on.  It first appeared in the collection Songs of a Dead Dreamer.

Noss lives in a sort of neverland, an odd city with no connection to our own real world, in which a festival is taking place.  A prime component of the festival is the wearing of masks, and Noss walks through town, to a shop which sells masks.  He has been delaying participating in the festivities, but has resolved to now acquire masks for himself.

We come to realize Noss is not a native of the town but an immigrant, and along with him we learn the truth of the festival at the mask shop.  The people of this town, during the rare mask festivals, put on two masks, one after the other.  The first erases their features, leaving their faces egg smooth, and the second mask creates for them a new face--Ligotti compares the slow process of a new face forming to being like that of a garden growing.  After some initial reluctance, Noss joins in this practice.

Any fiction in which masks feature prominently is going to make you think about identity and about the difference between what we show of ourselves to the world and the true character of our souls.  ("Every day you've got to wake up/disappear behind your makeup.")  On the second page of the story we get a description of how deceptive and fake are the facades of many of the city's buildings, incorporating false doors which do not open, stairways which lead nowhere, and balconies that cannot be accessed, decorative features which mimic practical ones, but lack any utility themselves.  This is a city characterized by false faces.  Perhaps ironically, during the festival of masks people in the city are more open and aboveboard: "He also observes numerous indications of the festival season.....For instance, not a few doors have been kept ajar, even throughout the night, and dim lights are left burning in empty rooms."

This city is also one characterized by change; it is implied that buildings come and go, and change places, like the plants of a curated garden.  (The garden is a metaphor Ligotti uses more than once in the story.)  And I think the story is primarily about change, the way change can be scary, the way that moving to a new city can change you, and also social change--everybody in the city, after all, changes at the same time, not each citizen individually and of his own volition.  The device of the masks seems to suggest that changes in the character of individuals come from without, not within, and Ligotti hints that social change comes from the periphery, not from society's recognized rulers ("...the delirium of this rare celebration does not radiate out from the center of things, but seeps inward from remote margins.")  He also suggests that after a major change the past is buried, forgotten ("of the old time nothing will be said, because nothing will be known.")

This reminded me of the adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire, and of recent changes in the conventional wisdom about homosexuality in the United States--such changes seem to bubble up from the the culture and the people, instead of being lead by politicians, who follow trends in an effort to appeal to the masses and seem to be lying half the time about how they really feel.  As Ligotti suggests, once the change has taken place everybody acts like the new fashion is the obvious norm, and claims to be shocked and disgusted by the way people thought and behaved in the past.

Well-written, full of good images and phrases, and thought-provoking--"The Greater Festival of Masks" is a quite good story.    

"Teratisms" by Kathe Koja (1991)

This story is sort of opaque, or at least difficult (editor Datlow appropriately uses the word "oblique" to describe Koja's style.)  As with the Ligotti story, I had to read this one twice to satisfy myself that I knew what the hell was going on plotwise.  The tone and feeling of the story is no mystery, however; Koja generates an atmosphere of disgust and despair, of helplessness in the face of challenges and guilt, partly by including realistic little details about the depressing lives of her degenerate lower class characters, partly with all the bizarre descriptions of blood.

Mitch and his sister, who changes her name periodically and is currently going by the name of Randle, are young adults.  Their mother, before dying, made them promise to look after their illiterate kid brother Alex, and so the three stick together even though Mitch and Randle openly detest and are sickened by Alex and by each other.  This soul-crushingly antagonistic family can't settle down anyplace, but instead moves across the country in a beat up old car because, unless I am totally misinterpreting Koja's clues, Alex is a cannibal, perhaps even a vampire or ghoul, who kills and eats children when he gets a chance.

("Teratisms" first was published in the anthology Whispers of Blood, which has the subtitle "18 Stories of Vampirism," but in the story Koja never uses the word "vampire" and Alex seems to walk around in the sunlight all the time.  The story works without any supernatural content, as far as I can see.)

Koja is a little cagey when describing the cannibal stuff, but open with other examples of this trio's insanity and abnormality.  Alex obsessively recites the list of towns they have been to, and obsessively plays with little scraps of paper.  Randle is always coming on to her older brother, exposing her breasts to him and so forth, and I thought Koja was hinting that the three of them form a love triangle or maybe sometimes have group sex:

They [Randle and Alex] were almost to the counter, holding hands. When Randle saw him [Mitch] enter, she looked away; he saw her fingers squeeze Alex's, twice and slow. What was it like for her? Middleman.   

In the final lines of the story (remember our spoiler policy here at MPorcius Fiction Log) Mitch, exhausted by this horrible life, intentionally runs over Alex as Randle sits beside him in the passenger seat, and then drives the car into some trees in hopes of exterminating his entire insane and predacious family.

"Teratisms" is a skilled performance, and is twisted, disgusting and disturbing.  Read at your own risk!

"The Dog Park" by Dennis Etchison (1993)

I read Etchison's story "The Dead Line" in the summer and thought it was pretty good. Dinosaur Dracula praised, and then illustrated, Etchison's novelization of Halloween III just recently.  (Illustration is the sincerest form of flattery.)  So I thought "The Dog Park" worth a look.  

"The Dog Park" is about Hollywood people.  I guess it is about the way Hollywood chews up and spits out so many ambitious people without the talent or luck to achieve their dreams ("success walks hand in hand with failure," you know), and maybe about how the people in Hollywood who have already made it feel contempt for and even prey upon those who have yet to make it.

The story takes place in a dog park alongside an overgrown canyon.  People come to the dog park to network, giving their business cards to the other dog walkers and discussing scripts and that sort of jazz.  In the canyon, apparently, live coyotes and mountain lions who, it seems, kill any dogs who stray into the canyon.  On the other side of the canyon are the houses of rich people.

The plot follows a novelist who has produced only one novel and is leaving Los Angeles soon, defeated.  His dog vanished into the canyon a few weeks ago.  In the dog park one last time, in hopes of finding his lost dog, he meets a young woman who works for the Fox Network on a TV show about police dogs; she aspires to write a movie-of-the-week about Elvis Presley and his relationship with dogs.  Her dog is also stupid enough to end up in canyon.  As the story ends the rich people above the canyon are having a party, and seem to be applauding the wild beasts in the canyon as they devour the TV writer woman's canine.  Etchison directly compares the canyon to the Roman arena.

Maybe this story would do something for me if I had lived in Hollywood or ever owned a dog.  As it is, I am just sort of shrugging it off as OK.  Despite my lukewarm reaction it won a British Fantasy Award in 1994, and is apparently the favorite horror story of Richard Matheson's son!  "The Dog Park" first appeared in Dark Voices 5: The Pan Book of Horror.

*********

Datlow seems to have put together a collection of solid stories of importance to the horror fiction community; maybe I'll read more tales from Darkness later this week.

Post-War American Tales of the Fantastic: Beaumont, Ligotti & Wolfe

The college library that is within walking distance of the dilapidated and spider-infested house the wife and I rent has a copy of Volume II of The Library of America's American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub and published in 2009.  Volume I, which I read three stories from last week, covers the period before 1940; this one presents work from 1940 to 2007.  A few days ago I borrowed the volume, and early this week read three of the stories therein.

"Black Country" by Charles Beaumont (1954)

Beaumont is one of those writers I have often thought I should read, but whom I have not gotten around to.  So here is my chance.

"Black Country" first appeared in Playboy. The story is about jazz.  It's my understanding that Playboy, at least in its early incarnations, was marketed as the magazine for the sophisticated man, and one of the things the Platonic ideal of the sophisticated man of the '50s and '60s cared about and knew about was jazz, and Playboy covered jazz within its pages quite extensively.  (Personally, I know nothing about jazz.)  The cover of the issue in which Beaumont's story appeared is actually adorned not with some hot chick, as has been the norm for decades, but a cartoon depiction of jazz musicians.

"Black Country" is a first person narrative by a member of an African-American jazz band whose talented and charismatic leader, Spoof Collins, plays the trumpet.  The group has a dedicated white fan, Sonny, who takes over for the saxophonist when he is killed in some kind of fracas.  The band later decides to take on a female singer, Rose-Ann.  Rose-Ann falls in love with Spoof, but Spoof loves his trumpet more than anything, and when she gets a little too cloying, Spoof hits her.  Sonny rushes to her aid, staring down Spoof; Sonny is in love with Rose-Ann, and they become an item. Spoof dies soon after (committing suicide because he has cancer) and Sonny becomes leader of the band, shifting from saxophone to trumpet.  The story's climax is when Sonny digs up Spoof's horn from the grave and Spoof's spirit plays through Sonny; the two men, of two different races, who butted heads earlier, are reconciled in their quest to achieve the ultimate, purest jazz.  

This story is just OK.  Maybe I would enjoy it more if I was a jazz aficionado--the numerous scenes describing musical performances ("Spoof lifted his horn and climbed up two-and-a-half and let out his trademark...Jimmy kanoodling the great headwork that only Jimmy knows how to do...Henry did that counterpoint business that you're not supposed to be able to do unless you have two right arms and four extra fingers...." etc.) left me cold.  Maybe others will find the story's racial and sexual politics interesting; presumably Beaumont is arguing for racial harmony here, but some readers might find the way a white man takes over the black band, or even the way Beaumont speaks in the voices of black men, condescending or offensive.

"The Last Feast of Harlequin" by Thomas Ligotti (1990)

A year ago (gadzooks, has it really been that long?) I announced to the world my deep and abiding love for Thomas Ligotti's story "Vastarien."  Can I experience such a love again?  I started this story, which first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, with hopes that I could.

Ligotti dedicated "The Last Feast of Harlequin" to "the memory of H. P. Lovecraft," and in the introduction to American Fantastic Tales' second volume Straub calls the story "a loving and exacting tribute" to Lovecraft.  Straub's description is perfectly apt; this is a finely crafted Lovecraftian story, carefully emulating the plot structure and themes and tone of Lovecraft's own works.

The story is a memoir or testament, written by an academic anthropologist, describing his investigation of an odd festival in a Midwestern town, a town founded by New Englanders in the nineteenth century.  Like the characters in various Lovecraft stories, our narrator travels around town meeting creepy characters, delves into old newspapers and other old documents for clues, and then learns a horrifying truth before escaping with his life, but not without dreadful psychological scars and the knowledge that something catastrophically terrible awaits him in his future.  In the climactic scene we even get the subterranean ritual of human sacrifice led by an evil wizard or priest which we expect to find in a Weird Tales-style story.

Maybe because I was exposed to so much Marxism in college, and maybe because in my twenties and thirties I spent so much time reading books in which social class is important (like Proust and various 18th-century things like Casanova and Boswell), I am always finding these SF stories to be worthy of some kind of class analysis. "The Last Feast of Harlequin" is perhaps a more appropriate subject of a class-based analysis than most.  The town at the center of the story is split into "desirable sections" of "normal residents" and a darker, uglier, poorer side, "the south end," which the narrator calls a "slum" or "ghetto" and which is home to "lethargic," "gaunt" and "nauseatingly passive" people.  The slum dwellers keep to themselves, and are, in fact, monsters of some type.  Every winter they have a dark, creepy, sinister celebration, and the loud and brightly lit festival in the "normal" part of town is (our narrator theorizes) devised to drown out or distract from the evil celebration of the monstrous freaks.  The narrator, as a professional scientist and college professor, is of course solidly middle-class, but, by putting on a disguise of old shoes, blue jeans and a coat whose pockets he tears and to which he applies stains, he has little trouble infiltrating the dark side of town.

The surprise at the end of the story, which is not really a surprise to careful readers because Ligotti foreshadows it quite clearly, is that the anthropologist is, previously unknown to himself, one of the freaks.  "He is one of us....He has always been one of us" says the wizard/priest, who turns out to be the narrator's mentor back from his days at his New England university.  This kind of class anxiety strikes a chord with me because of similarities to my own life.  My parents are working class, and my mother expresses hostility to white collar workers and complains when she sees me in my J. Crew outfits ("Why don't you wear jeans and sneakers?  Does Joe College think he is better than the rest of us?")  Does my own college degree, my intellectual hobbies and time spent working in universities and offices make me middle-class, or does my blood and the time I've spent working in machine shops, warehouses, and the stock rooms of stores make me working-class?

"The Last Feast of Harlequin" is like a smoothly running clock, each of its glittering gears rotating in harmony with every other.  Every paragraph serves a purpose and serves that purpose well.  I can enthusiastically recommend this story to Lovecraft fans, who may enjoy picking out all the little Lovecraftian elements and themes.   Because it is so good, I would also strongly recommend the story to people curious about Lovecraft's influence on later "weird" writers.  

I didn't like "The Last Feast of Harlequin" as much as "Vastarien," however.  It is so like a finely polished, exquisitely constructed exemplar of a Lovecraft story (dare I use the phrase "Platonic ideal" twice in one blog post?) that it is a little lacking in the surprise and novelty department.  Ligotti here has put together a masterpiece of an homage; it feels like the best possible version of something we've seen before, rather than something original or new.  I thought "Vastarien," while definitely Lovecraftian in feel, had something new to say and was more challenging, more mysterious, making for a more powerful reading experience.

"The Little Stranger" by Gene Wolfe (2004)

I'm one of those people who thinks of Gene Wolfe as his favorite writer and who thinks Wolfe is a strong candidate for "best" or "greatest" or "ultimate" SF writer of all time, so for me reading a Wolfe story that is new to me is always a significant event in my intellectual life.

This is actually the second time I've read "The Little Stranger;" when I checked out the book I thought it was new to me, having forgotten the title, but by the second page I realized I had read it before.  Perhaps I read it in Jonathan Strahan and Karen Haber's Fantasy: The Best of 2004; I used to get those anthologies at the New York Public Library all the time.  I'm sure I didn't read it in its first place of publication, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  

The story begins on a heartbreaking note: the tale is a series of letters written by a terribly lonely old woman, Ivy, to a dead cousin.  "Please forgive me for troubling you with another letter....You are the only family I have, and as you are dead you probably do not mind."  The story quickly becomes light-hearted, however.  The conceit of the story is that everybody thinks Ivy is a witch, and various coincidences, like a black cat joining her household and two little kids named Hank and Greta coming to visit her "gingerbread house," reinforce this idea and provide an opportunity for Wolfe to make jokes (of Hank and Greta our narrator says, "[they] are such sweet little strangers.  I could just eat them up!")  It is strongly suggested that Ivy's house is haunted or somehow alive, and also lonely, and manipulates events to relieve its own loneliness as well as Ivy's.  There are also hints that Ivy is hundreds of years old.

While I have suggested the story is light-hearted, at the same time we are constantly reminded that the world is full of evil.  Ivy often worries about thieves and burglars, and is very concerned that business people will cheat her.  There are gypsies in the story (our narrator doesn't use that word, but I think all the clues point to them being gypsies) and they have a contentious relationship with the authorities: one of the female gypsies opens a fortune telling business and is investigated by the police bunco squad, while the others flee into the woods at the very sight of the police. Readers may recall that I had the same attitude about Wolfe's 1990 novel Pandora by Holly Hollander; that it was outwardly fun, but full of reminders of war, crime, and broken families.

As usual with Wolfe, an economical and dense story worth rereading, with an odd, novel premise.

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I'm not the audience for the Beaumont story, but these three stories are all worthwhile reads.  While I, an inveterate cheapo, have borrowed the two volumes of American Fantastic Tales from libraries, I hope other people who care about genre literature have been purchasing them.  We certainly want to encourage The Library of America and other organizations to continue producing books like this, books full of stories about ghosts, witches, and evil cults but composed of fine paper and fine bindings, with attractive and easy-to-read typefaces and no typographical errors.  (Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick have volumes of The Library of America dedicated to them--if I eat my broccoli maybe I'll live to see similarly handsome volumes of Gene Wolfe's work.)

Lovecraftian Horror from Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley

Cover of the 1996 edition

Prolific British horror writers Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley each have two stories in Robert Price's 1996 collection The New Lovecraft Circle. Could any of them be as good as Thomas Ligotti's masterpiece "Vastarien?"  Let's hope so!

"The Plain of Sound" by Ramsey Campbell (1964)

In the early 1950s, three students from Brichester University are hiking across the English countryside.  They come to a flat valley nestled between four ridges.  There is a small house on the plain, and from some indeterminate place comes a loud irritating sound.  One of the characters thinks it sounds like machines are building a mine underneath the plain.

The students investigate the house, which is abandoned, but, as you expect in these sorts of stories, includes a diary, ancient forbidden books and a strange apparatus.  It turns out that the valley is a point where our universe intersects another universe, "S'glhuo," and the apparatus can be used to contact S'glhuo.  The college kids test the device, get a glimpse of the other universe, and one of them goes insane.

For the most part this is a traditional Lovecraft pastiche, with aliens communicating with humans via dreams and a guy going mad and all that, but there is an interesting weird element.  The alien world in this case is made up entirely of sound, and sounds in our world that reach S'glhuo can create objects there.  If the aliens get aggressive, as aliens are wont to do, humans can play particular notes on a specially constructed stringed instrument that will create an indescribable monster in S'glhuo; this monster will massacre the aliens in some mind-wrendingly gruesome fashion.

This story is OK, a step above the Glasby pastiches I read in my last foray into The New Lovecraft Circle.  

"The Stone on the Island" by Ramsey Campbell (1964)  

Back cover of 2004 edition

This is better than "The Plain of Sound," straying as it does from the Lovecraftian template a bit.

An island in the river Severn has been a site of pagan worship for thousands of years.  There is a Roman temple on the island, and a still older artifact, a white sphere on a short pillar.  People who touch this white stone are cursed and die soon after, horribly mutilated.

Michael Nash works in an office in Brichester.  His father, a medical doctor and amateur investigator of the creepy island, commits suicide, apparently to escape having to live through the mutilation process, he having touched that stone.  Young Nash investigates the island, and even though he knows that he shouldn't touch the stone, he can't resist.  The curse is upon him, and he starts seeing disembodied faces, staring at him through windows at home and at work. His coworkers cannot see these haunting faces.

In a scene that surprised me and pushes the story to a higher level than many of these Lovecraft-inspired things, young Nash is in a dark storage room at his office building, on a ladder, and sees one of the faces below him.  Nash viciously kicks the face, and too late realizes he has killed an innocent man, a new employee.

A solid horror story, just the right length and with some surprises.

"The Statement of One John Gibson" by Brian Lumley (1984)

This is an odd piece of work, largely a sort of literary game.  H. P. Lovecraft is a character in this story, and H. P. Lovecraft's work is depicted as nonfiction disguised as fiction.  The text of this story is a recording made by a man, John Gibson, who has come to realize he is not quite human after going through the effects of his father, an investigator of the occult who recently died.  Among these effects are old issues of Weird Tales, copies of books by and about Lovecraft, and a medallion depicting Cthulhu and other alien gods.

A large proportion of the story is taken up with a sort of history lesson about Cthulhu's career and methods, and by Gibson's analysis of a story by William Lumley and Lovecraft, "The Diary of Alonzo Typer" (1935).  Gibson believes that a character in that story is a real person, a great uncle of his.  To me, all this seems like a waste of time.  Perhaps I would appreciate it more if I had read "The Diary of Alonzo Typer."  Still, something about a Lovecraftian universe in which Lovecraft appears as a character (a stunt that authors besides Lumley have attempted) offends my ability to suspend disbelief.

The actual plot of the story is how Gibson comes to realize his own paternity.  He learns that his father's side of the family has some small proportion of alien blood in their ancestry.  We readers are led to believe that our narrator must also have some trace element of alien blood in his make up, but then comes the shocker: our narrator Gibson is not really the son of investigator Gibson!  In fact, while investigator Gibson and his wife were exploring the setting of the story "The Diary of Alonzo Typer," they were attacked by some extra-dimensional creature, and this monster raped the narrator's mother!  Our narrator is 50% alien monster!  In the climactic scene, John Gibson visits his mother in the mental hospital (bringing his tape recorder with him), transforms into a hideous tentacled creature, kills his mother with a corrosive ooze he secretes, and then flies or teleports away before the hospital staff can burst into Mom's room.

I'm going to have to give this one a negative vote.  The father-exploring, mother-raping, son-discovering, and matricide stuff is fine, but it is weighed down by too much extraneous material that is boring and distracting.  Lumley even includes a long end note about his own family, telling us he is not closely related to William Lumley. 

"The Kiss of Bugg-shash" by Brian Lumley (1978)

I'm not sure how seriously to take this one; at times it feels like a joke.

Two college students, while getting high and listening to prog rock (an LP by the band Fried Spiders) summon a demon that manifests itself as a theoretically limitless volume of slime, liberally sprinkled with grotesque eyes and mouths.  Bugg-shash can only appear in the dark, so the two students are safe as long as they are in the light, but in the event of a nighttime power outage they are vulnerable to being drowned in slime.

The students enlist the aid of an expert in the occult, and in the process the occultist also falls under the curse of Bugg-shash.  The occultist, thanks to his private collection of sorcerous books and access to still more at the British Library, figures out a spell that will lift the curse.  But the spell has some fine print: it only lifts the curse temporarily--once you die Bugg-shash has access to your corpse.  The spell is also reversible.  And don't forget that Bugg-shash also has the power to animate the dead.  That's a lot of fine print.

A week after the ceremony which liberates the three of them from the curse, the occultist dies in an automobile accident. Bugg-shash animates his corpse, the corpse ambushes the two students and reverses the spell, and so its glug glug time for two students who won't be graduating with their class, or any class.

Am I supposed to be scared by this story, or laugh at it?  There is also the problem of Bugg-Shash; the demon's characteristics don't seem to follow any theme.  He's a blob of slime who can't stand the light and also can animate the dead.  It's a little like if you wrote a story in which your werewolf could breathe fire and your vampire was scared of elephants; it feels a little arbitrary.

I guess this one gets a passing grade, but it's a close call.

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"Vastarien" is quite safe on its lofty perch.

I've had a good experience dipping into Robert Price's The New Lovecraft Circle.  However, I should probably take a break from reading these kinds of stories; since they all have the same elements (contact via dreams, alien dimensions, forbidden books, people landing in insane asylums) they lose their power if you overdo it.

Four Stories from 1996's The New Lovecraft Circle

Finding myself in Des Moines this week, I visited the Central Branch of the Public Library and put a pile of anthologies in the trunk of the old Toyota Corolla.  Feeling in the mood for some sincere and serious Lovecraftian horror, yesterday I scrutinized the table of contents of the 2004 edition of Robert M. Price's The New Lovecraft Circle, hoping to weed out any juvenile pastiches or parodies and identify the gems of cosmic horror via my spider sense.   

"I've Come to Talk to You Again" by Karl Edward Wagner (1996)

I think Wagner's 1974 "Sticks" is terrific.  It won the British Fantasy Award and has been anthologized all over the place, with good reason, because it is great, one of my favorite horror stories.  So I eagerly started "I've Come to Talk to You Again," Wagner's last published story.

I have to admit I was a little disappointed in this five page story; it is good, but it is no "Sticks."  American writer of Lovercraftian tales Holsten travels to London every year to hang out with fellow horror writers, and has done so for some twenty years.  The Yank is a healthy 60 or so, his friends are mostly younger, but in poor shape.  (This story is largely about the horror of growing old, and Wagner goes on and on about each of the half dozen British writers' medical issues: diabetes, cancer, heart attacks, drug addiction, etc.  We also get some of the complaining old people do about young people's tastes in music and literature.)

It becomes clear that Holsten, years ago in New York, discovered an ancient text that put him into contact with some kind of supernatural being or alien god, and that creature drains the life of Holsten's friends and invigorates Holsten.  Holsten's old friends are dying off, so on this trip he is not only meeting them, but cultivating a new younger set of cronies from whom to feed for the next twenty years.

There are references to Oscar Wilde, the Beatles, and to Robert W. Chambers.  I haven't read The King in Yellow, though I have been intending to for years, and I suspect I may have missed some nuances of this story as a result.

The more I think about this story the more I like it; my expectations were set very high, unfairly high, by my attachment to "Sticks," so I was initially judging this one too harshly.

"Vastarien" by Thomas Ligotti (1987)

This is the kind of story I was hoping to find when I picked up The New Lovecraft Circle.  It doesn't directly refer to Lovecraft in any way I can see, but it achieves a tone and conjures images that inspire a powerful feeling not unlike that of some of Lovecraft's work.  I enjoyed this 14-page story so much I read it on Thursday and again on Friday.

"Vastarien" first appeared in
Crypt of Cthulhu # 48

All his life Victor Keirion has been dissatisfied with the real world, and wished to examine and inhabit an unreal world that exists at the edge of reality and the limits of time, a sort of ruin which hinted at all possibilities, "where every shape suggested a thousand others, every sound disseminated everlasting echoes, every word founded a world."  After a lifetime of searching book shops and libraries for clues about this unreal world, Keirion encounters a strange little man (he reminds those who see him of a crow) in a queer bookshop who puts into Keirion's hands a volume for whom Keirion is the only possible reader.  To others, the pages of the book appear blank, but to Keirion the book is a guide to the unreal world he has so long sought; in a strange way the book actually is that world, called Vastarien.  During the days Keirion studies the book, and through the nights, in his dreams, he explores the horrible but fascinating depository of the ruins of reality that is Vastarien, a "paradise of exhaustion, confusion and debris...."

Keirion is the sole person who can read the book of Vastarien, but it turns out he is not the only man who has pursued Vastarien.  Once Keirion has mastered the geography of Vastarien (which Ligotti vividly describes as a huge dark city of winding streets and teetering towers) the crow man begins invading his mind and stealing his dreams.  Each night Vastarien grows smaller while a colossal apparition of the crow man grows larger, until Keirion tracks down and murders the crow man, a crime which lands him in an insane asylum.

I love everything about this story, the plot, the style, the tone, the images.  Five of five stars!

"The Keeper of Dark Point" by John Glasby (1967)

I'd never heard of John Glasby before; apparently he was a British scientist who wrote tons of genre fiction under numerous pseudonyms, including westerns and romance novels.  "The Keeper of Dark Point" first appeared in issue 107 of the magazine Supernatural Stories; the isfdb record for the issue indicates that Glasby wrote every story in the entire 160 page magazine!

"The Keeper of Dark Point" is a mediocre, pedestrian, by-the-numbers Lovecraftian pastiche.  I'd have to say it is a just barely acceptable entertainment; there is nothing original about it, and it lacks an admirable style, arresting images and any sort of deep feeling.  The plot consists of a bunch of Lovecraftian elements jammed together like puzzle pieces that don't quite fit together.

Stephen Delmore Ashton (his name presumably an homage to writer and artist Clark Ashton Smith, one of H. P. Lovecraft's friends) is an Englishman who can trace his maternal family's line back almost 2000 years.  This family, the Trewallens, have always been held in suspicion by the villagers who live near their manor on the coast of Cornwall, and in the 1920s the villagers attack the place, burning it down and killing most of the family.  Young Ashton is (apparently) the only survivor.

Our story takes place in 1936, and is narrated by one of Ashton's friends.  By exploring smelly tunnels under the ruins of the burnt manor and deciphering ancient books found there, as well as a note from Ashton's mother, it becomes apparent that the Trewallen family has had, since the time of the Roman invasion of Britain, the duty of keeping an eye on a gate between universes located in a lighthouse nearby.  In three days the stars will be aligned and monsters can come through the gate and wreak havoc on the Earth.  Ashton memorizes an incantation and at the appointed hour he is at the weird lighthouse, where he meets his mother, who is not dead after all, but is now a scaly green piscine ogrish creature (but with a recognizably human face.)  Our narrator, at a safe distance, watches through a pair of binoculars as the climax unfolds.  A darkness in the sky blots out the stars, a bolt of lightning strikes the lighthouse, Ashton recites the spell, and the portal is closed and the Earth is saved, but as the portal closes Ashton and his mother, the last of the Trewallen line, are sucked up into the sky and out of our universe.

The plot is serviceable, and with some polishing this might have been a good story, but when you are regularly writing entire magazines I guess you don't have time to smooth out the plot holes, generate atmosphere, make sure all the sentences are clear, and that sort of thing.

"The Black Mirror" by John Glasby (1967)

Two issues of Supernatural Stories were offered to the British consumer in 1967, 107 and 109 (108 never appeared, it seems) and John Glasby penned the entire contents of both of them.  "The Black Mirror" was included in issue 109.

Phillip Ashmore Smith (another evocative and/or derivative name; we all know what the P. in H. P. Lovecraft stands for!) is a young Englishman interested in the occult.  His world travels, including visits to Tibetan and Indian gurus and the exploration of a Transylvannian castle, have yielded to him knowledge of Cthugha, the evil firegod.  Cthugha has been imprisoned in the star Korvaz, visible in the southern sky near Fomalhaut, for millions of years, but the time of his liberation is nigh!  Through the medium of the Black Mirror, Cthugha can be brought to Earth on the night that Korvaz waxes brilliant.  And what will Cthugha do when he reaches the Earth?  Burn up the entire globe, exterminating all terrestrial life!  You remember the Great Fire of London in 1666?  That was the year the necromancer Zegrembi used the Black Mirror to summon to Earth one of Cthugha's lowliest servants!

If you are like me, or like Alexander Morton, the country doctor, you are thinking that you'll be sleeping a little easier when you know that this Black Mirror has been thrown down an abandoned mine shaft and smashed into little bits.  But if you are like Phillip Ashmore Smith your mind has already been infiltrated by Cthugha's agents and you will be spending the year 1937 moving into Zegrembi's old farmhouse in the English countryside, where you will watch the star Korvaz through a telescope all night and decipher manuscripts all day, trying to find out where that sweet Black Mirror is!

Luckily for all of us, after P. A. Smith finds the mirror and gets killed by a fire creature that emerges from it, the intrepid Dr. Morton snatches up the mirror and heaves it down the aforementioned mine shaft before Zegrembi, who is still alive and leading the Cthugha sympathizer movement in England, can get his hands on it.

Like "The Keeper of Dark Point," this story would have benefited from some editing and polishing to make the plot hang together better and to tidy up some confusing and ugly sentences.  It is not clear in "The Keeper of Dark Point" how or why Ashton's mother became a monster, and in "The Black Mirror" it is not clear why Zegrembi doesn't just get the mirror himself.  Zegrembi knows where the mirror is because he put it there.  Also, why go through the rigmarole of giving Smith hints that help him translate old manuscripts (that Zegrembi himself wrote in the 17th century) so Smith can figure out where the mirror is?  Just tell him!

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I'm in love with Thomas Ligotti's "Vastarien," and Karl Edward Wagner's "I've Come to Talk to You Again" is good enough.  As for the Glasby stories, they deserve a barely passing grade.  I can't recommend them, but they are not offensively bad, and it is interesting to read a new author and explore a corner of the genre fiction universe, Badger Books, which I was unfamiliar with.  So my experience with Robert Price's The New Lovecraft Circle has been a good one, and this week I plan to read more from it.