Merril-approved 1958 stories by J Williams, R Wilson, J Wyndham and R F Young

The day we all doubted would come has finally arrived.  The day we finish our tour of 1958's speculative fiction and bid farewell to our guide, critical darling (though one of our favorite critics, Barry Malzberg, has had some choice things to say about her) Judith Merril.  For what seems like forever, I have been reading and blogging about selected stories from the alphabetical honorable mentions list in the back of Merril's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy, 4th Annual Volume.  And today the light at the end of the tunnel is visible up ahead as we arrive at the last letters of the alphabet, "W" and "Y" (Merril didn't encounter any stories by "X" or "Z" authors she felt worth recommending.)  Today's blog post will be the final of this long term project.  

(Find at the bottom of this post a long list of links to the previous posts in this series.)    

Merril includes on her list five "W" stories and one "Y" story, and five of these pieces of fiction are easily accessible to us cheapos.  Sadly, Merril's first "W" story, "Piggy" by Paul Wallach, appeared in an issue of Swank that I can't find any scans of.  As for her second "W," that is James White's "Tableau," which we read in 2020.  it is the remaining three "W" tales and the "Y" piece we'll be reading today in scans of the publications in which they debuted.  Let's hope this project will be ending on a high note with four great stories!

"The Hunter and the Cross" by Jeanne Williams 

Jeanne Williams seems to have penned many historical novels about the American West, as well as a few fantastical sex or romance novels.  There are four short fiction credits at Williams' page on isfdb; this one is the third.  "The Hunter and the Cross" debuted in Fantastic, in an issue with some weaker than usual Virgil Finlay illustrations and an ad on the back cover for the Science-Fiction Book Club that highlights John Christopher's No Blade of Grass ("The book that SHOCKED the editors of The Saturday Evening Post"), which I read back in 2015.

"The Hunter and the Cross" is a story about Catholic mysticism, with lots of blood and some fetishistic sex undertones, set in a village in New Mexico.  The first paragraph sets the scene and offers some foreshadowing thusly:

It was the trail of the Penitentes, where they marched in the night wind, leaving a track of blood in the snow. There on the mountain at Easter they crucified one of their number, enacting the passion of Christ.

Soledad is a gorgeous girl who got married to some old geezer who can't get it up.  One day she is out in the woods getting water, and Gil, from the village on the other side of the mountain, comes by.  A great hunter, he is carrying the corpse of a mountain lion, his kill dripping blood on him.  Gil has banged the hot wives of many of the men back in his village, including those of "the jefe" and "the colonel," but when he sees Soledad he thinks this is the hottest chick he has ever seen!  He aches to possess her, but something keeps him from taking her by force and then carrying her off to his village.  Is it the cross that hangs between her breasts?  Is his love for her turning him into a believing Christian?

Gil takes lodgings in Soledad's village, gives the mountain lion's pelt to Soledad as a gift, starts attending church, even joins the Penitentes, who slash and flagellate his back, drawing blood, a process that deepens Gil's understanding of the sacrifices endured by Christ, a process Williams describes with gusto.

His back was a raw mass. In his belly was acrid sickness. But now he was one of the Brothers of Blood.

When Gil, feverish, makes a lonely pilgrimage up the mountain, a peon, I guess the Devil in disguise, tempts him with peyote, an episode I expect is to remind us how Satan tempted Jesus during those 40 days in the wilderness.  Gil resists, but only for so long--after he succumbs, he, apparently, transforms into a monstrous mountain lion that terrorizes Soledad's village, devastating the crops and slaying multiple farmers.  The jealous women of the village blame beautiful Soledad for the murderous attacks, accusing her of being a who transforms into the lion.  It doesn't help that they catch her caressing the lion's pelt Gil gave her.  Gil realizes Soledad loves him as much as he loves her!  

In an effort to save Soledad, Gil promises the villagers he will kill the monster cat after he's finished participating in the current ecstatic Penitente ritual, in which his fellow Penitentes have assigned him the role of Christ.  When they tie him up to the cross, Gil feels himself transforming into the monster lion again!  In front of everybody!  Soledad comes to him, her love redeeming him and turning him into a human again before he dies--this miraculous event proves to those watching that Soledad is not a witch.

A wild and crazy story that treats Christianity with deadly seriousness, condemns drug use, and also has the elements you expect to see in women's erotica/romance ("the hunkiest of hunks who has cuckolded all the elite men of his town comes to my town and can't resist my looks and I convince him to go monogamous for me.")  The style is a little weak and the plot construction is a little clunky, but not terrible.  We'll call it acceptable.

I can't find any evidence that "The Hunter and the Cross" was ever reprinted, and it is a little curious that Judith Merril, whom I think of as a Jewish Marxist, would recommend this ecstatic Christian story, but maybe she liked that it was written by a woman and included a woman falsely accused of witchcraft who, in the end, resolves the plot with her bravery?  And maybe Merril, who was always trying to convince people that genre boundaries were a scam, thought the story a prime example of how broadly SF could be defined, how science fiction/fantasy devices like a guy transforming into a monster could be used for almost any purpose, to push almost any agenda.

"Man Working" by Richard Wilson

It seems this story, which debuted not in a magazine but in the fourth of Fred Pohl's Star anthologies, has never been reprinted in English, though it would show up in a 1970s German version of the Star series entitled Titan and in a 1984 French anthology.  I believe this will be the fifth story by Wilson I have read.  Back in 2016 I denounced his apparently well-regarded tale "The Story Writer."  I liked "The Big Fix" and "Lonely Road" much better when I read them in 2024.  But in January I read Wilson's "Course of Empire" and thought it terrible.  So I guess anything can happen today with "Man Working."

As it turns out, "Man Working" is a trifling joke story, though it has some good SF concepts.  You might argue that it is an anti-racist or pro-diversity story, and/or that it pokes fun at the banal stock phrases used by liberals who preach tolerance.  The jokes and plot are not bad, they just don't amount to much.  We're calling it acceptable.  

It is the near future.  A skyscraper 528 stories high has been built in Chicago.  Unfortunately, a global depression hit soon after the mile-high tower was completed, so today only the lowest ten stories are occupied--floors 11 through to the observation deck are abandoned...or so they want us to believe!

In fact, the top-most stories are occupied by extraterrestrials of various species resident here on Earth in secret.  These long-term visitors are not alien government spies or the recon squad of an invasion force or anything like that--most of them are somehow involved in show biz.  There's an alien who can pass for human who uses his psychic powers to perform magic on Earth stages--it is rumored he has kidnapped a human woman, an Earth magician's assistant whom he made disappear but has not reappeared, for sexual purposes.  There is a blob alien who, a handsome leading man on his planet, takes monster parts here in Earth films.  Another alien is doing research on Earth for a book he is writing.  One alien is trying to sell an English translation of an alien novel.  And so on.    

Almost no humans know about these aliens; our narrator, a down on his luck show biz guy with experience as a publicity man, is himself in the dark.  If he doesn't make some money soon he'll be thrown out of his residence hotel--he is so low on funds he hasn't had his shoes shined in two days.  (Some of the details in the story remind you it was penned in the 1950s.)  He can make a few bucks if he can find a mind-reading act for a TV show airing tonight.  He spots an old friend, an old crony from happier days, and asks for help.  This second guy knows all about the secret a mile above Chicago's mean streets.  He takes our narrator up to the top of the 528-story building via its ultra hi-tech secret entrance to try to find a mind-reading act.  Some of the humor of the story lies in the amazement of the narrator that these aliens are on Earth, some in how his friend impresses upon him that the aliens are just folks with souls like you and me, so don't call them "aliens" because that is "Earth-supremacy talk," and besides they are better than humans.

There are lots of mind-reading ETs in the building, but none are really suitable for the TV spot, but our narrator makes the money he needs by taking a role as a monster in an alien movie--the aliens think us humans are as hideous and scary as we humans think blob people are.

Acceptable filler.  Maybe the "immigrants are just as good or better than we are and none of them are going to try to change our culture, abolish dog-owning or pork-eating or anything like that" angle attracted Merril's admiration.

"Idiot's Delight" by John Wyndham 

This is one of Wyndham's Troon stories.  We read another, 1960's "The Emptiness of Space" AKA "The Asteroids: 2194" way back in 2015. Damn, I've been running this blog a long time.  "Idiot's Delight" has been reprinted many times since its debut in New Worlds, often under the title "The Moon A.D. 2044" or just "The Moon," including in Fantastic, a Troon collection titled The Outward Urge, and several anthologies.  I'm reading the New Worlds version, which is like 35 pages long.

John Carnell, editor of New Worlds, spoils the theme of the story in his little intro, which alerts you to the fact that "Idiot's Delight" is a sad British wish fulfillment fantasy--the British become the leaders of the post-World War II effort to colonize space--and a lame bit of bolshie apologia that suggests doing anything to deter or defeat a Soviet attack is a waste of resources.  Ugh.

The first part of Wyndham's story establishes that fifty-year-old Michael Troon, commander of the British moon base, is a giant among men, that Britain's moon base would never have been established if not for his heroic efforts.  But, boo hoo, today his subordinates don't appreciate him!  They may even mutiny!  Well, at least one of his crew is still on his side--a beautiful thirty-year-old woman doctor.  They have a philosophical discussion on how good things can cause or be the result of bad things (the Roman Empire was brutal but laid the foundation for European civilization, cars and airplanes kill people but are extremely useful, etc.) and then we get the expository dialogue that sets the scene.

Ten days ago, war between the Soviet Union and the West erupted.  As is usual in SF stories, nobody knows if it was the liberal capitalists or the totalitarian communists who started the war--many members of the SF community sympathize with the USSR and its goals, so SF stories are very reluctant to say anything critical of the USSR, at least not without also saying something bad about the United States.  The American and Soviet moon bases launched many missiles, fully participating in the war, and, apparently, have been destroyed, but Troon (apparently) has held back, launching only a small notional number of medium-sized missiles, presumably to preserve the British moon base because he doesn't care about anything more than he cares about the quest for the stars.  His men are unhappy because they came to the moon to deter the Soviet Union and, if necessary, to defend Great Britain with the many heavy atomic warheads they think the base is equipped with, and under Troon's leadership the base has failed to fulfill its raison d'etre, not done all it could to protect their homes and families.  Troon's defense is that he hasn't received orders from Earth to launch the full complement of missiles, but his gung ho subordinates don't believe him or think he should launch them anyway on his own initiative.  (The example of Nelson as Copenhagen is invoked.)

Troon takes a walk in his space suit on the lunar surface and reminisces, and Wyndham provides us a flashback to Troon's life and career.  As a nepo-baby, son of a hero, Troon had the public prestige to convince the British government and public that a British moon base was a good idea, and Wyndham describes the various PR and psychological strategies Troon employed to get the British moon base constructed and some of the technical aspects of the base.  

Halfway through the story Troon returns to the base interior and we get more conversation with that female doctor that reveals how Troon has temporarily defused the tension between him and his subordinates.  We also get a brief feminist sideline, exposition on why women are on the base--to raise morale--which includes the assertion that women are more adaptable than men.      

In the second half of the story a handful of Soviet troops, including the Soviet moon base commander,  come to the British base claiming to be the only Soviet survivors on Luna.  The Soviet officer describes in detail how his base destroyed the American base but then American robots destroyed his base--Wyndham goes to great lengths in this quite long section of the story to make the communists sympathetic and the Americans appear alien and sinister, to make you hope the Soviet soldiers, who have killed all the Americans on the moon, survive the US retaliatory strike.  Wyndham goes even further--the wily Reds are smarter than the Americans and Troon's British subordinates--the commies are fully aware that the British moon base never had a full arsenal of heavy missiles, just that notional number of medium missiles that have already been expended!  That is our twist ending--the British moon base was toothless all the time, a sham!  

We readers are then encouraged to look forward to a future in which British tricksters and communist murderers join forces to explore the stars. 

Obviously I think a story which paints the monstrous gangsters who ran the Soviet Union and their thugs as more sympathetic than the elected leadership of the United States and members of America's armed services is disgusting.  But let's try to put that aside and judge whether this is a good or bad story based on whether it achieves the author's goals and whether it is entertaining or interesting to the reader.

All the technical stuff about building a moon base and the operation of war robots and so on is good.  The action scenes in which the heroic Soviets face the evil American robots are good on a literary and entertainment level even though their purpose is morally reprehensible, and Troon's walk on the surface of the moon is not bad.

So much for the good parts.  Now the problems.  Most of the story is a series of conversations, which is kind of boring.  Then there is the attractive doctor.  We hear all about how elegant she is and her nice hair and pretty eyes blah blah blah but then she vanishes from the narrative half way through, playing little role in the plot.  She was just there so Troon would have somebody to talk to, and when the Soviet commander appears she offers no more use to the author so he discards her.  Another problem: we are kept in suspense by the question of the unfired missiles, the mystery as to why Troon hasn't launched the missiles and why HQ back on Earth hasn't ordered the launch of the missiles, only to find that there are no missiles, that Troon isn't making an heroic or foolish decision--he isn't making a decision at all because there is no decision to make.  This is deflating.  Finally, it is a little depressing and annoying that the whole story is an endorsement of elites deceiving the public and those who look to them for leadership.  This is typical SF stuff, but it never sits well with me, as people who have followed my blog are well aware.

I am giving "Idiot's Delight" a thumbs down, but I can see why, with its celebration of elite manipulation, pro-Soviet and anti-American content, and two lines of tacked-on feminism, that leftists like Merril would like it.

(If you want to hear me attack more of Wyndham's work check out my blog post about Re-Birth AKA The Chrysalids.)

"Lucas Parkes" is a pseudonym of Wyndham's

"Magic Window" by Robert F. Young 

There is a typo in the vary last line of SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy, 4th Annual Volume--"Magic Window" is cited as having appeared in Fantastic Universe when it in fact debuted in the same issue of Fantastic as Williams' "The Hunter and the Cross," which we read earlier today.  "Magic Window" reappeared in a 1968 reprint magazine, in a 1977 Japanese Young collection, and in a 2011 American Young collection.      

This story is pretty lame, like a saccharine thing from a mainstream magazine or a particularly sappy episode of The Twilight Zone.  I guess Merril liked it for its valorizing of the creative artist and its contempt for the boring ordinary people who actually do the real work that keeps society functioning.  This is today's reminder that if you work an ordinary job in an office or factory or something like that, the people who write the books you read and perform the music you listen to and make the shows you watch think you are a little Eichmann. 

A salesman living in a big city one day stumbles upon a sidewalk sale of art--a pretty girl has only one painting for sale but nobody stops to consider buying it.  The painting catches the salesman's eye, and he talks to the girl briefly.  All day he thinks about the painting, which sounds (to me) like a totally boring piece of junk a kid would produce, but which I guess Young wants us to think is magical--a landscape with sparkling lakes and a night sky full of stars of many colors.  Good grief.  Our guy can't stop thinking about this painting and it distracts him while he's trying to make sales and when he has lunch with his fiancé.  Young makes clear that the fiancé is a square and that ahead of the salesman lies a square life in the suburbs with a house and kids.

Instead of keeping his dinner date with his fiancé, the salesman returns to the side walk sale to find only one artist remains, you know who, and she has not sold her painting.  He buys it and takes the artist to dinner and they talk about Keats and Wordsworth blah blah blah.  He takes her home and she shows him the window--she calls it her "Magic Casement"--through which she looks to see the visions she paints; he just sees the bricks of the building across the alley.  She pleads with him, saying she can help him see the magic in the world, begs him to not become just another cog in the machine, another person who watches TV, but he leaves.

Some weeks later the salesman sees the girl on the street, looking unhealthy.  Later he goes to her apartment but the landlord tells him the girl has left.  It is May 1st, which I guess is significant; maybe another reference to Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," maybe a reference to the start of summer or International Workers' Day or something.  Back home the salesman unrolls the painting and finds it is now a painting of bricks, not of a fairy tale landscape.  The salesman is a sensitive person who had the opportunity to become a beatnik or hippy or whatever, but he has thrown that chance away to join the masses, working a 9 to 5 and watching TV with a suburban wife and suburban kids in a suburban house.

In general I have sympathy for the theme of middle-class men who regret settling down to a boring wife and a boring job instead of leading a life of risk or creativity or adventure or something.  I love The Kinks' Soap Opera, for example.  But Young's story here is sterile and lifeless, like something anodyne for a kid with no edge, no challenge, no excitement or personality, obvious banal filler.  Thumbs down!

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I feel like our journey through 1958's SF is ending with a bang.  I didn't think any of today's stories was actually good, much less great, but they run the gamut of topics that might appeal to the woman who became the cheerleader of the New Wave and they are provocative and are certainly inspiring a big reaction in me.  Jeanne Williams' story is odd, a combination of ecstatic Catholicism and a womens' romance novel, something that is surprising to see in a SF magazine and on Merril's honorable mentions list.  Richard Wilson's entry on Merril's list is a mere joke story but it has some interesting SF elements and is pretty economical.  Today's John Wyndham story has politics that I find quite aggravating, but the story is ambitious and covers a traditional SF theme in a traditional SF format (a future history of the quest to conquer the stars) and its big action scene and the technical scientific stuff is well-handled.  Robert F. Young's story is the blandest bit of filler, but certainly representative of the outlook of many people in the SF community.

Well, this has been an interesting project, and I will probably embark on a similar expedition in the near future.  For now, find below a link to each of the previous entries in our exploration of Judith Merril's honorable mentions of 1958 SF stories.  

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

John T.Phillifent, Kit Reed, Mack Reynolds, and Charles W. Runyon 

Margaret St. Clair, Thomas N. Scortia and John Shepley

Robert Silverberg and Clifford Simak

Cordwainer Smith, Will Stanton, and Job Stopa

Theodore Sturgeon, William Tenn, and Walter Tevis

Peter Ustinov, Jack Vance, Joan Vastek and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 

Playboy Suspense: W Tevis, F Brown and A Davidson

Readily available at the internet archive are scans of 1967's The Playboy Book of Crime and Suspense.  Let's read three stories from the book by people connected to the science fiction community.  Before we begin, let's note that I've already read two stories included in the anthology, Charles Beaumont's "The Hunger" and Richard Matheson's "The Distributor," and that while I will be consulting the issues of Playboy in which today's stories debuted, I am actually reading them in a scan of the 1968 soft cover edition of The Playboy Book of Crime and Suspense, the one with the desperate-looking green cover by Richard Tyler.

"The Hustler" by Walter Tevis (1957)

This story is, it seems, the foundation or germ of the famous novel that I have not read that became the famous film which I have not seen.  I'm not particularly interested in reading about pool or billiards or snooker or any of that, but the story is only like 16 pages here in The Playboy Book of Crime and Suspense so let's give it a shot.  After all, I read Tevis' "Far From Home" a while ago and I thought it "well-written."  

Sure enough, "The Hustler" is a well-written mainstream story.  I liked it, but it reminded me why I always read speculative fiction and exploitation fiction--there's nothing crazy going on in "The Hustler," nothing surprising, and there is no political or social agenda or metaphor about life that I could discover.  Reading the story is like reading about real life, but since I am already living in real life, the tale is not very compelling or enlightening.  (Similarly, I am willing to watch 1960s British horror films and 1970s Italian crime films but recoil from spending any time with mainstream 21st-century American films because I wasn't born in the '60s and was a child in the '70s and have always lived in the United States, so something like Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed or All the Colors of the Dark is going to indirectly as well as directly expose me to an alien world, and since I have lived as an adult for over 25 years in 21st-century America any movie made in 21st-century America is only going to tell me stuff I already know, shove in my face boring ideas I am sick of hearing about.)

Sam gets out of prison after serving six years for manslaughter.  He puts on a disguise and heads to Chicago.  He practices at pool tables for a little while, then succeeds in setting up high stakes games with a big fat guy.  We learn that Sam is well-known as the best practitioner in the USA of the particular type of pool he plays, so if he wants to make money shooting pool he has to trick other people into thinking he is somebody else.  Six or so years ago a guy recognized him and a fight erupted and Sam killed somebody.  While making over a thousand bucks off the fat guy today, another guy recognizes Sam, and the suspense of the story ramps up as we wonder if Sam is going to get into another fight--Sam will likely not win or even survive this fight, as the fat guy is known to have a whole gang of thugs to back him up.  As the story ends we don't quite know what is going to happen to Sam, but we have to assume that a catastrophe is going to occur to him.

Tevis does a creditable job generating suspense during the pool game in which Sam tries to win money without revealing he is a world-champion level player, even if you don't really understand pool scoring, and after Sam is exposed and we have every reason to believe he is going to be tortured and/or murdered.  So, thumbs up, but don't expect me to abandon genre fiction for mundane bestseller fiction.

"The Hustler" debuted in the issue of Playboy that included Ray Bradbury's love letter to Picasso, "In A Season of Calm Weather," which I liked even though I find Picasso pretty lame.  The story has reappeared in at least one Tevis collection, The King is Dead.  

"The Hobbyist" by Fredric Brown (1961)

The issue of Playboy in which "The Hobbyist" debuted has a fun light-hearted cover, about a million ads for and articles about men's clothing and accessories, and a healthy serving of photos of Swedish women in various states of undress.  Brown's story, one of his "short-shorts" or "vinnies," takes up less than half a page of the magazine, but two pages here in this anthology.  

There is a rumor in town that the local druggist will provide to would-be murderers an undetectable poison.  A guy who wants to kill his wife goes to the druggist, requests the poison.  Unhappy hubby discovers the unwelcome truth--the druggist poisons the people who come asking for the poison as a means of preventing murders.  And he isn't a killer himself--he sells to those he poisons the antidote.  The druggist has also figured out a way to make sure the aspiring assassins he disappoints don't kill him out of a desire for revenge.

Convoluted, unbelievable, and silly.  Thumbs down!    

"The Hobbyist," AKA "Hobbyist," has been reprinted in many Brown collections, as well as the anthology Stench of Kerosene and Other Short Short Stories, which I believe is a textbook meant to be inflicted on British schoolchildren.

Stench of Kerosene also presents to the laddies and lasses Robert Bloch's 
"Hobo," which we read in 2019

"No Fire Burns" by Avram Davidson (1959)

Having just enjoyed Davidson's "Amphora," of today's three stories this is the one I was most looking forward to.  

Oh, well, "No Fire Burns" is kind of disappointing, a little long and convoluted and tedious.  You might call it a conspiracy story, and a twist ending story in which minor characters from the beginning show up at the end and prove to be pivotal.  It is also a speculative story about the potential of the science of psychology.

Dr. Colles is a psychiatrist who runs a big for-profit research institution.  Mr. Melchior runs a major business conglomerate.  And we've got Mr. Taylor, Melchior's personnel director.  In early scenes, Melchior hires Colles to develop a test to determine who among his many employees is a psychopath, ostensibly to avoid having people on staff who will commit major crimes all of a sudden, like murdering a colleague with whom they are competing for a promotion.  Early scenes also suggest Colles is a psychopath himself--he expresses contempt for ordinary people, arguing that a smart educated person like himself has no ability to communicate with a Joe Six Pack kind of guy, and we learn Colles has been having sex with his secretary for years without ever considering marrying her and is thinking of letting her go because she is losing her looks; there is even a scene in which she complains he treats her like he'd treat a dog.  Davidson also introduces us to working class characters, employees of Melchior's enterprises, who are psychopathic, a man who borrows money from a fellow machinist and feels no pressure whatsoever to pay it back, for example.

The first twist is when Colles figures out that Melchior is using the test Colles developed not to weed out psychopathic job applicants or provide psychiatric treatment to psychopathic employees, but to figure out whom he can hire to perform assassinations.  Instead of calling the police or whatever, Colles goes into partnership with Melchior in the assassination business.  The second twist is that Taylor, Melchior and Colles all conspire to kill each other, directing minor characters to murder each other.

"No Fire Burns" is well-constructed, all the various elements from the start coming together in a neat little package by the end, but it isn't fun or exciting--it feels bland and colorless.  A possible exception is the exploration of the personality of one of the working-class psychopaths--this material is kind of depressing, though maybe this individual's responses to the questions on the test, like the questions, is meant to be amusing in a black humor kind of way.  My disappointment with "No Fire Burns" is perhaps a reaction to the fact that it is a relentless downer--"Amphora" has cynical elements, being full of evil, selfish and negligent characters, but a few of those characters are actually fun and seem to have redeeming qualities--all the characters in "No Fire Burns" are execrable.  Or so I took them to be.        

One of the noteworthy things about "No Fire Burns," which is reflected in its title, is Davidson's discussion (in the dialogue of his characters) of distinctions among the sorts of people who kill other people.  Melchior doesn't want to hire people who kill because they enjoy killing people, or people who kill because they lack self control and in a fit of passion may kill a guy who steals their girlfriend or insults their mother.  Melchior wants to hire people willing to kill coldly, rationally, after calculating that committing a murder is in their interest, not people who kill because some kind of fire is burning inside them.  (I wonder if the idea that psychopathic killers lack a fire inside themselves is also a sort of reference to the Stoic idea that each man's soul is a divine spark that connects him to the divine and to the universe--in Davidson's taxonomy in this story psychopaths lack this divine spark, this fire that is a fragment of a universal soul.)     

I often call stories "OK" and "acceptable" that are routine filler pieces.  I'm going to judge "No Fire Burns" as "OK," but it is not a half-assed derivative filler piece; the story is ambitious and Davidson put serious work into it and it reflects Davidson's consideration of the human condition, but I just didn't enjoy it very much.       

The issue of Hugh Hefner's magazine that first presented "No Fire Burns" to the world also includes a story by Charles Beaumont that I might get around to reading some day as well as a bunch of limericks about how challenging it is to have sex in a compact car.  Judith Merril was keen on "No Fire Burns," reprinting it in the fifth of her famous series of Year's Best anthologies.  Wow, that fifth Merril volume has been favored with some pretty awesome covers; I don't think I've ever seen this one in stores. 

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Today's stories are, I expect, good examples of what they are, stories that achieve their author's goals, but they aren't really what I personally look for in a story.  Maybe the 1950s stories we read in our next blog post will be more up my alley.

Malicious tales by T N Scortia, W F Nolan and A Davidson

Another of the genre fiction anthologies I came across on the disorganized shelves of an antiques mall recently was Men and Malice, published in 1973 for the Ellery Queen Mystery Club and edited by Dean Dickensheet.  The title page, if not the cover, alerts us to the fact that the stories it presents are all by West Coast authors, and a quick look at the contents page indicates quite a few SF writers are represented.  Let's check out the included tales by Thomas N. Scortia, William F. Nolan and Avram Davidson.  I'm reading them in a scan of Men and Malice.

"The Goddess of the Cats" by Thomas N. Scortia (1973)

Most of the stories in Men and Malice are new to this volume.  "The Goddess of the Cats" debuted here, and would be reprinted in the 1975 Scortia collection Caution! Inflammable!  I own a 1976 paperback edition of Caution! Inflammable! and started reading it in 2019, but somehow never got around to reading more than half of it.  More recently I read Scortia's "Someday I'll Find You" and declared it "barely acceptable," his "The Avengers" and called it a "half-baked clunker" and his "Gag Rule" and denounced it as a "total waste of the reader's time."  Well, we won't let our previous experience with Scortia prejudice us against this production here--the best performer can have an off day and the most lackluster shooter can score a lucky hit.  

Miguel is a Mexican living in California.  He hates the English language.  He hates wearing shoes.  He hates Christianity.  He is filled with pride at his talents.  In the first paragraph of the story he has sex with some woman for whom he has contempt.  Miguel sounds like he belongs in the legislature, but in fact he is a guy who makes mosaic murals.

Miguel is living among the metal buildings and white people he detests because he got a job putting up a mural of a sea monster, a creature he dreams about at night, a creature with the head and torso of a stacked chick, but whose underparts are like those of some kind of scaly squid or octopus.  The mosaic mural is above a fountain at a new apartment complex.  The project was begun by an American named Warburg, but Warburg went bankrupt and sold it to a French Canadian.  Miguel hates this Canadian as much as he does the Yanquis--this Quebecois has the temerity to expect Miguel to help with physical labor as well as install the mural, as if he was just some hired hand and not a talented artiste!

Because of the venue I am reading it in, I expected "The Goddess of the Cats," despite the title, to be a straight detective story, while the first few paragraphs of the story led me to suspect "The Goddess of the Cats" was going to be a "liberal" wish-fulfillment fantasy about how mean Americans get their just comeuppance from a noble non-white immigrant.  One can certainly interpret the story along those lines, but there are additional nuances and layers that make "The Goddess of the Cats" more interesting and more challenging.  Scortia's story has strong weird, even Lovecraftian, elements, and Miguel is not necessarily the kind of guy who is going to enjoy the sympathy of college-educated progressives from the start of the story to its gruesome finish.  

Miguel is a sexist who thinks women should be subordinate and that if they get out of hand a good beating is in order who, back in Mexico, lives among worshippers of monster-gods who practice human sacrifice.  When the white woman with whom Miguel is regularly having sex, a sculptress, decides to kick Miguel to the curb and share her bed with the French Canadian instead, Miguel tries to summon monsters (great cats of some kind) to destroy the Quebecois.  Then, in the story's climax, Miguel rapes the sculptress--after Miguel has beaten her down and penetrated her, she begins to enjoy being used this way. 

In the end, the Canadian and the sculptress are both dead, and the cops shoot down their killer, Miguel, as he resists arrest.  Are the monstrous felines who mauled the Canadian, and the aquatic goddess to whom Miguel dedicated the heart he tore from the still-living sculptress' chest, real, or just Miguel's hallucinations, perhaps drug induced?

A good story in which a lot is going on, all of it compelling.  So much fiction is larded with fat and obscured with superfluous frills, but Scortia here only gives us sentences which offer value to the reader.  Fans of Yog-Sothery, nasty sex and genre fiction that is about art and design or tries to say something about class conflict and ethnic conflict in North America (we've got an Hispanic who follows the native religion and tries to break out of his working-class background to achieve middle-class respectability among whites, a culturally sophisticated Jew who somehow screws up his finances, a red-headed slut who loves getting banged by foreigners, and a middle-class French Canadian Christian who has vulgar taste) should certainly check "The Goddess of the Cats" out.  And maybe I should read more from Caution! Inflammable! some day.

"Down the Long Night" by William F. Nolan (1957)

I groaned when I realized "Down the Long Night" was first published under the title "Laugh Till You Die," fearing it might be a joke story.  On the other hand, that debut was in a magazine called Terror Detective Story, a periodical graced by some serious sex and violence covers, and as "Down the Long Night" the tale would be reprinted in 2022 in an issue of Weird Fiction Review, so maybe this story is going to have the sorts of horror and speculative elements that we enjoyed in "The Goddess of the Cats" and that are our bread and butter here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Also noteworthy--"Down the Long Night" is the title story of a 2000 Nolan collection, making you think it must be one Nolan is proud of and/or one editors think is particularly good.

Unfortunately, "Down the Long Night" is one of those less-than-credible psychological stories, rather than an actual weird story, plus one of those stories set in a hall of mirrors and funhouse at an amusement park or carnival.  The whole thing feels banal and overwritten, with too much description of the locale but not enough characterization and emotion, and then in the end comes the confusing twist that you don't feel like bothering to figure out because you could not care less about the characters and the whole story just feels bogus anyway, lifeless and mechanical, like Nolan is just going through the motions.  Thumbs down!  "Down the Long Night" is not a joke story, though, I'll give it that.

Alan is a Hollywood screenwriter who pens detective thriller screenplays.  Yes, this is one of those stories in which a guy who writes genre fiction finds himself in a genre fiction scenario.  To me, this kind of thing (like the chase in the funhouse) feels very tired.  Anyway, Alan is affianced to a hot chick, Jessica, who until recently was dating Alan's pal, Paul.  Paul is the Bohemian intellectual type, neurotic and odd.  Paul has called Alan up, saying he is in trouble, that Alan has to come meet him at the amusement park after dark, in the funhouse where the hall of mirrors is, because he (Paul) is hiding from the cops.  Apparently Paul hangs out at this amusement park all the time.

Once Alan is lost in the funhouse, Paul begins playing with him, getting revenge--Paul knows his way around in the dark, and has access to the control panel and can turn on and off the lights and so forth.  He also has a gun and a big knife.  Alan finds Jess's naked dead body--Paul slew her, and is going to slay Paul next!  There are chase scenes and fight scenes meant to be tense, and Paul accuses Alan of using him, alleging that Alan owes Paul his career and repaid Paul by spreading lies about him that ruined Paul's own career as well as his relationship with Jessica so Alan himself could get his mitts on Jessica.  We also get some suggestive insights into Alan's own perhaps abnormal psychology.  Paul ends up dying and Alan surviving, but when the police show up we can't be sure which of the two is the real villain, or what exactly happened, as Alan is an unreliable narrator who apparently compartmentalizes and forgets unpleasant memories--such as sabotaging other people's reputations--so maybe it was Alan that set up Paul and killed Jessica rather than the other way round.  Bewildering and frustrating.

After reading the story in Men and Malice I took a quick look at a scan of the 2000 Nolan collection Down the Long Night.  Nolan in that volume provides an intro to "Down the Long Night" in which he tells us the plot of the story is a collaboration between him and Charles Beaumont, and that some of the prose is actually Beaumont's.  (There is no mention whatsoever of Beaumont in Men and Malice.)  Nolan also talks about how Beaumont was his best friend and Beaumont was awesome, etc.  So I guess Beaumont fans, whom I am led to believe are legion, should check out this story, no matter how lame and annoying I find it.  Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we encourage people to make up their own minds after consulting the primary sources.

"Amphora" by Avram Davidson (1973)

We might consider this a rare Davidson story--after its inaugural appearance here in Men and Malice it was not reprinted until 2023 in AD100, a two-volume collection of uncollected and unpublished Davidson stories released on the occasion of the man's 100th birthday.

Scortia's and Nolan's stories are very much California stories, set in the Golden State and featuring California characters (the artsy types with low morals, the cultist, the Mexican, the entrepreneurial Jew, the screenwriter, etc.) but Davidson's is set on the coast of Spanish West Africa and stars an international cast of people who have nothing to do with California.  And while Scortia's and Nolan's stories are pretty damned serious, Davidson's is written in a sort of light jocular style.  Now, you know I hate joke stories as a general rule, but there are some SF writers, like Jack Vance and Barry Malzberg, who can thread the needle and include in stories humor that is actually funny and that doesn't undermine the actual plot, atmosphere or SF content of a story.  Today Davidson proves to be one of those guys.  Here's a good sample of the subdued, character-based humor to be found in "Amphora":

The captain of the chartered boat sat in the shade of the cooktent drinking hot bottled beer, watching his one-man crew (who also acted as cook) play dominoes with the local headman.  As the cook-mate made up his own rules and the headman simply cheated, the game was not without interest.  Of the three natives who had shown up for work today--sometimes none appeared, sometimes the whole tribe--one sat cross-legged, looking at the pictures in a tattered and greasy Spanish comic book, and the others took turns searching one another's hair for lice.

It isn't nice or politically correct, but this humor is legitimately amusing and not absurdist or farcical but founded on real life human foibles and experiences, so it doesn't cause distraction or threaten suspension of disbelief.

The characters.  Thomas Jefferson Northrup is an oil man from Oklahoma as well as an amateur archaeologist who fancies himself the next Heinrich Schliemann.  He thinks the ancient Greeks had a presence here in northwest Africa, and he is here to prove it.  Luigi di Benedictus is a Swiss inventor who is driving his experimental amphibious all-terrain-vehicle all over Africa on a test run.  Gladys Northrup is T. J.'s less than faithful wife (she married him for his money) and she is having an affair with Eddy, T. J.'s assistant.

The plot.  T. J. has spent most of his oil-derived millions on his crazy archaeological expeditions all over Latin America and Africa, and Gladys and Eddy hope the old man keels over sooner rather than later so there will be some money left for them.  A local, Ali, is pissed off at T. J., so Gladys and Eddy come up with the idea of giving Ali a rifle and instructions to hunt them a gazelle or something for dinner, in hopes Ali will take this opportunity to murder T. J.  T. J. has taken a ride with Benedictus in the Swiss engineer's oversized ATV to a site where he hopes to find amphora and thus prove his theory.  Gladys drops the key to the gun rack in the bay, and Eddy pursues it to the bottom of the bay, where it falls into the mouth of an amphora buried in the sand.  Trying to retrieve the key, Eddy gets his hand stuck inside the amphora and drowns and gets eaten by an octopus.  Meanwhile, T. J., while looking for amphora, has found oil and will get rich again.  The excitement of the new oil project leads T. J. to forget all about his theory that the Greeks were active down here, a theory he will never know was proven true by his vanished assistant, whose place will be taken by Benedictus.  Goofy nerds T. J. and Benedictus, it appears, will live happily every after, pursuing their passions and making a stack of money, while villainous Eddy is dead and vile Gladys will have to live with the guilt that her evil led to the death of her lover--it is hinted she will go insane.

A fun little story.  Thumbs up! 

**********

Alright, a decent crop of stories.  Obviously I thought Nolan's story was bad, but it still has value if you are a student of the genre, if only because of the Beaumont connection.  So not a total waste of time.  Scortia's story is a successful effort to marry the weird story, the exploitative sex and gore thriller story, and a sort of racial/class justice story and even manages to be a story about the power of art and the role of aesthetics in our lives.  Wow.  The Davidson is also about human passion and human evil that leads to death, but it has skillfully employed elements of humor and a more conventional, more comforting sense of justice.

More anthologized crime when next we meet here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Pellucidar by Edgar Rice Burroughs

We both had to smile at the use of my royal title, yet I was indeed still "Emperor of Pellucidar," and some day I meant to rebuild what the vile act of the treacherous Hooja had torn down.

But first I would find my empress.  To me she was worth forty empires.

The first sequel to At the Earth's Core, Pellucidar, appeared as a serial in five installments in All Story Cavalier Weekly in 1915.  The cover painting of the issue with the first episode almost looks like a repainted crop or detail of the painting used to advertise episode #1 of At the Earth's Core a year before.  An interesting choice, I guess meant to catch the eye of the drug store customer who recalled fondly the first Pellucidar adventure, or perhaps suggesting a pretty woman's face was thought to sell more copies than the body of a muscleman, the bulk of a brontosaurus, a terrifying pterosaur or a roaring sabre-toothed tiger.  Later printings of the book are actually more indicative of the novel's distinctive content and feature such dangerous beasts.  Not long ago, at the same antique store where I spotted a Paperbacks From Hell bargain which I took a pass on, I purchased an Ace edition of Pellucidar with a great Frank Frazetta cover and that is what I will be reading today.*  The image gracing this 1978 Ace paperback, sometimes known as Flying Reptiles, is one of my favorite Frazetta works, and within my breast resides a dear hope that the people at Frazetta Girls will one day put out a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle of this painting for me to hang up next to my beloved 1000-piece Vampirella jigsaw puzzle.

*Alas, this thing is full of typos and errors like "sate" for "state" and "described" for "descried" and "purpose" for "propose" which did not appear in a scan of a 1955 British edition I consulted.  For shame, Ace!  

In the prologue to Pellucidar, an amazing coincidence leads to the discovery of a telegraph line buried in the African desert.  The main text of the novels is a transcript of the Morse code signals that come through this device, transmitted to the surface from the inner world of Pellucidar by David Innes, who is the primary narrator of the novel, as he was of its predecessor.

As the main text begins, Innes travels to Pellucidar in his iron mole, which he has packed full of books, firearms and ammo; he arrives in that strange inner world he knows not where.  Amazingly, after marching around for a while, shooting the native wildlife for food and admiring the scenery (like Tarzan and John Carter, Innes has come to love the alien milieu to which he arrived through an unlikely series of events, even the inhabitants of this bizarre world are always trying to enslave or kill him), the first human being Innes runs into is his pal, elderly scientist and fellow American, Perry.

You'll remember from At the Earth's Core that, on his first trip to Pellucidar, Innes was accompanied by Perry.  Innes won the heart of the beautiful native Dian while Innes and Perry made progress in the grand project of uniting all of Pellucidar's primitive human tribes under an empire, the emperor of which was Innes himself, and equipping Innes' loyal subjects with superior weapons, like swords and archery, in hopes of liberating the human race of this inner world from the cruel domination of the diabolical matriarchal pterosaurs known as the Mahar and their brutal lackeys, the gorilla men known as the Sagoth.  Perry has some bad news for Innes.  Thanks to the machinations of the tricky Hooja, a human who himself covets the princess Dian, the human tribes are again in conflict and the Mahar and Sagoths have been giving homo sapiens a right thrashing!  Dian, whom Perry has not seen in ages, even doubts Innes' love for her!

Our ambitious American heroes set out to find Dian and rebuild Innes' empire.  On the way to the most loyal of the many human kingdoms which had pledged loyalty to Innes, they have many adventures, blasting many huge mammals with their rifles, making fur coats so they can cross a snowy mountain range, building a boat so they can cross an ocean infested with icthyosaurs and plesiosaurs.  They meet up with a tribe of humans who are friends of Innes but not part of his anti-Mahar empire yet--these humans have a trade relationship with the Mahars.  A bunch of these people go back to the iron mole with Perry to collect the invaluable equipment and supplies Innes has brought, while another bunch of them accompany Innes on his trip towards the heart of his empire.  Innes' party runs into trouble--Sagoths take them by surprise and Innes is dragged to the Mahar city where he was a slave during his first trip down here!

There are no extant male Mahars and this reptilian race of man-eating scientists reproduces itself via an arcane process of fertilizing their eggs after they have been laid.  These foolish females have only one copy of the fertilizer formula, and in At the Earth's Core Innes stole that book and hid it.  The Mahars demand Innes reveal the location of their guide to sexless reproduction, without which the Mahars will go extinct.  Innes refuses and is thrown in the arena.

Amazingly, another human captive is thrown in the arena at the same time--Innes' wife and empress, the princess Dian!  One third of the way through the book, these lovebirds are reunited.  Also amazingly, an influential Mahar whom Innes did a good turn arrives in town during the gladiatorial games and when she sees Innes down there about to be eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger, she has the ferocious feline carried from the arena by three of the animal-level intelligence pterosaurs who serve as the Mahar leadership's bodyguard.

The Mahars give Innes another chance to earn his freedom by returning the book.  He is inclined to refuse again, but Dian is a smart cookie with a deep faith in her husband and in the modern technology of the surface people which she has heard about from hubby and Perry.  Dian explains to Innes that it doesn't matter if the Mahars regain the ability to reproduce--if Innes is free to unite the humans of Pellucidar and teach them how to use modern technology, no number of cold-blooded psychic rhamphorynchazoid bitches will be able to withstand the attack of homo sapiens Pellucidaris!  While if Innes remains shut up in this Mahar city, the disorganized human tribes won't be able to hold their own stand against even the current number of Mahars.  Like every good husband, Innes admits his wife is right and takes her advice, agreeing to go get the book in return for his and Dian's freedom--of course, until the book is returned, Dian will be a hostage among the Mahars.

(One of the interesting thing in the first two Pellucidar books is how the Mahars initially view the humans as mere cattle and we humans get the idea the Mahars are totally evil monsters, but, as things progress, the Mahars begin to realize that the humans are reasoning beings and Innes and we readers get a sense that maybe the Mahars can be trusted to keep their word.)

When Innes reaches the cave where he hid the book he finds it is absent!  When he gets back to the Mahar city, he learns that somebody purporting to be his agent, now long gone, has already delivered the book to the matriarchal flying reptiles and the Mahars in return surrendered Dian into this joker's custody.  It was the crafty Hooja, who figured out where the book was and has again separated Innes from his lady love!

Innes sets off after Hooja and Dian through the land of shadow.  You see, suspended in the air at the center of the Earth is something like a sun which warms and illuminates the inner surface of the Earth's crust upon which all the people and beasts of Pellucidar tread.  Hanging a mile above this surface, rotating but never changing its position, is a sort of planet or moon, a huge sphere with its own hills and valleys and so forth, and its own gravitational pull.  This moon casts a shadow on the surface of Pellucidar that never moves.  Within this shadow, where plants grow far less robustly, there is a kingdom of humans who use diplodocus as beasts of burden, Thuria; the Thurians have expressed an interest in joining or allying with Innes' empire, seeing as they have long been subject to the oppression of a nearby Mahar city, and recently been attacked by a newly founded kingdom based on an island just outside the shadow, a kingdom that is allied with the Mahars and employs many Sagoth soldiers--the kingdom ruled by Hooja!

(Hooja as a recurring character really adds something to these Pellucidar books, even though his death is underwhelming, he being among those drowned as a boat sinks, instead of dying in a showdown with Innes or Dian.  Of course, maybe this means he can reappear in a later book--cross your fingers, Hooja fans!)

On his way to Thuria and then Hooja's island, Innes has some good adventures, some of the best scenes of the book.  Among these capers is his taming of a hyaenadon; it is good Innes has this monstrous dog fighting by his side, because while he is sleeping somebody steals his revolvers and his rifle.  The hyaenadon also provides Burroughs a chance to give Innes more of an inner life with his descriptions of how the man loves dogs.  The thieves also stole the token Innes bears that proves his identity as Emperor, and the lack of it gets him accused by the Thurians of being an agent of Hooja.  Oops!  So, instead of being at the head of a Thurian army, Innes sets off for Hooja's island kingdom in hopes of rescuing Dian all by his lonesome.         

His dog having left him, Innes is quickly captured by the natives of the island, seven-foot-tall farmers, sort of half human, have beast types.  These peaceful giants are the first farmers Innes has met in Pellucidar.  The beastmen hate Hooja and his invaders, and Innes tries to get them to join forces with him in a war on Hooja, but they figure Innes is Hooja's spy and put him to work in the melon patch.  One of Burroughs' jokes here in Pellucidar is that the beastmen tell Innes he will be executed when the melons are harvested, so Innes tries to delay the harvest, fostering the growth of weeds.

A force of Hooja's men and Sagoths attacks the beastmen's settlement, and the beastmen realize Innes really is their friend when he shows them how to drive off the attackers.  Innes is freed and guided to Hooja's HQ.  The first person he meets there is a human whose village Hooja's thugs took over, a man who is in league against Hooja with none other than Dian, who, though a captive herself, helped this guy to escape Hooja's dungeon.  

Again we see that Dian is very brave and very capable.  You sometimes hear people moan that women in old SF stories are mere damsels in distress who need rescuing, but when I read old SF books I often encounter women like Dian who are clever and brave and resourceful.  A more sensical feminist complaint is that immortalized in the Brueghel Test: resourceful women in old genre fiction generally employ their abilities and demonstrate strength of will not by pursuing some peculiar personal interest of their own, or fighting to improve the condition of their sex or social justice more broadly, but in trying to build or preserve a relationship with a man, the good characters making sacrifices and taking risks to protect a man's life and freedom, the villainous female characters trying to manipulate and dominate men.

Anyway, this guy directs Innes to where Dian is being held, and there are good fight scenes and action scenes as Innes, Dian and their pal escape Hooja's thugs...only to be captured by Hooja's lackeys again.  Luckily a page later the beastmen farmers rescue them.  Then somebody on a diplodocus kidnaps Dian, but Innes' pet hyaenadon returns and makes possible the rescue of Dian.  All these action scenes are individually entertaining, but their impact is somewhat lessened by the fact that after one of our guys  performs prodigies of valor and benefits from astounding pieces of luck he or she will just get captured all over again.

The last two chapters of Pellucidar tell the story of the big naval battle between Hooja's primitive fleet of little boats and the fleet of feluccas equipped with lateen sails and black powder artillery that Perry has constructed off screen and, after Hooja's defeat, how Innes and Perry set up their empire, uniting humanity and friendly non-humans into a federation of kingdoms, seizing all the Mahar cities and driving the matriarchal pterosaur-women off to uncharted territory, establishing an economic system based on barter--no money or resales allowed!--teaching the savage Pellucidarians about mercy, and so on.  This material is kind of utopian and appears in summary form rather than dramatic form, and also reminds us of how John Carter made himself Warlord of Mars and taught the people of Barsoom how to better behave.  Like his Barsoom and Africa stories, Burroughs' Pellucidar stories both celebrate white imperialism and the alleged noble aspects of the "close to nature" lives of barbarians, savages and animals.  We might roll our eyes at this effort to have your cake and eat it too, or, more sympathetically, suggest Burroughs is presenting a utopian synthesis of what is good about modern Western civilization with what is (supposedly) good about life in environments and societies that are more "natural" and less "artificial."   

I enjoyed Pellucidar and of course recommend it.  This sequel differs in tone from At the Earth's Core, being much more optimistic and positive.  I've noted above how the Mahars are a little more sympathetic, the scenes about the wonderful relationship between people and dogs, and the presence of pacific non-human farmers, and the novel's happy ending in which a just society with no money is created in Pellucidar by Innes and Perry.  Again and again Innes and Perry develop healthy and productive relationships with animals and people, relationships which are complementary and foster personal growth in the individuals within the relationships and positive change in the world beyond the relationship.  Another way Pellucidar is "lighter" than At the Earth's Core is its relative lack of horror elements; At the Earth's Core was full of scenes in which people and animals were tortured, dismembered, or lost eyes, and there is very little of that in Pellucidar; though people in the thousands get killed in the wars and fights it depicts, the gore element is much reduced.

A good adventure story with some utopian elements.  There are a bunch more Pellucidar books and I'll be reading more of them in the near future, but first we'll be back to reading short stories that have been anthologized and thus, presumably, represent above average specimens plucked from the vast sea of 20th-century genre fiction.

Scream Along with B Copper, M St Clair and A Budrys

Followers of my twitter feed are all too aware that I spend a lot of time digging through piles of old paperbacks and magazines at antique stores.  Just a few days ago I took a look at a copy of Dell's 1970 Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Scream Along With Me, a paperback selection of stories from the 1967 hardcover anthology edited by Robert Arthur, Stories That Scared Even Me.  I balked at spending six bucks on this artifact, but decided to read three stories included in it by people we here at MPorcius Fiction Log have some interest in.  The stories: Basil Copper's "Camera Obscura," Margaret St. Clair's "The Estuary" AKA "The Last Three Ships" and Algis Budrys' "The Master of the Hounds."

Before we get to the main event, investigating these allegedly scary stories that are said to induce screams, I'll point out that I've already read and blogged about two stories from Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Scream Along With Me by major SF writers, Theodore Sturgeon's "It" and Thomas Disch's "Casablanca."  Also, note that I am reading today's three stories in a scan of Stories That Scared Even Me, not original printings or later reprints.  Plus, if you enjoy gazing upon Alfred Hitchcock's beautiful face, check out our last blog post, in which we read four stories from late 1970s issues of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

And, finally, note that the estimable tarbandu at The PorPor Books Blog is a fan of these Alfred Hitchcock anthologies and has read and blogged about all 25 stories in Stories That Scared Even Me, and talks about collecting Alfred Hitchcock anthologies and reading Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine in the comments to the recent blog post of mine I linked to above.   Make sure to check out what tarbandu has to say!       

"Camera Obscura" by Basil Copper (1966)

Here we have a long and somewhat tedious story that you might say constitutes a Christian story, or an anti-Semitic story, or a story that exploits readers' bitterness at their creditors, or perhaps all three.  "Camera Obscura" also bears some similarities to "A Christmas Carol," and is one of those "horror" stories that, instead of disturbing you by telling you the universe is horrible, seeks to comfort the reader with a wish fulfillment fantasy in which the universe is in fact just and punishes people the reader doesn't like.  Not a scary story.   

The individual sentences of "Camera Obscura" are all well written and there are plenty of interesting images, but the narrative moves very slowly and is repetitive, and the story is thuddingly manipulative--we know from the get go that we are not supposed to like the protagonist, so there is little suspense, as we expect all along that something bad is going to happen to this guy and that we are not supposed to sympathize with him when it does.    

Mordecai Sharsted is a moneylender.  He has a client, Gingold, an apparently wealthy man who has not been paying his debts on time, so Sharsted walks to Gingold's place in order to give the man a final warning before seizing some of his assets.  Instead of letting us make up our own minds about Sharsted, Copper just comes out and tells us that Sharsted has a "sinister, decayed look" and a "mean soul" and so forth, laying it on thick, making sure we know he is no good.  Much is also made of his poor eyesight, I guess a metaphor for how he can't see right from wrong or refuses to open his eyes to the light of Jesus or whatever, and his green lensed spectacles, a sort of cliched way of telling us he is careful with money.  Talk of eyes and eye glasses that limit light and restrict vision also constitute foreshadowing of what Sharsted is going to encounter in Gingold's house.  

Gingold lives high up on a hill in a crummy section of town with twisty labyrinthine streets; he wears white and I guess is supposed to remind us of God.  More than once the view from this house is compared to the view God must have of the Earth.  In Gingold's presence, Sharsted get a little tongue-tied and has trouble bringing the conversation to the point of his visit.  Way upstairs in his house full of valuable paintings and other artifacts, Gingold has an elaborate camera obscura that projects upon a table a bird's eye view of the town.  He shows this to Sharsted, and points out the home of a woman who owes Sharsted money; this woman can't pay her debts and will soon be evicted.  Gingold asks repeatedly if Sharsted will forgive this woman her debts; Sharsted will not.

Gingold has a second camera obscura that projects a weird altered vision of the town, all red and showing buildings still standing which have long since been destroyed and replaced.  Gingold directs Sharsted into this world.  Sharsted desperately tries to find his way home in this maze-like hell version of the town, running into animated corpses wriggling with worms who turn out to be thieves and confidence men of Sharsted's acquaintance, men and women long dead, his steps always bringing him back to a Christian chapel.  Sharsted then tries to make his way back to Gingold's to tell the man he will forgive the woman her debts, but it is too late, Sharsted has been consigned to hell forever.

Too long, too slow, too repetitive, too obvious; seeing as the actual writing style is accomplished, if you are the type of person who figures he shouldn't have to pay his debts and that the people who loaned you money should be tortured everlastingly, maybe you'll enjoy "Camera Obscura," but I am giving it a thumbs down.

"Camera Obscura" seems to have first seen print in The Sixth Pan Book of Horror Stories and people seem to love it.  Everybody resents his creditors!  Besides in Copper collections, "Camera Obscura" has appeared in multiple anthologies that compile favorite contributions to the long-running series of Pan Books of Horror Stories and Copper's story was even made into a short for the TV show Night Gallery.  According to imdb, the TV version of Mordecai Sharsted is played by the guy who portrayed the villainous WASP on Benson, and the moneylender has been rechristened "William Sharsted."  Hmm.

"The Estuary" by Margaret St. Clair (1950)

When it first appeared in Weird Tales, this story was titled "The Last Three Ships."  "The Estuary" is a merely tolerable filler story, and it is a little odd to see it in an anthology like this, as there is not a single special thing about it.  Was Robert Arthur friends with St. Clair or something?

There are a bunch of old Liberty ships rusting away in the harbor.  Pickard sneaks aboard them at night and steals components from them to sell--his faithless and acquisitive wife uses the money to buy a fur coat.  Pickard hires other petty thieves to aid him in his illegal scavenging of this government property.  These other men tell him that, while working in the decaying vessels, that they sometimes hear strange noises.  One of the assistant thieves vanishes, then another quits because he is so spooked by the sounds.  Pickard also has a weird dream one day.  Anyway, it turns out that people who die on these Liberty ships become zombies, and one night one of them, the accomplice who disappeared, kills Pickard and Pickard becomes one of the zombies.  Don't worry about Pickard's wife--she has to return the fur coat, but she gets another man pretty quick. 

A competent trifle composed of commonplace genre fiction elements.  St. Clair does the bare minimum in the relationship and personality departments, and chooses to make her story more jokey than scary and apparently feels no need to come up with an explanation of why the Liberty ships are turning those who die in them into the living dead.  Not actually bad, but unambitious and not scary.  

After the wholly unremarkable "The Last Three Ships" was included in Stories That Scared Even Me and the abridged paperback version of that volume it went dormant for some four decades, inexplicably rising from the dead in a 2013 anthology titled Horror Gems.

"The Master of the Hounds" by Algis Budrys (1966)

Budrys' work is usually about what it means to be a man, and "The Master of the Hounds" is devoted to comparing before us two different men who have gone through, or are going through, some kind of life-changing trial.  Which of them is a real man who gets shit done and appeals to women?  Is a real man a guy who dominates others and his environment by any means that comes to hand?  Is your manhood inherent in your physique, or in your will?  Do you have to be good to be a real man?

Our first contender in the who-is-a-man battle royale is Malcolm Lawrence, the New York artist.  He has an attractive wife whom we are told was a little plump ten years ago when they married, but now is lean with a long face and high cheek bones.  I guess the implication is that Malcolm is not bringing in enough groceries, even though this kind of sounds like he has upgraded his wife into a fashion model.

Malcolm has been working at an ad agency, but aspires to be a fine artist, and has quit the agency to spend a summer in a rented house on a quiet stretch of the Jersey shore, to get away from it all and see if he can come up with some real meritorious paintings.  We witness the Lawrences interacting and the wife seems to always kind of be nudging Malcolm, not-so-subtly pushing him around, trying to manipulate him because she is disappointed in him. 

To save money, the Lawrences took a house in what we'd have to call a failed development.  The developers only finished two of the seaside houses, and only one of them is well-maintained--the two completed houses are surrounded by half finished houses that are falling apart in the seaside air.  The Lawrences take the poorly maintained house, across the street from the well-maintained one, which they learn is occupied by a famous British Army officer, Colonel Richey, a veteran of the Second World War who was the senior British officer in a POW camp where he and other British officers were held year after year.  Richey's exploits were the subject of a fictionalized film which the Lawrences have seen.  (Budrys' story here was perhaps inspired by the 1963 film The Great Escape and the books which inspired it.)

Budrys does a good job making the first part of the story sort of creepy--the sad, abortive, rundown development, the Lawrences' first intimations about Richey's Dobermans, dogs Budrys tries to make seem scary which they see long before they actually meet Richey and learn they are living next to a celebrity.  In the second part of the story the Lawrences and Richey sit down and get cozy, drinking tea, and Mrs. Lawrence and Colonel Richey seem to be flirting right in front of Malcolm!  

Richey talks about his experiences in the German camp.  The British prisoners were digging an escape tunnel, a tunnel Richey didn't really want to see used, as it would be risky to do so and perhaps pointless besides--by the time the British soldiers would be usable to leave the camp via the camp the war would be over or nearly so.  The point of the tunnel in Richey's eyes was to serve as something for the prisoners to do, a goal to inspire teamwork and promote discipline.  A cave in that occurred while Richey was working in the tunnel crippled him--among other things, his genitals were rendered inoperative.  After the war, a journalist wrote about Richey's adventures, leading to the film and a trip to Hollywood for Richey top work on the film as a technical advisor.  British taxes being so onerous, Richey decided to stay in the US and got this house and acquired and trained the two Dobermans, a breed of dog he knew something about because the Germans used them as guards in the camp.

Richey makes it clear that he will use his Dobermans to make the Lawrences his prisoners, even his slaves, all summer.  Also clear is that Malcolm's wife thinks Malcolm is a loser and Colonel Richey some kind of evil genius whom Malcolm can never outwit--even though Richey the ruthless leader of men literally has no balls, he is more of a man than Malcolm the failed artist!  Wifey even discourages Malcolm from resisting the colonel's attempt to confine and control them, and when things come to a dangerous climax she blames her husband more than the psycho who is tormenting them (she may even be appreciating the torment!)

(The Alfred Hitchcock-related stories we've been reading today and last time seem to paint women in a pretty poor light, don't they?)

Who will live and who will die?  Will Malcolm come out on top and prove to himself and to his doubting wife that he is a man, or will the crippled Richey prove his superiority even though he cannot achieve an erection and is some kind of sadistic maniac?

A good thriller that is full of surprises but not cheap surprises--everything is foreshadowed and set up skillfully by Budrys.  Budrys is almost as good at details and images and sentence construction as Copper, but while Copper overdoes it and his fine sentences become burdensome and many only provide information that is extraneous or superfluous, Budrys' sentences all contribute to the story's effect.  Budrys' story also has believable and nuanced characters we can identify with, not just lame manipulative archetypes, and real suspense--we are not sure what will happen to the characters or how we are expected to feel about them.  Thumbs up for "Master of the Hounds," easily the best story we are reading today and the only one that is legitimately scary.

"The Master of the Hounds" debuted in an issue of The Saturday Evening Post with the Beatles on its cover, and has reappeared in Budrys collections and many anthologies, including Dennis Etchison's Masters of Darkness III and Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois' Dogtales!

We've blogged about the L. Sprague de Camp story in Masters of Darkness III and
the Harlan Ellison and Fritz Leiber stories in Dogtales! 

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So there they are, three stories selected by Robert Arthur to be reprinted under the prestigious aegis of the director of Psycho.  Algis Budrys' story is very good and absolutely deserves to be widely disseminated, Copper's is pretentious and ambitious and tells people what they want to hear and so it makes sense to reprint it, but the inclusion of St. Clair's banal piece constitutes a mystery.  Well, life is one mystery after another, I suppose.

I love dipping into these anthologies, but next time we'll be reading a novel.  See you then!