Barry N. Malzberg: "Nordic Blue," "Safety Zone," and "Another Goddamned Showboat"

In 1990, the year I turned 19, a film full of actors I don't like was released based on the famous comic strip Dick Tracy.  Also released in 1990 was a paperback anthology of all new stories about Tracy entitled Dick Tracy: The Secret Files.  I've tried to get into the (original, Chester Gould) Dick Tracy comic strip a few times, but the art and the writing, I found, were just too boring.  (On the other hand, like everybody, I've loved the Daffy Duck spoof of Dick Tracy known as "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery" since I was a kid.)  So, why do I care about Dick Tracy: The Secret Files?  Because I recently discovered that our hero Barry N. Malzberg contributed a story to it!

Today we'll read that story, and two other stories by Malzberg that appeared in 1990 anthologies, "Safety Zone" and "Another Goddamned Showboat."  I considered blogging about a fourth 1990 Malzberg story, "Playback," but when I looked at it I realized I had read it before but not blogged about it.  "Playback" is an annoying gimmick story, a sort of literary stunt in which Malzberg builds a story by augmenting a contemptuous spoof of science fiction penned by Raymond Chandler, quoting every line of Chandler's mocking parody and adding material between Chandler's sentences.  I'm in no mood to deal with this kind of thing; consider this a sub rosa blog post on "Playback," like an Easter Egg or hidden bonus track.

"Nordic Blue"

Back in 2018 I acquired a seriously battered copy of 1970's The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy for two dollars and today, to prepare myself for Barry's take on Tracy, you know, get a sense of the tone and themes of this American classic, I read three of the included 1940s Chester Gould stories, titled in this 1970 volume "88 Keyes," "Flattop" and "Breathless Mahoney and B. O. Plenty."  I still found the art to be pretty poor, even repulsively ugly, but the stories were actually entertaining, real hard-boiled portraits of human evil, monstrous individuals committing atrocities and more or less ordinary people succumbing to temptation or being seduced into the criminal underworld.  Many people--including women--get shot, run over by a train, set on fire, impaled with gardening tools, etc., and the death count is high.  Besides that welcome mayhem there is a lot of business with clues, Tracy finding something the killer dropped and the police lab analyzing it, that isn't exactly thrilling, but isn't too bad.  Perhaps the best parts of the strips are the extreme measures the villains take to hide while on the run, crawling down into chimneys or climbing into a bag of laundry and the like.  Maybe I have changed, become more amenable to this sort of material, or maybe the strips I tried to read years ago were not the best ones, and the ones I chose today represent the cream of the Gould crop.  Anyway, I can recommend at least those three sections of The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy, like 70 pages of a 250-page book.  

OK, let's take a look at Malzberg's take on the Tracy character, penned like 45 years after the Gould material I just read.

Well, it seems to me that Malzberg here uses the surface elements of Dick Tracy to write about his usual themes, like skepticism of technology and disastrous sexual relationships, and maybe to satirize the violence and pro-law-and-order attitude of Gould's strip; he doesn't seem to be trying to reproduce or pay homage to the elements of the '40s Gould strips that I found engaging, though maybe Malzberg is responding to later strips--somewhat to my surprise, the Dick Tracy comic strip is still going to this day, long after Gould's retirement in 1977.  

Malzberg's story starts at police HQ, with Tracy and a female subordinate getting word of a strange death, that of a man who froze to death, even though it is July.  A big theme of "Nordic Blue" is growing old and resentment of the change around you, and this woman colleague furthers this theme--it seems likely she will replace Tracy when he retires.  A male subordinate plays a similar supporting role in Malzberg's tale; this guy loudly complains about how things like the Miranda ruling and soft judges and juries have given criminals more freedom to operate and tied the hands of the cops; Tracy agrees, but is less vocal about it.  

During the investigation, Tracy uses high technology to solve the case, but he and his male colleague are nevertheless very skeptical of technology.  The villain is a manifestation of the dangers of high technology, a woman named Crystal Freezum who produces drugs via some process that generates extreme cold, cold that is killing people. Freezum also serves to represent the customary Malzbergian theme of the disastrous sexual relationship--she has two henchmen who are in love with her, even though she treats them like garbage. 

Malzberg shoehorns into his story still more themes.  One is pessimism about city life--the city is said to be "overpopulated" and unlikely to "make it out of the century."  ("Make it out of the century" is an example of a metaphor being used to obscure meaning and evade responsibility rather than clarify meaning and illuminate a point--what the hell does "make it out of the century" mean?  It can mean anything, so nobody can accuse Malzberg of being wrong in his dire prediction.)  To me, this feels like a 1970s attitude than a 1980s one.  More in tune with what I expect to hear from 1980s liberals like our sad sack pal Barry is the idea that the rich are building a two-tier society and walling themselves off from the second-class citizens.  Miranda, which gets mentioned a lot in this piece, means "perps could make believe that they were citizens," luxury hi-rises are said to be where people live to escape interaction with the doomed city, and we are told Crystal Freezum never leaves her apartment, the decor of which is entirely uniformly white.  The extreme extent of Malzberg's pessimism is revealed by the fact that, in this doomed city of haves and have-nots, Tracy is not universally considered a selfless champion of the have-nots!  We learn in no uncertain terms that some beat cops and ordinary civilians have been making snarky comments about how Tracy is now a celebrity who spends a lot of time on TV and only heads out to the field to work flashy cases!  

The plot of "Nordic Blue" is not great, and there are problems with the execution of multiple scenes.  In the '40s Dick Tracy strips I read, the villains kill people with their own hands in order to get their hands on others' cash, and then kill and deceive and corrupt still more people in their efforts to retain the cash and escape justice--everything in these WWII-era strips is very direct and morally clear.  In Malzberg's story, Crystal Freezum is some kind of drug dealer and what she is doing and why, and its moral valence, are far less clearly defined and far less exciting.  I couldn't really understand why she needed to generate deadly cold to manufacture drugs nor what the connection was between some of the injuries and deaths in the story and her drug manufacturing operations.  I can see that Malzberg wanted some grand guignol scenes, like the one with a veteran of the Bataan death march whose hands needed to be amputated because they froze, as a nod to all the terrible bloodshed in the original comic strips, but Crystal Freezum's connection to this atrocity  is sort of tenuous.  (Maybe Malzberg is trying to suggest that the really bad criminals in real life are not people who stab other people or set them on fire with their own hands but businesses who pollute the environment or something.)  Malzberg starts his story off on a bad foot with some pretty feeble jokes in the police station that don't seem to play any role in developing the characters or generating atmosphere.  The concluding action scene is not very well done--you can't visualize where people are or what they are doing, and their movements make no sense.  And the ending, a downer of course, is somewhat cryptic.

"Nordic Blue," which as far as I can tell has never been reprinted, is kind of a mess and I am going to have to give it a thumbs down.   

"Safety Zone" 

"Safety Zone" debuted in an anthology about ghosts in New England.  Like everybody, I like New England, a great road-tripping region.  Consider this a recommendation from MPorcius Travel Guide.  I am reading "Safety Zone" today in a scan of 100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories, and you can also find it in Collecting Myself, one of the Malzberg collections recently published by the good people at Stark House.      

"Safety Zone" bears as an epigraph a quote from Joanna Russ that refers to the fact that H. P. Lovecraft had a very limited sex life, and apparently little interest in sex, and dealt very little with sexual relationships in his writing.  Malzberg's story is set in Providence, and is narrated by a young woman, Donna, who has never heard of Lovecraft and lives with a lame roommate who hates to leave the house and spends his time watching TV and writing his autobiography.  As for Donna, it seems like the center of her life is going to the singles bar.  

Tonight Donna meets an odd character at the bar--she doesn't realize it, but it is the ghost of H. P. Lovecraft, come back to Providence in this year, the year he would have turned 100, to try to learn about sex!  He clumsily tries to develop some sort of relationship with Donna, even gets physically aggressive, but Donna rejects him.  The ghost talks about hearing the hounds in the distance, I guess a metaphor for the realization of those no longer young that death is approaching.  Donna goes home, and after finding her roommate passed out in front of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, she goes to bed and for the first time hears the hounds in the distance.  It is implied that she, like Lovecraft, has an unhealthy attitude about sex and time may be running out for her to build a healthy sexual relationship before she dies, as it ran out for HPL. 

Like "Nordic Blue," "Safety Zone" is a "riff" on a major American pop culture phenomenon that Malzberg (it seems) is uneasy with or hostile to, a story about getting old and a story in which figure people who don't want to leave their apartments and otherwise erect barriers between themselves and others.  "Nordic Blue" is much better than "Safety Zone," though; the jokes are actually amusing and the characters' motivations more clear and their fates more poignant.  Here we have a solid Malzberg production.

("Playback" is another derivative piece drawing on the work of an iconic American genre writer--I guess this was what Malzberg was up to in 1990.  Detractors might call this behavior lazy, but fans can comfortably label these works "meta" and "recursive"!) 

     

"Another Goddamned Showboat"

I don't know a lot about Ernest Hemingway, so much of this story must be flying right past me.  In "Another Goddamned Showboat" Hemingway is a frustrated writer and has turned to the pulp market, focusing on science fiction.  He sits in a Paris cafe with his wife as the Germans advance on the city, groaning because "the kids" Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein have broken into Astounding but Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr. has rejected all of Hemingway's many submissions.  The tone of Malzberg's story is despairing--Hemingway is broken up over the fates of his peers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce, feeling old, drinking too much, and worried because soon the money will run out and they'll have to leave France and he'll have to take some menial job.  But Hemmingway isn't giving up--he reads the Asimov and Heinlein stories with care, hoping to learn from them.  Malzberg's last line, "The war was on.  The war was coming.  Bit by bit, one by one, the stars were coming out" perhaps is meant to contrast how the world at large was entering a long period of terrible destruction and tremendous risk--global conventional war among all the great powers followed by the Cold War between the nuclear-armed hegemons that come out of the conflagration on top--but the world of science fiction was beginning its golden age with the appearance of Asimov, Heinlein, and others; maybe, among those others, along with A. E. van Vogt and Clifford Simak and Ted Sturgeon, in this alternate universe, will be Ernest Hemmingway.

A moderately good piece that presumably draws on Malzberg's own experience as an aspiring literary writer who had to resort to genre fiction to get published.  "Another Goddamned Showboat" debuted in What Might Have Been: Volume 2: Alternate Heroes, and in the same year appeared in the omnibus edition of both volumes of What Might Have Been.  In 1994 the story was again presented to the SF community in the collection The Passage of the Light: The Recursive Science Fiction of Barry N. Malzberg, and when our Italian friends put out a book of science fiction about science fiction in 2010 they included a translation of "Another Goddamned Showboat."

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We're on a journey here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and that journey is not a straight line to any particular final destination.  Sometimes we get diverted on to little side roads, see what is at the end of what turn out to be cul-de-sacs.  Our little Dick Tracy detour today may have been a disappointment, but time spent learning about major elements of American popular culture and the career of Barry N. Malzberg is not time wasted.  And the Hemingway and Lovecraft stories Malzberg put out there in 1990 are not bad.

More short stories next time, dear readers, stories from further back in time, back before I was born.

Asimov's Masters: A C Clarke, L Niven and B Malzberg

Barry Malzberg's "The Several Murders of Roger Ackroyd" came to mind while working on my last blog post, so let's read it today.  One of the places "The Several Murders of Roger Ackroyd" was reprinted is an anthology of stories from Asimov's magazine entitled Isaac Asimov's Masters of Science Fiction.  This is a curious artifact; it looks like they just took the same plates used to print the magazine and used them to print almost all the pages of this book.   I also have to wonder if any of the stories in the book live up in tone or content to the promise of the sex and violence cover. 

We'll read "The Several Murders of Roger Ackroyd" from a scan of this anthology, and round out this blog post with stories by two other masters, men whom we'd have to guess know a lot more than Barry about the hard sciences and also about bringing in the big bucks for publishers and bringing home those Hugos, Arthur C. Clarke and Larry Niven.

"Quarantine" by Arthur C. Clarke 

As Clarke describes in an intro to this story, "Quarantine" is a stunt.  Some British guy came up with the idea of printing up postcards with an entire SF story on them that SF fans could collect and mail to each other.  Asimov wrote one, and so did Clarke; "Quarantine" is that postcard-sized story.

"Quarantine" is a little cryptic, but I think I get it.  There is a vast interstellar empire of robots.  They keep sending recon units to Earth, but all these recon units get "infected" and so HQ destroys them.  After this has happened many times, the command program of the inorganic space empire directs the destruction of the Earth.  The surprise ending is that the "infection" suffered by the recon robots was getting addicted to chess, and the command program knew that this addiction, if allowed to spread, would so obsess the computers of the empire that the empire would collapse.

Acceptable.  After its debut in Asimov's, "Quarantine" has reappeared in multiple Asimov properties and Clarke collections.

"Cautionary Tales" by Larry Niven 

This is a brief philosophical piece.  We might say it has a twist ending or subverts one's expectations.  It is written in a vivid and easy to digest style.  We'll marginally recommend it.

Gordon is one of the few humans on some kind of space station or something full of intelligent aliens of many different species.  One alien approaches him, a being who has a similar body chemistry to a human.  This alien is obsessed with trying to achieve immortality, and has been spending his life travelling hither and thither throughout the universe, investigating every culture and every technology, trying to find the secret of immortality.  He has not found it yet, but he hasn't given up.  He has developed a sense that tells him when he meets other intelligent beings who share his obsession--Gordon he knows is one.

Gordon hears this alien talk, describe all the places he has been, all the time he has spent on the quest for immortality.  The alien is now too old to have children, something he has left undone; the alien lets slip that he has lived over ten thousand Earth years.  Then he asks Gordon to join him on his quest, which will afford Gordon access to knowledge and technology no human has ever before had access to.

The story thus far resembles the first chapter of a novel about a long quest, but this is a short story, and Niven's twist ending is that Gordon refuses to join this alien on his quest talking to the alien has opened Gordon's eyes to ancient wisdom--it is better to spend your brief life productively, not on a a quixotic quest seek to extend that life indefinitely.  Gordon heads back to Earth, presumably to meet a woman and build a family, the only real way to achieve anything close to immortality.

I like it.  "Cautionary Tales" shows up in a few of the aforementioned Asimov properties as well as a bunch of Niven collections.

"The Several Murders of Roger Ackroyd" by Barry Malzberg

OK, this is why we are here today.  Let's dig in!

"The Several Murders of Roger Ackroyd" is an epistolary story consisting of communications between different individuals; each individual gets his own font, at least in the Asimov's printings.  Through the documents we learn that it is the 24th century and a big organization handles what amounts to TV broadcasts across the solar system, maybe across the galaxy.  Our protagonist, the Roger of the title, is an expert on mystery stories, and has applied for a job composing mystery scripts.  He was rejected, largely because the mystery form is no longer popular and thus few mystery writers are needed.  Science fiction, westerns, pornography and "gothics" are much more popular, and the organization's management suggests Roger apply for a job writing military adventure stories set on Venus.

Roger is a very emotional and egotistical guy.  He is insulted by the suggestion he write SF, and argues passionately that the mystery is the form that built popular fiction entertainment and that soon it will again rise to dominance over SF, the western, and the gothics.  When the management still refuses to hire him, Roger hatches a cunning plan of revenge.  He has a friend who is already employed as a mystery writer, and Roger has this accomplice put scripts composed by Roger into the system.  These scripts cause an uproar as they, apparently, kill off famous fictional detectives like Hercule Poirot.

A pretty fun story with meta characteristics that are not cloying or indulgent but actually sort of amusing and interesting.  What genres will continue to be popular in the future?    

"The Several Murders of Roger Ackroyd" would be reprinted in various publications associated with Asimov, and Malzberg and his oft-times partner Bill Pronzini included it in their anthology of SF crime stories, Dark Sins, Dark Dreams.  The version of the story printed in Dark Sins, Dark Dreams lacks much of the distinctive use of fonts, but it includes an intro by Malzberg in which Barry tells us that, when he (Barry) publicly declared he was quitting the SF field, Philip K. Dick called Barry "a whiner."

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Three stories which accomplish their goals, which are not too long or too convoluted, stories in which people's behavior and motivations make sense, stories which have twist endings that do not strain credulity but sync up with what has come before and thus offer the reader satisfaction.  These stories are not breathtaking masterpieces, but the respectable work of craftspeople who show respect for their field, their audiences, and themselves.  Things don't always go so smoothly here at MPFL, so let's show some gratitude to Messrs. Clarke, Niven and Malzberg, and the editor of Asimov's, George H. Scithers.  

More short stories when next we convene here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Asimov's Mar-Apr '78: B Aldiss, J D Haldeman II & R Wilson

I recently read Richard Wilson's 1958 story "Man Working" and gave it a mixed but more or less friendly review.  One of this blog's well-read commenters pointed out that Wilson published a sequel to "Man Working," or at least a story set in the same setting, in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in 1978.  It makes sense to read this '78 story while I still remember the '58 piece, so let's read it today.  While we are at it, we'll take a look at some other stuff in that issue of Asimov's.

Right there in the beginning of the magazine is a crude ad for TSR's board game Dungeon! and an early edition of Dungeons and Dragons.  As a kid I played tons of Basic/Expert D&D and 1st edition AD&D with my brother, and spent many many hours poring over the piles of rulebooks, modules and issues of Dragon magazine I accumulated, and I still think about Dungeons and Dragons every day, my mind still bubbling with ideas for dungeon layouts and quest hooks and different magic systems and easier ways to simulate the interaction between sharp or blunt weapons striking rigid or flexible, metal or cloth armor, and on and on.  (Later we'd get into Warhammer 40,000 and I still think about Eldar psychic powers and jet bikes and Imperial Titans and superheavy tanks and comic relief Space Ork weapons systems.)  

Then we get Asimov's boring editorial about the definition of the term "science fiction;" fun fact: Asimov doesn't care for "speculative fiction," the most successful candidate for a replacement for the term "science fiction."  More entertaining is a sophisticated ad for an edition of Dunsany stories illustrated by Tim Kirk, and more valuable is Charles N. Brown's quite good book column, which briefly addresses many books and succeeds in saying useful things about each of them.  In the back of the magazine we've got the letters column, including a chummy one from Barry Malzberg in which he expresses gratitude over how well his story "The Several Murders of Roger Ackroyd" was presented in the Winter 1977 issue.  I feel like I recognize its title but I don't think I have ever read the story, so maybe we'll be seeing "The Several Murders of Roger Ackroyd" discussed soon here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

There's a ton of fiction in the Mar-Apr '78 issue of Asimov's but we are only going to read three pieces, those by Brian Aldiss, Jack C. Haldeman II, and the aforementioned Richard Wilson.  I considered reading A. Bertram Chandler's included Grimes story, but decided to put it off--my memories of the Grimes stories I read in the period before this blog was summoned via occult procedures from the nether world are that they are just OK, and if I am going to tackle the vast Grimes corpus someday I will want to start with stories published earlier or that depict Grimes earlier in his career.

"The Small Stones of Tu Fu" by Brian Aldiss

Aldiss doesn't use the word, but this is a story about God and God's feelings about the world he created, and dramatizes a tension between the idea that God loves everybody and everything equally, and the idea that God has favorites.

Our narrator appears to be a time traveller from the future who likes to explore different places and periods in China.  He is hanging out with an aged poet and sage, Tu Fu, visiting a site by a river where stand some monoliths.  Were these monoliths placed by a king to commemorate his military victories during the era of the Three Kingdoms, or did they appear naturally?  Tu Fu and the narrator exchange little puns and other little jokes--I have to question the appropriateness of Aldiss filling this story, in which people are, presumably, speaking Chinese, with English puns.  Then things get philosophical.  Tu Fu looks at how the action of the river has, over time, "organized" by size  the stones and shells that lie on the river bank.  Is this merely the result of random, natural, undirected action, or the work of some obsessively punctilious Intelligence that seeks to order and organize the entire world?  And does this Intelligence hate humanity because people are forever undoing its organizing work, shifting stones and shells and everything else to suit its own whims, like the kids who are on the bank picking up and throwing stones, or further grand purposes, like the kings who equip armies and raise monuments?  The old sage Tu Fu dies within an hour or so of raising these philosophical questions, and the time traveller returns to the far future, to a time when no human survives, and we realize our narrator is the Intelligence theorized by Tu Fu.  We are assured, however, that, despite Tu Fu's fears, that the narrator, the creator and obsessive organizer of our world, does not hate humanity, but loves each human as he loves each pebble, recognizing the unique value of each person and of each stone.  Still, it is clear he loves Tu Fu more than the rest of humanity, and will treasure a pebble Tu Fu picked up and handed to him more than any other pebble.

This story is well-written, and maybe some will find it profound in its attitude about God or clever with its paradoxes and jokes, but one could just as easily see it as a pretentious trifle, as filler of an uppity or presumptuous type.  We'll mildly recommend it.

"The Small Stones of Tu Fu" has been reprinted in many anthologies of material from Asimov's as well as in a bunch of Aldiss collections. 

"The Agony of Defeat" by Jack C. Haldeman II

Pop, my maternal grandfather, always watched Wide World of Sports, to which the title of "The Agony of Defeat" alludes, but I never got very interested in sports myself.  It looks like Haldeman's contribution to Asimov's is a sports story and a joke story, but I'm reading it anyway--at six pages, I can probably take it.

It is the future--it is illegal for humans to participate in football games, the sport being judged too dangerous.  So for a while the game has been played by robots.  But this year a team of genetically engineered freaks who have enough oxen and gazelle ancestry to legally be recognized as non-human have made their way to the Superbowl.

This lame filler story describes that beast-man vs droid Superbowl and the way two sportscasters cover it.  There are slapstick jokes and little else.  Two sample jokes: 1) One of the freaks bites the ear off of one of the sportscasters.  2) The robot team is named the Armadillos and they have brought with them to the stadium hundreds of real armadillos as mascots--when some scamp releases all the little armored insectivores onto the field the freaks are stupid enough that they mistake an armadillo for a football.  

Total waste of time.

A paperback book version of the contents of the March-April 1978 issue of Asimov's was produced under the title Comets and Computers and so that is one place where "The Agony of Defeat" was "reprinted."  This piece of junk can also be found in Laughing Space, a big anthology edited by Asimov and his wife, J. O. Jeppson.

"The Far King" by Richard Wilson

This is why we are here, a novelette of about 43 pages that would be reprinted in various Asimov-associated publications, the anthology Another Round at the Spaceport Bar and a 735-page Wilson collection put out by Centipede Press in 2018.          

Small town girl Ann Bagley is the daughter of a preacher.  Dad is an unusual member of the clergy--he thinks other planets have fostered intelligent life, probably more intelligent than that on Earth, and that God has sent sons to those planets in the same way He sent Jesus to us Earthers.  Teenaged Ann daydreams about meeting one of these dreamy Christs from another world the way another girl might dream of meeting Elvis or David Cassidy or Corey Haim or whoever (I don't know who the teen heartthrobs of today might be, or even if there are teen heartthrobs anymore.)  

Our narrator is Jack Norkus, the same guy who narrated 1958's "Man Working," though "The Far King" offers a very different explanation of how he learned of the aliens' presence in Chicago than that laid out in the 1958 story.  This discrepancy presages a pervasive theme of the story--people's names and identities are fluid and unknowable, and in fact everything a human (Ann, Jack or the reader) knows may turn out to be untrue.  

Jack is the same age as Ann and grew up in the same small town and attended the church where her father preached; as teens they spent some time together, talking about her father's theories and looking over the books which formed the basis of his theories.  It briefly looked like they might develop a sexual relationship, but this did not eventuate. 

As adults, Jack and Ann meet again in the mile-tall skyscraper in Chicago which is the secret gathering place of space aliens come to Earth to conduct research or do some kind of business.  Like Jack, Ann takes to spending all her free time in the bar 528 stories above the streets of Chi-town that caters to the aliens.  Ann is often referred to by a new, jokey, name, but I am going to keep calling her Ann.

While "Man Working" was about show business, "The Far King" is about sex.  Ann is a serious reader and an able sculptress, but also a terrible tease, and hangs around the bar, arousing Jack and the ETs, sitting in their laps and so forth, without giving them a chance to do anything more than kiss her.  Jack, who seems to make most of his money selling alien drugs to Earthers, when short on funds, will sell his sperm at a local sperm bank; it is implied that the donation center makes the process of donating particularly satisfying, and that Jack goes there to relieve his pent up sexual excitement when Ann has got him all hot and bothered.  

Many of the aliens who hang around the bar can read minds or have super vision or super hearing or whatever, and these unscrupulous types not only learn all of Ann's thoughts and read her copious notes and diary entries, but share all her secrets with Jack.  Thusly we learn Ann's biography and her hopes and dreams, why she acts the way she does.  The plot really gets going when an alien arrives who can project different images of himself to different viewers.  To Jack and Ann, he looks like a handsome human; to the other aliens he looks like an attractive member of their own species.  None of the aliens explain this to poor Ann, and she falls in love with this new alien, Leo Reo, purportedly royalty on his home planet.

Jack and we readers learn Leo Reo's life story from a talking robot encyclopedia.  ("The Far King" isn't one of those stories in which the protagonist has a goal and we follow him in a straight line as he tries to overcome obstacles in pursuit of his objective; rather, Wilson's novelette is one of those gossipy stories in which the main plot is related piecemeal in little sub-stories, each of which is imbedded in a little frame, a story in which we learn most everything second hand or third-hand from not-quite-reliable narrators.)  Leo Reo is the second son of a king of some alien society.  While his older brother was being trained for kingship, the neglected Leo Reo engaged in an all-consuming homosexual love affair with an educated male.  Leo Reo's lover acted as a mentor, teaching Leo Reo all about art and culture and how to win over people and manipulate them, so when his brother died in an accident, Leo Reo turned out to be a whiz at making friends and influencing people at court.

So, Ann thinks Leo Reo, whom everybody except she knows is a gay blob monster, is the man she has been waiting for since she was a teen who dreamed of meeting alien Christ analogs.  Wilson doesn't do a very good job making clear the motivations of the characters in this story, but for some reason Leo Reo sort of leads Ann on, fosters her belief that she will have a chance to marry him and become a queen on some other planet.  Then news arrives that his father has died and Leo Reo is now king.  The Far King rushes off, leaving Ann behind.  Ann, suffering the largely self-induced delusion that Leo Reo wants her to come to his world and marry him, buys a ticket to Leo Reo's planet and leaves Earth behind.  On the alien world (where she never realizes all the people she meets are blobs in disguise, even though they touch her intimately), Leo Reo pays Ann only limited attention.  He does use her, in conjunction with various aphrodisiacs and machines, to get aroused so he can produce the sperm needed to impregnate a female of his race--his life of homosexuality has made it very difficult for Leo Reo to get aroused by a female of his own species.  Ann realizes that Leo Reo is more or less doing to her what she did to so many males back in Chicago when she aroused them to achieve her own perverted satisfaction and then left them hanging, frustrated.  Ann returns to Earth.

As foreshadowed by Jack's own sperm donations, Leo Reo doesn't have sex with females, but has his sperm collected by machines that then impregnate many females, making sure there will be an ample supply of heirs.  Leo Reo provides Ann with a little vial of his sperm and a memory tape which she can plug into a dream machine so she can experience virtual reality sex with him and then give birth to his child.  

Or so she thinks!  "The Far King" is all about people being deceived by others and deceiving themselves, about people pretending to be what they are not, putting on false appearances and bearing false names   Jack gets a message from Leo Reo, who has somehow got the idea that Jack and Ann are going to be married--I guess Leo Reo has been deceived by Jack and Ann's alien friends at the bar.   In the message, Leo Reo explains that the sperm in the vial Ann wears around her neck as a locket and is always caressing is not Leo Reo's; after all, he is a blob monster and his sperm could in no way impregnate a human woman.  The sperm is in fact Jack's, a sample of which Leo Reo's agents purchased at the sperm bank that Jack uses as a brothel.

Jack reveals all to Ann, including his desire to make the lie that they are going to be married reality*, but Ann refuses to believe the truth and rejects Jack's proposal.  Finally, however, the aliens at the bar get together to convince Ann to marry Jack and have children with him; why they are doing this was not clear to me, and the way they go about it is ridiculous, I guess just a set up for one of Wilson's jokes, perhaps a meta-joke about common SF tropes.

*One of the story's problems is that Jack never makes clear to the reader why he wants to marry Ann, never talks about what he likes about her, never expresses any affection for her or describes his fascination with her.  

The aliens tell the humans that they have the power to look forward, to see possible futures, and that as a favor they will show Jack and Ann one possible future.  This turns out to be a scam--the "future" they show Jack and Ann is in fact an immersive film about a guy whose wife gives birth to a messiah figure; in the film, father, who appears to Jack and Ann as Jack, and son leave Earth, abandoning mom (Ann), to start a ministry on an alien world; for some reason Jack and Ann's son, who has supernatural powers, murders Jack.  Even though it is revealed that this is a hoax, experiencing the immersive film changes Ann, makes her more mature and wise.  (How would the experience of being betrayed by your husband and son make a woman more mature and wise and more likely to marry the guy who betrayed her in the dream experience?)  Ann decides to marry Jack and have two children, one from the sperm in the vial and one the old fashioned way by having sex with her husband.  The end.

"The Far King" is not very good.  The story is long and convoluted, the narrative zigging and zagging in ways that are frustrating, and which further stress the reader's ability to suspend disbelief in a story which is pretty incredible in many of its elements already.  For example, we are to think Ann and Jack poor, but if the plot requires it they suddenly have the money to fly to another planet or rent a cabin on a lake.  I don't know, maybe this is how the finances of drug dealers work, flush today and impecunious tomorrow, but it is just one instance of Wilson leading you to think one thing and then pulling the rug out from under you.  The big final joke, that the aliens pass off a canned film as a view of the Jack and Ann's future, is also hard to credit, as the film seems to match in every particular Ann and Jack's strange relationships with Leo Reo and Ann's father.  Maybe the film is so interactive that it conforms to the viewers' lives, or maybe it was already based on their lives, but, like Jack and Ann's finances, it is another thing about the story that strains credulity, that takes you out of the story.  

Wilson makes it hard for the reader to care what happens in the story, what happens to the characters.  The jocular tone does not jive with the actual events depicted in the story, all of which are sad.  Is the reader supposed to feel for Ann and Jack?  It is hard to sympathize with the characters because they all behave foolishly and/or unethically.  And all the zigging and zagging, Wilson leading us to believe something and then revealing that it is not true, discourages the reader from taking anything seriously--should I feel bad that something happened to this girl, when it maybe didn't really happen?

Thumbs down for this mess.  

**********

I'd be lying if I told you reading these three stories from the March-April issue of Asimov's was a wonderful experience.  But hey, live and learn.  And the Aldiss is not bad.

More short stories next time, friends.

Tanar of Pellucidar by Edgar Rice Burroughs

“Stellara!” he cried. “My darling!” But the girl turned her face away from him.

“Do not touch me,” she cried. “I hate you.”

“Stellara!” he exclaimed in amazement. “What has happened?”

It is time to read the third Pellucidar novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tanar of Pellucidar, which first appeared as a six-part serial in Blue Book in 1929.  We've already read the first two Pellucidar books, At the Earth's Core and Pellucidar, the saga of the development of the empire of American David Innes in the savage inner world that lies far beneath our feet, a world whose sun sits forever at the zenith so your shadow always lies directly beneath you, a world that is home to stone age humans, psychic matriarchal pterosaurs, giant cave bears, plesiosaurs, and an endless array of other dangerous people and animals.  It looks like this novel will shift gears and star not an imperialist reformer from the surface but a native of Pellucidar.  

Like most of Burroughs' output, Tanar of Pellucidar has been reprinted many times.  I'm reading the $1.95 Ace copy my brother sent to me back in 2019 when he mailed me our combined Edgar Rice Burroughs collection.  This paperback, over 240 pages of text (like 60 pages longer than my Ace Pellucidar), has a brilliant Frank Frazetta cover; the composition is terrific--the curve of the muscleman's body, the way the wind pulls his hair, etc., --as are the moody colors.  The man's face and expression are also good--sometimes Frazetta's faces are a little flat or lack expression, but this one is fully realized graphically and emotionally.  A flawless Frazetta classic.

OK, Tanar of Pellucidar, taken as a whole, is the least of the Pellucidar books so far.  It feels long and it feels repetitive, what with people getting captured, escaping captivity, and then getting captured again and how an apparently endless series of love triangles and repeated instances of irrational jealousy keep the love birds at the center of the story apart; and then there are some elements of the story that are derivative and a little silly.  However, some parts of the book (mostly in the last quarter or so) are as good as anything in either of the two previous Pellucidar volumes, and amidst the repetitious escapes and fits of jealousy Burroughs gives us some satirical social commentary about sexual mores and some mind-bending science fiction concepts, so I am still recommending Tanar of Pellucidar, and looking forward to my next forays into Pellucidar and into the wider Edgar Rice Burroughs canon.  

For a blow by blow recounting of the novel's plot and a look at its themes, and my own little criticisms, read on.

Five of the six issues of Blue Book in which installments of Tanar appear 
have cover illustrations promoting Burroughs' serial that focus not on
how Tanar's love interest is constantly jealous but rather on how Tanar has to
fight one oversized mammal after another

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The Prologue to Tanar of Pellucidar is about how Burroughs has a friend, Jason Gridley, who has discovered a new radio wave; tuning into this wave on his receiver exposes him to some mysterious signals.  Eventually, somehow, he starts receiving Morse code transmitted by Abner Perry, David Innes' right hand man, from the other side of Earth's 500-mile thick crust.  Then comes the Introduction of the novel, which is in the voice of Perry, who reports that Innes and his empire are in trouble!  A piratical sea-faring race of humans, previously unknown to the region of Pellucidar familiar to Innes, Perry and us readers, has been raiding the empire of Innes and, among other crimes, carried off Tanar, the son of one of Innes' closest native friends, a king of one of the principal constituent kingdoms of the empire.  Innes has set out after Tanar in a boat with one other comrade and with a captive pirate as a guide.  

The main text of Tanar of Pellucidar is written in the third person omniscient, and begins with Tanar captive aboard a pirate ship.  The humans Innes encountered when he first arrived in Pellucidar had a stone age technology, but these pirates bear Renaissance or Early Modern equipment like high-decked sailing ships, arquebuses, and that sort of thing.  Burroughs leans into the stereotypical pop-culture image of a pirate pretty heavily, in a way that I found kind of silly; these troublemakers hail from a country called Korsar and wear gaudy brightly-colored head scarves and sashes, carry cutlasses, and make people walk the plank.  After the exotic and original Mahars and Sagoths of the last two books, a bunch of cartoonish pirates are a real let down, although I should perhaps count my blessings--one of my pet peeves is the romanticization of pirates, and Burroughs portrays these pirates as totally evil.

The Korsars' gunpowder is inferior to that developed by Perry and used by the people of Innes' empire, so Tanar manages to get better treatment from his captors by suggesting to the supreme leader of the Korsars, a man known as The Cid (good grief), that if he and his fellow prisoners are kept healthy they can teach the pirates how to manufacture superior powder.  

Burroughs' heroes generally develop relationships with princesses, and, sure enough, the daughter of The Cid, Stellara, is aboard and Tanar and she see something, each in the other, that is intangible but alluring, much to the envy of Bohar the Bloody One, The Cid's lieutenant, a particularly ugly and emotional pirate.  A freak storm wrecks the ship, leaving many aboard dead or facing an uncertain fate on the ship's scattered boats; when the storm passes the only living souls aboard the drifting hulk are Tanar and Stellara.  Tanar learns Stellara is not really a Korsar, which he sort of expected because she was the only person among the pirates who wasn't acting like a total jerk.  Stellara explains that she is the daughter of a woman of a stone age tribe resident on the island of Amiocap, the island of love.  The Cid captured mom and took her as his mate--according to mom, Stellara was conceived just a few days before her mother was captured, so the Korsars think Stellara half-Korsar, but Stellara is confident she is 100% Amiocapian.

The derelict ship drifts to an island that turns out to be Amiocap.  The stone age people there are skeptical of Starella's claim to be of their race, and similarly doubt Tanar's tale that he is from a kingdom and an empire they never heard of.  While imprisoned and scheduled for execution, Stellara and Tanar begin to get an inkling that they are in love with each other, but they are too shy to open up about their feelings, dooming their love to travel a rocky road.  The first actual expression of that love is Stellara's jealousy when a local girl who brings the prisoners food voices her great admiration for the handsome Tanar.

Mammoths attack the village and in the excitement Tanar and Stellara escape.  Tanar, earlier in his career, was captured by a tribe of the monkey people we saw briefly in At the Earth's Core and they taught him how to travel in the jungle canopy and our hero uses this ability--which he teaches to Stellara--to flee the natives without leaving a trail.  I have to admit I was a little disappointed to see Burroughs pulling a gag out of the Tarzan tool box so soon after giving us the trite pirate stuff and a guy named "The Cid." 

They can't spend all their time aloft, and back on terra firma Tanar and Stellara are forced to contend with a Coripie, the bane of the humans of Amiocap, a sort of subterranean ghoul.  Stellara pitches in during the fight; in fact, the Coripie would have killed and eaten them both if not for her participation in the struggle.  Our heroes then meet a human mammoth hunter; he is fleeing an enraged mammoth, and Tanar helps him kill the beast.  As we readers have been led to expect from earlier in-your-face foreshadowing, this man turns out to be Stellara's father, chief of a nearby village.

Tanar and Stellara take up residence in her father's village.  Here Burroughs hits us with some social commentary.  The people of Amiocap are very open about love; men and women have no compunctions about and face no social pressure against expressing their attraction to each other.  Burroughs tells us that this is psychologically and sociologically healthy and that much of the unhappiness experienced in our own world here on the outer surface of the crust is the result of men and women failing to make manifest their love for members of the opposite sex.  Of course, Tanar is not of this island, and while Stellara has the blood of these people, she was raised among the evil Korsars, so even in this free-love environment neither of our main characters directly reveals his or her love to the other, and this reluctance causes them a lot of trouble, with Stellara, for example, manipulating people to make an oblivious Tanar jealous.

Bohar the Bloody One survived the storm, and, while Tanar is away hunting, Bohar leads a Korsar attack on the village and carries off Stellara.  When Tanar returns and hears this horrible news, he chases after the pirates.  During a brief fight with the Korsars he falls in a hole and lands in the labyrinthine world of the Coripies, who capture him and add him to the local Coripie tribe's larder.  Instead of tearing captives apart to be eaten at once, standard operating procedure among the Coripies, the chief of this tribe of the ghouls has decided to hoard enough captives to hold a big feast at which there will be enough fresh meat for every member of the tribe. 

Most of the captives fated to be eaten alive at the upcoming feast are condemned criminals from this Coripie tribe or captives taken from other Coripie tribes, but with the arrival of Tanar two humans are now on the menu.  The other human is a guy named Jude from the island of Hime.  I wondered if this guy was going to be Burroughs' vehicle to comment on the Jewish people, and I am still not sure if this was Burroughs' intention.  Jude is bitter, depressed, and full of hate for everybody; Tanar suspects this may be because he's been cooped up as a doomed prisoner for so long, and so this may not be a reflection of his original character or the character of his people, but soon enough he will learn the truth.

Jude being so disagreeable, Tanar becomes more friendly with one of the Coripies from a rival tribe of ghouls, Mow, than with his fellow human.  Tanar learns from Mow all about the totally evil culture of the Coripies, who have no word for love in their language; I guess the ghouls are a foil for the free love humans of Amiocap.  Subject to food shortages, the Coripies practice population control, executing any female who gives birth to a third child.  As a result, male Coripies don't have sex with females they like, for fear of setting them up for execution, and instead rape females they don't like, and female Coripies do not love their own children.

Mow knows a secret way out of the cavern that is their prison, though team work is required to use it.  Mow and Jude both hate all the other prisoners, but with his sunny disposition Tanar is able to weld the three of them into a team.  Mow is killed during the escape, but after a long march through dim tunnels, during which Jude's extreme pessimism provides comic relief (this is one of the more entertaining sections of the novel), Tanar and Jude make it to the surface.  Where, in one of the wild coincidences that are so common in Burroughs' work, they immediately stumble upon Bohar the Bloody One who is strangling Stellara because she has refused to have sex with him.

Tanar kills Bohar and he and Stellara finally give voice to their love for each other.  But at the first opportunity Jude of Hime kidnaps Stellara, puts her in a canoe and heads for Hime.  Tanar sets out after them but is delayed by having to fight an array of monsters, one after the other.  Having defeated a sabre-toothed tiger, then crossed the water to Hime, then escaped a herd of bison, Tanar ingratiates himself with a native of Hime by killing a huge wolf that threatens him; this kid is the son of a chief, and he brings Tanar home.    

The people of Hime turn out to be Burroughs' device for attacking the bonds of matrimony.  (It is interesting to see Burroughs presenting this Ted Sturgeon type material as early as 1929--speculative fiction, even adventure-type fiction in which a guy gets captured and escapes every week or so and has to kill a monster every weekday and twice on Sundays, has always been questioning society and proposing alternatives.)  The people of the island are all bitter and angry and the families constantly fight amongst themselves and against others, spouse against spouse, sibling against sibling, spouse against unfaithful spouse's adulterous lover, etc.  Why?  Because divorce and separation are forbidden on Hime, and when the members of a married couple no longer love each other they become so unhappy they not only cheat but get violent and their animosity poisons all relationships around them.  I guess this is the complementary component of the free love philosophy Burroughs demonstrates on Amiocap--people should express their love freely, and then, if you are no longer in love with your lover, you should dump him or her tout suite instead of maintaining the loveless relationship.

Among these endlessly quarreling people Tanar encounters Gura, a young woman who isn't as full of hate and violence as the rest of the Himeans--she is half Amiocapian, her Himean father having kidnapped her mother.  (All across Burroughs' body of work, heredity is very important in determining one's character and behavior.)  Gura helps Tanar escape when her father plots to kill Tanar, he suspecting his wife is in love with Tanar.  In fact it is Gura who is in love with Tanar.  

Tanar and Gura, Jude and Stellara, and the eighteen Karsars who were previously under the command of Bohar the Bloody One all wind up in the same cave.  Stellara, seeing the half-Himean/half-Amiocapian girl with Tanar, gets jealous and tells Tanar she hates him.  The wily Jude escapes, but Stellara, Gura and Tanar all end up on a ship to Karsar--Tanar is separated from the women and doesn't see them aboard ship or when they arrive at the big city (population half a million) that is the capital of Karsar.  We learn a little about the city, perhaps the largest and most technologically and economically advanced in Pellucidar; for example, the bearded and brilliantly attired people of Karsar lord it over a vast countryside of smooth-faced stone age slaves who grow the food the city dwellers eat.  Societies in Burroughs' fiction that aren't absolutely stone-age seem often to have an economy based on slavery.

The last 60 or 70 pages of Tanar of Pellucidar, the parts after Tanar's arrival in the city of the Karsars, are more entertaining and interesting than almost all of what came before in the previous chapters.  The monsters are more gross.  The escape attempts are more tense.  The satire and social commentary is gone, there is more gore, and more of a horror vibe, and the details all feel more unusual and more original.  Did Burroughs draft this stuff at the end and the early chapters first and then pad out the novel's length by writing the repetitive middle?  

Among the captives in the giant-rat-infested dungeon into which Tanar is thrown is David Innes, Emperor of Pellucidar.  Innes and Tanar convince The Cid to treat them well and give them some freedom of movement so they can set up a manufacturing capability in Karsar for the production of  decent gunpowder.  (Karsar gunpowder fails to ignite like half the time.)  They eventually manage to escape with Stellara and Gura after hatching a scheme that is sort of interesting, certainly more compelling than earlier escapes in the novel.  They venture through and beyond the slave-inhabited countryside to cold regions few Pellucidarian have ever explored.  Amazingly, their shadows lengthen, and off in the distance, beyond some kind of weird ocean, Innes sees what he believes to be Sol, the sun about which Earth orbits!  This must be a passage between Pellucidar and the Arctic!  The existence of this passage is among several clues that suggest that the Karsars are the descendants of 16th-century pirates who somehow made their way from the surface of the Earth down here to Pellucidar 400 or so years ago.  (Remember how English crusaders got stuck in Africa in the medieval period and maintained their jousting culture all the way up to the 20th century in Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle?  I guess these pirate jokers similarly are still building sailing ships and making people walk the plank after four centuries.)  This revelation, which I guess I should have predicted, makes the silly names and derivative behavior of the Karsars a little less annoying.

Having made this mind blowing discovery, the party turns back and starts the long march to Innes' empire, but they manage to get captured and imprisoned by Karsars yet again.  Tanar and Innes are put in a different dungeon than last time, separately, in solitary confinement.  In probably the best section of the novel, Tanar struggles to maintain his sanity in a tiny lightless cell where he is tormented by swarms of nonvenomous serpents.  Of course he eventually figures out how to escape, but this is the most compelling escape attempt yet in a novel full of escape attempts.  And of course the first people he runs into once he has escaped the dungeon are Stellara and the man who is about to beat her because she refuses to have sex with him, but the ensuing fight, in which Tanar kills this guy, is a pretty exciting fight.  Tanar then cuts off this guy's beard to use in making disguises for himself and Stellara.  The lovers bluff their way out of the city and a long chase follows, and then Tanar and Stellara make it back to Innes' empire.  The novel ends inconclusively, however, with David Innes, apparently, still stuck in solitary under the Karsar city, and on a cliffhanger--in the "Conclusion," Burroughs' friend, Jason Gridley the radio inventor, declares he is going to do something to help Innes.  What could this be?  I'm curious to find out!

Well, stay tuned because ERB will be back on MPorcius Fiction Log soon, after some more recent short stories by divers hands.

Weird Tales, January 1942: D Quick, M E Counselman and F Leiber

In December we completed a step in our journey to dark enlightenment when we achieved our goal of reading at least one story that appeared in each issue of D. McIlwraith's Weird Tales in the year 1941.  Today we begin our eldritch slither through the year 1942 with the January issue of WT.  This issue includes one of H. P. Lovecraft's best stories, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," and in the letters column we find August Derleth discussing the place of this story in the Cthulhu Mythos.  I've read "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," multiple times, and blogged about it in 2018, so we won't be dealing with that masterpiece today.  Instead, we'll read stories by Dorothy Quick, Mary Elizabeth Counselman and Fritz Leiber.

An interesting note.  In Canada, a version of this issue of Weird Tales appeared with an Innsmouth-inspired cover and a May cover date.

"The White Lady" by Dorothy Quick

Like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," "The White Lady" is afforded an illustration by the great Hannes Bok.  I have to admit I am not crazy about the way Bok depicts the ghost, however.  

Our story begins with a long description of the looks and attire of two people, the handsome but cruel Abbot Telva and beautiful and elegant Mary Vetrell.  The Abbot, resident in England but of Spanish blood, wants the English Mary to marry his nephew, Clement, but she is not interested; sure, the Abbot's family is prestigious, but so is Mary's, and Mary is not in love with Clement, but with heroic soldier Sir John de Winton.  The Abbot is insistent, because he himself is in love with Mary, whom he has tutored since she was a little child, and if she marries into his family she'll always be nearby.  Besides, a union of the Telva and Vetrell families will allow him to add some valuable real estate to the Abbey's.  (Of course, we readers won't be placing any bets on the future prosperity of this Abbey, as we realize this story is taking place during the reign of Henry VIII.)  Mary and her father refuse to agree to the marriage, so the Abbot storms off, promising to use his high position in the Catholic church to make life tough for Mary; for example, making it impossible for her to marry John de Winton.

John de Winton arrives and we get a long description of him.  Quick's style is not very good.

He had a great chest and arms, with a figure to match, and was the type of man that women love.

Then arrives Mary's father, whom we are told looks like Santa Claus.  Sir Charles Vetrell is on good turns with Cardinal Wolsey, the king's closest advisor, so Sir Charles writes a letter to Wolsely requesting relief from Telva's prohibition on any cleric marrying Mary and John.  After John rides off with the letter, Sir Charles, a widower, and John's mother, a widow, reveal that they are in love and they plan to get married.  Quick seems to be more interested in writing about jejune vanilla sexual relationships than about anything weird.

Halfway through the story it looks like the Abbot and Clement have gotten to the King before John got to Wolsey, so the King is on Team Telva and will make sure Clement and Mary wed.  Mary says she'll commit suicide before marrying a Spaniard and then faints.

John, Wolsey, and Anne Boleyn concoct a scheme to get Mary out of marrying Clement.  They convince King Henry that Sir Charles' manor house is haunted by a Lady in White.  When the King and his court come by to attend the wedding of Clement and Mary the ghost--somebody in disguise--will appear and warn that the marriage should not take place, that Mary must marry for love.

There is a mix-up--Mary thinks she is to play the ghost and Anne Boleyn thinks she is to play the ghost, so there are two ghosts at the appointed hour and the whole thing is a shambles, both girls being seized by Henry's soldiers.  But then a real ghost, Mary's mother, appears, and lays down the law.  The king will compel the Church to marry Mary and John.

We have here a poorly-written and totally boring story.  Quick makes a hash of the personality of the Abbot and we readers have no idea how we are supposed to feel about him--he is in the villain slot, but we keep hearing that Mary had a good relationship with him for years.  Quick clumsily tries to exploit the reader's supposed interest in the court politics of Henry VIII and the English Reformation and supposed hostility to Spaniards and the Catholic Church, which feels like a cheap short cut, like she can't generate emotion in the reader on her own and so resorts to latching on to feelings she thinks you already have.  Th descriptions are tedious and numb the mind instead of building atmosphere or painting images.  As for the plot, "The White Lady" reads like a caricature of what men suspect fiction by women is like, a bunch of women using their social connections to get married.

Thumbs down!

"The White Lady" was reprinted in 2001 in an anthology by Forrest J. Ackerman and in the 2024 Quick collection The Witch's Mark and Others.  I believe this is the fifth Quick story I have read--click the links to see how I rated "The Witch's Mark," "Turn Over," "Edge of the Cliff," and "The Lost Gods" and rest assured that I didn't dislike all of them.

"Parasite Mansion" by Mary Elizabeth Counselman

"Parasite Mansion" is also adorned with a Hannes Bok illustration, but I am finding the composition of this one, and the faces and poses of the figures, below par for Bok.  Too bad. 

More bad news.  "Parasite Mansion" is another long and tedious and poorly-written story.  What is the world coming to?

Blue-eyed redhead Marcia Trent is a grad student in Psychology and a teacher at a girl's school in Carolina.  When she hears that her fiancé is marrying her sister back home in Birmingham, Alabama, she hops in her car and sets out on a 400-mile trek, full of rage.  She somehow ends up on a lonely road where she crashes the car because a sniper puts two rounds through her windshield.  She hits her head and sprains her ankle and is carried into a decaying mansion by some weirdos, the Mason family.  Counselman provides us, with sleep-inducing detail, descriptions of the Mason mansion and its occupants that stress how contradictory or paradoxical the milieu and its occupants are--the mansion is full of beautiful antiques, for example, but is also in a terrible state of repair.  Our heroine is stuck in bed and a succession of mentally ill people shuttles in and out of Marcia's room for page after page after page.

We've got the sniper, Renny Mason, a murderous little boy who, having failed to slay Marcia with his rifle, tries to strangle her.  Little Renny is trying to kill our redheaded academic because he fears she has come to take away his older sister.  Renny's campaign of destruction is arrested by his adult brother, Victor Mason, a filthy drunk who is also a trained physician who wraps up Marcia's ankle and puts stiches in her noggin.  (Victor is one of Counselman's paradoxes, a man of science who has become a slave to superstition, a handsome chap under a thick coat of booze and dirt.)  We've also got a hideous old woman who married into this insane family long ago, Gran, whom we are told multiple times looks like a mummy.  Gran thinks she is better than the others and is acquisitive, steals Marcia's money and jewelry.  Finally we have teenaged girl Lollie Mason, Renny and Victor's sister, blonde and skinny and innocent; she thinks Marcia is a princess.  Poltergeist-type phenomena attend Lollie, and she spontaneously suffers bloody wounds, as if an invisible demon has scratched her.  Marcia, a scientist (you know, we all pretend psychology is a science, our of politeness), thinks Lollie's gruesome injuries are psychosomatic.

"Parasite Mansion" is like 17 pages long.  Halfway through, Victor tells the history of the cursed Mason family.  His great aunt and then his aunt were terrorized by an invisible monster, tormented until their deaths; Lollie is the third such victim.  The first two victims of the monster were admitted to asylums but the doctors could do nothing for them, so Lollie and her family are determined to keep victim #3 from being similarly taken away, uselessly, to a depressing institution and so the Masons have shut themselves off from the world, leaving the family in poverty and Renny and Lollie with no education or social skills.  Victor declares he cannot let Marcia leave, as she would attract the authorities and lookie-loos to the dilapidated estate and Lollie would end up in an asylum.

In the last third or quarter of the story, Marcia figures out what is going on and saves the day.  Gran has the power of telekinesis and has been using it to terrorize the pretty Mason women whom she envies and resents because the Masons were not as wealthy a family she thought they were when she married into their family.  As for the injuries, they really are psychosomatic, like stigmata.  After she has been discovered, Gran tries to murder Marcia, fails, and has a heart attack and dies.  We are led to expect that Victor, Lollie, and Renny will rejoin society and have normal lives--Victor will quit the booze and marry Marcia, he being a hunk once he is shaved and washed up.

Long, slow and repetitive, and irritating to read because of the clumsy style.  I can't blame Counselman for the typos, but I can blame McIlwraith, and I can blame both of them for some of the lines that are so wacky as to take you right out of the story:

"It sounds like the supernatural, I know. But so did television, to people of Shakespeare’s time."

Thumbs down for "Parasite Mansion."  Arkham House put out a Counselman collection, Half in Shadow, in 1978, and you can find "Parasite Mansion" in there.  In 1987 Peter Haining included this clunker in his anthology Poltergeist: Tales of Deadly Ghosts.

For some reason I have read a stack of Counselman stories--behold the links: "The Unwanted," "The Black Stone Statue," "Twister," "The Girl with the Green Eyes," "The Cat-Woman," "Mommy," "The Web of Silence" and "Drifting Atoms."  As with the list of Quick, stories, I actually didn't condemn all of these.

"The Phantom Slayer" by Fritz Leiber

After those two long boring pieces it is a relief to read a well-written story with some human feeling and some strong images.  "The Phantom Slayer"'s content is just OK, but thanks to superior technique the story is miles ahead of Quick's and Counselman's.

Our narrator is sort of a loser who is going through some tough times.  An uncle he never met dies, and he inherits unc's meagre estate; unc was a retired police lieutenant and paid his rent in advance, so our narrator gets to live in unc's apartment in the big city and eat unc's stockpiled canned food.  Leiber does a good job describing the narrator's loneliness and what it is like to move into a little apartment in the big city.  This material is right up my alley; I am fascinated by city life and small apartments, the sounds and the smells, the light and shadows and all that.

The plot concerns the narrator going through his uncle's things, in particular newspaper clippings about a series of murders by what we today would call a serial killer, and horrible dreams the narrator has after moving in to unc's flat.  Or are they dreams?  Is the narrator's uncle trying to communicate with his nephew from the grave?  Trying to take over the narrator's body?  Is the uncle trying to solve the case of the Phantom Slayer, or is he himself the Phantom Slayer?  Is the narrator going to become a murderer himself or save the day and solve the crime?

It is not rare for a character in weird fiction to learn something dreadful about his own ancestry and/or identity, to have dreams that may in fact be memories of things he is doing while he thinks he is asleep, and to fear someone else is taking over his body.  But Leiber handles this conventional material pretty skillfully.  I can moderately recommend "The Phantom Slayer."

Sometimes under the title "The Inheritance," "The Phantom Slayer" has been reprinted many times, in various Leiber collections and in several anthologies. 

      

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Not a great start of the 1942 leg of our long march through the history of Weird Tales, but when walking the weird road, you gotta take the rough with the smooth.  And Fritz's contribution is good.  As for this issue of the magazine, of course "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," Bok's illo for that story and Derleth's commentary on it make it worthwhile for the student of the weird.

We'll continue our explorations of 1942 weird stories soon, but first a novel from the late 1920s.