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. 

**********

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! 

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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!

Barry N. Malzberg: "Getting In," "Getting Out," and, w/ B Pronzini, "Night Rider" and "A Matter of Survival"

Digging around scans of late 1970s detective magazines I came up with two Barry N. Malzberg stories I haven't read, and to round out a full blog post let's add to them two stories Malzberg collaborated on with his pal Bill Pronzini.  I read these all in scans of the issues of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine in which they debuted, haphazardly reading the collabs out of chronological order.

"Getting In" by Barry N. Malzberg (1977)

This is an absurdist, somewhat dreamlike, story depicting the pressures inherent in the life of the middle-class male.  Our narrator, I guess an architect or something like that, is so stressed out by dealing with his office job, with his wife and kids, and with his mistress, that he tries to admit himself to an insane asylum called "the Residence."  The doctors run many tests on him and over his protestations declare him sane.  They explain to him that nobody is happy, that his psychological state is normal for one of his age and socioeconomic status.  

We get jokes about how the narrator always contacts his mistress by calling her from a payphone at the fast food restaurant Wonder Waffles, and scenes in which the narrator drives his assistant insane and jealously watches as the man is hauled off to the Residence.  Plus lots of dark humor that demonstrates how selfish the narrator is and how manipulative and emotional women are.  The story ends with the narrator taking up a Smith and Wesson .38, like the guy in one of the Malzberg stories we just read a few days ago, and using it to torture a doctor, who, even as he bleeds from his gunshot wounds, insists the narrator is sane.  As the story ends it becomes starkly dreamlike, and we are given the impression the narrator is going to commit suicide.

This story is so fantastical, feels so much like a cynical fairy tale set in a hyperbolic caricature of our own world, that it is odd to see it in a crime magazine instead of a science fiction magazine.  I don't know that "Getting In" has ever been reprinted, so all you Malzberg obsessive collectors out there will need a copy of the March 1977 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, but if I know you sensitive and sophisticated guys as well as I think I do, you wanted one as soon as you saw the cool blue of the issue's cover.

"Getting Out" by Barry N. Malzberg (1978)

Nothing makes the cool blue photographic cover of the March '77 AHMM look better than the embarrassingly lame (the kids would call it "cringe") golf cartoon cover of the July 1978 ish.  Ugh.  But it seems "Getting Out" has never been printed anywhere besides behind this cover that is making me ruefully shake my head.  

As we were hoping, "Getting Out" is a sequel to "Getting In," even though the insane asylum, called "The Residence" in "Getting In" is called "The Institute" here in "Getting Out."  (Wonder Waffles is still "Wonder Waffles," thankfully.)  After shooting at least one person with his Smith and Wesson .38 (described here as "antique," giving us science fiction vibes), and not killing himself, the narrator is held in a cell which he considers more comfortable than the middle-class work and family milieu from which it (partially, as the wife and mistress do come to visit and the kids send correspondence requesting an increase in their allowance) separates him.  He expresses the hope he will be able to spend the next thirty years in this cell, but further tests indicate he is sane, and a doctor confides "You are a valuable social resource, a presumptive sane person. We cannot keep you, really, for thirty hours."  

Released, the narrator returns to work and to home and we get the same kinds of jokes about middle-class life as we got in "Getting In."  Then comes the punchline of the two stories--the narrator and his mistress truly fall in love, and the narrator decides to abandon his family.  This destruction of the family unit cannot be accepted by society, and so the insane asylum that rejected him when he was miserable and tried to admit himself now forcibly admits him, now that he has a chance of happiness by ditching wife and kids.     

Malzberg writes about the profession of psychology, big institutions, and disastrous sexual relationships all the time, and "Getting In" and "Getting Out" are pretty good examples of his work on these themes.  The extent to which Malzberg is sincere in his portrayal of the mental health establishment as a cog in the machine of bourgeois capitalism, as devoted to the project of corralling men in the prison that is the child-rearing family in order to bolster GDP, and to what extent he is spoofing such assessments, I don't know, but the text Malzberg produces is fun and provocative both in its general themes and in its many little jokes and details.  Thumbs up!    

"Night Rider" by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg (1977)

Compared to the "Getting" series, "Night Rider" was an international sensation, seeing reprint in the Pronzini and Malzberg collections Problems Solved and On Account of Darkness as well as translated for the Finnish edition of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine as well as the Japanese Hayakawa's Mystery Magazine.  

When I was living in the Hawkeye State, I checked On Account of Darkness out of the Des Moines Public Library, and so I read "Night Rider" in that dimly recalled period of time before I started this blog.  The New Jersey setting and the marital conflict plot stuck with me--I remembered the story immediately as I started reading it today.  Oh yeah, and the fact that I didn't really like the ending.

Our narrator is a failure in life who has always taken the path of least resistance and is married to a nagging boring woman who has the TV on all day.  His only relief is his nightly drive of over 60 miles along the highways and country roads of Northern New Jersey in his worn out Cadillac Fleetwood.  Pronzini and Malzberg take us with the narrator on one of these drives, mentioning real highways like Route 80 (what people in other states, I have learned, call "I-80") and towns like Lodi, though the geography feels fictionalized and there seems to be a typo, "Watching" for "Watchung."

Anyway, we hear how annoying the wife is and how unhappy the narrator is, and how he is stopped by the police so often for speeding he has developed a whole system of trying to bribe them with plausible deniability if the cop refuses the bribe.

Another car starts chasing the narrator, and we get a pretty good--realistic and tense--car chase.  The narrator drives too fast, is distracted by trying to figure out who might be chasing him, and crashes on a lonely country road by a swamp.  He gets out of the wreck, injured, sees the pursuer's car parked on the shoulder--it is his car!  The man emerging from the car must be himself!  The illusion, presumably a manifestation of his guilt, vanishes and the narrator remembers that he murdered his wife by hitting her with her TV and put her corpse (and that of the TV) in the trunk.

I had little tolerance for such silly psychological twist endings when I was younger, but now I take them in stride and don't find "Night Rider" as disappointing as I did when I read it over ten years ago.  So, thumbs up.

"A Matter of Survival" by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg (1976)

Another Pronzini-Malzberg collab that was reprinted in Problems Solved.  This is today's weakest story, more an idea than an actual story, and lacking the little jokes and sharp images and biting phrases that add so much value to our earlier three tales.

Two business executive are on the balcony of an apartment building over twenty stories up in some Midwestern or Western city where a party is being held.  Each man owns an electronics firm that is losing money because of competition from out east and because corporate welfare from the feds has dried up.  Both companies will fold unless they merge and take advantage of the resulting economies of scale by slashing personnel and space costs.  But the two men don't get along, so a merger seems impossible.

The men don't like each other because one is married to a faithless, manipulative, promiscuous slut and her latest affair is with the other.  She has them under her thumb, enjoys torturing them, refuses to allow her husband to divorce her, refuses to allow the other to end their affair.  And she is against the merger the men think is the only means of saving their two companies.  She comes out on to the balcony to torment them, and they join forces to throw her off the balcony and convince the cops it was a freak accident.  The men's business careers and psychological well-being have been saved.  

Merely acceptable, a sort of skeletal outline of a story that lacks personality and emotional impact.   

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So, four stories about the tragedy of the bourgeoisie, how work life and women drive middle-class men insane, drive them to violence!  Maybe we can tie these themes to a specific time and place, perhaps they reflect conditions in the doom and gloom 1970s and the exigencies typical of American capitalism, and maybe Malzberg intends that interpretation.  But I think the themes of these stories are universal--no doubt medieval European merchants and Soviet apparatchiks were under the same sorts of stresses, were themselves pushed to the brink and sometimes beyond by the pressures of juggling the demands of women and bosses and their responsibilities to and for subordinates and children.

Of today's tales, "Night Rider" feels like the most palatable to a broad audience, a conventional suspense piece written in a realistic style that I think would appeal to mainstream thriller readers, though it has a Malzbergian psychological resolution.  Also conventional, but blandly and boringly so, is today's least piece, "A Matter of Survival," a story with a sort of boiler plate plot that is unadorned by stylistic flourishes or compelling characters or images.  The two solo Malzberg stories, "Getting In" and "Getting Out," are pure Malzberg, reminiscent of so much of his body of work in their themes, style and details, and full of fun; these two are definitely worth seeking out for the Malzberg fan.

At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs

For a moment I was puzzled to account for the thing, until I realized that the reptiles, being deaf, could not have been disturbed by the noise my body made when it hit the water, and that as there is no such thing as time within Pellucidar there was no telling how long I had been beneath the surface. It was a difficult thing to attempt to figure out by earthly standards—this matter of elapsed time—but when I set myself to it I began to realize that I might have been submerged a second or a month or not at all. You have no conception of the strange contradictions and impossibilities which arise when all methods of measuring time, as we know them upon earth, are non-existent.

Let's return to the world of Edgar Rice Burroughs with the first Pellucidar novel, At the Earth's Core, which debuted in 1914 in serial form across four issues of All-Story Weekly.  The cover illustration of that first appearance appeals to readers' interest in women in chains, but such masters as Frank Frazetta, J. Allen St. John and Bob Eggleton have graced many of the book reprints of At the Earth's Core with terrific reptile-centric covers.  In 1976 a very fun film based on the book and starring fan favorites Peter Cushing and Caroline Munro hit the big screen and in 2015 at a thrift store in Iowa I bought a hardcover movie tie-in edition of At the Earth's Core; that is the version of the novel I will be reading today. 

At the Earth's Core has a prolog in which a man who is acquainted with members of the Royal Society tells us that he unexpectedly ran into another white man among Arabs in the African desert; the main text of the novel is the author's recounting of the wild tale related to him by this gentleman, who was astonished to learn his adventure began ten years ago--he thought it was just one year!

This main narrator is David Innes, a native of Connecticut and physical fitness hobbyist who inherited a successful mining business.  Innes is friends with Perry, an old scientist and a religious man who, with Innes' financial backing, developed a superior engine and used it to power a colossal vehicle of his own design, a sort of ship that could bore through rock and earth.  Burroughs, like a legit science fiction writer, comes up with solutions for the problems presented by travelling through dirt and solid rock, like ways to refresh the air in the machine, how to make sure the occupants are seated upright no matter the direction the "iron mole" is travelling, where the earth dug away by the drill nose of the vessel must go, and so on.  Innes is our leading man, who does the fighting and who gets involved in love triangles, while Perry plays the role of comic relief and of wise man--he gets scared and prays and swears when there is danger, and it is he who identifies the exotic fauna they encounter (his hobby is paleontology) and figures stuff out by reading alien documents that providentially fall into his hands.  Much of the plot of At the Earth's Core is driven by Perry's inventions and aspirations; the rest is propelled by Innes' relationships.

The iron mole's test voyage, crewed solely by Innes and Perry, quickly goes awry, neither brainiac Perry nor muscleman Innes  finding himself able to steer the machine.  The iron mole drills downwards for days, carrying our heroes hundreds of miles below the Earth's surface.  Just as the vessel's air supply is about to run out, after digging through bands of rock and ice of radically diverse temperatures, the machine unexpectedly emerges into a region that offers cool fresh air!  Has Innes and Perry's conveyance accidentally been turned round and come back to the surface?

Of course not; the adventurers have emerged in a subterranean world alongside a placid sea, below a sun that forever sits in the center of the sky.  This is Pellucidar, a world on the inner surface of the hollow sphere that is the Earth, somehow held there by a gravity that pulls people away from the center of the planet, where hangs a small sun.  Burroughs puts some real effort into describing this world, most mind-bendingly, the psychological effect of living in a milieu where the sun doesn't move, so there is no sense of time--Burroughs even suggests that there is no such thing as time, that it is an illusion.  Even if this stuff is unconvincing--all the talk of time in At the Earth's Core I personally consider absolute balderdash--it adds texture and additional levels of interest to a story that is, of course, mostly about a guy who meets a princess in an alien world and gets involved in her wars, like most of Burroughs' compositions.  

Almost at once, Innes and Perry are set upon by a huge prehistoric mammal, and only escape destruction thanks to the intervention of some naked monkey-people and their teeming pack of ferocious canines.  These jolly primitives, whom Burroughs describes as having the skin color and facial features of "the Negro of Africa," have no tools or weapons, but they have a village fifty feet above the surface in the branches of trees, as well as a crude arena into which they throw Innes and Perry to be devoured by a hyaenodon.  Before the hyenadon can overpower them, furry gorilla people who have clothes and weapons attack, putting the monkey people and hyaenodon to flight and adding Innes and Perry to their chained line of captive humans.

The gorilla-people lead the chained humans past a sea teeming with battling plesiosaurs and icthyosaurs and giant turtles to the city of their masters, the Mahars.  Innes makes friends with a beautiful woman chained next to him, Dian, and she teaches him the language of her tribe.  Also among the captives is Hooja, who covets the beautiful Dian.  When Hooja gets fresh with Dian, Innes punches him out.  According to the custom of the humans of Pellucidar, this makes Dian Innes' property--he is expected to formally take her as a mate or give her her freedom, but Innes doesn't know this idiosyncrasy of local culture yet, and Dian is insulted and gives Innes the silent treatment.

When the party of gorilla men and captives passes through a dark tunnel, Hooja, a deft hand at picking locks, escapes and takes Dian with him.  Now that Dian is gone, another captive explains Pellucidar sexual relationships to Innes, and also helpfully points out that Dian is the princess of her people.

Innes and Perry end up in the city of the Mahars, where humans by the thousands serve as slaves to the dominant race of this inner world.  The Mahars are intelligent pterosaurs up to eight feet long who are deaf and communicate among themselves via some mental power and with lesser races, like the gorilla men, their servant and soldier class, through sign language.  The slavery our heroes endure doesn't involve particularly taxing work or particularly severe surveillance--Innes and Perry are assigned jobs like shelving books and find free time to make swords out of scrap metal that is laying around.  From the Mahar documents he is supposed to be dusting, Perry learns the history of the flying psykers--the current Mahars are all female, having figured out a way to artificially fertilize their eggs and then dispensed with the males.  Innes conceives a scheme to topple the hegemony of these scaly matriarchs and put homo sapiens where he belongs in Pellucidar as on the surface--on top!   

We readers are administered a hearty dose of gore and brutality when, as exemplary punishment for their fellow humans and as entertainment for the Mahars, two disobedient slaves with whom Innes and Perry are not acquainted get thrown into the Mahar's elaborate arena with two huge prehistoric mammals, a gargantuan bovine and a titanic feline.  Chaos erupts when one of these colossi ends up out of the arena and among the audience; Innes seizes this opportunity to sneak out of the underground city and back out into the wider world.  He meets a tribe of human fishermen who have a business relationship with the Mahars; as so often happens in these Burroughs stories, our protagonist ingratiates himself with strangers by helping them fight a monster.  We get an additional helping of horrible gore as this fisherman guides Innes to a Mahar temple, where they watch as the Mahars hypnotize and eat human women and children--because they are hypnotized, these humans do not flinch as their limbs and breasts are eaten off!  Yikes!  Male human slaves are devoured, without benefit of hypnotism, by the low-IQ pterosaurs who serve as the intelligent Mahars' watchdogs and bodyguards.

At the Earth's Core is a something of a peripatetic novel, one in which the narrative, instead of proceeding directly from point A to point B to point C, instead wanders here and there a bit.  The episode of the primitive monkey people, for example, seems to serve little plot purpose, though it is entertaining--why have Innes and Perry captured by the good-natured savages and then captured by the barbaric henchmen of the Mahars, why not just have them get captured first by the gorilla-men?  Similarly, Innes escapes the city of the Mahars, witnesses some horror scenes, and then just goes back to the city.  There is also some foreshadowing that doesn't pay off.  All this "extra" material is fun or otherwise affecting, so doesn't weaken the novel, but on reflection the plot is far from streamlined.

Anyway, Innes decides to return to the city of the Mahars to be with Perry and work on their scheme to overthrow the Mahars and civilize and Christianize the humans of Pellucidar.  When Innes is reunited with the old man, Perry suggests it was only an hour ago that they parted in the arena, while Innes, who has been marching for miles and miles, rowing canoes, fighting monsters, and witnessing atrocities, feels like months have passed.

The Mahars interrogate Innes, the strangest slave they have ever owned--no escaped slave has ever returned of his own volition, and no human has ever claimed to be from another world.  The psychic matriarchal feminist rhamphorynchusoids determine Innes must be lying about being from some outer surface world and sentence him to live vivisection--the Mahars may not have invented the bow and arrow or discovered electricity, but they are skilled biologists and eugenicists.  Innes, in chains, watches as the Mahars vivisect a shrieking living man, but luckily contrives to escape before being put on the operating table himself.  

Innes and Perry then put into operation their plan to destroy the Mahars--two natives, Hooja, who has been recaptured by the Mahars, and a another guy, have joined their crusade.  Innes slays four Mahars (three of whom were asleep when he launched his attack) and the men skin them and don their scaly hides as a disguise.  They steal the only copy of the formula for the fertilization chemicals the Mahars use to reproduce without male participation, and manage to sneak out of the city.

For months--maybe years!--the four men march across Pellucidar, overcoming obstacles and fighting off monsters.  The gorilla-men of the Mahars are on their trail, and catch up to them just before the fugitive slaves reach a human tribe.  The party splits up, the treacherous Hooja sneaking off and Innes going it alone in a successful effort to divert the gorilla-men away from poor old Perry and the hulking native who has to carry the Yankee inventor.  Innes has good fortune--a huge cave bear ambushes and massacres the entire company of gorilla-men.

Perry and his native companion escape to a human settlement, but Innes gets lost amid mountains and canyons and does not reunite with them for some time.  By chance he runs into Dian, the beauty who has been incessantly on his mind since her escape from the slave raiding party, just as she is being attacked by a pterosaur.  Innes kills the flying reptile and then has to contend with Jubal the Ugly One, a seven-foot tall he-man who has been after Dian, and whom she has been avoiding, the whole of her postpubescent life.  More horror material from Burroughs--Jubal is a famous fighter of monsters, and his body bears testimony to his many battles; the flesh of one side of his face, including an eye, is missing, the bones of his skull exposed.  Having defeated this brute, Innes still has to figure out how to win the heart of Dian, who keeps saying she hates him.  Of course, she really loves him, and when he gets frustrated enough to throw aside his civilized gentlemanliness and just grab her and kiss her against her (apparent, performative and false) will, she melts in his arms.  

Dian is keen on Innes' plan to unite the human tribes and teach them how to make bows and maybe even gunpowder and firearms and exterminate the Mahars and their gorilla-men.  The two lovers seek out Perry and begin to put the plan into action; Dian's tribe is one of the first to join the human coalition, of which Innes is declared Emperor!  But our heroes find that producing gunpowder is more difficult than anticipated, so Innes takes the iron mole back to the surface to get the science books that will spell it out for them.  But the iron mole again proves impossible to steer and Innes ends up in the Sahara instead of New England.

As the novel ends the author of the prolog has again taken up the narrative.  He tells us Innes has collected the books and other equipment he wants to bring back to Pellucidar with him, but doesn't know if Innes has made it back to Perry and Dian down in Pellucidar.  Like the first Barsoom book, the first Pellucidar book ends on a cliffhanger!

At the Earth's Core is a quite good adventure story with plenty of science fiction elements that speculate on how you might get to the Earth's core, what a society of deaf feminist monsters might be like, how the lack of a view of the sky might affect you psychologically, the nature of time, etc.  Of course the plot relies on wacky coincidences and at its center has a guy meeting and falling in love with a princess, as do so many Burroughs plots, so if that gets on your nerves I can't recommend At the Earth's Core to you.  But let's consider some ways At the Earth's Core may be different from other ERB classics.  I think the fight scenes in At The Earth's Core are a little more believable than many of those that take pace on Barsoom and in Tarzan's Africa--Innes doesn't single-handedly outfight huge animals or hordes of men all the time like John Carter and Lord Greystoke do.  The novel also has a sort of horror or grand guignol flavor to it, thanks to the fact that people and animals are forever getting mangled and dismembered.

I really enjoyed At the Earth's Core and look forward to our next journey down to Pellucidar.  There are five or six more Pellucidar books, so I suspect we have plenty of mutilation and musing about the nature of Time ahead of us.  But first we'll have a blog post addressing one of our bread and butter topics here at MPorcius Fiction Log.