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| They don't have to be in mint condition for me to buy them |
In his Introduction, Schiff, who I guess was a trained dentist living in the greatest state in the union, says that fantasy and horror are now big business, what with Sissy Spacek as Carrie, Max von Sydow as The Exorcist and Michael J. London as The Snowbeast burning up our screens, but these popular commercial versions of horror and the weird designed to please the masses are diluted, adulterated. In his work as an editor of Whispers, a semi-pro zine, Schiff (his friends like David Drake call him "Stu") has tried to encourage the creation of and to disseminate more pure, less commercial, horror/fantasy fiction. He goes on to praise the role of little magazines like Whispers throughout the modern history of horror, citing the early careers of Lovecraft, Bradbury and Stephen King.
Whispers II includes 21 stories and I think I am going to read and opine on 19 of them. I am skipping Karl Edward Wagner's "Undertow," a Kane story. I read all the Kane stories in the late New York and early Iowa periods of my life and didn't really find them to my taste, though some were better than others. My vague memories suggest that "Undertow" was better than the average Kane story. I have already blogged about Hugh B. Cave's "From the Lower Deep" and Russell Kirk's "Lex Talionis," having read them back in 2015 in DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII, which was edited by Wagner.
Tarbandu of The PorPor Books Blog has already trod this ground--feel free to read his brisk and informative blogpost from 2010 about Whispers II and skip my long-winded babbling about it and get back to your real life; I'm sure you'd be better off doing something productive like chasing girls or making money or something like that.
"Berryhill" has a straightforward plot. On the edge of town is a decrepit house where live some really old people who are rarely seen and are kind of weird. All kinds of rumors about their alleged crimes have sprung up over the decades. One day a nine-year-old juvenile delinquent who likes to torture animals and vandalize local farms ventures into the old weirdos' house. What will happen to all these creepy characters?
Lafferty, with understated brilliance, takes this plot and makes it both hilarious and horrifying. Everything from people's names to the little turns of phrase he uses to the details about small town life and casual descriptions of human evil work to make the reader smile and laugh or wince and shiver. Engrossing and surprising, and easier to understand than some of Lafferty's work, which can often be difficult, this story alone is worth what I paid for this book.
Very good, highly recommended. "Berryhill" first appeared in Whispers #9, and would later appear in the collection Iron Tears, which has a good cover by the Dillons.
I often find Davidson's stories to be erudite but gimmicky and silly, though I gave his novel Enemy of My Enemy a moderately positive review earlier this year. "The King's Shadow Has No Limits" seems to have appeared approximately simultaneously in Whispers #8 and the book The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy. I think this will be the first Dr. Eszterhazy story I have ever read.
I guess this story is a mood piece about historical change with a focus on social class and what today we would call income equality. Dr. Eszterhazy lives in a bustling metropolis in an alternate history 19th century, the capital of a multi-ethnic empire in the Balkans that I guess was inspired by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This empire has a triple monarchy (one better than the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary) and is known as Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania. The city is home to both both modern buildings and ancient ruins, to modern devices, like steam shovels, electric lights and telephones, and centuries-old rituals and superstitions, like poor people clamoring for the dust scarped yearly from a long dead saint's grave. Esterhazy wanders around the town, seeing the poor working on a construction site, accepting alms, waiting in line for the aforementioned dust, etc. Some impoverished old men remind him of the aged Emperor, and Eszterhazy addresses one and finds that it is the Emperor! The Emperor tells him that some wise Jews inspired him to spend time among the poor; he also compares himself to Louis XV, quoting "after me, the deluge," suggesting that after he dies the empire will fall apart.
Later we are provided evidence that the Emperor had been in a coma all day, and his soul left his body to travel around the city and experience life from a different perspective.
Most stories which deal with historical change have the protagonist acting as a change agent, a rebel or reformer or innovator, but Esterhazy seems to be a sincere supporter of the Emperor and I think we are supposed to get a sense of foreboding from this story, to suspect that the death of the elderly Emperor is going to usher in a cataclysm like the French Revolution or World War I that will kill untold numbers of people and sweep away cultures which, while they have faults, perhaps have admirable elements whose destruction is to be lamented. I detected similar ideas and themes in Enemy of My Enemy; I'm getting the feeling that Davidson is a sort of sad, romantic conservative, or maybe I am just projecting my own tragic view of life onto his work.
(Being the last story in the collection The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy, it is perhaps appropriate that "The King's Shadow Has No Limits" foreshadow and expound upon the passing of the book's setting.)
This is a well-wrought literary story, dense with description and allusion. It is a success, but it is not exactly fun or thrilling--it is sad, but not cathartic the way a more extravagant tragedy might be; "The King's Shadow Has No Limits" is haunting rather than melodramatic. I have to admit it is leaving me feeling kind of depressed; maybe I should have eaten more chocolate today.
Here's a story from the son of the guy who wrote Steven Spielberg's best film and Vincent Price's best film. "Conversation Piece" appeared first here in Whispers II, and Schiff liked it so much he also included it in his anthology Mad Scientists. "Conversation Piece" also shows up in the Richard Christian Matheson collection Scars.
This is a gimmicky silly story; maybe it is supposed to be funny. Most of it is taken up with the transcript of an interview, "A"s following "Q"s, bookended by the brief recollections and reflections of the journalist who posed the "Q"s. Basically, the journalo interviews a guy who is just a head, a guy who was born in a normal healthy body and made money by selling body fluids and then body parts to medical scientists until he had sold almost everything. We don't realize he is just a head until late in the story. The interviewee's attitude is not that of a victim; he acts like his chosen career of selling off his body piece by piece is just a normal profession, saying it suits him and talking about how he sold this part to pay for his wedding and that part to pay for his daughter's school clothes, etc. The journalist, at the end of the story, lays on the heavy symbolism, suggesting that we all surrender or sacrifice parts of ourselves, our honesty or convictions, for example, in our pursuit of a career and a satisfying sex and family life.
Acceptable.
I think I read a few Jack L. Chalker SF novels in my high school days in the 1980s, but all I can remember is that a party of people was on a space ship, searching for something and being chased by enemy space ships and all that usual stuff, and at one point they had to design a new life form, and they divvied up the design duty, with one person designing the head and another designing the body and whatever. One guy got the job of designing the life form's penis, and there was a whole paragraph in which the guy described the penis's fascinating attributes (the word "telescoping" was used.) Did I really read this or is this just a crazy dream I had that I have unfairly associated with Chalker?
Anyway, here we have a short story which first appeared here in Whispers II but would later be included in a Chalker collection and some anthologies of American ghost stories. Boo!
Our narrator is a guy who got a degree in "elementary education" but had a hard time finding a position and devoted much of his time to booze, drugs, and women with the same dubious hobbies. Some money falls into his lap after a car accident caused by the other driver, so he leaves the city and moves to the hillbilly country of West Virginia. Chalker gives us some descriptions of how poor and illiterate and ignorant the people in the hills are, and also how proud they are, how close they are to nature and how they value people and their word more than materialistic and overly sophisticated city folk.
The narrator convinces the state to pay him to be a sort of peripatetic teacher of these country folk who refuse to have anything to do with conventional schooling. Our ghost story involves a little girl (approximately 12) whom others consider a witch. Little Cindy Lou Whittler (I suspect this name is a joke because Chalker also directly refers to Dr. Seuss in this story) believes she can control the weather and that her dead father speaks to her, telling her when to make it rain. And sure enough, one day our narrator hears two voices from the Whittler shack, arguing--a man wants Cindy Lou to trigger a powerful storm, but the little girl says it will cause the dam to burst and kill the local people!
The ending of this story is anti-climactic. The dam bursts, but nobody gets killed. Cindy Lou doesn't have to suffer the guilt of wrecking the dam, because (she tells the narrator) her father the ghost, who has responsibility for the weather of the region, enlisted some other witch to make fall the rain, which was mandated by a still higher authority. The narrator reflects that maybe everybody in this world has a purpose, even drug addicted losers like him (his purpose is to educate these illiterate poor people) and the impoverished people of Appalachia (who control the weather at the behest of Mother Nature or God?)
Lame.
Lunde is new to me, but we've encountered James Sallis before. I didn't like his experimental story from Quark 3, thought his experimental stories in Again, Dangerous Visions were alright, but could not recommend his experimental stories in Alternities. The story here has an epigraph from Yeats, four lines from "The Madness of King Goll" about woodland creatures, cluing us in to the source of the story's title.
This is a sleep-inducing prose poem full of sentences like, "A doe, invisible in a dapple of sun and shadow, suddenly bounds down the slope before him," and "A door slapping shit, firmly, like the closing of a fist; a car gearing up, then fading quickly away." I think it is about a guy who just graduated from college with a physics degree coming home to the forest to his family of witches; the witches are about to face some war or other trial, and the college kid burns his college books and prepares for "the Strengthening" of "the Agreed," who must face "Them"--the college kid is now the leader of the witches and their animal friends.
A total waste of your time.
"They Will Not Hush" first appeared in Whispers #4 and has not been reprinted since Whispers II came out.
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The Lafferty is very good, but it has been downhill from there, from the successful Davidson to the OK R. C. Matheson to the weak Chalker and finally the pointless Sallis and Lunde production. Hopefully this trend will be reversed when we read five more stories from Whispers II in our next episode.
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| The inside jacket flap text of my hardcover copy of Whispers II |
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