Merril-endorsed '58 tales: Phillifent, Reed, Reynolds, Runyon

Today's blog post is brought to you by the letter "R."  Yes, we're reading four more stories from Judith Merril's alphabetical list of honorable mentions at the back of the fourth of her critically-adored SF: The Year's Greatest anthology series, the volume covering stories published in 1958.  Today's authors are John T. Phillifent (working undercover as Arthur Rackham), Kit Reed, Mack Reynolds, and Charles W. Runyon.  (I'd like to read the story by Joel Townsley Rogers that Merril recommends, "Night of Horror," but I can't find a scan of the issue of Saturday Evening Post in which it appears.)  With the exception of Reynolds, these are people I rarely read, so today is a day on which anything can happen.  Let's just hope "R" stands for "really good."

"One-Eye" by "Arthur Rackham" (John T. Phillifent) 

Already I'm questioning the itinerary our tour guide Judith Merril has prepared for us.  When I read Phillifent's novel Genius Unlimited ten years ago I said, on this very blog, that

The writing is bad, one of the characters is silly and all the rest are without any personality, the jokes are bad, the action scenes are boring, much of the detective stuff and the science stuff feels perfunctory.

And yet, there is a glimmer of hope.  When I read Phillifent's short story "Advantage" I liked it, and even defended it from the criticisms of influential blogger Joachim Boaz.  Maybe "One-Eye," published in John W. Campbell Jr.'s Astounding, will emulate "Advantage" and win my admiration.

It is the future of hover cars.  Tom Garbutt is a big muscular guy, a hover car mechanic with autism or a  low IQ or a speech impediment or something, which is kind of annoying as much of this story consists of his halting dialogue and Phillifent's tortured descriptions of his thought processes.  As the story begins, Garbutt is in jail.  A shrink comes to talk to him.  This smooth-talking smart guy is the first person ever to be kind to the hulking dimwitted mechanic, and for him Garbutt is willing to tell his tale of woe.

This morning Garbutt suddenly found that he could see accidents and tragedies in the future, but only a few seconds before they occur.  Each of these prophetic visions is heralded by a terrible headache, then Garbutt sees his boss get injured on the job, or sees a cook slip and burn somebody with grease from the pan, or whatever.  After the vision, Garbutt quickly tries to warn people, but there is no time, and the accidents still take place.  Because of Garbutt's fruitless attempted interventions people begin to suspect Garbutt is somehow to blame for the misfortunes; his boss even fires him for being a jinx.  (I guess jinxes aren't a protected class any more.)  Garbutt has some more crazy adventures involving people being hurt or killed seconds after he had visions of the tragedy, and then he gets into a fight in a bar as part of his ill-conceived experiment to test whether he is himself causing the tragedies.  (Maybe one of the things Campbell liked about this story is how Garbutt tries to use the scientific method to figure out the extent of his powers and his responsibilities for the disasters.)  This fight is what landed him in jail.

After the shrink leaves, Garbutt has a vision of committing suicide and then he commits suicide.

This story is not a smooth read, and while the idea of a guy grappling with the unwelcome ability to see accidents and disasters seconds before they occur is sort of interesting, Phillifent doesn't really come up with a good plot based on this idea or a plot that exploits this idea.  Phillifent doesn't substantially extrapolate on what this power could mean for an individual or a society and the mechanic doesn't do anything constructive with the power or overcome the challenge it presents--his life and then he are just destroyed by it in short order.  I'm afraid the point of this story, the effect Phillifent seeks to have on readers, is to elicit sympathy for Tom Garbutt, a man who, because of his intellectual or physiological disability, is shunned by society and who then is overwhelmed by bizarre circumstance.  (We smart readers of Astounding are expected to identify with the shrink, a compassionate man who uses his brains and knowledge to help others, so that he stands head and shoulders above the rest of society.)  I'm not crazy about stories about helpless victims of fate or gentle giants who are abused by society, nor those in which nice liberals demonstrate their virtue by condescending to help their inferiors.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down. 

It looks like "One-Eye" has never been reprinted.  Understandable.          

"Devotion" by Kit Reed  

College professor Kit Reed, according to wikipedia, is a Guggenheim Fellow and got a "five-year grant literary from the Abraham Woursell Foundation"--Kit Reed is the science fiction writer the intellectual elite in their ivory towers want you to read.  Well, let's do what we are told by our betters for once and eat our vegetables.

We find "Devotion" in an issue of F&SF that includes a reprint of one of Leslie Charteris' The Saint stories, a Damon Knight short-short I bitterly denounced when I read it many moons ago, and Anthony Boucher's own backhanded smart-alecky denunciations of Robert E. Howard and Charles Eric Maine.  

To the relief of all involved, I don't have to denounce Reed's "Devotion."  (I know my kind-hearted readers don't flock to MPorcius Fiction Log lusting to read negative reviews--we're all softies, on the inside!)  "Devotion" is actually a pretty good little story, creative and uninhibited by left-wing pieties (Reed includes an underhanded and jealous woman in the story as well as a vain and ridiculous man.)

Harry Farmer, all his life, has had a perfect and beautiful mouthful of teeth, the envy and/or wonder of all who see them.  He maintains them with punctilious care, and he makes it to his seventies with them fully intact, no fillings, no blemishes on their dazzling whiteness.  He loves the teeth more than anything, spending an inordinate amount of time admiring them in the mirror and showing them off to people.

At his Florida retirement home, Harry has a particular friend, almost a girlfriend, perhaps, a Mrs. Granstrom, who is his regular partner at shuffleboard and croquet.  Mrs. Granstrom is very supportive when Harry faces the worst day in his life and is told by a doctor that he has to have his teeth all removed.  She even provides him a beautiful velvet box in which to store and admire his--still perfect!--natural teeth like they are the family jewels or something.  But she begins to get jealous when Harry starts spending less time at shuffleboard and croquet and more time in his room adoring--ne even caresses them!--his old teeth.

Harry's other problem is his replacement false teeth.  They are animate and emotional, and express their jealousy towards Harry's old teeth, pinching Harry when he brags about the previous occupants of his mouth, moving around the room in an effort to get attention, etc.  The clever ending of the story resolves both of Harry's issues--Mrs. Granstrom sneaks into Harry's room with a hammer, intent on smashing Harry's old teeth.  Harry's new teeth attack her, preserving their rivals in a display of devotion that softens Harry's heart to them.  Harry and his new fake teeth live happily ever after, the old teeth who abandoned him forgotten.

Thumbs up for "Devotion."  The intellectual elite up in their ivory towers aren't always wrong.

"Devotion" has been reprinted a few times here and over in Europe, including in the Reed collection Mister Da V. and Other Stories.  Joachim Boaz read the entire collection and blogged about it--check his assessments out!  Oh yeah, and check out my middling review of Reed's story "The Visible Partner," which appeared in a 1980 issue of F&SF.  If you are in the market for MPorcius negative reviews, at that same link you will find my long-winded explanation of why Harlan Ellison's story "All the Lies that Are My Life," the cover story of that same issue of F&SF, is no good and why Barry N. Malzberg, our hero, has all the virtues and none of the vices of the overrated Ellison.  At MPorcius Fiction Log we court controversy!

"Pieces of the Game" by Mack Reynolds

I have written quite a bit about committed leftist and world traveler Mack Reynolds even though I think his writing is poor, I guess because I find his career fascinating and stupefying, and because his brand of left-wingery is unpredictable and defies easy categorization; he was thrown out of a hard core leftist organization because he was not averse to bucking his masters and trying to make a buc behind their backs.  Reynolds is more of a maverick adventurer type than a commissar or toady, and it is fun to reflect on the fact that famously right-wing John W. Campbell, Jr. published so many of his stories in Astounding, Merril's 1958 pick "Pieces of the Game" among them.  It looks like Astounding is the only place it has ever appeared--Reynolds aficionados and collectors take note!

This story is so bland, so nondescript, and at the same time rather subtle and oblique, that I almost feel like I am missing something.  As far as I can tell there is no twist ending, no character growth, no substantial or surprising ideological or philosophical point that Reynolds is trying to make.  Maybe the point is to depict a future world in which international politics are cold and rational (you know, like chess) instead of ideological, with limited wars and little concern for human rights and forms of government--pure power politics, the pursuit of the national interest, with nobody caring about democracy or socialism or any of that jazz.  References to the Hapsburgs are sort of giving me the idea that international conflict in the near future world depicted is modelled on the limited warfare of the 18th century, the period of the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War, wars often felt to be dispassionate and nonideological in comparison to the religious wars that preceded them and the ideological and nationalistic wars that followed them, wars in which elites at least pretended to be fighting for some sort of religious or political principle or for justice for their ethnic or cultural group.

"Pieces of the Game" is set in a future world in which the Soviet Union has apparently won a war, maybe a nuclear war, against the West, and even has military bases on the Moon, but the West does not seem to have been conquered entire nor its ;populations wiped out.  Switzerland is still neutral, and the main character arrives in Switzerland, I guess from Britain or America, and makes his way into Austria, a "People's State" with lots of secret police--I guess Austria has been taken over directly or indirectly by the Soviet Union.  I don't think the USA, USSR, or UK are ever specifically mentioned in the story, which is why I am guessing about all this stuff.  Our protagonist is just five feet two inches tall, and it seems there are lots of diminutive people in this world, as well as deformed people and monstrously obese people, and these people are not regarded as freaks, but populate the elite--our guy attends a diplomatic function in Vienna and all the diplomats and dignitaries have one of these, to our minds, unusual body types.  We have to assume they are mutants.

The main character is a sort of James Bondian super spy with lots of high tech equipment.  He meets his contact, a doctor who injects him with a drug that gives him super strength, and then he spends several pages sneaking in and out of windows, climbing walls, swimming the Danube, breaking into offices, assassinating guards and cops and witnesses (well, maybe he just beats the witness unconscious), making a clandestine copy of some important document, and then sneaking back to Switzerland.  

I guess we can call this odd thing merely acceptable.

"First Man in a Satellite" by Charles W. Runyon

Charles W. Runyon has four novels and 18 short story credits at isfdb.  Apparently he is more famous for his stories and novels in the crime genre, though his true love was science fiction--see this interview of Runyon by Ed Gorman.  "First Man in a Satellite" was his first published SF story, and will be the first Runyon I have ever read.  "First Man in a Satellite" appeared in Super-Science Fiction after being rejected by Campbell--Runyon talks about Campbell's rejection letter in the linked interview above.  Robert Silverberg included "First Man in a Satellite" in his anthology of stories from Super-Science Fiction; it's a Campbell vs Merril and Silverberg throwdown--let's see who we side with!  

The covers of Super-Science Fiction and of Runyon's novels (again, see the linked interview) are bubbling over with delicious sex and violence, and this story is absolutely about love and death, but it is more of a sentimental tearjerker than something sensationalistic and exploitative.  Max is a dwarf and an acrobat.  He's in love with the co-star of his act, Marie.  They want to get married, and Max wishes he could set them up with some way to support themselves after they are too old to safely do their act.  Then a solution falls right into his lap!  

The government needs a dwarf who is in top physical condition for a top secret mission--to be the first man in space!  A man his size weighs less, uses less food and oxygen, etc., an essential savings in this early phase of the space race, and his pay for three months work will set him up for life!  The world must not know a human being is in the capsule, so Max can't tell Marie why he is leaving her for three months, which leads to her threatening to dump him. 

After two and a half months of training, Max blasts off on his ten day mission, orbiting the Earth again and again while the many machines he is hooked into record his physical reactions and, when he is in line-of-sight radio range, the scientists interview him.  Runyon focuses on Max's psychological stress while the operation is going as planned and then when a one-in-a-million piece of bad luck puts Max's life in jeopardy.  A meteor pierces the sphere, and Max's air supply is diminished, so they have to try to bring him down earlier than scheduled.  Uh oh, the remote control receiver on the jets is also down.  Damn that meteor!  The people on the ground go through a whole rigamarole, trying to direct Max in how to manually fire the jets at just the right time by exposing wires and stripping them and touching the right ones to each other at just the right moment but it is hopeless.  When all hope is lost the world is apprised of Max's heroism and doom, and the story ends with Max and Marie spending Max's last hours talking over the radio, and Runyon's speculations on how knowledge of inevitable death affects a person.

This is a story about a man's psychology and relationships under stress, and Runyon does a pretty entertaining job of describing Max's struggles and his feelings about Marie, the head government shrink, and the military officer in charge of the whole operation.  I couldn't tell if Max was going to make it or not, which was good.  So I am siding with Merril and Silverberg over Campbell--"First Man in a Satellite" is a good story.  In Campbell's defense, in his letter to Runyon rejecting the tale Campbell suggests Lester del Rey already did a story about a dwarf in space and maybe Runyon's was too similar to that earlier one to comfortably be included in the magazine.       

**********

Well, of this batch, the Reed is the best and the Runyon is pretty good; Reynolds' story is lacking but it is not actually bad--the bad one is Phillifent's, which shares some of Reynolds' deficiencies and is also a drag to get through.  

1958 stories from big names you'll recognize, but not necessarily titles you will be familiar with, in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.  We'll leave you with links to the earlier blog posts in our Merril-guided tour of 1958.

Poul Anderson and Alan Arkin
Pauline Ashwell, Don Berry and Robert Bloch
John Brunner, Algis Budrys and Arthur C. Clarke
"Helen Clarkson" (Helen McCoy), Mark Clifton, Mildred Clingerman and Theodore R. Cogswell
John Bernard Daley, Avram Davidson and Chan Davis
Gordon R. Dickson 
Charles Einstein, George P. Elliot, and Harlan Ellison
Charles G. Finney, Charles L. Fontenay, Donald Franson, and Charles E Fritch
Randall Garret and James E. Gunn 
Harry Harrison, Frank Herbert and Philip High
Shirley Jackson, Daniel Keyes and John Kippax
Damon Knight and C. M. Kornbluth
Fritz Leiber, Jack Lewis and Victoria Lincoln
Katherine MacLean, "T. H. Mathieu" (Les Cole) and Dean MacLaughlin 
A. E. Nourse
"Finn O'Donnevan" (Robert Sheckley) and Chad Oliver
Avis Pabel, Frederik Pohl, and Robert Presslie

More 1974 "Dazzlers": J J Russ, E Pangborn, S Goldin

In the last exciting installment of MPorcius Fiction Log we read three stories from the fifth volume of Terry Carr's critically acclaimed Universe series of all-new anthologies, those from Fritz Leiber, George Alec Effinger and F. M. Busby.  We weren't too happy with those three tales, but there are twelve stories in the 1974 book (we own the 1975 paperback with a surreal feline and statuary focused cover) and maybe some of them really are "dazzling"?  Let's give Terry Carr a chance to win us back and try three more, those by J. J. Russ, Edgar Pangborn and Stephen Goldin.

(I forgot to mention last time that Universe 5 also includes a Kris Neville story we read some years ago, "Survival Problems.")

"M is for the Many" by J. J. Russ

As Carr tells us in his little intro to this piece, J. J. Russ is not Joanna Russ but Jon Russ, California psychiatrist.  We read Russ's "The Interview" back in 2014, and his "Aurelia" in 2015, and I found both to be acceptable.  Gazing at Russ the shrink's page at isfdb, we see he has six credits and that it looks like "M is for the Many" has never been reprinted.  

"M is for the Many" takes place in one of those overcrowded socialistic futures where the government assigns you living space and decides who can and can't reproduce.  Every couple can have only two kids, and the government seizes your kid on his or her fifth birthday.  People stay in their apartments all day; kids watch TV, but if you are five or older you are supplied a big "bag" that hangs from the ceiling like a hammock--you zip yourself in, the bag fills with goop, wires connect to your noggin, and you have wonderful dreams all day.  If you ever tire of the bag, maybe want some social interaction, you can make friends via what we might call the internet in holographic chat rooms.

Some people, it appears, don't take to the bag--at all.  Nyta is one of these--she has nightmares in the bag, so can't stay in it all day like her husband.  What Nyta enjoys is being pregnant and raising her children.  Most of the text of "M is for Many" is about how she tries to deal with the fact that her child, Lery, whom she dotes on, is approaching his fifth birthday and will soon be taken out the door to the apartment--the door hasn't opened since Nyta's first child was taken away years and years ago.  Nyta keeps thinking back on that first child.  Nyta calls up the government robot on the video phone to beg it to allow her to keep Lery or to have another child after Lery is dragged off.  Nyta tries to get Lery to pay attention to her, to say sweet things to her, like he did when he was two and three, but he just wants to watch TV and talk about how much he is looking forward to leaving mom  and getting his own dream bag.  Nyta buys pet animals but they don't fulfill her needs.  (The interactions between women desperately seeking an outlet for their maternal feelings and the various weird animals they buy are blackly comic.)  Nyta tries to use the bag to live out her fantasies of having another baby, but she just has nightmares.

The chilling twist ending.  You are permitted up to two children, and if your child dies before its fifth birthday, it doesn't count.  It is also permissible to throw your child into the disposal chute--this is termed abortion.  Nyta throws Lery down the chute and her husband programs his bag to start collecting his ejaculate during his sex dreams so it Nyta can be impregnated yet again--Lery is her third abortion.

This is a good story that really makes you feel for Nyta and then shocks you with her murderous behavior, though that behavior is foreshadowed and, on reflection, sympathy perhaps returns, as Nyta's homicidal tendencies are perhaps entirely the result of tyrannical government policy (which the government says is necessary because of overpopulation.)  Russ's descriptions of this future world are economical and effective.  The treatment of infanticide and abortion, of what amount to virtual reality entertainment and internet relationships, of pets as surrogate children, of men's preference for imaginary women over real women, of women's desires to be mothers, and of violence committed by women, make "M is for the Many" very thought-provoking for a 21st-century audience.  Thumbs up!

"The Night Wind" by Edgar Pangborn

Carr in  his little intro tells us that "The Night Wind" is set in the same post-apocalyptic world as Pangborn's famous Davy, which I read ten years ago and don't really remember much of.  

"The Night Wind" is a somewhat ponderous and pretentious story that tells you religion is a scam and celebrates teenage homosexual sex.  The fifteen-year-old narrator is caught having sex with a younger boy and it looks like he might be stoned to death by the religious villagers--homosexuality is a sin and gays are treated similarly to mutants in this post-apocalyptic world--so he runs away.  He comes upon a wolf, some kind of monster mutant wolf, I suppose, eating a dead man.  The narrator recognizes the victim, a sort of craftsman who lived with his invalided female lover, a fallen aristocratic lady, at a remote homestead, and goes to the homestead to give the woman the bad news.  The woman endorses the narrator's sex life and gives him a pile of dough she has stashed, and then dies of a broken heart.  This little memoir, which is full of nature imagery (leaves blowing in the wind, domesticated animals having sex, hawks circling high above, lots of talk about the sound of the wind) and what I guess we can call countercultural anything-goes and if-it-feels-good-do-it wisdom (e.g., "any manner of love is good if there's kindness in it" and "I've just lain here wondering what goodness is, and if anybody knows") was written by our protagonist as he sat in the neat and tidy house of the dead couple.  Now he will head to the big city to look for one of his earlier gay lovers, an older boy whose family moved out of the village a while ago.

Maybe a story denouncing religion and celebrating teenagers having gay sex seemed shocking in 1974, but in today's world the story is pretty ho hum--Christianity has been in terminal decline my entire life and everywhere I go there are flags celebrating homosexuality; affirming the dignity and beauty of gay sex is one of the rituals you have to perform to maintain a respectable position in mainstream life.  Maybe the way "The Night Wind" suggests homosexuality and aristocracy go hand in hand and are inevitably set against religion and the close-mindedness of village life is sort of interesting?  We'll call "The Night Wind" barely acceptable--it is a competent wish-fulfillment fantasy for the LGBetc community.  Genre fiction is full of wish-fulfillment fantasies, and there is no reason gay people shouldn't get their share.

Terry Carr thought "The Night Wind" one of the best stories to appear in the first dozen or so Universe anthologies and reprinted it in the 1984 volume The Best from Universe.  You can also find it in a few Pangborn collections and the anthology Kindred Spirits.

"But as a Soldier, For His Country" by Stephen Goldin

This is a pretty good military SF story with lots of action scenes and talk of weapons and equipment.  The plot and character interactions and the twist ending are not bad.  Mild recommendation for "But as a Soldier, For His Country."

Our protagonist and a friend, veteran soldiers, have no steady girlfriends or families or anything, and so volunteer for a new high tech military program.  The government freezes you and thaws you out in the future when they need experienced soldiers.  Our guys go through this a few times, fighting in wars in various hot spots.  Each time they are thawed, technology has advanced.  Pretty soon the government doesn't freeze and thaw you--they just record your mind and, when they need you, they build a new body to download your mind into.  Human civilization extends to the Moon and then to other planets and stars, and war goes with it, so our protagonists--or new iterations of their consciousnesses, at least--get to fight against and alongside aliens all over the galaxy.  The twists in the story involve the fact that our guy ends up fighting copies of his friend and even of himself.  I guess this symbolizes the self-destructive nature of war.

Entertaining.  "But as a Soldier, For His Country" has reappeared in the Stephen Goldin collection The Last Ghost and Other Stories and in anthologies of military SF.

**********

With two good stories and one acceptable one, this batch of tales from Universe 5 is far better than the first batch we sampled.  Maybe we'll read more from this assembly of alleged dazzlers, but first we'll be returning to the 1950s, so darn your bobby socks and get your grey flannel suit pressed.

1974 "Dazzling" stories: Busby, Effinger, Leiber

Back in 2015 I bought a stack of books in Mankato, MN, and among them was the 1975 paperback edition of Terry Carr's 1974 Universe 5, an anthology of new stories.  This paperback printing has an awesome wraparound cover by Patrick Woodruffe featuring so many of our favorite things--a cat, a bug, boobs, lichen, muscles, they are all there.  (Do the disparate elements of the cover reflect the contents of the stories inside?  Maybe!)  I've never actually read anything from this book, so, ten years after acquiring it, fifty years after it was printed, let's read three of the included stories, which were promoted on the back cover as "dazzling" "storytelling triumphs."

But first, you can check out my dumb twitter joke about this cover.

And tarbandu's blog post about Patrick Woodruffe.

"If This is Winnetka, You Must Be Judy" by F. M. Busby

Years ago I read Busby's To Cage a Man and thought it alright and two Rissa Kerguelen books and found them "competent" but "long and flat."  All three of those novels, at least as I recall them, spent a lot of ink describing people suffering abuse and trauma, and the Rissa books in particular were full of fetishistic sex.  Well, let's see if Busby crams this approximately 25-page story full of torture and perversion.  

"If This is Winnetka, You Must Be Judy" feels a lot like boring mainstream fiction about a writer guy who keeps getting married and divorced and who has trouble keeping his attractive wife of whom he is fond from finding out about his attractive mistress of whom he is also fond and doesn't really know what he wants or how to get it, etc.  We get lots of conversations with women about relationships, lots of assessment and comparison of women's personalities and bodies, lots of sexual encounters, etc.

Our narrator is Larry Garth, a writer who gets married at least three times and divorced at least twice.  He doesn't live his life in linear order, from birth to death--instead, he hops around, backward and forward, often waking up in the morning in a different period of his life, able to recall some chronologically later parts of his life, which he has already experienced, and only some, but not all, chronologically earlier parts.  This, as you would expect, causes problems because he may not remember what happened yesterday, but knows that the woman he finds in his house, wife number two, say, is attractive and fun today but is going to be an obese drunk in a few years and he is going to divorce her, and has to pretend he knows the past and doesn't know the future.  To help himself he leaves little notes in his wallet and a safe deposit box at the bank, and tries to memorize things.  There are also advantages--when experiencing a middle-aged period of his life he reads some of his early novels and then when he is experiencing that younger portion of his life it is easy to compose the novels from memory.

I seem to recall reading stories about people with telepathy, about how they feel alone, and then the big moment of the story is when they finally meet another telepath.  Ed Bryant's "The Silent World" is one such story, and I am sure there are others.  I read Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside in my New York days, long before this blog emerged soft and vulnerable from its chrysalis, and I suspect meeting another telepath is a major event in that book.  Anyway, Larry Garth realizes his third and favorite wife is also a person who lives her life out of sequence when he sees her before they have chronologically met and recognizes her, and she recognizes him in turn.  This is a period during which he is living with, but has not yet married, wife #2.  To spend time with wife #3 requires a little sneaking around.  More importantly for us SF fans, as in a lot of time travel stories, the time travelers grapple with whether or not they can change history.  In this happy ending story the protagonists can change history--Garth figures out how to avoid marrying wife #2 and hook up with wife #3 early; wife #2 never gets fat or becomes a drunk and has a happy marriage with some other guy, and wife #3 escapes dying of breast cancer by taking that lump more seriously than she did in the previous, no longer operative, time line.

We'll call this one barely acceptable.  I think it is kind of boring, but Lester del Rey, Jacques Chambon, and Leigh Ronald Grossman all included "If This is Winnetka, You Must Be Judy" in anthologies.  Maybe we should see it as a typical example of New Wave writing, a sort of conventional mainstream fiction narrative with some science fiction trappings.

Two years ago we read the Lafferty story from del Rey's fourth Best Science Fiction
Stories of  the Year, "And Name My Name," and I really liked it.  The included story
by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, "Mute Inglorious Tam," I read two months ago
and called an "acceptable" "gimmick story." 

"How It Felt" by George Alec Effinger

      

This baby has only ever resurfaced in the Effinger collection Irrational Numbers, which our kameraden over in Deutschland know as Endzeit.  Endzeit uses a flopped version of the cover image to be found on a British edition of Kate Wilhelm's riff on the Frankenstein story, The Killer Thing.

Less than ten pages long, "How It Felt" is one of those stories about people in the far future whose technology is so efficient and so powerful they can do almost anything, making life so easy they have fallen into decadence and spend all their time searching for new diversions to ease their ennui.  Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time series is I guess the most prominent example.

Vivi is one of the handful of these godlike decadents.  She is special in that while the others lack emotion, she still feels loneliness and fear and so forth--this makes her entertaining to the others.  It also helps her entertain herself--at night the stars scare her, and it is one of her few real pleasures to look up into the night sky and feel this fear.

Despite the fact that it makes her special, over the course of this story Vivi strives to deaden her emotions, to become cold--we are given the impression that she regularly tries to reinvent herself, to put on a new personality, and this time the character she is trying to assume is "studied indifference."  Moa, a woman with whom she regularly shares extended lesbian sexual encounters, comes by with a man, Tagea--they have something to show Vivi.  They have discovered a new planet with primitive native inhabitants.  They teleport to the planet, and Moa watches Vivi to see her reaction--Vivi's reactions are usually entertaining, because she is the only person left alive with emotion.  But Vivi is stifling her emotions, so even when Moa causes an earthquake and shifts this planet's largest ocean and blows up a native village, killing all the villagers, Vivi shows no reaction.  Moa even kills Tagea.  Still, Vivi does not respond--she has lost all emotion herself, is no longer even scared of the stars, and Moa loses her will to live--Vivi's emotion was her only pleasure.  

A story in which people can do anything and have no emotion is not going to inspire much excitement in the reader.  We'll call "How it Felt" barely acceptable.

"Mysterious Doings in the Metropolitan Museum" by Fritz Leiber

Fritz Leiber is a fascinating character with a broad and diverse career, and many are the times I have fulsomely praised his work, as with "Lean Times in Lankhmar" and "The Button Molder," but I have also criticized what I have considered his weaker work, like "The Wolf Pack" AKA "Let Freedom Ring" and "The Good New Days."  And again and again I have pointed out potentially uncomfortable elements in Leiber stories, in particular sexual content that leans in the direction of incest, underage sex and rape (see "The Princess in the Tower 250,000 miles High," and "The Glove.")  Well, today I must bring you some unwelcome tidings: "Mysterious Doings in the Metropolitan Museum" is an absolute waste of time, an annoying and unfunny joke story in which Leiber seems to be likening Jewish people to cockroaches!  Say it ain't so, Fritz, say it ain't so.

Beetles from all over the world are congregating in New York City, in a plot of grass in Central Park next to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for their biennial convention.  Leiber tries to slot various types of beetles into human ethnic categories, one of the story's many sterile jokes:  

...not just U.S. beetles, but coleopts from all over the world--slant-eyed Asian beetles in golden robes, North African beetles in burnished burnooses, South African beetles wild as fire ants with great Afro hairdos, smug English beetles.... 

I'm not against ethnic jokes per se, but just saying "Asians have slant eyes, black people are wild and English people are smug" isn't actually a joke--it's more like a list of ungenerous observations and questionable stereotypes.

Cockroaches are not actual beetles, but they still resent not being admitted to the convention and launch a protest.

...the New York City cockroaches were out in force, picketing the convention....Round and round the sacred grass plot they tramped, chanting labor-slogans in thick Semitic accents and hurling coarse working-class epithets.

Via the sorcery of the world's finest website, the internet archive, I looked at this passage in later printings of "Mysterious Doings in the Metropolitan Museum."  In a scan of The Worlds of Fritz Leiber (1976), I found that "Semitic" had been struck, but in a scan of Space Odyssey (a 1989 printing), I found "Semitic" remained intact.

One of the beetles says of the protesting roaches,

"...many of them are mere German (German-Jewish, maybe?) Croton bugs, dwarfish in stature compared to American cockroaches, who all once belonged to the Confederate Army." 

There isn't much plot to this story--mostly it consists of these kinds of anemic jokes.  Leiber manages to work in a few references to rape--studying an English word, the beetles think "B" and "R" are drawings of a snake raping another snake.

What little plot "Mysterious Doings in the Metropolitan Museum" offers comes in the later portions of the story when some of the beetles go to visit the Egyptian section of the museum and come to think the scarabs there are real beetles that have been drugged or hypnotized.  In a satirical reference to Middle East turmoil and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, one Egyptian beetle thinks that these beetles are the victims of some facet of the cockroaches' plan to take over the world:

...part of a World Cockroach Plot carried out by commando Israeli beetles....His wild mouthings were not believed.

The beetles figure out a way to carry off the scarabs, puzzling the museum staff and police.

Whether or not you find this story offensively racist, "Mysterious Doings in the Metropolitan Museum" is definitely not funny or engaging.  Thumbs down!  Find it in Horrible Imaginings or the previously mentioned Leiber collection or anthology, if you must.

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These stories are not dazzling!  They are not even good!  How could Terry Carr, Dallas News, Kirkus Reviews and the Chicago Sun-Times do us dirty this way?  Maybe these three stories are an unrepresentative sample and we should read some more...well, we'll see.  

Richard Matheson: "Being," "The Test," and "Clothes Make the Man"

Back in October, the internet archive was down (it was a tough time, people!) so I went to Wonder Book to buy a cheap copy of the A. E. van Vogt fix-up novel The War Against the Rull because I wanted to compare its text to that of an anthology version of one of the component stories, "The Gryb" AKA "Repetition."  While there, I also bought a copy of Avram Davidson's The Masters of the Maze.  It turned out that the store was having some kind of "buy 2 paperbacks and get a 3rd free" sale, so I grabbed a decaying copy of Richard Matheson's The Shores of Space, Bantam A1571.  (I didn't have time to hunt through the shelves for something with a good cover.)  In honor of my cheapness and of the man who wrote Vincent Price's best movie and Steven Spielberg's best movie, let's read three stories from this freebie.

But first!  Links to the two stories in The Shores of Space which I've already blogged about: "The Last Day," and "Pattern for Survival." 

"Being" (1954)

"Being" debuted in an issue of If with an awesome meteor shower cover; Matheson's story is graced with some pretty chilling Virgil Finlay illustrations.

"Being" is an effective horror story that exploits the tension between city and country folk, depicts two marriages, convincingly portrays people under terrible stress, and includes two very common science fiction elements; I quite enjoyed it.

It is August, and married couple Les and Marian, Los Angelenos, are driving cross country to New York to visit Marian's family.  Matheson does a good job describing their discomfort and frustration as they drive through the deserts of the South West--the intolerable heat, the need to get off the highway due to construction and follow poorly maintained dirt roads, the ever present risk of the car overheating.  There ain't no air-conditioned Toyota Corolla or GPS in 1954!  On some remote road the couple get kidnapped and held captive in a makeshift zoo owned by a gas station owner!

"Being" is more than hicksploitation.  Merv, widower, war veteran, and gas station owner, is a prisoner himself--a telepathic blob monster from outer space is making him capture people so it can eat them, one man every two days!  (We encounter many blob monsters and telepathic aliens here at MPorcius Fiction Log.)  This is the first time Merv has ever captured a woman, and he is shaken to his core--he's already fed eight men to the blob monster but feeding it a woman feels like an even deeper level of degradation!  And Marian looks like his beloved wife Elsie!  

Matheson's descriptions of the psychology of our four characters as they struggle to survive in extraordinary circumstances, always trying to outwit or outfight each other, are compelling.  Merv and Les in particular are forced to balance the need to survive with their ideas of justice and duty.  All the characters act believably and it is easy to sympathize with any or all of them.

A quite good science fiction horror tale.  "Being" has been reprinted in a bunch of anthologies and Matheson collections, including another I own, Collected Stories Volume 2, where Matheson in an afterword talks about the genesis of the story and his efforts to turn it into a screenplay.

"The Test" (1954)

"The Test" first saw print in an issue of F&SF alongside Chad Oliver's "Transformer," a story I panned when I read it a few years ago, and an Edmond Hamilton story I have yet to read.  There is always new territory to explore!

It is the year 2003.  A law has been passed--old people, I guess 65 and older, have to take a comprehensive physical, mental, and psychological test every five years and those who fail are euthanized!  Our characters are a married couple with two kids and the husband's father, age 80.  The story dwells on ambiguity and ambivalence--the justification for the law is overpopulation and the way it strains resources, but of course there is reason to believe it was passed because many people are sick of having their elderly parents around.  The emotions of the married couple in the story are torn--the old man is a burden, a hassle, but at the same time his son still loves him.

This is only barely a SF story--for the most part it is a mainstream literary story about the relationships between adult children and their parents in our prosperous individualistic age in which family ties are weaker and people live longer, in which people want more and more freedom and (paradoxically) give the government more and more power in hopes of securing that freedom--generally at the expense of the freedom of others.  Matheson handles the material ably, and employs an economical style--every phrase and image is powerful, the story is just the right length and moves at just the right speed.  Thumbs up!      

This is another widely reprinted story.  "The Test" appears under the heading "Overpopulation" in Isaac Asimov Presents the Best Science Fiction Firsts, and in his afterword to the story in Collected Stories Volume 2, Matheson talks about F&SF editor Anthony Boucher's reaction to the story and tells us there was some interest in Italy in adapting the story for the screen, but Matheson doesn't know if anything came of it.

           

"Clothes Make the Man" (1951)

"Clothes Make the Man" debuted in the final issue of Damon Knight's short-lived magazine Worlds Beyond.  This is a silly filler story.

An ad exec guy is a real clotheshorse.  He has all his clothes custom tailored, even his undies.  He never takes off his hat, even inside, and however hot it is, he won't take off his jacket.  On a picnic his wife, brother, and sister-in-law take off their shoes and socks to wade in a stream, but he refuses.  

Anyway, it becomes apparent that the man can't function without his clothes.  If someone swipes his hat as a joke this wizard who is always coming up with spellbinding ad campaigns becomes an imbecile.  If he doesn't have shoes on he can barely walk.  The climax to the story is that the clothes come to life and start walking around without him, even doing work at the office and dating women; bereft of his clothes, the ad exec is a useless wreck, unable to even talk, in the hospital in steep decline. 

We also get a twist ending.  "Clothes Make the Man" is a first-person narrative; the narrator is at a party and the story of the clotheshorse is being told to him by the clotheshorse's heart-broken brother.  The narrator is very dismissive towards this poor bastard.  The twist ending is that the narrator is the suit of clothes, out on a date with the clotheshorse's wife.

The plot does not make any sense, but the story moves at a quick pace and all the individual sentences and paragraphs are OK--we'll call "Clothes Make the Man" barely acceptable.

I don't think this one has been anthologized in English, but "Clothes Make the Man" has been included in European anthologies, as well as a stack of Matheson collections in many languages.

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Matheson has a high reputation and "Being" and "The Test" demonstrate why--Matheson's characters feel very real, making his SF ideas all the more engaging.  As for "Clothes Make the Man," well, they can't all be winners, and we have read much worse.

More short stories in our next exciting episode, but from over twenty years later.

Avram Davidson, '58: "Paramount Ulj," "Great is Diana," and "The Bounty Hunter"

Let's read some 1958 stories by Avram Davidson, starting with "Paramount Ulj," which debuted in the same issue of Galaxy as a Fred Pohl story and a Robert Bloch story we read recently, and then checking out two other stories that debuted in SF magazines.

"Paramount Ulj" 

I didn't care for Frederik "Gateway" Pohl's "The Wizards of Pung's Corners," nor for Robert "Psycho" Bloch's "Block that Metaphor," but maybe this issue of H. L. Gold's Galaxy offers a good Davidson story as a kind of consolation prize or silver lining?

The Pohl was largely a joke story, with weak obvious jokes littered throughout it and a central theme that was broad satire of the modern market economy and modern warfare.  The Bloch was a longish story that served as the set up for a gruesome and childish bit of wordplay.  "Paramount Ulj," like the Bloch, ends on a tired little macabre pun, but the story as a whole is a little more subtle and sophisticated, but not much.  We'll call this merely acceptable.

(Is Galaxy a humor magazine?  I asked this question when reading a Davidson story in Galaxy in the autumn, and today I ask it again.)  

Alien diplomats arrive in current day (1950s) New York.  Much of their speech is intelligible by the natives, but they throw around a few terms that are untranslatable, and unfortunately these words are the important ones.  It seems the aliens have amazing, inscrutable and insuperable powers--they can communicate and even teleport across the galaxy, and wipe out the life of an entire planet with ease.  They are travelling around the galaxy, looking for societies that exhibit "ovlirb-tav"--those who fall short are annihilated.  If Earth's people do not demonstrate this mysterious characteristic, we will be exterminated.  Earth's diplomats are desperate to show we have this quality, and sort of assume it means peace or justice or something like that, and squirm when the aliens look at newspapers and see stories about murder in America, riots in India, civil war in Thailand.  The aliens are suddenly called back home--their father, leader of their space empire, has died.  Our twist ending comes back on these aliens' home world.  These star-hopping beings represent a civilization whose culture revolves around assassination and cannibalism, and they will probably wipe us out because we don't eat dead humans but instead make it our general practice to bury or cremate them.  The pun in the last line, as the diplomats eat their father's corpse, is that the old man had excellent taste.

One of the interesting things about "Paramount Ulj" is that, of the three Earth diplomats, one is Thai and one is Indian, and Davidson offers little jokes about and caricatures of those cultures which are not exactly flattering.  Thus, the story perhaps illustrates the liberties which American writers dealt with non-Western cultures in their work, and provides insight into what an intelligent well-read American thought the noteworthy aspects of India and Thailand in the 1950s.  Along with Davidson's references in the story to the Soviet Union and its satellites sort of provide a view of what was going on in the world and in the minds of Americans in the middle 1950s.

Much better than Pohl's revolting pile of junk, and somewhat better than Bloch's overly long gag story, but no better than passable.  This is not a good issue of Galaxy, folks.

"Paramount Ulj" would be reprinted in the collection Strange Seas and Shores.

"Great is Diana"

I can't come across a reference to Diana without thinking of one of my favorite sculptures, Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Diana of the Tower, versions of which you can see in New York, Philadelphia, New Hampshire, and Washington--when I am in our nation's capital I often take time to look at the version in the National Gallery of Art, which I think is my absolute favorite, though I haven't seen the New York one in a long time.  Saint-Gaudens' elegant and heroic masterpiece depicts Diana in her hunter guise--Davidson's story is about one of Diana's other aspects.

In its debut appearance in F&SF, "Great is Diana" is preceded by a rather long introduction by editor Anthony Boucher the subject of which is another of my favorite subjects--women's breasts!  Well, actually, the intro is a discussion of terms and euphemisms for mammaries.  

Davidson starts the story with a bunch of wealthy guys talking over after-dinner drinks about how women nowadays don't breastfeed and maybe this is why kids act crazy in the 1950s--they were weaned on dextrose, maltose and corn syrup!  (Woah, these guys can maybe get jobs at HHS!)  This is the frame; the core story is told by one of these jokers.

The main narrative is about an 18th(or early 19th?)-century Englishman who travels across Europe to Turkey, sampling all the food and drink available and banging lots of women.  In his letters he describes all his adventures.  In a wild part of Turkey, near Ephesus, he meets an attractive woman who was, apparently, once rich but has now fallen on hard times.  He tries to have sex with her but when he reaches into her clothes he feels not two breasts but many.  This is of course a reference to the famous Diana of Ephesus, a sculpture which depicts Diana as a fertility goddess who has a multitude of mammaries (though some think they look like eggs or even testicles.)  Thinking this a test from God or a temptation from the Devil, the Englishman runs from the woman, and becomes a committed Christian and a devoted husband and father.  Having touched a fertility goddess, he and his wife have many children.

I'll note that evolution, heredity and selective breeding are also pervasive themes of this story.

"Great is Diana" is well-written, Davidson ably employing multiple styles and throwing around many cultural, historical, and literary references.  I can mildly recommend it.

"Great is Diana" was collected in Or All the Seas with Oysters and The Other Nineteenth Century and also selected by David G. Hartwell for Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment.

"The Bounty Hunter"

Of today's three 1958 Davidson stories, this is perhaps the most critically successful--Brian Aldiss, Dennis Pepper, and Hans Stefan Santesson all included it in anthologies after it debuted in Santesson's Fantastic Universe.

"The Bounty Hunter" is also probably the most entertaining  story we are reading today; less erudite than "Great is Diana," it is a pretty smooth read, a decent twist ending story that is well-written and economically draws portraits of characters and of a society--the twist is important, but there is quite a bit more to it than that.  

A legislator and his son, a college student, come to visit a remote cabin in the woods inhabited by a trapper.  These three people are the descendants of space colonists--their ancestors took over this planet generations ago after travelling across the galaxy.  Those hardy ancestors tamed this wild world, fought for independence, then fought civil wars amongst themselves; their descendants today live in an orderly society in which everything is carefully planned and structured.  Is the current regime of strict disciple and conformity a sign this society is exhausted, has lost the drive and spirit of their brave, war-like, industrious forebearers? 

Some small percentage of people resist this discipline, and the trapper is one of them.  He lives out in the wilderness, trapping native wildlife--"big varmints"--and sometimes hunting them with some kind of firearm.  He eats real meat instead of synthetics.  He even drinks booze, which everybody knows is unhealthy!  The government pays him a bounty for each big varmint he catches--the varmints are dangerous, and their population needs to be kept down.  With modern techniques the native creatures could easily be exterminated, but the government doesn't pursue such a policy, perhaps because these trappers, who are often featured in fictional 3D TV shows, are people's last connection to their adventurous past.

The twist ending of "The Bounty Hunter" is that this planet is Earth, and the big varmints are the last human beings--the legislator, college student and trapper are inhuman, but quite humanoid, aliens.  We readers have, of course, been assuming they were the descendants of Earthborn people on some alien world.

I like it.

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A solid batch of stories.  I should probably read Davidson more often.  I say this kind of thing about writers all the time, of course, and fail to follow up on it--I'm afraid there is far more material I want to read than I will ever get to, even if I manage to cut all the dextrose, maltose, corn syrup, seed oils, alcohol and carbohydrates from my diet.

More short stories from the 1950s in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.  Until then, keep an eye out for traps, my fellow varmints!

Robert Bloch, 1958: "Block that Metaphor," "Egghead," and "The Deadliest Art"

In our last episode we read a story by Frederik Pohl (the less said about it, the better) in an issue of Galaxy.  That issue of Galaxy also includes stories by Avram Davidson and Robert Bloch that piqued my interest, so today let's read that Bloch story, "Block that Metaphor," and two other stories by the man who brought you Norman Bates that appeared in 1958 magazines.  Next time we'll read three 1958 stories by Davidson.

"Block that Metaphor"

This story has two foundational ideas, one solid science fiction idea, and one childish joke idea.  It is the space faring future and the human race has recently made contact with another of many intelligent alien races.  These aliens have abandoned their physical forms and installed their brains in robotic bodies, so they don't have to eat or rest or take a dump and they have super 360-degree vision and super hearing and super memory, etc.--that's the solid SF idea.  The childish joke idea is that these aliens (whom humans call "Mechs") are extremely "literal"--they have no concept of metaphor, simile, or hyperbole.  There is a lot of tension between humans and the Mechs because, when humans first met them, the Mechs heard a guy say offhandedly that "I ought to have my head examined" and the literal-minded Mechs took the man's head apart, accidentally killing him.  Other similar mistakes have occurred, inspiring the animosity of ordinary Earth people towards the Mechs, whom the Earth government and big business want to be friends with.

The plot of "Block that Metaphor" concerns diplomat Lane Borden, who is hosting the first Mech to arrive on Earth at the Embassy while outside an angry anti-Mech mob demonstrates.  Around the Mech, Borden, and all the other staff at the Embassy, wear a device to "scramble" their "subvocalizations" because if the alien's super duper electronic hearing picks up any figurative or metaphorical comments the Mech may act upon them and cause trouble.  There is a ball at which Borden's fiancé plays the piano.  The mob gets past the gates and throws a rock through the window of the ball room.  Borden goes outside and pacifies the crowd.  The alien is grateful--it believes the human mob might have killed it if Borden hadn't worked his diplomatic magic on the crowd.  The Mech wants to give Borden a gift to show its gratitude.  Borden's scrambler has been malfunctioning, and our gruesome twist ending is the result of the Mech picking up one of frustrated musician Borden's subvocalizations while watching his fiancé tickle the ivories--"I wish I had those fingers...."     

"Block that Metaphor" is well paced and smoothly written and all that, so I want to like it, but the fact is that the story's entire raison d'etre is to provide the opportunity to deliver a dumb joke, the kind of joke a little kid might compose, and that makes it impossible to give it a passing grade--thumbs down for "Block that Metaphor."

"Block that Metaphor" can be found in the oft-reprinted Bloch collection Atoms and Evil, as well as a Dutch collection which takes as its title story Bloch's "Comfort Me, My Robot."  What is the Dutch equivalent of "ooh la la"?

"Egghead"

Here's another story that shows up in Atoms and Evil.  "Egghead" debuted in Fantastic Universe, alongside stories by Grand Master Robert Silverberg; Evelyn E. Smith, whose "Softly While You're Sleeping" we liked; and Michael Shaara, who is probably more famous for his American Civil War and baseball fiction than his SF--we read his sentimental robot story "Orphans of the Void" a while ago and I gave it a thumbs down.  Enough with the sentimental robots already.

"Egghead" is about conformity, one of the big topics when people talk about the 1950s.  The story is set in the near future of the 1970s, when everybody wears the same clothes and has the same hair cut and eats the same thing for breakfast (cruller and coffee.)  Bloch also manages to fit in other de rigueur 1950s topics--how there is too much TV, too much advertising, too much consumerism, and too much automobile, I mean, too many automobiles.

Our protagonist and narrator, a college student, lets his hair grow long, wears a suit that is some years out of date, and orders eggs and cocoa for breakfast.  He even is willing to sit in the booth at the drug store (remember kids, in the 1950s many a drug store was like a diner or coffee shop) which doesn't have a TV, and to sell his car.  His girlfriend dumps him, not wanting to be seen with such a nonconformist guy.

News that our narrator is a nonconformist gets around fast and it looks like our guy will get thrown out of college--in this world college exists to enforce conformity among the middle class and train the professional elite to enforce conformity on and inspire consumerism among the proletariat through advertising and other psychological techniques.  Our guy is contacted by the local underground of individualists, college students led by a disgraced professor who seek to hide their nonconformity and work their way into the highest ranks of society to later lead a nonviolent individualist revolution.  The professor gives a long history lesson about how America went from being an individualistic country to a conformist one and points out that while the establishment calls the nonconformists "commies" and "pinkos" those words are now just terms of abuse, divorced from their literal meanings, and the nonconformists aren't really communists at all.   

The twist ending is that the narrator is a double agent, working for the elite.  He collects info on the individualists and turns them in to the authorities.

A pedestrian twist ending story that airs the complaints about mid-century America we have heard a million times already.  Barely acceptable.

"The Deadliest Art" 

Here's a story that first saw print in Bestseller Mystery Magazine.  It would reappear in several Bloch collections, among them the second volume of The Complete Stories of Robert Bloch (whch is where I'm reading it) and the German collection Horror Cocktail.

"The Deadliest Art" is a little trio of short-shorts.  The first is about how a British guy in India discovers his wife is cheating on him and tosses a snake at the man who cuckolded him--when the second guy survives the bite he convinces the wronged man that the Indian who sold him the serpent cheated him, selling him a harmless snake, and that the guy's wife is a liar.  The twist ending is that the guy who got bit has an artificial leg--the snake really is deadly and the wife's lover proceeds to trick the cuckold into getting killed by his own snake.

The second is about a Chicago musician, a drummer, who is a heroin addict.  Bloch writes this with a lot of musician slang.  The drummer's drug dealer owns a pawn shop, which is convenient because the drummer can pawn stuff and get his drugs all in the same place--one-stop shopping.  The time comes when the junkie drummer has pawned his drums and can't work to get the money to buy them back.  He tries to steal the drums back, and in the struggle with the pawn broker the drums get busted up.  The druggie drummer then murders the pawn broker and uses medical instruments in the shop to skin the pawn shop owner and use the skin to fix his drums.

The third and final story involves two guys who own a barbecue joint.  They annually hold a cook out in honor of the local police.  When one of the men kills the other he cooks the corpse up and feeds it to the cops; the story ends with one of Bloch's lame puns.

Barely acceptable.

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Not Bloch's best work--forgettable, disposable little trifles.  Hopefully the Avram Davidson 1958 stories we will be reading next time will be a little more ambitious and successful.