Whispers II: Lafferty, Davidson, R. C. Matheson, Chalker, and Sallis & Lunde

They don't have to be in mint condition
for me to buy them

Followers of my twitter feed know the wife and I like to go to antique stores.  In some of those antique malls that host booths from a large selection of sellers you can find a booth which is practically a mini-used bookstore, and at one such booth in the Westminster Antique Mall in Westminster, Maryland this last weekend I purchased a hardcover copy of Whispers II, the 1979 anthology edited by Stuart Schiff.  Let's check it out!

In his Introduction, Schiff, who I guess was a trained dentist living in the greatest state in the union, says that fantasy and horror are now big business, what with Sissy Spacek as Carrie, Max von Sydow as The Exorcist and Michael J. London as The Snowbeast burning up our screens, but these popular commercial versions of horror and the weird designed to please the masses are diluted, adulterated.  In his work as an editor of Whispers, a semi-pro zine, Schiff (his friends like David Drake call him "Stu") has tried to encourage the creation of and to disseminate more pure, less commercial, horror/fantasy fiction.  He goes on to praise the role of little magazines like Whispers throughout the modern history of horror, citing the early careers of Lovecraft, Bradbury and Stephen King.

Whispers II includes 21 stories and I think I am going to read and opine on 19 of them.  I am skipping Karl Edward Wagner's "Undertow," a Kane story.  I read all the Kane stories in the late New York and early Iowa periods of my life and didn't really find them to my taste, though some were better than others.  My vague memories suggest that "Undertow" was better than the average Kane story.  I have already blogged about Hugh B. Cave's "From the Lower Deep" and Russell Kirk's "Lex Talionis," having read them back in 2015 in DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII, which was edited by Wagner.

Tarbandu of The PorPor Books Blog has already trod this ground--feel free to read his brisk and informative blogpost from 2010 about Whispers II and skip my long-winded babbling about it and get back to your real life; I'm sure you'd be better off doing something productive like chasing girls or making money or something like that.

"Berryhill" by R. A. Lafferty (1976)

"Berryhill" has a straightforward plot.  On the edge of town is a decrepit house where live some really old people who are rarely seen and are kind of weird.  All kinds of rumors about their alleged crimes have sprung up over the decades.  One day a nine-year-old juvenile delinquent who likes to torture animals and vandalize local farms ventures into the old weirdos' house.  What will happen to all these creepy characters?

Lafferty, with understated brilliance, takes this plot and makes it both hilarious and horrifying.  Everything from people's names to the little turns of phrase he uses to the details about small town life and casual descriptions of human evil work to make the reader smile and laugh or wince and shiver.  Engrossing and surprising, and easier to understand than some of Lafferty's work, which can often be difficult, this story alone is worth what I paid for this book.

Very good, highly recommended.  "Berryhill" first appeared in Whispers #9, and would later appear in the collection Iron Tears, which has a good cover by the Dillons.

"The King's Shadow Has No Limits" by Avram Davidson (1975)

I often find Davidson's stories to be erudite but gimmicky and silly, though I gave his novel Enemy of My Enemy a moderately positive review earlier this year.  "The King's Shadow Has No Limits" seems to have appeared approximately simultaneously in Whispers #8 and the book The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy.  I think this will be the first Dr. Eszterhazy story I have ever read.

I guess this story is a mood piece about historical change with a focus on social class and what today we would call income equality.  Dr. Eszterhazy lives in a bustling metropolis in an alternate history 19th century, the capital of a multi-ethnic empire in the Balkans that I guess was inspired by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  This empire has a triple monarchy (one better than the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary) and is known as Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania.  The city is home to both both modern buildings and ancient ruins, to modern devices, like steam shovels, electric lights and telephones, and centuries-old rituals and superstitions, like poor people clamoring for the dust scarped yearly from a long dead saint's grave.  Esterhazy wanders around the town, seeing the poor working on a construction site, accepting alms, waiting in line for the aforementioned dust, etc.  Some impoverished old men remind him of the aged Emperor, and Eszterhazy addresses one and finds that it is the Emperor!  The Emperor tells him that some wise Jews inspired him to spend time among the poor; he also compares himself to Louis XV, quoting "after me, the deluge," suggesting that after he dies the empire will fall apart.

Later we are provided evidence that the Emperor had been in a coma all day, and his soul left his body to travel around the city and experience life from a different perspective.

Most stories which deal with historical change have the protagonist acting as a change agent, a rebel or reformer or innovator, but Esterhazy seems to be a sincere supporter of the Emperor and I think we are supposed to get a sense of foreboding from this story, to suspect that the death of the elderly Emperor is going to usher in a cataclysm like the French Revolution or World War I that will kill untold numbers of people and sweep away cultures which, while they have faults, perhaps have admirable elements whose destruction is to be lamented.  I detected similar ideas and themes in Enemy of My Enemy; I'm getting the feeling that Davidson is a sort of sad, romantic conservative, or maybe I am just projecting my own tragic view of life onto his work.

(Being the last story in the collection The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy, it is perhaps appropriate that "The King's Shadow Has No Limits" foreshadow and expound upon the passing of the book's setting.)

This is a well-wrought literary story, dense with description and allusion.  It is a success, but it is not exactly fun or thrilling--it is sad, but not cathartic the way a more extravagant tragedy might be; "The King's Shadow Has No Limits" is haunting rather than melodramatic.  I have to admit it is leaving me feeling kind of depressed; maybe I should have eaten more chocolate today.

"Conversation Piece" by Richard Christian Matheson (1979)

Here's a story from the son of the guy who wrote Steven Spielberg's best film and Vincent Price's best film.  "Conversation Piece" appeared first here in Whispers II, and Schiff liked it so much he also included it in his anthology Mad Scientists.  "Conversation Piece" also shows up in the Richard Christian Matheson collection Scars.

This is a gimmicky silly story; maybe it is supposed to be funny.  Most of it is taken up with the transcript of an interview, "A"s following "Q"s, bookended by the brief recollections and reflections of the journalist who posed the "Q"s.  Basically, the journalo interviews a guy who is just a head, a guy who was born in a normal healthy body and made money by selling body fluids and then body parts to medical scientists until he had sold almost everything.  We don't realize he is just a head until late in the story.  The interviewee's attitude is not that of a victim; he acts like his chosen career of selling off his body piece by piece is just a normal profession, saying it suits him and talking about how he sold this part to pay for his wedding and that part to pay for his daughter's school clothes, etc.  The journalist, at the end of the story, lays on the heavy symbolism, suggesting that we all surrender or sacrifice parts of ourselves, our honesty or convictions, for example, in our pursuit of a career and a satisfying sex and family life.

Acceptable.

"The Stormsong Runner" by Jack L. Chalker (1979)

I think I read a few Jack L. Chalker SF novels in my high school days in the 1980s, but all I can remember is that a party of people was on a space ship, searching for something and being chased by enemy space ships and all that usual stuff, and at one point they had to design a new life form, and they divvied up the design duty, with one person designing the head and another designing the body and whatever.  One guy got the job of designing the life form's penis, and there was a whole paragraph in which the guy described the penis's fascinating attributes (the word "telescoping" was used.)  Did I really read this or is this just a crazy dream I had that I have unfairly associated with Chalker?

Anyway, here we have a short story which first appeared here in Whispers II but would later be included in a Chalker collection and some anthologies of American ghost stories.  Boo!

Our narrator is a guy who got a degree in "elementary education" but had a hard time finding a position and devoted much of his time to booze, drugs, and women with the same dubious hobbies.  Some money falls into his lap after a car accident caused by the other driver, so he leaves the city and moves to the hillbilly country of West Virginia.  Chalker gives us some descriptions of how poor and illiterate and ignorant the people in the hills are, and also how proud they are, how close they are to nature and how they value people and their word more than materialistic and overly sophisticated city folk.

The narrator convinces the state to pay him to be a sort of peripatetic teacher of these country folk who refuse to have anything to do with conventional schooling.  Our ghost story involves a little girl (approximately 12) whom others consider a witch.  Little Cindy Lou Whittler (I suspect this name is a joke because Chalker also directly refers to Dr. Seuss in this story) believes she can control the weather and that her dead father speaks to her, telling her when to make it rain.  And sure enough, one day our narrator hears two voices from the Whittler shack, arguing--a man wants Cindy Lou to trigger a powerful storm, but the little girl says it will cause the dam to burst and kill the local people!

The ending of this story is anti-climactic.  The dam bursts, but nobody gets killed.  Cindy Lou doesn't have to suffer the guilt of wrecking the dam, because (she tells the narrator) her father the ghost, who has responsibility for the weather of the region, enlisted some other witch to make fall the rain, which was mandated by a still higher authority.  The narrator reflects that maybe everybody in this world has a purpose, even drug addicted losers like him (his purpose is to educate these illiterate poor people) and the impoverished people of Appalachia (who control the weather at the behest of Mother Nature or God?)

Lame.

"They Will Not Hush" by James Sallis and David Lunde (1974)

Lunde is new to me, but we've encountered James Sallis before.  I didn't like his experimental story from Quark 3, thought his experimental stories in Again, Dangerous Visions were alright, but could not recommend his experimental stories in Alternities.  The story here has an epigraph from Yeats, four lines from "The Madness of King Goll" about woodland creatures, cluing us in to the source of the story's title.

This is a sleep-inducing prose poem full of sentences like, "A doe, invisible in a dapple of sun and shadow, suddenly bounds down the slope before him," and "A door slapping shit, firmly, like the closing of a fist; a car gearing up, then fading quickly away."  I think it is about a guy who just graduated from college with a physics degree coming home to the forest to his family of witches; the witches are about to face some war or other trial, and the college kid burns his college books and prepares for "the Strengthening" of "the Agreed," who must face "Them"--the college kid is now the leader of the witches and their animal friends.

A total waste of your time.

"They Will Not Hush" first appeared in Whispers #4 and has not been reprinted since Whispers II came out.   

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The Lafferty is very good, but it has been downhill from there, from the successful Davidson to the OK R. C. Matheson to the weak Chalker and finally the pointless Sallis and Lunde production.  Hopefully this trend will be reversed when we read five more stories from Whispers II in our next episode.

The inside jacket flap text of my hardcover copy of Whispers II

Tales of Forbidden Acts from 1995 by Koja & Malzberg, Tem and Wagner

I'm still working the 1990s perversion desk!  In our last episode we confronted three tales of rape and death from Poppy Z. Brite's Love in Vein.  Today we subject ourselves to three visions from the 1995 anthology Forbidden Acts, edited by Nancy A. Collins and Edward E. Cramer.  I got my copy of Forbidden Acts on the clearance shelf at Half Price Books.  The cover is very lame, with lots of negative space, a boring picture, no blurbs and no famous names.  Was this a rush job or something?

Forbidden Acts has an introduction by Joe Bob Briggs, the B-movie review guy!  When I was still living with my parents in New Jersey my brother and I would watch all those B-movie TV shows with hosts like Gilbert Gottfried, Morgus the Magnificent, Commander U.S.A, Grandpa Al Lewis, and Briggs.  Those were the good old days!  Anyway, Briggs warns us that we will not "enjoy" the stories in Forbidden Acts, that they are "rude"and "brutal" and will "shock" and even "hurt" us.  Well, let's see if this anthology's offerings by four writers we've already talked about here at MPorcius Fiction Log will rudely brutalize us.

"Mysterious Elisions, Riotous Thrusts" by Kathe Koja and Barry Malzberg

A professional woman is in the middle of a bitter divorce from her second husband, Gerald.  She left her first husband for Gerald because Gerald was a good lay and was as sexually ravenous as she is, but Gerald started cheating on her before the first anniversary of their wedding.  Currently our main character lives alone, sexually frustrated and spending her free time getting drunk on scotch Gerald left behind.

While drunk she hears a sound at the door, and opens it to find an odd little monster has come to visit.  This thing, which I guess is like a volley-ball-sized blob or slug (it has "stalks" and "ganglia" and green blood) but with human-like hands and face, climbs up her legs and has sex with her, using its "claws" and "smile" to give her some of the best sex of her life!  Then it crawls away.

The second time the monster visits her, after it has exhausted her with its attentions, she realizes it has the face of Gerald!  The last sentences of the story invoke the names of Paolo and Francesca, the famous adulterous lovers from Dante, and hint that, like Paolo and Francesca, Gerald and our protagonist are in Hell, being punished because they let their passionate lust carry them away from their duty.  O lasso!

Rossetti's classic 1855 watercolor illustrating Canto V from Inferno

This one is pretty good, a crazy pornographic monster story grounded in believable human emotion; Koja and Malzberg handle both the insane monster stuff and the realistic relationship material well.  Koja and Malzberg completists may be forced to get a copy of Forbidden Acts; I don't think this story has been published in any other place.

"Blood Knot" by Steve Rasnic Tem

This is a story about how claustrophobic families can be, narrated by a guy with psychological problems who isn't good at detecting relationship boundaries; he was sexually attracted to his step-mother, for example, and to his own daughters.  Tem doesn't come out and say much about where these people live or their jobs or anything (besides that our narrator spent time in the Army), but I got a "redneck" or "hillbilly" vibe from the story, I guess because of the contractions and nonstandard grammar used in the dialogue.  "Rednecks" are a demographic that everybody feels comfortable looking down on, an "other" for people who champion diversity and are always criticizing other people for "othering" people.

The narrator's father had four wives, and may have killed one of them (she just disappeared after a loud night of drinking); he serves as a role model for the narrator. An example of his wisdom:  "It don't matter if you like your family or not.  You're tied to 'em; might as well accept that.  It's in the blood."  Tem takes advantage of the multiple meanings of "blood" in English, and there is a lot of talk about family ties ("blood knots") as well as about menstrual blood.

The narrator longed to have a family of his own, but had trouble attracting women. When he did marry it was to a woman much younger than he is (just as his father's fourth wife, the one our narrator lusted after, was much younger than his father.)  The narrator doesn't know how to be a good husband or father, and found living with his wife and three daughters difficult.  The smell of them during their periods was particularly upsetting.  When the daughters started dating he went off the deep end, and, as far as I can tell, murdered them with a sharp implement ("cutting" those blood knots the way Alexander cut the Gordian knot.)  It is possible he cannibalized them, or just drank their blood (he compares his daughters' breasts to apples, onions and tomatoes, and has drinking blood on his mind, comparing his wife and daughters at one point to vampires.)  This is one of those stories in which everything is hinted at rather than baldly stated, so maybe I am misinterpreting something.

I'm going to have to give "Blood Knot" a thumbs down; I didn't feel like the energy spent trying to figure it out was a worthwhile investment, because the plot and characters didn't interest me or inspire any feeling in me.  Some guy I can't identify with in some place I don't know about murdered his family because he was insane and/or came from a broken home--"Blood Knot" is like the news stories I ignore every day when they pop up on the computer screen or the radio.  Maybe people who are into serial killer stories and child abuse stories will like "Blood Knot."  I know Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling included it in the ninth Year's Best Fantasy and Horror so I have to assume I'm voicing the minority opinion here.   

Back cover of Forbidden Acts

"The Picture of Johnathan Collins" by Karl Edward Wagner

Wagner of course is famous for those grim sword and sorcery tales of Kane and for writing and editing horror stories.  I've mentioned before how much I like his story "Sticks."  I also like "The Picture of Jonathan Collins," though not as much. This story appears in two later anthologies of Wagner's horror stories, so you don't have to track down a copy of Forbidden Acts to read it.

Collins is a Londoner.  During the Second World War his house suffered a direct hit from a German bomb.  He was in a coma for a week and awoke with no memory of his past--he even had to learn to walk and talk again!  Any records that may have been in the house were destroyed by the bombing. Forty years later he still looks thirty years old, and still lacks any memory of his pre-war life.

Collins is a bit of a lady's man, and also a collector of turn of the century pornogrpahy.  At an auction he purchases some late Victorian photos, and finds among them pictures of two men dressed in women's clothes having anal sex.  Close examination suggests the active member of the pair is Oscar Wilde, while the passive participant is none other than himself!  Collins starts having flashbacks to homosexual experiences with Wilde, and begins to suspect he is the model for the title character of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Collins seeks help from fringe elements of English society in figuring out the truth and finding the painting or photograph or whatever it is that has kept him young and alive all these decades, so that he can safeguard it and ensure his immortality.  There's a fraudulent psychic cat lady, a transvestite dominatrix, and a gay collector of old pornography.  Even though he has been straight since the war Collins has gay sex with the transvestite (at eighty pounds a session!) as a means of jogging his memory. After being "buggered," as our cousins across the pond say, Collins faints and has vivid memories of the photo sessions that produced the pictures he purchased at auction, at which Wilde "used him like a girl" and then abandoned him.

Collins' quest is ultimately disastrous; he unwittingly puts the image that renders him immortal at risk and suffers a horrible, and long overdue, death.

This story has a strong central idea and is well plotted and structured.  It is also explicit (in every sense of the word) and easy to understand, unlike some of the oblique and obscure stories I have been reading in these 1990s porno anthologies.  I do think "The Picture of Jonathan Collins" is a little too long.  In an apparent effort to shock or offend "square" readers and amuse or even arouse "hip" and gay readers, the story is full of explicit scenes of homosexual sex and detailed descriptions of S&M clothing. Maybe other people will enjoy these scenes, but I thought they were too long and repetitive and dragged the story down a bit.

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I wouldn't say these stories "hurt" or "shocked" me, though the Koja & Malzberg story and the Wagner tale are both outside the norm with their explicit depictions of sex with a monster and exhibitionsitic gay sex.  Both of those stories are worthwhile reads with engaging plots and characters and references to canonical literary works.  The Tem story about broken families and murder feels like an episode of one of those TV shows "ripped from today's headlines" about cops chasing perverts, but without the cops.  Well, two out of three ain't bad.  

Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII: The Final Battle: Steve Sneyd, Charles L. Grant, Harlan Ellison & Richard A. Moore

I see a light at the end of the tunnel!  Today we are reading the final four tales from Karl Edward Wagner's The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII, DAW No. 393, published in 1980.  This batch includes two famous writers, Harlan Ellison and Charles Grant, and two I am not familiar with, Steve Sneyd and Richard A. Moore.

"A Fly One" by Steve Sneyd (1979)

This is a brief (six and a half pages) first person narrative from a British detective, Vrczynski, whom Sneyd makes a point of telling us is foreign-born. A fourteen-year-old girl has been murdered; there are signs of sexual assault.  Vrczynski has no clues, but when a freakish hunchback comes into the station he realizes, in a flash of intuition, that this weirdo is the killer. The freako explains to the gumshoe that he needed the blood of a virgin to complete the magic spell that would give him wings--as Vrczynski watches the wings start bursting out of the sorcerer's hump! Vrczynski rips the wings off, and keeps them at his home, in alcohol, as a trophy!  The wizard, who was proclaiming that he was the next stage of human evolution seconds before Vrczynski tore his wings off, goes to whatever British people call the funny farm...maybe "nuttery?"

This is a cynical story, depicting a fallen, corrupt world.  The cops beat and trick the prisoners to get information, the family members of the slain girl either don't care she is dead or use the opportunity to get attention, the way the evil wizard guy has to murder a vulnerable, innocent, person to work his spell implies that the only way to "get ahead" and "make progress" is by exploiting others, and Vrczynski acts as judge, jury and punisher, ignoring the long English tradition of a jury trial.  Maybe, like Russell Kirk's story about criminals in this same volume, it makes sense to consider this story in the context of rising crime rates in the 1970s.

One thing to ruminate over is why Sneyd has the detective be foreign-born.  To provide an outsider's view of British society?  To emphasize the decay of British culture by having the smartest and hardest-working character in the story be one of non-British background?  To provide a chance to accuse the police force of discrimination (Vrczynski claims few foreign-born officers achieve seniority)?  Maybe Vrczynski is a refugee from communism (his name sounds Polish, right?) and so he serves as a reminder of international conflict and/or government tyranny?

A good story: economical, atmospheric, and full of interest.  Like Dennis Etchison's "The Dead Line," "A Fly One" was first published in Whispers 13-14.  It would be included in Whispers III in 1981.

"Needle Song" by Charles L. Grant (1979)

Like Harlan Ellison's "In the Fourth Year of the War," "Needle Song" was first unleashed on the world in Midnight Sun #5.  It has been reprinted a few times, including in the 2012 collection Scream Quietly: The Best of Charles L. Grant.  As you probably know, Grant is famous for practicing and advocating for "quiet horror." How sotto voce is "Needle Song"?

Pretty sotto voce, but with a bloody gong at the end.  The ten pages of the story switch back and forth between brief paragraphs in italics about an old blind woman and long passages in normal type about two kids, Caren and Eric.  It seems that Hawthorne Street was a happy neighborhood where everybody got along and people had decent jobs and stable families.  Then a blind old woman moved into the house number 136. This weird character refused to interact with the rest of the neighborhood.  Then she began regularly playing the piano at 9:00 PM; the music could be heard throughout the neighborhood.

The town suddenly has good luck; people were winning lotteries, getting raises, Caren's brother got into a high class university, and little Eric was discovered to be a musical prodigy!  But then the little concerts ended.  Everybody's luck turned sour; people lost their jobs, Caren's brother became a drug addict, the lawns and trees started dying, a house burnt down.  Then the music starts up again, irregularly.  Eric and Caren believe that the old woman is sucking the happiness and good luck out of the town.

The italicized paragraphs suggest they are on to something--the blind woman, after one of her little concerts, takes a magic needle and sews colors onto a black square of cloth.  "One day, she thought, she would sew herself a new dress of a thousand colors and be young again."

Caren and Eric, after abandoning schemes to shoot or decapitate her, try to foil the witch by relating happy memories to each other and laughing enthusiastically during one of her sorcerous serenades; they think this will show the witch that she can't hurt them and convince her to give up and leave.  They believe they have succeeded, but then Eric slips and smashes his mouth into the corner of a table, ruining his hopes of a career as a trumpet player.

This story is just alright.  The mechanism of what the witch is actually doing is a little mysterious, what with all the starting and stopping, the good and bad luck, etc. Maybe her music at first brought good luck to the town, and then took the luck away, like how a farmer fertilizes and seeds a field before reaping it.  There are also hints that the entire region or nation is suffering some kind of economic downturn, that the witch travels from town to town devastating one after the other.  The central idea is OK, but the way the story is constructed is kind of confusing, the style is pedestrian and nothing about the story evoked any emotion.

"All the Birds Come Home to Roost" by Harlan Ellison (1979)

I always associate the phrase "the chickens come home to roost" with Malcolm X and Ward Churchill and the idea that murders like those of JFK and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were retribution or poetic justice inflicted on whites because of Western misdeeds of the past like slavery and colonialism.  The phrase is used more widely however, and apparently originated in the early nineteenth century.  Ellison modifies it to "birds," I suspect, as a reference to the use of the word "bird" to refer to a pretty girl, and maybe because "chicken" evokes comedic images, like rubber chickens or the funky chicken dance, while "bird" is somewhat poetic.

"All the Birds Come Home to Roost" first appeared in Playboy, and has been included in a number of anthologies, like 2013's Psycho-Mania and The Playboy Book of Science Fiction, as well as the 1987 Essential Ellison collection.

Michael Kirxby is a lawyer, in bed with a girlfriend.  He tells her about the unhealthy relationship he had with his wife of some 20 years ago, Cindy, how her infidelities and psychological problems made her difficult to deal with, how while under the stress of studying for the bar one day he snapped and gave her a terrific beating.  And how he divorced Cindy and she ended up in a mental institution.  "She very nearly took me with her to the madhouse.  I got away just in time."

After this confession, over the succeeding days, Kirxby has apparently random encounters with former girlfriends.  He comes to realize that he is meeting all of his lovers in reverse order; each woman from his past he meets and sleeps with brings him one step closer to Cindy, his first lover.  When he meets Cindy again will she exact some terrible revenge?  As he continues to meet women from his past he becomes more and more desperate and more and more mentally unhinged.

Ellison writes the story in a smooth style, and it is well-structured.  It didn't inspire any feeling in me, though, with its clever but incredible central idea and unsympathetic protagonist.  It reminded me of an episode of The Twilight Zone or one of those old EC Comics, though with its numerous references to the unsavory side of sex (e.g., "the wet spot," erectile dysfunction, and female frigidity) it is one that cries out for an "adults only!" label.  Moderately good.

"The Devil Behind You" by Richard A. Moore (1979)

This is a good finale to the collection; "The Devil Behind You" is genuinely suspenseful, surprising, and depicts something horrible.  At seven pages it is nice and tight.

An eight-year-old boy from a broken family loiters in the woods by the church on Sunday rather than attend services; the rabble-rousing preacher scares him, and the congregation doesn't like him because of his disreputable mother and absent father.  In the woods he is accosted by an escaped convict, who forces him to sneak into the church to steal a set of keys for one of the cars in the parking lot.  The impressionable child thinks the criminal may be the Devil himself, to the felon's amusement. In the final paragraph of the story the child makes a bold move that I thought would save his life, but I, like he, had been tricked--the boy's brief and unhappy life is over.

A crime story (it first appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine) in which a small boy is murdered perhaps deserves to be called exploitative, but, for me, it achieved the goal that Wagner set for the stories he selected for this anthology: it created "a convincing mood of fear and unease."  (Despite Karl and I liking it, "The Devil Behind You" is Richard A. Moore's only fiction credit at isfdb; there is also a "Richard Moore" listed who has two stories.)

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The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII as a whole has to be counted a success; of the 16 stories all but two or three show merit, and even the clunkers (the anti-gun story and the ghost motorcycle story) are odd and memorable in an amusing way.  The collection shows great variety; there are stories by famous authors and stories by new and minor writers, left-wing and right-wing stories, stories sympathetic to religion and hostile to religion, supernatural stories, science-fiction stories, psychological stories, and realistic crime stories.  Wagner, in his first time up at bat as editor of The Year's Best Horror Stories, did a solid job for DAW and the speculative fiction community, and I feel comfortable recommending The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII to horror fans.      

Year's Best Horror VIII: Part 3: Alan Ryan, Kevin Lyons, Russell Kirk & Robert Keefe

Here comes the third installment of our journey into 1979's nightmares with Karl Edward Wagner, who, as he explains on the first page of The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII, cast a wide net in his quest for stories that "create a convincing mood of fear and unease."

"Sheets" by Alan Ryan (1979)

Here we witness some of the snobbery people who think they are smart and/or educated feel for those who work in retail or at other low status jobs.  I am sensitive to this kind of thing, having witnessed such contempt at close range among New York academics and having been (all too credibly, I fear) accused of it myself.

George April, an unemployed teacher, resorts to taking a job at Macy's.  The boredom is "crushing, a think enveloping fog...but the frustration came from the knowledge that he alone of all of them was the only one who felt it....How can they not be bored...how can they stand it....what do they think about while they stare into space...?"  He works in the sheets department during a white sale, and is expected to be familiar with all the different patterns; there are about fifty patterns on display. The boredom of the job begins driving poor George insane, and, when at the insistence of his wife, he takes advantage of his discount and buys new sheets for their own bed, he dreams or hallucinates that the butterflies printed on the sheets come to life and murder him.

The realistic stuff about working a job you don't like was alright, reminding me a little of Charles Bukowski's Post Office or Factotum, or Henry Miller bitching about working for the telegram office.  But the hallucinations felt too long and too silly, and did not jive* with the realistic sections.  I guess I have to give "Sheets" an "OK" rating.

"Sheets" first saw light of day in Chrysalis 5.  Will Errickson has a number of interesting posts at his fun blog Too Much Horror Fiction about Ryan's work as a horror writer and anthologist; check them out here.

*For decades I've been one of the people who uses "jive" to mean "goes along with" and "jibe" to mean "a taunt," and despite recently discovering that this may be incorrect, I'm sticking to it. 

"Billy Wolfe's Riding Spirit" by Kevin A. Lyons (1979)

This story first appeared in Easyriders, which Wagner describes as a "free-wheeling biker magazine that also carries some fine fiction."  Lyons, like your humble blogger, is a graduate of Rutgers University.  There are only two publications listed for "Kevin A. Lyons" in the isfdb.

This five-page story is about a ghost motorcycle!  In my home state of New Jersey!  Every full moon, at midnight, a "real long chopper" drives recklessly from east to west on Route 80, past towns I am familiar with, like Dover (where I would catch the train to Manhattan) and Rockaway (location of "the mall," where I purchased AD&D modules and Fritz Leiber and Piers Anthony paperbacks at the Paperback Booksmith in the '80s and tried without success to date up a pale black-haired art student who worked at the Museum Company Store in the '90s).  The state police pursue the biker, whom they believe must be scofflaw Billy Wolfe, but he always escapes near the Delaware Water Gap.

Our narrator works for the state, picking up dead deer from the highway and carting them to the rendering plant.  One day he is following a wounded deer into the woods, and he finds Billy Wolfe's corpse!  And the corpse of his bike!  The corpses are quite old, proving what we already suspected and what I already told you, that Billy Wolfe (and his chopper) are ghosts!

It is fun to see the unimportant towns you spent time in as a kid in print, but this story is a silly trifle.  Put another "OK" on the scoreboard.

"Lex Talionis" by Russell Kirk (1979)

Like Hugh B. Cave's "From the Lower Deep," "Lex Talionis" first appeared in David Schiff's Whispers II.   As all you Latinists know, "Lex Talionis" means "the law of retaliation," the principle that the punishment should fit the crime.  Considering the date it was published, maybe we should think of the story as a criticism of lenient criminal justice policies.

Russell Kirk is famous as an erudite conservative intellectual, more the traditionalist religion and order type of conservative than the free market and small government type, and it shows in this story.  Again and again we are reminded of how civilization and public morals are in decay, and Kirk doesn't shy away from paraphrasing Pelagius and Saint Augustine and using this story as a forum to discuss Catholic doctrine.  If George Hay's story in our last episode suggested that Satan was real, Kirk in "Lex Talionis" asserts that Hell must be real, that Hell is necessary if there is to be any justice in the universe.

Back cover of
The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII

The plot: Eddie Mahaffy, after spending time at sea, foolishly joins a ne'er-do-well relative in an armed robbery.  When someone gets killed in the commission of the robbery, Eddie ends up in prison for life.  In prison Eddie devotes himself to learning and religion, and tries to stay out of the way of Butte, the rapist who, though an inmate, due to his tremendous strength and important outside connections is de facto king of the penitentiary.  But when Butte starts torturing someone, Eddie challenges him, and Butte and his lackeys beat Eddie to the brink of death.

We learn all that background via periodic flashbacks, presented out of chronological order.  At the start of the story Eddie is out of prison, and visits a church and then a bar.  At the bar he encounters Butte.  Butte wants Eddie, the only man to ever stand up to him, to help him break into an old mansion in a once fine, now crime-ridden and semi-abandoned, neighborhood to retrieve a pile of money.  Butte hid the money in there after raping and murdering the middle-class inhabitants, who had stuck around after all the other decent people had fled the area.

Eddie accompanies Butte to the house, where Butte learns to his horror what has been foreshadowed to us readers several times: Eddie died of complications from the beating Butte meted out to him, and is a ghost, an instrument of justice sent by God to deal with Butte.

I sometimes feels like almost all speculative fiction is written by socialist atheists and libertarian atheists, while the talented Catholic SF authors like R. A. Lafferty and Gene Wolfe express their religious beliefs in oblique ways.  So the way Kirk baldly asserts that we are going to live forever, that Hell was built by divine love, that this world is corrupt and evil but it matters little because we must focus on our eternal souls' destination, is kind of refreshing.  This story doesn't just have a religious subtext, it is an in-your-face religious text.  An atheist myself, I wouldn't seek out a steady diet of such material, but it is an interesting change of pace.  

"Lex Talionis" is perhaps a little too long, but the style is good and I should probably know more than I do about Pelagius and Saint Augustine, so I don't begrudge Kirk for giving me a precis of their thought.  Moderate recommendation.

"Entombed" by Robert Keefe (1979)

This story is Robert Keefe's sole credit at isfdb.  Keefe is an academic, an expert on Gothic literature, and "Entombed" first appeared in a small press literary journal, Gothic.

"Entombed" is a mainstream literary story with no supernatural content, as far as I can tell.  A teenaged boy has a difficult life: his father left before he was born, and he lives with his mother and aunt, two annoying women who never stop complaining and yelling.  He has a job at a diner, and had a good relationship with the cook (a drunk), but the cook has moved away, vanishing unexpectedly without saying goodbye or telling anybody where he was going.

The boy was fascinated by mummy horror movies as a younger kid, and recently become fascinated by the Egyptian Wing of the art museum.  For several days in a row he has come to the museum when it opens in the morning, and sat in the Egyptian Wing, with the mummies and sarcophagi, for hours.  Today he has lost track of the time, and finds himself locked in the museum overnight.  The story ends as the sun is going down and the room is getting dark.

This story, about the horrors of our real lives and how we try to escape them in art and entertainment, is not bad.  I thought it a mistake that Alan Ryan in "Sheets" had scenes in which the sheets came to life and massacred the protagonist, so it is probably wise that Keefe did not have a scene in which the mummy of the princess came to life to reveal the boy was the spiritual descendent of a pharaoh and take him away to a better life or whatever.

Mild recommendation.

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

Not a bad crop of stories; each has a particular point of view, be it that of  a Catholic intellectual, bitter veteran of Macy's, Gothic lit aficionado or New Jersey habitué.

Only four stories yet remain in DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII. Stay tuned for our next episode!

More late '70s horror: Davis Grubb, John Tibbetts, Eddy C. Bertin & George Hay

Let's read four horror stories by people I have never heard of!  I liked the first four stories in Karl Edward Wagner's The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII; let's hope ol' Karl has picked four more winners for us!

"The Baby-Sitter" by Davis Grubb (1978)

Wagner in his introduction tells us Grubb is "in the front ranks of writers of Southern regionalism." This story, however, is set in my home state of New Jersey (or as Meg of the year 3485 would put it, "Joysy.")  Is there any chance this story is going to celebrate the high culture, productive industry, and world-class agriculture that make the Garden State a wonderful place to grow up, attend university, and build a family?  (No, there is not.)

"The Baby-Sitter" reads like a PSA from a gun-control advocacy group, and is an attack on American (perhaps all modern) society.  There is no particular reason to set the story in New Jersey--Paramus is just a stand in for "AnyTown, USA."  The story is not set in New York or the South so that readers do not mistake it for a denunciation of rednecks or a meditation on urban crime or whatever; Grubb wants to make sure we get that his gripe is with all 50 of the states and every human being, from city slicker to country boy.

A Vietnam vet, Jim, owns an M-16.  (I don't know anything about gun laws; could private residents of New Jersey legally own an M-16 in 1978?  It is not 100% clear if the weapon in the story is capable of full automatic fire.)  He and his wife Jan are going out for the evening, and hire teenage Marion, who is reading Future Shock, to baby-sit their twin five-year-old boys, Joe and Jim Junior, and six-month-old girl, Sally.  While Mom and Dad are away the boys get a hold of the rifle, wrestle over it, and accidentally shoot up the house, shattering Mom's Ming vase and other valuables.  When Marion runs upstairs to see if the baby was hit, the boys take turns shooting at her until she is dead.

A main theme of "The Baby-Sitter" is collective guilt.  Grubb asserts that all of society is to blame for the evil or foolish acts of individuals:

Marion watched their faces watching hers then and she felt her own face flood and she knew suddenly how every guilt in the world is shared.  Because it did not matter who had pulled the trigger....  When Joe pulled it so had Jim Junior.  So had Jan and Jim.  And so, inexorably and most terribly of all, had Marion.    

I'm not impressed with the story's anti-individualistic "society made me do it" politics. Does the story have artistic merit I can admire anyway?  Not really.  There is no suspense, as it is clear from the beginning that the gun is going to be the "villain" of the piece.  On the first page we get this passage:

"Jim has a gun," she [Jan] said cryptically.  "Or did I mention that?"

And for a reason she could not understand then, Marion shivered.  Was it the chill of the November night?  Or some sense of some thing, some unfathomable, unknown thing to come in the night which lay before her.

The story dispenses with moral agency, so there is no drama: how can there be any drama when everyone is to blame for whatever goes wrong and the focus of the story is a quotidian inanimate object?  The story is also too long--there is page after page of the five-year-old boys arguing over and wrestling for the rifle while the baby-sitter watches them impotently.  The characters are symbols rather than real people, so who cares who gets blasted?

People who hate guns and/or modern society may like this one for its politics, but I'm giving it a thumbs down.  It first appeared in Grubb's collection The Siege of 318: Thirteen Mystical Stories.    

"The Well at the Half Cat" by John Tibbetts (1979)

Frank Vincy is a sensitive 29-year-old Englishman who has recently been released from the mental hospital following a painful divorce.  Vincy has decided to get out of the rat race and fix up and run an inn, the Half Cat, out in the countryside at a village which has maintained its Olde World character.

Vincy's first guests are a gruff intimidating working-class man and his beautiful wife; oddly enough, they have no luggage.  The wife flirts with Vincy, and he is immediately obsessed (remember, he's sensitive!)  We readers, but not Vincy, learn that decades ago the Half Cat closed after its owner had an affair with a beautiful woman, which resulted in her being murdered by her husband, who was in turn killed in a fight with the innkeeper.  The innkeeper threw the corpses down the well, and then died himself, either falling or jumping into the well.  Vincy's first guests are the ghosts of the unfaithful wife and her violent husband, and they reenact the deadly drama that ended their lives, this time with Vincy playing the innkeeper role.

This story is long, with lots of descriptions of sights and smells and sounds and of such humdrum activity as the repair work on the inn.  It didn't engage my emotions; I'll rate this one "OK."

"The Well at the Half Cat" first appeared in Eldritch Tales No. 5.  John Tibbetts only has two fiction credits at isfdb, and four art credits.  But don't worry about his career; Renaissance man Tibbetts is a critic who has published extensively on film, music and literature (sample titles from Wikipedia: “Young Berlioz Revealed,” “The Case of the Forgotten Detectives: The Unknown Crime Fiction of G.K. Chesterton,” and “Beyond the Camera: The Untold Story Behind the Making of Hoop Dreams”and is also a professional pianist.

"My Beautiful Darkling" by Eddy C. Bertin (1979)

Belgian Bertin publishes in six languages, and originally wrote "My Beautiful Darkling" (the title of which comes from Baudelaire) in Dutch; it is the title story of the collection Mijn Mooie Duisterlinge.  Wagner informs us that Bertin himself translated the story into English for inclusion in The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII.

The bulk of the story is the transcript of an arrestee's interview with the police. The suspect relates how some time in the past his head was injured in a motor accident, and this gave him the power to sense other people's emotions.  He can't quite read minds, but he can, as he puts it, "taste thought," and, in context, make an educated guess at what people are thinking.

The arrestee likes to attend fairs and amusement parks, to taste the emotions of the crowds of people.  One evening at such a fair his mind touches that of a physically attractive and mentally strange, even inhuman, woman, Cathy, whom, he detects, has the same power he has! They have sex in the shadows, and it is perfect, exhausting, sex because they can feel each other's emotions and need not speak a word to each other.  He and Cathy meet regularly every few nights at different fairs, never speaking but enjoying a wonderful, if exhausting, mental and physical union each time.  But then one evening he can't find her, and is arrested while desperately accosting people at a fair, seeking Cathy (and, it is hinted, masturbating.)

After the transcript comes five pages of conventional third-person omniscient narration starring the arrestee's shrink.  The doctor gets the guy out of jail, explaining that he is a harmless victim of schizophrenia, that his mental abilities are a product of his imagination and Cathy but "an alternative shard of his own personality," a simulacrum of a woman named Catherine who rejected him shortly before his drunken auto accident.  His patient is going through a crisis, beginning to fear Cathy is going to abandon him--a sign sanity is returning with the realization that Cathy is not real.

But then, when the doctor is walking through the fairgrounds to his car, an attractive woman beckons to him from the shadows, physically and telepathically!. He follows the creature his patient calls "Cathy" into the darkness; she is, apparently, some kind of psychic vampire who steals a person's life force, and is dumping the patient to take up with the younger and more vigorous doctor.

This story is not bad.  Moderate recommendation.

"A Serious Call" by George Hay (1979)    

This six-page story is just a trifle, though well-written.  All you intellectual types may enjoy the copious name dropping that goes on: Lytton Strachey, Karl Popper, Carl Jung, and H. M. Tomlinson are among those who are casually mentioned.

The narrator relates why he, while attending a college in an industrial section of northern London, abandoned his thesis on the ghost stories of M. R. James, which sought to debunk James's belief in evil.  A Rev. Paul Tremblett came to give a guest lecture on good and evil--the lecture coincided with the most ferocious thunderstorm the narrator has ever experienced.  The Reverend explained that Satan is real, and very clever, adept at doing his evil work while at the same time convincing people he is merely a myth.  At the end of the lecture the Reverend stepped outside and was immediately killed by a bolt of lightning.

"A Serious Call" first appeared in the first edition of Ghosts & Scholars, a periodical devoted to M. R. James, a famous and important British medievalist and writer of ghost stories whose work I have never read. (Every day I lament my poor education, but I only have myself to blame...and maybe the Atari 2600, the Commodore 64, Gary Gygax, id software, etc....)  So I have no idea if Hay has managed to capture the spirit or style of James's work, which I believe was his intention.

The style is good and I appreciate all the name-dropping and the London details, so marginal to moderate recommendation for this one.  I should try to find out which of M. R. James's stories are considered his "best" or "most representative;" it appears they are easily accessible at gutenberg.org.

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

Not up to the standard set in the first batch, alas, but, taken as a group, not too bad. Four more stories, hand picked by Wagner from divers sources, await us in our next episode.

Horror from 1979: Dennis Etchison, Ramsey Campbell, Harlan Ellison & Hugh B. Cave

Let's get horrified!  I recently purchased a paperback copy of DAW's eighth The Year's Best Horror Stories, the first installment edited by Karl Edward Wagner. As I have said on this blog before, Wagner wrote one of my favorite horror stories, "Sticks," and is perhaps most famous for his sword and sorcery tales about Kane, which I found uneven and underwhelming. Wagner also co-wrote with David Drake the entertaining space-alien-in-Ancient-Rome novel, Killer, which I talked about here recently.

I've decided to read every story in this volume, DAW No. 393, UJ1549, which includes numerous stories by people I have never read before, as well as people I have mixed feelings about, so there is no telling what is going to happen.

"The Dead Line" by Dennis Etchison (1979)

We're off to a horrifying start with this one.  On the first page of the story the narrator is in the hospital, visiting his comatose wife.  When nobody is looking he breaks a bottle, grinds the shards under his foot, and then sprinkles the tiny pieces of glass into his wife's eyes.  When I read this I think I made that face I make when I drive by a deer that has been hit by a tractor trailer, a regular event out here in America's heartland.  "Uchhhhhkk...."

At first I thought the narrator some monster who hated his wife, but Etchison quickly overturned my expectations; his story is full of disturbing details of bodily mutilation, but proves to be a brief rumination on medical ethics.  "The Dead Line" is a science-fiction story set in the near future, when the hospital can keep a brain dead person's body alive indefinitely, and harvest the blood and tissues for years, for use in treatments of others and for experiments.  Knowing his wife is not quite dead and is regularly subject to all kinds of invasive procedures causes the narrator tremendous anguish, and he seeks to sabotage her body in order to render it useless, so she can finally die and be buried.  He meets a woman whose husband has recently fallen into a coma, and passionately urges her to refuse to allow him to be admitted to the harvesting program, to bury him and achieve closure as soon as she can.

Disturbing, surprising, and dedicated to raising a moral dilemma; pretty good.

"The Dead Line" first appeared in Whispers 13-14, a semi-professional zine edited by Stuart David Schiff which attracted a lot of top talent.  The story has been reprinted numerous times.

"To Wake the Dead" by Ramsey Campbell (1979)

This is the prologue to Campbell's novel of the same title (well, in the U.S. I guess it was released under the title The Parasite) which won the August Derleth Award in 1981.  I've liked some Campbell stories and disliked others, so let's cross our fingers for this one.

A ten-year old girl accompanies some older kids and teens into an abandoned house, where it is said a person died a few months ago.  The leader of the group has set up a ouija board, and the kids appear to contact a spirit.  When the older kids flee the room the door locks behind them, leaving the ten-year-old trapped dark room, where she is assaulted by who-knows-what.

I found this story to be effective; it generates a sense of unease at its beginning that escalating to truly scary at the end.  It would be easy to criticize Campbell for piling on a surfeit of physical description of settings and objects, for using such a tired device as the ouija board (though maybe it wasn't so tired in '79), and for trying to manipulate us in a cheap way by having the victim be a little girl.  Despite the apparent validity of all these complaints, the story works.  The verbose description, the dialogue with the (purported) spirit, and the vulnerability of a small girl succeed in setting a tone of suspense, fear, and then terror.  I also think Campbell does a good job of channeling the feelings of a young child among adults and older children; the frustration of not quite belonging, of feeling like an inferior, the painful need to both show independence and win approval; the little girl comes off as a real person, which makes her ordeal at the end emotionally affecting.

Thumbs up!

"In the Fourth Year of the War" by Harlan Ellison (1979)

As with Campbell, I've enjoyed some Ellison stories and been unimpressed by others, so let's hope I get lucky again.

"In the Fourth Year of the War" reminded me of a Malzberg story, though more lushly written. A guy argues with a voice in his head (the war in the title is the narrator's struggle against this voice for dominance of his mind and body)--in the fourth year of this struggle the voice insists he murder his Uncle Carl!  The narrator hasn't seen or spoken to Carl in years!  But he has (perhaps dubious) reasons to think Carl ruined his father's life, and the voice triumphs.  So he travels from California to Chicago and disposes of Carl.  Revenge!  But the voice's bloodlust is not satiated!  As the voice's power over the narrator increases, more people who have contributed to the unhappiness of the narrator's life are slated to suffer vengeance for deeds of years long past!

This is a good psychological horror story, maybe more fun, with its clever details (the blue pinstripes on Uncle Carl's night shirt match the veins of his skinny legs) and its little jokes (the murderous voice sometimes does an impression of Humphrey Bogart!) than actually scary, but quite entertaining.  As Etchison does in "The Dead Line," Ellison invites us to identify (maybe just a little!) with the destructive protagonist, to consider to what extent his anti-social acts are justified by psychological trauma and the selfishness of others.

A good story.  "In the Fourth Year of the War" first appeared in Gary Hoppenstand's Midnight Sun Five, like Whispers, a well-regarded semi-pro zine.

"From the Lower Deep" by Hugh B. Cave (1979)

Cave's name comes up all the time in horror anthologies and criticism, and he has a stack of Lifetime Achievement Awards to his credit.  But when I borrowed a copy of a novel by Cave from the New York Public Library at 5th Avenue and 41st Street eight or ten years ago (I think it must have been The Mountains of Madness), I was flabbergasted at how boring it was.  The whole book was a guy walking around a tropical island! (At least that is all I can remember.)

Well, the time has come to give Cave another chance.  I've already read three good stories in The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII--can Cave make it four?

Matthew Greene, professional photographer, owns a home on an island in an East Coast lake.  While he is on assignment in Connecticut he gets word that there has been an earthquake and a flood at the island, so he rushes back.  There he discovers gruesome hints that indicate that the earthquake has opened up a cave and unleashed on the island man-eating frog/blob monsters!  The ultimate horror: Greene's housekeeper goes insane when she sees a pack of the monsters eating a woman, and witnesses her nine-year-old son, believed to have drowned months ago, chowing down right there with them!

This story is OK.  The style is not very good, pedestrian with some sentences I thought clumsy.

"From the Lower Deep" was first published in Whispers II, an anthology published by Doubleday and edited by Stuart David Schiff which included new stories as well as some material from Schiff's Whispers magazine.  Tarbandu read Whispers II in its entirety a few years ago; check out his assessment of its contents here.

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I'm quite happy with The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII so far.  Wagner seems to know how to pick 'em.  The next four stories are by people I have never even heard of, so it will be interesting to see in our next episode if they can maintain the high standards set by famous pros Ellison, Campbell, Cave and Etchison.

Killer by David Drake & Karl Edward Wagner

The lizard-ape bounced to the earth like a cat, as the last two snarling hounds sprang for it together.  Spinning and slashing as it ducked under and away, the thing was literally a blur of motion.  Deadly motion.

I read a library copy of Killer when it was relatively new, in my teens, and parts of it have always stuck with me, maybe because when I read it I knew nothing about Ancient Rome.  Recently I was in South Carolina, and visited 2nd & Charles, a chain of used books/music stores which I guess fills a market niche similar to that filled by Half Price Books out here in the Central Time Zone.  (As a kid growing up in New Jersey I pitied people in the Central Time Zone, who had less time to do their homework and eat dinner before the prime time TV shows came on, and who would have to watch Johnny Carson at the early hour of 10:30.)  2nd & Charles had a copy of the same edition of Killer I had read in my youth, so I brought it back to my Middle West HQ and this weekend read it.

Nota bene: Only one of the book's
twenty-seven chapters is in space

The galaxy is ruled by the methane-breathing Cora, a race of varicolored blobs.  These killjoys have outlawed the blood sports that are such a common feature of SF stories, but oxygen-breathing biped RyRelee isn't going to let that harsh the buzz of fight fans everywhere.  RyRelee is a kind of secret agent or bounty hunter hired now and again by the Cora, but he has a side business supplying monsters to the arenas still in operation on scofflaw planets. Unfortunately, one of his monster transports just crashed on some Class 6 planet the primitive natives call Earth, and a female phile, just about the meanest creature known to interstellar civilization, is now loose in central Italy, the center of the empire ruled by Domitian, the eleventh Roman Emperor.  The phile, which the Earthlings take to calling a "lizard-ape," is almost unkillable, and if RyRelee doesn't capture it quick it will give birth to enough little philes to swamp the planet and exterminate all native life.  The Cora feel a responsibility to protect the peoples of primitive planets like Earth, so if the phile starts reproducing they plan to nuke the Mediterranean region from orbit to protect the rest of the humanity.

Before RyRelee sets foot on Earth (the plastic surgery which will allow him to blend in among the people of Italy takes a little time) Domitian puts Lycon the Greek on the lizard-ape case.  Lycon is a 40-something veteran of the Roman legions, the gladiatorial arena, and a career as a beastcatcher; he hunts tigers, lions, and other animals and brings 'em back alive to Rome.  When RyRelee presents himself to Domitian (in disguise as an Egyptian), the Emperor instructs Lycon and RyRelee to work together to catch the monster.  Part of the tension in the story comes from the fact that while the basically decent Lycon and the Cora are determined to destroy the menace, money-grubbing RyRelee and twisted sicko Domitian want to catch it alive (Domitian wants to watch it massacre animals in the arena.)

Did Baen pay a kid in candy bars for this cover?

Killer is a pretty straightforward adventure story.  There is an omniscient narrator, and we see the story unfold from the point of view of several characters, including the blue-scaled, bird-footed monster itself. There is a lot of action, and quite a bit of gore as the phile eviscerates animals and people and the sadistic Domitian tortures and murders people.  (Killer is one of those stories which on the one hand condemns people's bloodlust while on the other appealing to it.)

The adventure/horror elements work, as do the science fiction elements.  The techniques RyRelee uses to try to fit into Roman society, and the growing suspicions of canny Earthlings like Lycon of this strange man who claims to be an Egyptian but speaks Greek and Latin with weird accents and does odd things like touching sizzling hot metal without flinching, are engaging and add suspense.

All the references to Roman history and culture add another layer of interest to the book, and Drake and Wagner also set up lots of parallelisms between the human and alien characters.  The Cora are kind of like the Romans (arrogant jerks who make wide use of auxiliaries from other races/ethnicities and maintain order across a broad empire), Lycon is like RyRelee (both hunters who go to exotic lands on the periphery of civilization), and like the phile (both are expert killers who have been trained to fight in the arena for the pleasure of their so-called superiors.)

Killer is an entertaining mix of elements exploitative (depravity and gore) and highbrow (mentions of Horace and Euripides, descriptions of life in Ancient Rome.)  I enjoyed it.

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

There are eight pages of ads at the back of my 1985 printing of Killer.  The final two pages constitute an order form, while each of the other pages is devoted to a single publication.  Unfortunately most of these full page ads, which attempt to reproduce cover illustrations in black and white, look pretty bad.

Readers of any of the eighteen advertised books (and Killer, of course) are invited to comment.  Of all of them I have only read Jack Vance's Cugel's Saga, which I adore, of course.  I have read the title story of Joanna Russ's The Zanzibar Cat; it was thought-provoking, but not entertaining, like something a college professor would assign you to read to get you to think about the place of literature in society or something.

John Willett has only one novel listed at isfdb, but at least it is endorsed by famous scientist Robert Bussard.  Seven issues of Far Frontiers were produced, and then it changed its name to New Destinies, and endured for nine additional issues.  Keith Laumer and Fred Saberhagen are authors I feel like I should like, but whose work often feels kind of pedestrian when I read it.  I do plan on reading some of their signature works in the future.

I didn't think much of the Mack Reynolds I read.  I have the same attitude about Gordon R. Dickson that I have about Laumer and Saberhagen.  

Stories from 1973 by C. S. Claremont, Geo. Alec Effinger and David Drake

In the past I have mentioned that I often am not sure what to read, and will allow myself to be guided by the Fates.  Recently, in an Iowa antique mall, I came upon a copy of the April 1973 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  I was charmed when I saw that a previous owner of the periodical had read and graded each piece of fiction therein.  I willingly parted with two bucks and brought the issue home with me.  This artifact provided me not only the chance to pass judgement on the work of science fiction writers, but the opportunity to pass judgement on the judgement of an unnamed stranger!

This week I read this individual's favorite story from the issue, "Psimed" by C. S. Claremont, his or her least favorite tale, Geo. Alec Effinger's "The City on the Sand," and a story which received the modal grade (look, I'm using math words), David Drake's "Arclight."   Of the eight novelets and short stories in the issue, five, including the Drake piece, received "g"s.  Let's see if MPorcius Fiction Log is on the same page with the SF fan we can know only as "Previous Owner."

"Psimed" by C. S. Claremont

If you look at Previous Owner's handwritten note, I believe we can gain an insight into his or her thought process.  It looks like Previous Owner was going to give "Psimed" a score of "VG," but then realized he/she was shortchanging Claremont, and upgraded "Psimed" to "Excellent."  (I am disregarding the possibility that Previous Owner's grade is the neologism "vexcellent," meaning "having the ability to cause a high degree of vexation.")            

I've never read anything by Claremont before--in fact, I had to do some research to find out if Claremont was a man or a woman.  As people reading this probably already know, Claremont usually goes by "Chris Claremont," and is staggeringly famous for writing about Marvel's X-Men and collaborating with George Lucas on some fantasy novels.  I'm learning every day!

My man tarbandu has written a little about Claremont's comic book work and I think it is fair to say that tarbandu would not use words like "excellent" to describe it.  Torn between the disparate opinions of tarbandu and Previous Owner, I tried to go into "Psimed" with an open mind.

"Psimed" is the story of Petra Hamlyn, a female doctor in a future high tech New York.  I get the impression that Claremont often writes female protagonists.  Hamlyn is a showy individualist, wearing jewelry and short skirts in a society in which fashions are androgynous and conservative.  Male characters stare at her legs, female characters think she looks like a prostitute.  When a new colleague calls her "Doctor," she corrects him: "My name's Petra.  I'm afraid I despise formality...."

The child of a wealthy man collapses of a rare disease, and Hamlyn's team of doctors try to save the kid.  Hamlyn and the kid are both psychics, and, in this universe of Claremont's, psychics tend to lose their powers and get all angsty and then commit suicide.  There is some melodrama as the kid goes berserk upon learning he has lost his psi powers and when Hamlyn has a painful flashback to when she lost her powers while terrorists tortured and murdered her husband.  Hamlyn also has sex with the new colleague.  The story ends when the kid dies, and another one of Hamlyn's colleagues, a psychic who has melded his mind with the kid in an effort to save him, also dies.

I'm no expert on the X-Men, but it seems like the themes of this long, boring, and histrionic story about a small elite of angst-ridden people with special powers who are expected to use those powers to help society, have something in common with the themes of those X-Men comics.

So, what did Previous Owner like about this story?  I guess lots of people are into medical dramas, and into stories about people with special powers who suffer angst and alienation.  I don't find medical stuff interesting, and while I sometimes like the whole alienated mutant thing (I just gave Kuttner and Moore's "The Piper's Son" a positive review), I didn't think this was a good example.

Previous Owner Grade: Excellent

MPorcius Fiction Log Grade: Not good

"The City on the Sand" by Geo. Alec Effinger

I've already encountered Effinger and his short stories during the course of this blog's life.  My feelings have been mixed.  Let's see if "The City on the Sand" tips the scales one way or the other.  SF blogger extraordinaire Joachim Boaz thinks highly of Effinger, so again we see a blogger I admire at odds with the mysterious Previous Owner, who was at a loss for words to describe his or her unhappiness with "The City on the Sand."  Who will I side with?

"The City on the Sand" is a consciously literary and subtly amusing story about decadence and a life wasted.  It takes place in an alternate early 20th century world (they have electric lights and radios) in which Western Europe is so decadent that its people have not bothered to conquer or even explore the New World or Sub-Saharan Africa.  The main character, Ernst Weinraub, is a would be poet and novelist who has traveled Europe, but found no place truly congenial.  So he has settled in the one city of North Africa, where he sits at an outdoor cafe all day, drinking and watching people walk by.  He has an outline for a trilogy of novels but has made no progress on the novels in years.  When it rains he doesn't even have the energy to move inside or lower the awning.

Weinraub has done nothing with his life, he has no friends, no wife or children.  He doesn't make an effort to get his poetry published; he just hopes some tastemaker will spot him sitting in the cafe and "discover" him.  When people try to develop a relationship with Weinraub or enlist him in their projects (a Polish political activist is trying to raise a volunteer army to free slaves or something like that) he just waves them away.

I have to disagree with Previous Owner again.  Effinger's style here is good, and the setting and tone of the story are good.  I can see why someone wouldn't care for "The City on the Sand," though-- there's not much plot and certainly no action or sex.  This is a literary mood piece, but it is a good one and I quite like it.  My opinion of Effinger has just gone up.

Previous Owner Grade: ugh

MPorcius Fiction Log Grade: Good

"Arclight" by David Drake

In my youth I read and enjoyed Killer, which is about a space alien murdering people in ancient Rome, and was written by David Drake and Karl Edward Wagner.  I read a couple of Drake's Hammer's Slammers stories, and they just made me shrug.  I quite liked Drake's short story "The Barrow Troll," and in late 2010 I read his novel The Voyage and wrote a three star review of it on Amazon in which I focused on the fact that the protagonists are a bunch of amoral jerks.

So, that is a brief history of my relationship with David Drake, who seems like a competent writer but whose isn't always ideally suited to my temperament.  I was curious to see how I would respond to "Arclight."

Well, for once I am on the same page as Previous Owner; this is a good story.

Drake served with the U.S. Army in Vietnam and Cambodia, and this story draws on his experiences.  A cavalry unit (the main characters operate ACAVs, M113 armored personnel carriers equipped with additional machine guns and armor) accidentally uncovers an ancient Cambodian temple.  There is a hideous idol in the temple which the troops damage in the course of investigating the ruin.  Over the succeeding nights the soldiers dream of this monstrous statue, and some of them are mysteriously killed, their bodies horribly mangled.  Was it communist guerrillas who killed them?  A ravenous tiger?  We readers know it was an invisible demon!  The demon's campaign of vengeance ends when the U. S. Air Force bombs the temple into oblivion, demolishing the idol.

This is a solid entertaining horror story.  We've all probably read lots of stories about monsters from ruins terrorizing people, but Drake's story really benefits from its setting among American soldiers in South East Asia.  For example, I found the military stuff interesting (I was not familiar with the terms "ACAV" and "arclight" before.)  So, thumbs up for this one.

Previous Owner Grade: g

MPorcius Fiction Log Grade: Good.

**********

Even if Previous Owner and I have different tastes, I enjoyed my exploration of his or her old magazine, which gave me an opportunity to learn more about three authors I have only had a limited exposure to.

The April 1973 F&SF also has a bunch of interesting ads.  On the first page of my copy (which I suspect is in fact the third page--I think the first sheet of my copy was lost) we have an ad for an anthology of SF stories about sex.  Hubba hubba!  Also, an ad for a novel about what would happen if some guy figured out astrology was real.  I'd be curious to read some of the sex stories (despite the embarrassingly dumb font they use in the ad for the title), but the astrology book sounds horrible.

In the back of the mag (we cool people call magazines "mags," you know, to save time) we have the "Market Place," which is full of fun classifieds.  I had no idea there was a town in California called "Brubank."  Not only is there such a town, but the people there love dinosaurs!  There's an ad for Dianetics; these were the days before the Elronners had that John Travolta and Kirstie Alley money and could afford those TV ads we all remember.  A guy in Hawaii is willing to teach you telepathy.  You can mail three questions to a psychic in Illinois and for only ten bucks he will use his powers to answer them.  And if you don't have ten dollars and live in South West Canada, a guy will teach you how to pan for gold right in your own neighborhood!  Awesome!  

Click to read about all the bargains I missed in 1973 when I was two years old