Merril-approved 1959 stories by T Godwin, "D Gordon," & W L Gresham

After "F" comes "G."  Back on July 9, we read three stories published in 1959 by authors whose names begin with "F," stories that Judith Merril, renowned anthologist, had recommended.  On the same list of Honorable Mentions in the back of Merril's critically acclaimed The Year's Best S-F: Fifth Annual Edition we find six stories by author's whose names begin with "G."  We're reading four of these, skipping Daniel F. Galouye's "The City of Force" because I read it in Bodyguard and Four Other Short Novels from Galaxy back in my New York days and Ron Goulart's "Parlor Game" because I avoid joke stories and always assume that is what Goulart is selling, and I am not in the market for joke stories.  But we've still got four capers torn from the science fiction magazines of the second Eisenhower term to explore.

"Empathy" by Tom Godwin 

Let's see what kind of story Merril thought worth promoting that was penned by Tom Godwin, author of the controversial "Cold Equations," a story heavily influenced by John W. Campbell, Jr.  "Empathy" debuted in Fantastic and would not be reprinted until our own wild 21st century in a Baen collection; I'm reading the Fantastic printing.

"Empathy" is one of those stories about how some white people who represent a Western power are nice to nonwhite natives and some other white people are mean to nonwhites and you should be one of the nice ones.  Also, a story about intragovernmental rivalries and the limitations of computers and the danger of doing everything by the book instead of thinking on your feet.

Captain Rider of the Frontier Corps used to be in charge of the Terran outpost on Deneb Five, a planet whose location makes it strategically essential to further Earth exploration, and he had a decent relationship with the natives, a bunch of black-skinned dragon-riding cavalrymen armed with slug rifles.  But just recently Deneb Five has fallen under the jurisdiction of the Extraterrestrial Relations Board (ERB--maybe a joke reference to the creator of John Carter?), a new agency that has been hoovering up all the funds once issued to the Frontier Corps.  Now Deneb Five's human outpost is under the control of a General Beeling, whom we know is no good because he is fat.  While Rider of Frontier Corps had a tiny staff of dog-people from the Altair system, people renowned for their powers of empathy, Beeling of ERB has a vast human staff, many of them young men tricked into joining ERB with promises of adventure.  Beeling has contempt for non-Terrans like the canine Altairian empaths and the black Denebian riders.  As the story begins, hundreds of native mounted troops are surrounding the Terran outpost, annoyed and scared by the arrival of Beeling's large force, and a final negotiation is about to begin--Rider fears that if Beeling botches the negotiation the far more numerous Denebians will kill all the Terrans (and the dog-people.)  When it rains it pours, and Rider has another problem on his mind-- one of the dog-people is off on a mission on the coast forty miles away and is about to be drowned by the very high tide caused by this planet's many moons, and Beeling won't authorize use of the helicopter to rescue her while there is a chance of native attack on the base--Beeling and ERB think of the Altairians as mere animals, as Rider's pets or mascots.  

Beeling has a computer analysis of the natives and it guides his negotiations into disaster--as Rider knows, computer analysis doesn't work in negotiations with people; sensitive people like Rider who have respect for others and can understand their emotions have to negotiate with people, not some haughty computer-user like Beeling, who sees people as soulless profit maximizers.  Rider is aware that ERB computer analysis has failed on almost every alien race, a fact the ERB has kept a secret from the chief executives of the Earth government.  So, it looks like tomorrow the Denebian riflemen will kill all the humans and dog people, even though the computer told Beeling the black natives would never actually attack the Terran base.     

Beeling, via helicopter, abandons his men at the base after sending a report to Earth blaming the Frontier Corps for the impending massacre; this report that will likely lead to the total defunding and disbanding of the Frontier Corps.  Rider marches forty miles to rescue the female dog-person.  When the natives see that Rider, unlike the absent Beeling, isn't a racist and a coward, they decide to resume negotiations; Rider not only secures the use of the planet as a refueling station for Earth, but the Denebian chief sends a message to Earth explaining how great Rider and the Frontier Corps are and how terrible are Beeling and the ERB.

This story's message and drama are both pretty banal and pretty over-the-top; for example, the dog people don't just look kind of like dogs, but act like dogs, wagging tails when happy and carrying stuff in their mouths and all that, so we readers get the hint that they are loyal and devoted, like dogs are, and should like them, while the General is a moron and a coward and a fatso and every other bad thing Godwin can think of.  We call this stacking the deck.  I wouldn't call "Empathy" bad, just weak filler, so we'll grade it "barely acceptable."  Presumably Merril liked "Empathy"'s anti-racist message.

"Despoilers of the Golden Empire" by Randall Garrett (as by David Gordon)

I tend to avoid Randall Garrett as I expect his stories to be joke stories, and the two stories by "David Gordon" recommended by Merril on her 1959 Honorable Mentions list certainly have joke titles.  I was, however, initially fooled by the pseudonym and didn't realize who the real author of these stories was until after I had psychologically committed myself to reading them, and a blog post with only two stories feels kind of light, besides, I am interested in John W. Campbell,  Jr. and Astounding, so it sort of makes sense for me to read these Garrett pieces if I am going to read any.

"Despoilers of the Golden Empire" is written in a chatty casual style, like the narrator is hanging out with you, and is one of those stories that has the feel of a popular history written in the far future, discussing events from the not quite so far future with a level of detached irony.  The narrator, for example, says stuff about how this or that question you might have about elements of the story aren't addressed by extant sources, and stuff like "Before you can get a picture of the commander—that is, as far as his personality goes—you have to get a picture of the man physically."

The commander in question is one of the most famous of the many adventurers of the Second Empire.  You see, long long the human race conquered the universe, then its empire collapsed into squalling factions, but then came the Second Empire, which tries to maintain control while allowing individual regions some autonomy.  The odd thing to the reader about this Second Empire is that gold, in some unexplained fashion, is key to the universe's economic and political systems, not uranium or petroleum or something that seems more intuitive, and so starships full of adventurers travel the galaxies looking for gold while scientists and businessmen struggle to figure out a way to artificially create gold.  Kelly Freas' opening illustration to the story makes crystal clear the connection of these Second Empire adventurers to the conquistadors and pirates of the days of Cortes and Drake.

After this background, Garrett offers his physical and psychological description of the tough 60-year-old soldier Commander Frank, and then it is on to his grand adventure.  Frank is confident he has found a planet loaded with gold, but investors are very cautious, so his expedition is undermanned and underequipped.  On the planet he and his men acts exactly like conquistadors, not scientists or astronauts or whatever.  Frank gives stirring speeches to his men, everybody is clad in steel armor and armed with swords and pikes because the charges for their energy weapons are expensive.  They march around the planet on foot, though they do have motorized "carriers," which are used like pack animals most of the time but in battle ridden cavalry charge style.

If Frank and his men are like conquistadors, the natives of the planet are almost exactly like Pre-Columbian Mesoamericans, red-skinned humans who don't have the wheel or riding animals and whose civilization consists of a ruling demographic that lords it over the lesser tribes of its vast empire. 

What follows the landing on the planet is a standard adventure story with very few science fiction elements.  The Terrans, though outnumbered, can outfight the natives with their superior equipment and they take over one village after another; other obstacles include disease and the fatigue of the march and snake attack and occasional dissension in the ranks.  Frank is shown to be a great fighting man able to take on multiple opponents at once and best them, as well as a cunning and charismatic leader.  Garrett throws in an analog of Christianity and a missionary priest who wants to convert the natives--this element suddenly appears in the middle of the story and feels tacked on.  When Frank's little army arrives at the capital city of the native empire, Frank captures the native emperor via trickery and takes over the planet.

Garrett then quickly sketches out the succeeding decade, in which Frank has to crush rebellions by both natives and Terrans.  Then comes the twist ending, in which Frank is murdered by traitors, and the big reveal, when Garrett explicitly admits that this story is a retelling of Pizarro's conquest of Peru.

As I was reading "Despoilers of the Golden Empire," I was expecting to give it an "acceptable" rating as an unoriginal, plodding, mediocre, but not actually bad, adventure story, but the final self-satisfied revelation of the story's lazy and cheap gimmick was so annoying that it sank the story down into bad territory.  Thumbs down!  Why would prestigious editors Campbell and Merril countenance such a thing? "Despoilers of the Golden Empire" has nothing interesting or new to say, no real point of view--it doesn't even have the "imperialism is bad" or "white people are greedy" theme you might expect--and no particular artistic merit--it isn't well-written or funny or make you feel sympathy for Frank or the natives or anything like that.  And why would anthologists like Stanley Schmidt and Robert Adams reprint it?  Schmidts anthology has a humor theme, but "D of the G E" is not funny.  Adams' anthology is about soldiers, and Frank/Pizarro is a soldier, but "D of the G E" is not particularly exciting or entertaining and doesn't say anything interesting or special about the life or profession or character of soldiers.  What were Campbell, Merril, Schmidt and Adams (or co-editors Greenberg and P. C. Adams) thinking?

When I worked in public academia I pretty regularly had to copyedit, and sometimes even compose, propaganda that was a bunch of lies, eh, I mean, qualitative research the conclusions of which I found unconvincing.  To do so, I would, like an actor, "get into the head" of some other person and make the kinds of arguments such a person would make.  Let's pretend I am being paid to come up with arguments that Campbell, Merril, Schmidt and Adams might make if you asked them what is good  about "Despoilers of the Golden Empire."  As for "D of the G E" as joke story, perhaps it is a satire of those science fiction writers who lazily rehash episodes from history as adventure stories, or maybe a puzzle pointed at science fiction readers, a test to see if they are familiar with history.  A brief mention of psychic powers which has no bearing on the plot may be a friendly little dig at Astounding editor Campbell, well-known to be fascinated by psychic powers and eager to print stories on that theme.  More philosophically, perhaps "D of G E" is a meta/recursive criticism of escapist literature that sets adventures in fantasy lands when real life includes locales and civilizations, journeys and battles, and characters and ideologies every bit as strange and amazing as anything a genre writer could dream up. 

I don't know if I am earning my pay today speaking for SF editors any better than I earned my pay speaking for academic pinkos back in my Manhattan days; these arguments of mine are not too hot.  The success of this story will remain inexplicable to me.    

"...or Your Money Back" by Randall Garrett (as by David Gordon)

This will probably be the last Randall Garrett story I ever read, so pay attention!

Like "Despoilers of the Golden Empire," "...or Your Money Back" chugs along competently though unimaginatively through a bunch of formulaic and mediocre scenes until we get a sort of twist ending that we sort of saw coming.  We'll call this one barely acceptable as it is shorter than the very long "D of the G E" and at least has some traditional science fiction elements like speculations about the future, you know, what you read an actual science fiction magazine looking for.

Our narrator is a Las Vegas attorney and Garrett runs up the word count with cliches about the law, you know, a lawyer is an officer of the court and has a duty to give his client the best possible defense even if he knows he is guilty and that sort of stuff.  You've already heard this stuff a hundred times, hearing it the 101st time won't hurt you.  A guy from New York hires the narrator to defend him--NY guy expects to get in trouble at the casino.  

Big Apple guy has a pocket-sized device with a dial on it and when he goes to the top casino in town he turns the dial to the number of the roulette wheel on which he has placed his bets and wins all his bets.  Garrett gives us a long scene in which Gotham guy does this stuff again and again and the people at the casino--casino staff, customers, police--react to the guy's amazing run of luck.  He and his device end up in the hands of the police, and he is indicted for cheating at gambling.  

Next up, a long trial scene in which our narrator and the district attorney question witnesses and the NYer and the judge says this and the jury does that blah blah blah.  The casino scene and the court scene feel like the thousand casino scenes and the million court scenes you have already endured on TV, in the movie theatre, and in books before.  

Anyway, the twist is that the device does nothing whatsoever, it is just a decorated box (it actually sounds like one of those fidget boxes that first became available a few years ago.)  The NYer has had success at the roulette wheel because he has psychic powers.  He wanted to bring this case to court to publicize the existence of psychic powers, which many people have but which generally lie dormant.  Three years later, human life has been revolutionized by the unleashing of humankind's psychic powers--for example, a space ship powered by psychics has just landed eighty astronauts on Mars and chemical and mechanical machines are becoming obsolete.

Astounding editor Campbell was fascinated by psychic powers so we can see why this optimistic story about such abilities might tickle his fancy.  I don't know why Merril liked this one.  I may think "...or Your Money Back" is better than "Despoilers of the Golden Empire," but SF editors don't seen to have thought so--this tale of cheating at the casino for the good of humanity has only ever been reprinted in the 1987 Garret collection Takeoff, Too!, sequel to 1980's Takeoff, which includes "D of the G E." 

"The Forsaken Earthman" by William Lindsay Gresham

Gresham of Baltimore has only five fiction credits at isfdb; he seems to have been more successful as a detective writer and a nonfiction writer specializing in spiritualism and the milieu of the carnival sideshow.  His life sounds more interesting than his work, to be honest; it seems Gresham's catastrophic mishandling of the family finances, his alcoholism and his infidelity drove his wife, poet and novelist Joy Davidman, to flee to England and marry C. S. Lewis, whose master wordsmithery had played a role in her conversion from atheistic communism to Christianity.  Anyway, "The Forsaken Earthman" debuted in Satellite* and does not appear to have been reprinted; did Merril, always trying to build bridges between and dissolve barriers between the genres and between the genres and the mainstream, promote "The Forsaken Earthman" because Gresham's 1946 novel Nightmare Alley was a hit and the basis for a film?  With its emphasis on human relationships--sexual relationships between men and women, the relationship between a man under stress and a man of the cloth, and the relationship between a man and his children--and because it is a sort of riff on Matthew Arnold's "The Forsaken Merman." "The Forsaken Earthman" often feels like a mainstream story. 

*Here in this bitchy footnote I will complain that "The Forsaken Earthman" here in Satellite ("THE BEST IN SCIENCE FICTION") is full of typos and the illustration that accompanies the story is crude and without style or charm. 

And maybe Merril liked "The Forsaken Earthman" because it is an anti-racist story and one of those stories that concocts a utopian society of aliens who are better than humans as a way of criticizing the human race.  The protagonist of "The Forsaken Earthman" is a crew member of the first serious expedition to Mars; he goes native, abandoning the mission to marry a Martian girl.  Part of the story is a first person account from the chaplain and morale officer on the mission, part of it letters written by the deserter to the chaplain from his new Martian home.  Early letters describes his happy life among the amphibious Martians, who have gills and spend most of their time underwater in their canals, which they long ago covered over with airtight buildings and rooves, to keep in the oxygen they need, which is scarce on the Martian surface--Mars is dead on the surface, but alive below the surface, in what the chaplain likens to an aquarium.  The Martians have a technology based on bioengineering--the airtight suits of armor they wear while on the surface are a bunch of living molluscs stuck together, for example, and they work steel by applying to it colonies of acidic germs or single-celled creatures or something.    Reading about how happy and smart and good-looking the Martians are and how beautiful their civilization, where everybody runs around naked and plays music all day is, paragraph after paragraph, kinda boring.

The deserter lacks gills, of course, and has to live in the buildings and on the ledges just under the roof of the canal, and in his letters keeps asking the chaplain to provide him diving equipment so he can spend more time with his family and explore the dark depths of the canals.  The chaplain eventually brings it, so we get more long descriptions of how beautiful everything is under the canals and how superior the Martians are.  The deserter writes a book about the stuff he discovers.

"The Forsaken Earthman" is a tragedy of sorts.  The deserter's Martian wife abandons him, leaving the part of the canal to which he is confined by his lack of gills, and she takes the kids with her--he never sees any of them again.  In his letters he goes on and on about missing the kids and eventually even missing Earth.  He becomes a drunk and dies of an infection the Martians don't know how to deal with.  But posthumously, he is a hero and statues are built of him.  His half-Terran, half-Martian kids are leaders in the development of a peaceful interplanetary civilization that consists of Venus (the people there are aquatic, too), Earth and Mars, and his book on submarine Mars is a classic pioneering work.  Most importantly, by defying the racism of his fellow Terrans and by disobeying orders and abandoning his post, he demonstrated the importance of being a rebel and the tremendous value of interracial marriage.  Yes, this story doesn't just say interracial marriage should be legally and socially equal to intraracial marriage, but is actually better because it advances the human species.

His tragedy was an illustration of a fact now accepted everywhere throughout die solar system—that when two species capable and desirous of mating are thrown together by circumstance, it is criminal to keep them apart by law, by force, by censure or by ridicule. Through the mating of similar species new species are developed which have their contribution to make in the ever upward spiral of life in the galaxy and eventually beyond.

"The Forsaken Earthman" feels like a filler piece as it covers well-trod themes without generating any excitement or surprise, married to an OK mainstream story about a guy who screws up his relationships but turns out to be a hero in the end because he's a rebel.  Is this a pathetic wish-fulfillment fantasy of Gresham's, a drunk whose wife and children left him for a more successful scribbler from a related but distinct culture?

Reading "The Forsaken Earthman" felt like a chore while I was doing it, but looking back on it, the basic plot and themes are more or less sound, it is just that Gresham lays it all on way too thick.  Barely acceptable is our verdict.

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Oy, another rough day here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Four stories that feel long and rehash shopworn themes without adding to them any novel twist or adorning them with some kind of unique style.  I guess we have to hope Merril will be serving up a better plate of "H"s than she has "G"s.  Stay tuned to find out if she does so.

Dark is the Sun by Philip José Farmer

Deyv said, “This is all very well, but how does it concern me? I won’t live nearly as long as a tharakorm, and these gateways terrify me. They are not guaranteed entrances to places where the Earth won’t die—for an unimaginably long time yet. Anyway, what is life to me without my own soul egg and my tribe, the people I know and love?....No, I’m not going one step further on this crazy quest of yours." 

Just a few blog posts ago I read Philip José Farmer's "The Alley Man" and was very impressed by it--the writing style, the images, the metaphors and similes were all good, the characters were compelling and believable, and the story had a good mix of humor, sadness, and edginess.  Farmer's stock in my mind went through the roof!  Then, while in Marietta, OH, among the 50¢ books at a flea market where I bought a Hot Wheels space agency rover, I spotted a paperback copy of Farmer's 1979 novel Dark is the Sun.  I felt like I recognized the cover, but from long long ago...had I read this in the Eighties?  I am astoundingly cheap, so I didn't buy it, but later decided to read (or reread?) the novel and downloaded a PDF to read right here on this very screen.  

Maybe we should consider Dark is the Sun one of those world-building exercises, one that takes place billions of years in the future, so Farmer can include any kind of idea in his world, no matter how wacky, explaining it as a result of high technology or alien influence.  We learn all about the ecologies of a multitude of monsters and aliens in the book, and their relationships to humanity, and the bizarre customs of the humans and semi-human people who inhabit the Earth in this far future, as well as the astronomy and geography of this far future universe in which the Earth no longer has any radioactive material and the very solar system has been changed beyond recognition by high technology and the compression of matter as the universe collapses in on itself.  For example, the inhabitants of this Earth are unfamiliar with sunrises or sunsets because the sun is dead, the sky is lit by artificial means.  

I suppose Dark is the Sun is in the tradition of Clark Ashton Smith's, Jack Vance's and Gene Wolfe's "dying Earth" works, though unfortunately Farmer doesn't demonstrate the brilliant wordsmithery of those three heroes, and he doesn't include the mystery and sorcery prevalent in Smith's and Vance's work, the humor in Vance's, or the challenging narrative strategies or Christian world view of Wolfe's.  We might also see Dark is the Sun as influenced by Edgar Rice Burroughs, specifically the Tarzan and Pellucidar books--every two or three pages the main characters of Dark is the Sun have to fight or escape from some monster or primitive tribesmen or climb something or sneak into some place.  Unfortunately, Farmer's action scenes are not as exciting as ERB's, and at times I found them a little confusing, leaving me unsure who was standing or clinging where during a fight or while climbing a rope or whatever.  This isn't because Farmer's style is terse or sketch-like--on the contrary, Farmer overexplains, tells us more than is necessary, making individual scenes and the book as a whole seem too long.  Farmer won't tell you the characters went down the hill to the building when he can tell you that they had to go left to avoid a steep decline and then right because of a boulder and then this guy almost tripped and then that person almost dropped this item, etc.   And while I'm piling on poor Farmer, I'll say that his human characters here are not memorable or iconic like Cugel the Clever, Severian, or Tarzan of the Apes, but instead pretty forgettable and overshadowed by the superpowered nonhuman beings who guide and protect them.  

Even though Burroughs' books are full of violence and danger, they often serve as utopian, wish-fulfillment fantasies that contrast 20th-century industrial life with a simpler life closer to nature in which there is less concern with money and obeying the clock and wearing clothes and so forth.  While Farmer's book here grows steadily more dystopian and apocalyptic as it progresses, Dark is the Sun does feature some of that utopian jazz.  The main character of the novel, Deyv, is a member of a tribe of savages who don't have to work, because food is all around the seasonless equatorial jungle in which they live.  None of the tribesmen is sexually frustrated, because their society makes provision for unattached males, assigning the role of unpaid prostitute to certain women.  The problem of health care costs, a topic that every person I have to deal with in real life relishes discussing ad infinitum, has been solved because everybody in this book has the mental ability to focus attention on individual damaged cells and repair them tout suite.  The problem of razor prices has been solved, as humans have evolved to no longer have facial hair.  Farmer doesn't examine the social or long term implications of these conditions and abilities, they just sort of get mentioned and help smooth out the plot--you can march all day for weeks and fight all the time if you can heal fast, for example.      

Nine tribes inhabit Deyv's region, and they are more or less at war most of the time, hunting each other's heads and so forth, but on a regular schedule they meet peacefully to trade.  Among the things they trade are ancient high tech artifacts, items left behind by the many advanced civilizations of their ancestors which rose and fell over the past dozen billion years, items like swords that never rust or dull.  (Their own technology is at the poison blow dart and stone tomahawk level--they don't even have archery or the wheel!)  Everywhere around these primitives is evidence of their high tech ancestors.  The jungle is crisscrossed by highways so durable as to have endured billions of years.  The sky high above is regularly crossed by flying machines bearing incomprehensible symbols, a message from the past nobody can read.

A high tech artifact ubiquitous among the savages and central to their lives is the soul egg--each savage wears one around his or her neck on a cord.  The soul eggs are a kind of mood ring--if you are scared it turns one color, angry another, etc.  We eventually learn they can be used as lie detectors.  We immediately learn that people choose their spouses using the soul eggs--members of the opposite sex can perform a procedure that makes the soul eggs flicker and pulse, and if the two people's eggs flash in harmony they are compatible.  Usually young people find a compatible mate within the tribe, but, if not, they seek a spouse at the regularly scheduled trade meeting.  The different tribes are essentially different ethnicities whose members each have a distinctive look about them, and the occasional breeding across tribal lines introduces new blood to the tribes. 

As our story begins, Deyv has been unable to find a mate either among his own tribe, the Turtles, or among the other eight local tribes at a trade meeting.  So he sets out on a quest beyond the local region to find a girl in some far flung tribe and bring her back to introduce new blood to the region.  He is accompanied by his dog and his cat, which have the intelligence of primates and are quite large and thus a big help in the novel's innumerable hand-to-hand battles.

To make a long story short (we've got like 400 pages of text here), Deyv travels around, meeting other people and getting drawn into more and more elaborate quests and various side quests that involve fighting people and monsters, climbing stuff, and sneaking into places.  His soul egg is stolen, so he starts chasing the thief.  He meets an attractive woman whose egg has also been stolen and they chase the thief together.  Then  he meets a superior being, a plant man twice as big as a human and far more intelligent and knowledgeable, the descendent of a genetic engineering effort of long ago.  This veggieman gives science lectures and talk a lot about how the universe is collapsing.  He has had a device of his own stolen by the thief and joins Deyv's pursuit of the thief.  They catch up to the thief, a fox-man or something.  The thief was employed by a witch to steal the soul eggs, and the thief helps Deyv and company storm the witch's lair and capture her.  The witch wanted the soul eggs as part of a scheme to steal alien high technology from an alien snake-woman monster living in a wasteland.  So the witch and her household join the group and they go to the wasteland--on the way making friends with a robotic alien with a laser cannon--where they make friends with the serpent alien, who is like 50 feet long.  They all work together to find a gateway to another universe because this universe is collapsing faster than initially predicted by the plant man and snake woman.  A breeding population of humans will be needed in the other universe, so the plant man and snake woman have to trick tribes of humans, who have a superstitious fear of leaving the Earth for another universe, into joining the mission.  The less savory or easy-to-identify-with characters, like the thief, witch, and laser cannon robot, get killed or deactivated, but eventually Deyv and his girlfriend and the two smart giants get to another universe along with enough humans to constitute a viable gene pool.  The humans leave behind their dopey superstitions and religious fetishes, including the soul eggs, no longer needing those crutches--Dark is the Sun is in the science fiction tradition in which smart nonhumans are a contrast to wicked stupid humans, the common people need the cognitive elite to manipulate them to survive, and religion is denigrated, as well as the adventure tradition in which you've got to climb something or kill somebody every three or four pages.

When I was young, I watched a ton of TV.  Every so often something thrilling or brilliant would be on the screen, like a woman I had a crush on like Isabella Rossellini or Dana Delany or a monster like King Kong or Godzilla.  But mostly the TV was bland and inoffensive, merely a good way to kill time, one hour after another.  Dark is the Sun is kind of like that; it goes on and on, not boring or annoying, but for the most part lacking emotional or intellectual effect on the reader.  This monster's way of killing you, how the party builds a raft, the thief's expression of his love of stealing or the witch's expression of contempt for her children, et al, are all faintly entertaining or amusing, but not powerful, and you don't care who gets killed or who makes it to the other universe, and many episodes feel like they are superfluous or dead ends.  The tone of the novel is flat; every scene feels the same, Farmer apparently uninterested in building up to a climax or springing any surprises on you or doing that thing where he builds tension and then releases it in a catharsis.  But every scene is at least OK; Farmer is a professional.

We're calling Dark is the Sun acceptable.  It took me a while to read because reading it wasn't any more attractive than engaging in my other hobbies--the art museums, Telengard, the model trains, the antique stores--so I'd read only a few chapters a day, but it wasn't painful.  It may be a while before I read another long novel; in my opinion, the short story is a superior vehicle for presenting the SF ideas and horror scenarios that I find compelling.

If you want more insight into what is actually going on in this plot-heavy and incident-rich novel, feel free to read on for a blow by blow description of the saga of Deyv, the man dragged by fate and a talking vegetable to enlightenment and to another universe.  I'm warning you, though, that you may not find it asengaging as a trip to the art museum or the antique store.

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The first five chapters of Dark is the Sun consist of Deyv fighting off and escaping from attacks by monsters, as well as dealing which such problems as needing to find food to eat and water to drink.  Many of the novel's 46 chapters deal with such every day events--eventually we even get passages in which the characters have to figure out where to go to the bathroom.  Recurring earthquakes that cause fissures, avalanches and tsunamis add to the constant danger faced by Deyv and all the people of this world.

The sixth chapter introduces the twist that gets the actual plot rolling--while asleep, somebody steals Deyv's soul egg!  Without a soul egg, Deyv's people believe, a man has no soul and so will be shunned, thought of as a ghost--when he dies, he will be unable to enter heaven and live forever with his ancestors.  Farmer in this novel is not only charting Deyv's physical journey from Earth to another, better, universe, but Deyv's intellectual journey, in which he leaves behind his dumb superstitions, and, if only tentatively, embraces science.  In Chapter 6 Devy is at square one, rock bottom, the slave to superstition.  The loss of his soul egg throws our guy into a deep depression, and he refuses to eat or drink, starts to die.  But then he is struck by lightning and this convinces him that the sky god wants him to live, wants him to find the thief and retrieve his soul egg.  So he sets out to after the thief, about whom he knows nothing, and whose trail has been erased by the rain--Deyv trusts in the sky god to guide him.

In Chapter 7 Deyv encounters a woman who has also had her soul egg stolen, an exotic beauty with blue eyes, blonde hair, a straight nose, thin lips, and small high breasts--Deyv's own people are dark and have thick lips and the women have big breasts.  Deyv and this woman, Vana, join forces to find the soul egg thief.  Soon they make friends, in Chapter 8, with another victim of the thief, a sort of centaur-plant-man of great intelligence and learning whose name to humans sounds like Sloosh.  The plant-man, broad-minded but a little arrogant in his superiority, throughout the novel is a sort of spokesman for what science fiction fans (Farmer presumes) believe (or should believe): the pursuit of knowledge is glorious, you should think of the future and consider the entire ecosystem in your decision-making, human beings are violent, selfish, short-sighted and greedy, etc.  Sloosh also drives the plot and overcomes most plot obstacles, being so much bigger and smarter and more moral than the humans.  He can see people's psychic residue, the traces they leave behind everywhere they go, making catching the thief a viable proposition.  By getting in touch with the memories of his fellow plants around the world, Sloosh can also sort of see into the past and into the future, and in Chapter 9 delivers a science lecture and a history lecture about the big bang, human history (mankind has risen and fallen many times, during the rises even having enough power to move Earth away from the dying sun and replace the sun with an artificial energy source) and the inevitable collapse of the universe.  This collapse will be soon on a cosmic timeline, but at this point Sloosh still thinks it many thousands of years away, so while it is a big deal to the plant man, Deyv and Vana just shrug it off.

The main cast catches up to the thief, a furry person.  The thief has been captured by a village's warriors, and in Chapter 10 Deyv and Vana watch from their perch in a tree, which affords a view over the village stockade, as the thief gets tortured.  (Siting up in a tree watching the activities in a primitive village is the kind of thing Tarzan does all the time that Deyv also does all the time.  In real life, don't the people who build fortifications chop down all the nearby trees, if only to serve as material for the fortification?)  In Chapter 11 the villagers are all drunk and D and V invade the village and outfight the few guards who aren't drunk as well as the village canines, but narrowly miss retrieving the eggs because the red-furred thief manages himself to escape in the confusion, snatching the eggs again in the process.  This whole sequence is an example of an action scene that is sort of confusing and overwritten, and a scene that feels like a dead end or like a superfluity--eventually, to advance the plot,  Deyv and Vana have to catch the thief and get their soul eggs, and in this scene they almost, but not quite, succeed, so we have to wait until a later scene accomplishes 100% of what this scene only achieves 90% of.

Chapter 12 continues the pursuit of the thief and is full of more monster encounters, and 13 features travel through a tunnel drilled through a mountain and then on dugouts on a river.  Farmer spends plenty of time on the debate among the characters about how to get to the other end of the tunnel.  The fourteenth chapter sees our heroes riding an organic air ship, a big bag of gas, pursuing the thief, who rides a similar living balloon.  A recurring theme of Dark is the Sun is animals genetically engineered by past civilizations to act as machines, in particular vehicles, that have gone feral after those civilizations collapsed.  These air beasts just drift with the wind, and the thief's gets carried on a different course than the one our heroes are riding due to a change in wind direction.  Deyv and company punch a hole in their organic vehicle so it descends.  In Chapter 15, while escaping some monsters, they discover an astounding artifact, a space craft that can be folded up into a cube three feet across.  The adventurers are able to whip this thing open fast enough to jump into it and seal it up when threatened by enemies--they do this in Chapter 16, which also features a monster that exudes a euphoric drug that reduces humans to joyful incompetent delirium.  I kept thinking they were eventually going to fly someplace in this space ship, but they never do.  They often use it as a mobile fort, however--while light enough to carry around, the space craft is also essentially impenetrable.

The plot moves forward in Chapter 17 when our heroes, a quarter or third of the way through the novel, catch up to the furry thief.  But he doesn't have the eggs--he was hired to steal them by a witch, and now she has custody of them, having seized them from the foolish thief, along with his own soul egg, without even paying him.  This woman is not a magician or a devil-worshiper like the witches we are used to, just a woman who has all kinds of ancient high-tech equipment and uses her arsenal to enslave people and generally exploit the locals.  (As in a Burroughs novel, slavery in Dark is the Sun isn't treated as some disgusting crime against humanity but just a fact of life.)  She is the latest in a long line of witches who have long dominated the area from behind their monster-guarded fortification.  Also present on the periphery of her lair are fruit trees that drug those who eat them into having a positive attitude about the witch, to thinking she is the victim of discrimination and not in fact a cruel tyrant and slaver.  Woah, maybe there was a tree like this in New York City that made the students at the grad school I worked at say all those odd things about Mao Zedong, Hugo Chavez, and Vladimir Lenin.

Our main cast, now augmented by the thief, sneaks into the witch's lair, which consists of three of the living gas bag  airships lashed together and floating at the end of a tether like 600 feet above.  The fight up on the three air beasts with the witch and her minions takes up Chapters 18 through 21.  The battle is very detailed, with lots of dialogue as the heroes plot their next moves and lots of sneak attacks and maneuvering among and between the various gas bag airships, and it all is a little hard to follow and not terribly exciting.

Immediately after the fight, in Chapter 22, we get a lecture from Sloosh on the rotation of the Earth--over the last few billion years, the Earth's rotation has varied due to manipulations made by super-high tech human civilizations.  D and V require this lecture because their people don't have clocks or even the concept of hours and minutes, and so have trouble understanding that the air ship they have captured is going 100 miles an hour thanks to a storm so they will be over a thousand miles from home by the time they can land safely.  During this flight our heroes torture those of the witch's family members and slaves whom they captured during the fight.  But these underlings don't know where the soul eggs are, so the plant man negotiates with the witch, who reveals where she hid the eggs--back where the air ships were moored, of course.  The witch explains why she hired the furry thief to steal the eggs, and tells her life story in Chapter 23.  As so often happens in these adventure stories, the villain is more interesting than the protagonists (consider Dracula, Fu Manchu, Darth Vader, etc.)

As a young woman, the witch, thrown out of her home by her mother, went on an adventure with the plan of stealing some high-tech artifacts from a space alien known as the Shemibob who is currently living on Earth.  This alien captured her and the witch had to serve the alien as a slave for some time; during this time the witch learned that the Shemibob had the secret of immortality and even had theories on how to travel to another universe when the collapse of this one was imminent.  Eventually the witch escaped and took up her rightful station, seizing her mother's lair and artifacts.  Now an old woman, the witch has been stealing soul eggs in hopes of thereby attracting heroic individuals who would venture to the land of the Shemibob--known as the Jeweled Wasteland--and acquire the secrets of immortality and how to travel between universes and bring them back to her--she would hold their soul eggs as hostages.  It seems the witch has stolen hundreds of soul eggs over the years and sent many adventurers into the Jeweled Wasteland, but none has yet returned.

The living airship eventually comes down in a body of water, and our characters narrowly escape from a diverse collection of sea monsters, including living sailing ships.  The folding space ship is unfolded, and they float inside it, drifting until they hit shore on an island in Chapter 25.  Having just introduced us to the idea of portals to other universes in Chapter 23, Farmer puts one on the mountain peak of this island two chapters later.  A man with a beard and pants, maybe a time traveler because man has left behind facial hair and pants many generations ago, or maybe just from a younger universe, appears briefly from the portal and then returns into it; the gateway projects a field that causes nausea, so our people can't enter it, not that Deyv or Vana wants to--at this point, only Sloosh and the witch are really interested in other universes.

Most of the characters want to leave the island, but the surrounding water is teeming with monsters big enough to destroy any boat they can build.  In Chapter 26 Deyv suggests boarding one of the smaller living sailing ships and seizing control of it.  Success is achieved in Chapter 27, and the protagonists guide the monster towards the mainland.  Along the way a larger sailing ship beast chases down their ride and has sex with it--the explosive ejaculations kill one of the witch's sons, but we don't care because just four pages ago the witch was saying how her sons were weaklings and she was ashamed of them.  "'What have I ever done to deserve such a brood? My slaves are better men than you, and that includes the women!”'  The witch has a daughter who is more admirable than her sons; besides being helpful to Mom and brave in the face of danger, she is "long-legged and slim but had huge breasts and a long narrow face, a long hooked nose, and dark eyes."  (If I was editing this book, I would have made sure the face and nose were described before the "but"--"slim but had dark eyes" doesn't make any sense.)

On the mainland the party begins the long march to the Jeweled Wasteland, Deyv and Vana having decided to accompany the quest for the door to another universe which animates the witch and Sloosh (the furred thief just wants to steal what the Shemibob has.)  They march for thousands of miles in Chapter 28; Farmer also uses the chapter to develop the sexual relationship between D and V, who haven't been having sex because they find each other's lack of a soul egg repellant, as do the witch's slaves, who reject D and V's advances.

In Chapter 29 our heroes are captives of a people who I guess are descended from dolphins or whales or something, people seven feet tall with blowholes on the tops of their skulls.  One of Farmer's little jokes is how these people, just as primitive as Deyv and Vana's tribes, paint both six-pointed stars and swastikas on their bodies, and Sloosh talks about how these symbols have had very different meanings over Earth's billions-years-long history.  These cetacean people have a stone and metal god that they have been trying to communicate with.  Every captive they take they tie up in front of the god and compel to try to communicate with the god via flashing lights--they give the captive an oversized firefly (growing up in New Jersey we called these "lightning bugs.")  So far, none of the captives has had much luck passing to the god the message that the village shaman would like the immobile god to come to visit the village shaman's hut.  Each captive has died in the attempt and then been eaten by the tribe.

In Chapter 30 our party is dragged to the god--the plant man thinks it is a machine, maybe a vehicle from outer space, that doesn't move because it is low on fuel or something.  The god's light pulses are laser beams that invariably slay any captive before they can exchange any information.  First to go among Deyv's companions captive is the witch's other despised son.  Only one captive is killed per meal time, two or three a day, so Deyv and Vana have time, under the pressure of imminent death, to realize their soul eggs were not the repository of their souls but just some device that became a crutch for fallible weak humanity and they should have been having a love relationship all this time.

After two of the witch's slaves have been lasered down and it is Deyv's turn at bat, Sloosh, in Chapter 31, persuades the tribe's leader to place captives a few feet to one side when they try to talk to the god so the laser will miss them.  Soon Deyv's party are learning the alien machine's language.  This part of the novel is less credible than the others--why didn't the shaman soon realize that he could preserve those he sent to talk to the god by letting them stand out of the line of fire of the communications laser?  Because the captives tasted good?  This whale-man section reads like a satire of religion more than something believable meant to generate excitement or suspense--it even ends deus ex machina style.

One of the many earthquakes that we hear about periodically strikes and the village falls into the sea and almost every member of the tribe of whale-people is killed. The surviving villagers commit suicide.  Deyv and Vana's party survives, as does the alien machine person--having fallen into the ocean it uses valuable scarce fuel to drive out of the drink.  In Chapter 32 the heroes find radioactive material--from the same meteorite that brought the machine alien--with which to fuel it up, and then ride it towards the Jeweled Wasteland.  Their journey is interrupted in Chapter 33 when they are attacked by a kaiju-sized ("tracks in the forest, prints at least two hundred feet long....the apish skull....was big enough to house several human families") creature--the alien robot machine cuts it down with its laser.  This sequence is the one excerpted behind the cover of the paperback to try to interest prospective buyers, but it is a non sequitur sequence that has no influence on the plot.  Deyv and companions then come to the Jeweled Wasteland, a landscape devoid of life that consists entirely of fields, hills, valleys, etc., of faceted translucent stones.  Our heroes drive through this place for some weeks, facing floods and earthquakes, until they reach the castle of the Shemibob.

In Chapter 34 our cast explores the castle, and in 35 they meet the Shemibob.  This alien is a sort of snake-centipede-centaur, a creature with a female human torso and head that are twice the size of a human head and trunk and are equipped with fangs and a long tongue and quills on the head instead of hair and a different number of fingers and so forth, while below the hairless genitals is a 40-foot-long hideous worm body with 40 humanoid legs.  The Shemibob reveals that she has been trapped in her castle by what acts like a one-way forcefield that has allowed the party in but won't let them out.  In a way I did not understand, the forcefield keeps water and air from coming to the castle, even though it let Deyv and Vana's party in, so the Shemibob's high tech machinery has been manufacturing new air.  This forcefield is an effect of a gateway, presumably to another universe, deep within the castle.  The gateway causes fear and nausea, like that at the island of Chapter 25, but they will have to go through it eventually because the time will come when the raw materials needed by the machines to make new air are exhausted.  Oh, wait, the forcefield starts contracting just after the Shemibob tells her life story so this alien monster and our adventurers have to jump into the gateway now.  In Chapter 36 they find themselves in what they think is a cavern in another universe.  Using their various pieces of equipment and their skills, they escape the rubble of the castle that is flying through the gateway behind them and bust through a cavern wall to the emerge below the ocean surface and then rise to an island beach where they come to realize this is not some other universe after all but just some other place on their Earth.  I always find these bait and switch things, when the author leads you to expect something wild is going to happen and then what happens is not really that wild, to be an annoyance.

In Chapter 37 the Shemibob reveals she has made soul eggs for D and V by scanning their brain waves.  The two check to see if they are compatible mates, and they are, but they wonder if maybe the Shemibob's eggs aren't legit, if the ophidian alien maybe fashioned the eggs specifically to show they were compatible, whether they were or not.  We readers learn more about the eggs. 

Here I will note that, despite all the descriptions of breasts, Dark is the Sun may be seen as a feminist story.  Vana is right in there with Deyv killing with her blow gun and stone tomahawk and arguing about what to do next.  The wisest and most ambitious human character is the witch, and her most admirable offspring is her daughter.  The most powerful character in the novel is the Shemibob, and she is portrayed as a good leader, pushing everybody around and deceiving them for their own good. 

The party begins the trek across the planet to the site of another gateway detected by the Shemibob--maybe this one will lead to another universe?  The plant man urges Deyv and Vana to sign on to the trip to another universe, arguing that this universe is collapsing faster than expected, as evidenced by the increased number of earthquakes, but the humans are not sure and tentatively plan to leave the party when they approach the lands of their tribes, which conveniently are on the way.  In Chapter 38, on this long march, Vana gets pregnant and the machine alien tells the story of its life and people.  An earthquake opens up a fissure and the machine alien falls into it along with the witch's daughter, who has survived this long without having any effect on the plot--I thought she would have a big moment, taking over the family business of being a witch, causing a love triangle with Deyv and Vana, something like that, but no, she just dies having made no impression on the narrative, just leaving in our minds the image of a girl with huge breasts and a long hooked nose.  The party does manage to rescue the machine that protects them with its laser weapon.  Whew, close one.

Chapter 39 largely concerns the personalities of the thief and the witch.  The party has arrived at another wasteland to be crossed, and the thief proposes killing the witch, whom he hates, saying feeding her in a land where no food is available would just be a waste.  The superior beings--the noble and wise Sloosh and the alien vermiform Shemibob--defend the witch, as do Deyv and Vana--this chapter is a SF staple, the human race put on trial by superior beings.  By defending the witch, Deyv and Vana pass the test.  Vana also gives birth in this chapter.

At the center of this wasteland the characters discover the 200-foot-high tower from which those indecipherable flying symbols regularly emerge and fly around the Earth.  You remember them, right?  It takes many pages but eventually our heroes get to the top of the tower and look down through an unbreakable skylight into this millions' years old unbreakable tower.  Inside sits a figure in suspended animation which Farmer's description makes us readers think looks like Santa Claus.  A joke, I guess.  Sloosh and the serpent alien come to believe the flying figures and this tower are a clock that foretells the end of this universe, and the end is soon.  This chapter, the fortieth, just tells us something we've been told already, and takes its time doing it.  I guess the value proposition of this chapter is that there is the Santa Claus joke and that we are supposed to enjoy the sense of wonder of the characters who are looking at a building and a machine millions or billions of years old, even though we've already been exposed to tons of stuff that is super duper old.

The long march continues and in Chapter 41 the child is starting to talk and Vana is preggers again.  The furry thief murders the witch and runs off with lots of Shemibob's high tech devices, but is killed in an avalanche.  The snake woman's devices are lost under the fallen rocks.  The machine alien has to shut down because it is out of radioactive fuel and there is no more to be found on this worn out old Earth.  In Chapter 42 it is months later and the surviving adventurers find another of the gateways.  D and V are finally convinced--by a dream--to try to get their tribes to join the mission to leave the Earth and reestablish the human race in another, younger universe.  In Chapter 43, the characters learn that Deyv and Vana's tribes have moved and cannot be found.  Can't Sloosh follow their psychic emanations like he followed the thief's?  Maybe Farmer explains this, maybe not, I forget.  Anyway, Deyv and Vana will have to go to another universe without their tribes, which causes much grief.  

To have a suitably large breeding community, says Sloosh, they will have to bring other tribes to the other universe.  To win a nearby tribe over to this scheme, which of course seems insane to the savage tribespeople, our heroes exterminate a colony of monsters who are always harassing the tribe--participating in the extermination campaign leads to the death of Deyv's dog, while back at the camp guarding the baby, Deyv's cat is killed by a snake which also kills Deyv's and Vana's child.  I guess Farmer wipes out all traces of Dyev's past life to emphasize that he is beginning a new life with a new tribe in a new universe.  Farmer describes all this negotiating and hunting and weeping in tedious detail in chapters 43, 44, 45 and 46.  Following long science fiction tradition, the cognitive elite--the alien snake woman and the plant-man--use trickery to get the humans to go along with their risky plan, which of course is entirely for the humans' own benefit.  Also, less than 25 pages from the end of the 400 page novel, Farmer is still describing quotidian activities like how people find food and where they go to the bathroom.  Farmer signally fails to generate a sense of excitement that we are approaching the end of this story--you would only know you are near the end because you know there are few pages left.

Finally, the heroes go through a portal to a young Earth-like planet that still has a conventional sun and thus sunrises and sunsets.  In Chapter 47 the people of those tribes they manipulated follow them through the portal, leaving their gods and ritual items behind.  The human race will endure after the collapse of our universe.

Night Screams by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg

What now?  What did the forces want her to do next?  Leave the house, try to get away in the darkness?  No.  The murderer was out there, watching, waiting; he would see her if she tried to leave, and she couldn't outrun a man through the snow.  Hide?  No.  There wasn't anywhere to hide that she wouldn't be found.

1981 paperback edition

A year or so ago, I guess, I spent four dollars on a 1979 Playboy Press hardcover copy of the novel Night Screams by critically acclaimed mystery writer Bill Pronzini and our hero Barry N. Malzberg.  The time has come to read it!  I'll be reading my physical copy, the jacket of which is severely damaged, though the actual book itself seems to be in good shape; an image of a noose is inscribed on the blue front cover, which is kind of fun.  You can find your own copy of the novel on e-bay for less than ten bucks if you aren't picky, or read a scan available as I write this at the internet archive.

Before we dig into this 260 or so page thriller, here are links to my blogposts about other Pronzini/Malzberg collabs.

The Running of the Beasts

"Fascination"

"Inaugural"

"The Last One Left"

"Night Rider"

"Matter of Survival"

"Another Burnt-Out Case"

"On Account of Darkness"    

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Sad to say, I am pretty down on Night Screams.  We look into a book like this for sex and violence and fear, first and foremost, and very few of the pages actually feature murders, fights, or titillating sex, or actually generate any emotion in the reader.  There are a lot of characters, and none are particularly interesting or likable, I guess so that we don't feel bad when they are killed or revealed to be the killer.  The characters also don't act in a fashion that feels very believable; they are cartoonish, but unfortunately not funny.

The writing of Night Screams is bland and lacks personality, with lots of what I would consider filler passages about scenery that, I admit, are meant to create an atmosphere of isolation and unease (it's a cold snowy winter in the country and many of the characters have an aversion to cold and/or the country.)  Pronzini and Malzberg seem to be trying to appeal to the reader by exploiting in a childish fashion various cultural divides, perhaps catering to who they think will buy a book from Playboy Press, or maybe simply appealing to the prejudices of the editors at Playboy Press.  Basically, on one side we've got hip with-it young urban types who accept the validity of psychic powers with the casualness that you and I accept the validity of electricity, and on the other bigoted rural oldsters who think the paranormal is either bunk or the work of the devil.  Many of the main characters of Night Screams have psychic powers, but their powers rarely actually help them accomplish anything, though the inclusion of premonitions and precognition gives Pronzini and Malzberg a chance to introduce the theme of free will vs determinism; unfortunately the repeated invocations of this theme only serve to strip agency from the characters, who, upon seeing some future, are compelled to make that future come true.  Again and again we are told the psychic characters' choices are circumscribed by these vaguely defined "forces."

As for the plot, it is normal slasher/giallo/Ten Little You Know Whats stuff--we have a bunch of characters who are getting killed one by one and the detective has to figure out which character is the killer while he enjoys a romance with the most attractive and most normal of the cast of suspects/potential victims.  Many scenes feel like dead ends as the characters try one method or another to gather info and come up empty.  I find these ultimately sterile scenes annoying, but I guess such scenes are the norm for detective fiction.

So, thumbs down for Night Screams, even if Robert Bloch [claims to have] liked it.  Despite my serious misgivings, the novel was reprinted in paperback in 1981, by our French friends in 1989, and here in America in 2011--hilariously, the woman on the almost indecipherable cover of the 2011 edition (is that a hand or a snowdrift in the lower half of the cover?) seems to have facial piercings.  

Obviously I am going to blame Pronzini for the weakness of this novel, not my spirit animal Barry N. Malzberg, even though my academic experience has taught me to expect that the second, third or fourth author of a publication probably did more actual work on the text than the top name on the list.  After all, Night Screams is structured and presented as a mainstream detective story with a bunch of suspects and victims and a detective who bangs the top suspect slash potential victim, plus a lot of mainstream pseudo literary gunk in which people look out at the snow; Night Screams does not feel like a science fiction novel or like the typical Malzberg novel which is a series of surreal events that may or may not be the delusions of a madman who is either an astronaut or has some mundane life, spiced up with crazy jokes that reflect the narrator's or the protagonist's insanity.  But we can see Malzbergian elements in Night Screams.  Malzberg protagonists are often self-deluded and/or monomaniacal to the point of insanity, and one of the story's characters, Neal, kind of fits that bill.  Malzbergian protagonists also generally suffer sexual dysfunction, and while our main characters, Brad the FBI man and Leslie the psychic landscape painter, are sexual athletes who are marvelously sexually compatible (on their first date, Brad has two orgasms and is able to maintain his erection between orgasms without having to take any time to recover, while Leslie has three orgasms and tells Brad he can pound her as hard as he likes), the second rank characters and the minor characters all seem to have problems in the bedroom.  

So, there is my sad verdict on, and my Malzberg-centric analysis of, Night Screams.  If you want a plot summary and some additional evidence that back up the various claims I make above about why Night Screams is not very good, read on below.  And remember, I am going to totally spoil the "absolutely stunning surprise ending."

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Part One, nine pages, introduces us to a serial killer as he sneaks into the house of a female flutist, Sandra, and strangles her with a blue velvet cord as she is practicing on the flute.  Once she is dead, he gets another, different piece of rope and hangs up the dead woman with a noose.  It is implied that the murderer is periodically taken over by some supernatural force, that this being or whatever it is drives the killer to commit these foul deeds by giving him premonitory visions of the murder he has to commit--should he not make these visions come true, he will himself die!  In the kill scene, Pronzini and Malzberg focus on the sound of the victim's screams and on the smell of her feces as her bowels relax upon death.  Yuck!

Part One also introduces Leslie Abbot, a woman landscape painter.  She has a vision of the murder of the flutist that includes the sound of the screams and the stink of the feces.  And another vision--of the murderer approaching her own house!

Part Two is the meat of Night Screams, like 240 pages. 

Leslie the painter is a member of a little group of people with psychic powers.  Recently they numbered seven, but today only five remain, as Sandra the flutist was one of their group, as well as a man killed a month earlier, Tony.  Pronzini and Malzberg almost immediately reintroduce the theme of people being compelled to do things against their will, telling us Leslie often has the experience of doing things because "some random events or series of events seemed to be preordained by whatever forces controlled the universe."  I don't like this theme--to me a good story is about people making decisions and succeeding or falling due to the nature and extent of their own personalities and abilities, not because of some decree of fate.  I also don't like invocations of "the universe" and its decrees in modern writing--such ideas feel like a vague, toothless and bloodless substitute religion for people too educated and too hip to believe in Judaism or Christianity.  

The founder and leader of the group of psykers, Oscar, an elderly widower who edits a trade journal for pet dealers (circulation: 10,000), calls a meeting of the five survivors in Vermont, where Leslie has been living for a few months in an old church converted into an artist's studio.  Also among the psykers are skinny Jo from New York City, a chain-smoking theatrical agent who calls people "darling" and "dear;" overweight failed actress Gloria of upstate New York, where she manages a community playhouse; and Neal of Long Island, a married accountant who hopes to use his psychic powers to become an entertainer like his hero The Amazing Kreskin.    

So here we have our core list of potential victims and likely suspects.  Having established this crew of middle-class creatives with whom writers like Pronzini and Malzberg can identify, we get our intro to the agents of the state, beneficiaries of the people's taxes, who are going to end up dealing with the case of the murdered psychics, FBI men Brad Saxon and Stan Walker.  Connecticut-based Walker is a passive by-the-book kind of guy, whom DC-based field agent Brad, the younger but senior agent, a hip urbanite who complains about Hoover, fears the Bureau is fascistic, and wears his hair long, finds annoying.  Brad believes in the ability of psychic powers to help solve crimes, and is eager to meet the assembled psykers.  As all my readers who are attorneys know, the FBI doesn't get involved in the murders of psychic flutists unless the penumbra of their psychic emanations affects interstate commerce; Brad and Stan's real mission is investigating the disappearance from DC of Morris Evers, Atomic Energy Commission administrator--Sandra was his cousin, bringing her murder into the bailiwick of the FBI men.

Having set their tale in New England in January, Pronzini and Malzberg inflict on us plenty of descriptions of snow and ice and slush, many scenes of people looking out the window at the snow and scenes of people putting on and taking off their mufflers and coats and bitching about the weather.  I guess this is supposed to add atmosphere, make things feel more oppressive, more dangerous, but these scenes sort of make the eyes glaze over.  Somewhat more successful at making the reader uneasy and generating suspense is how P & M portray New Englanders as superstitious types who think that psychic powers are witchcraft.  "The old Puritan beliefs died hard up here, if they ever died at all."  The local people all fear and hate the psykers, so we can add them to the list of suspects, I suppose.  Somebody, presumably one of the villagers, regularly makes threatening calls to Leslie, saying stuff like "We don't want your kind here."  I guess P & M are trying to win for the psychics some of the sympathy readers would feel for Jews or blacks under threat from bigots, as well as stoke the contempt for rural people felt by the city folk whom P & M assume make up their audience (Brad considers the little village where Leslie lives to have "an aura of emptiness and provincial and cultural isolation...[to be] a place on the edge of nowhere.")

Brad and Walker come to the meeting Oscar has organized and ask questions of the assembled psykers.  (The word the characters use is "clairvoyants.")  All of the clairvoyants act like weirdos or jerks with the exception of Leslie the painter.  Leslie is also the prettiest of the women and Brad immediately develops a crush on her.  So, it is Leslie whom Brad enlists to use her psychic powers to help the investigation.  The next day Brad and Leslie go to Sandra the flutist's place to see if Leslie can get any psychic insight into what happened to Sandra.  Leslie has such powerful visions that she almost collapses, but these visions don't add much to the visions she had when the murders took place.  This book is full of people with psychic powers, but these powers don't actually accomplish much until the last 20% or so of the novel.  That evening the painter and FBI agent have a date at Leslie's house, and share their love of jazz (holy crap, P & M really are aiming to please the Playboy audience with this book) and then go to bed together, where they have the best sex of their lives--after another of the menacing calls from the anti-psychic harasser comes through, of course.

In the first hundred pages of the book we get a bunch of scenes with goofball Neal and cynical jerk Jo, helping us to get to know them, but little exposure to Gloria, even though it is Gloria who is the victim in the book's second murder scene.  Leslie, asleep in bed with Brad, has a vision of the murder.  P & M arrange things so that we have reason to suspect Oscar.  Walker arrives on the scene in time to chase the killer, but the killer gets away--after all, as one of the novel's skeptics of psychic powers and a by-the-book guy with a crew cut instead of a cool hip jazz aficionado with long hair, we have to expect Walker to fail.  This chase is actually pretty exciting, probably the high point of the novel.

Brad brings Leslie to the site of Gloria's murder, but, as usual, her powers don't turn up any useful info.  The next actual bit of excitement is Leslie finding her house vandalized, all her paintings destroyed--except the painting inspired by her vision of the killer approaching her home!  Dun--dun--Dunnnn.  

Brad and Walker get the news that Evers has been found--he was killed by his homosexual lover.  Now there is no reason for the FBI to be involved in the murders of the three clairvoyants.  (Why did P & M make their protagonist an FBI man, anyway?  So he would be a city slicker that Playboy staff and readers could identify with in the way they would not identify with a county sheriff or state trooper?)  Of course Brad wants to stay on the case, and luckily a blizzard rolls in and the FBI men are stuck in Leslie's psyker-hating burg.  At the novel's halfway point, Brad assembles all 20-odd citizens of the village at the inn to interrogate them, hoping to figure out who has been telephoning and now breaking, entering and vandalizing Leslie's home.  This allows P & M to present to us for comic relief some starry eyed ex-hippies turned Jesus freaks who say stuff like "Praise Jesus" and suggest the psychics are possessed by the devil.  Of course, no clues emerge from the interrogations.  Leslie does not attend this event, even though she wants to, because "The controlling forces again, the sense of inevitability: She was here because she was supposed to be here."  Night Screams is the kind of book in which people who believe in Christ are portrayed as idiots but people who believe in psychic powers and do things because abstract ill-defined "forces" make them are considered eminently sensible.

Neal sneaks away from the big village get-together organized by the FBI because he had a vision of himself in the basement of the local antique store--the alcoholic antiques dealer is one of the most vociferous anti-psychics, a prime suspect in the harassment campaign against Leslie and, according to Neal, a prime suspect in the slayings of the clairvoyants.  Neal has been portrayed as a comic relief nerd loser, but he doesn't just break into the antique store because he is foolish--he has to do what he saw in the vision.  "You couldn't deny a precognition; you could get into trouble that way, trying to change what you were destined to do."  What is the point of psychic powers if they don't help you make decisions, to avoid trouble?  Why are the psychic powers even in this story?--I swear the plot would work just the same if they were left out, just have the villagers fear "city folk" instead of "clairvoyants."

The trip to the antiques store leads to a scene, maybe supposed to be funny, of Neal and the alcoholic antiques dealer almost coming to blows and Brad stumbling upon their confrontation and calming them down by "rocking" his revolver, which I guess is a typo for "cocking."  I hope it's not a typo for "racking."  Neal's psychic vision and the whole antique store sequence, which is pretty lengthy and includes Brad doing a top to bottom search of the antique store, contribute nothing to the plot.

Oscar has a vision of his own and runs out into the snow.  Jo follows him, only to be ambushed and murdered.  Leslie also has a vision that leads her and Brad to where Jo hangs from a noose, dead, under a covered bridge (like on the book jacket)--Oscar is still there, in a daze, too out of his wits to offer any clues.  Again we get the idea that Oscar may be to blame.  Is this just P & M trying to fool us?  Or is Oscar under the control of some other psyker, the real villain who is using Oscar merely as a tool?

As the final 50 pages of this caper begin, Brad and Leslie go to Leslie's house to have sex; Brad leaves Walker at the inn to look after Oscar and Neal.  Oscar is still out of his mind, and is so for the remainder of Part Two, but Neal has psychic visions that actually offer some value.  Neal has seen images from the past that prove the antique dealer is a fraud who sells fake antiques he makes himself and that he was the one who has been calling Leslie and who destroyed her paintings while drunk.  He wanted to get rid of the clairvoyants because he feared they would uncover his fraud.  (It is never explained why he destroyed many canvases but left one alone, the one influenced by Leslie's vision of the attack on herself--I guess we have to credit the forces of the universe for this, like so much else.)  The antiques dealer runs off and Walker chases him; left alone, Neal has a vision that sends him to Leslie's house.

After banging Leslie, Brad goes downstairs to get a sandwich and sees a figure outside.  Is it Neal?  Oscar?  Who knows?  Brad goes out into the snow to chase this mysterious character and we hear a lot about how cold it is--I thought the line "The wind-chill factor had already begun to suck body heat from him" was pretty funny, though maybe because I am the kind of person who is skeptical of "wind chill factor" and "heat index" and "real feel temp."  The mystery man ambushes Brad and knocks our hero out with some firewood.

This leaves Leslie to deal with the killer alone.  Both Leslie and the killer select weapons and tactics and strategies based on what their visions and what "the forces" permit them--they are both puppets on strings rather than agents who determine their own goals and how to pursue them, and then succeed or fail based on their decisions and abilities.  Totally lame storytelling, though I guess in keeping with Malzberg's pessimistic view of life.

The fight between Leslie and the killer is not bad, but the revelation of who the killer is is total garbage that made angry.  The person who has been killing all the psychics is a minor character I had been paying no attention to, the innkeeper's overweight wife.  (I guess we are supposed to believe her fat body looks like a man's in the distance, like when Walker chased her and when Brad saw her through the window while making a little postcoital snackerino.)  Why would a fat woman who runs an inn with her husband kill psykers?  Because she is possessed by the ghost of her dead brother, a character never mentioned in the story until page 245 of a novel the last numbered page of which is page 262.  (Maybe we are supposed to think this possession by a man gives the innkeeper's wife a masculine gait and masculine strength, at least when in kill mode, making it more believable that she can pass for a man and so successfully fight people and run away from people and lift dead bodies above her head so she can hang them from nooses.)

When she was thirteen, the innkeeper's future wife and her eight-year-old brother were playing cowboys and Indians (maybe you say "Native Americans") and she tied up her brother with a blue velvet cord and accidentally strangled him.  To make the tragic accident look like suicide, she strung her brother up with a noose.  A few years later, the brother's ghost came to inhabit his sister's body.  (This is all kind of reminding me of the Genesis masterpiece, "The Musical Box.")  Dead brother prefers living, even if he has to share a woman's body, to being dead, so when Leslie came to town, and other psykers followed, he decided to kill them because he feared they would detect his presence and send him back to the afterlife.

This little ghost plot isn't terrible but it is very frustrating that there were no clues that this fat innkeeper's wife was important to the story or had a tragic past or had masculine attributes or anything like that.  I thought a good mystery story was supposed to provide the reader an opportunity to figure out who dun it (well, at least I heard T. S. Eliot say that.)  There is no way the reader could figure out a ghost who was possessing a minor character was to blame because said ghost was never mentioned.  Come on, Pronzini!

Neal's psychic powers guide him to the unconscious Brad, whom he arouses--Neal is the only psyker in this book whose powers ever seem to actually produce.  Leslie is losing the fight and is about to die when Brad rescues her.  Instead of surrendering to Brad the ghost decides to direct his sister's body to jump out a high window--the final fight sequence takes place in the belfry; you remember Leslie's house is an old church, don't you?--to their deaths.

Part Three, three pages of text, lets us know that Brad and Leslie live happily ever after in a city apartment, that Oscar recovers his wits, and offers a joke scene in which Neal is a guest on a TV talk show where he has a vision of the host and a guest having oral sex backstage.  We never learn any more about the "forces," or Brad's or Neal's or the innkeeper's reaction to learning that a ghost was forcing the innkeeper's wife to massacre people or what happens to the alcoholic dealer of bogus antiques.  What a load of crap.