Quark/4: Stories by Helen Adam and Gail Madonia

An unexpected trip to New Jersey, the land of my birth, put a kink in my reading schedule, though it did afford me an opportunity to visit Morristown's Old Book Shop, which I can recommend to all my readers who find themselves in the Garden State.  During my trip north from MPorcius Fiction Log's current HQ in the suburban no-man's-land between Baltigore and our nation's capital, I did find time to read two more stories from 1971's Quark/4, the "Quarterly of Speculative Fiction" edited by Samuel R. Delany (I read Delany's Triton last year) and critically-acclaimed poet Marilyn Hacker.  (Delany and Hacker were married during Quark's four-issue run.)  Delany and Hacker include in Quark/4 an introduction in which they make the case, at tedious length, that fiction can produce models of reality that are in some ways more "sophisticated" and "accurate" than simple mathematics.

"The True Reason for the Dreadful Death of Mr. Rex Arundel" by Helen Adam

According to Wikipedia, Helen Adam was a Scottish poet who became a major figure of the San Francisco Renaissance, a movement contemporaneous with that of the Beats.  Besides her poetry, she also did collages; you can see many of these collages at the University of Buffalo website; it looks like Adam would cut a figure out of one old print and then paste it onto another old print—Max Ernst did this sort of thing decades earlier. You’ll accuse me of being a conservative if I tell you that producing the original prints took more talent, skill, imagination and labor than did chopping them up and gluing the pieces together, so I’ll keep that to myself.

One of Helen Adam's collages, as it appears
at the University of Buffalo website. The main image is a
famous illustration of Milton's Paradise Lost
by Gustave Dore. Where the young woman was
lifted from, I don't know.

"The True Reason for the Dreadful Death of Mr. Rex Arundel" is like 24 pages long. A brief prologue tells us that the main text was found among an old man’s papers after his death. The main text is a first person narrative, a memoir penned by a guy, Tobias Barrington, who tells us that when he was 11 years old, sixty years ago, he hated a 14-year old kid and wished he would die. That 14-year-old, Rex Arundel, was mangled to death in a train crash, and for six decades Barrington has worried that perhaps he was responsible for the tragedy.

You see, Arundel was the handsomest, richest, finest boy in school, whom everybody admired. But he had a dark side! Secretly he bullied and tormented poor Tobias, an orphan who would need to work to survive, and a scholarly type who wanted an intellectual career instead of some soul-crushing laboring job; Tobias needed to succeed in school, and the psychological trauma inflicted on him by Arundel was ruining his concentration and thus his grades—and thus his life! (We’re talking about 19th-century Britain here, long before our days of grade inflation and social promotion in which the most indifferent or rebellious student is allowed to matriculate.)

Tobias’s one friend was an old maid, Miss Arabella, who herself was orphaned at a young age--they both lived with a relative generous enough to support them but who treated them somewhat coldly.  As a sad little girl Arabella claimed to have fortuitously learned a supernatural way to destroy those who tormented her, and the lion’s share of "The True Reason for the Dreadful Death of Mr. Rex Arundel" consists of her telling Tobias of her outre experiences of witchcraft!  When she was ten years old a teacher who was cruel to her died horribly and mysteriously, and when Arabella was a young woman a rival who stole her fiance met a similar terrible end, and we and Tobias learn all the ins and outs of Arabella's means of contacting the Devil and working this destruction!  The entire time she is relating her weird occult experiences, we know Tobias is going to follow her example and destroy that evil piece of human filth Arundel!  But will liberating himself from Arundel’s tyranny consign Tobias’s immortal soul to Hell?

This is a quite good horror story; I really enjoyed it. Adam does a good job describing the supernatural elements and the human relationship components, the character and emotions of Arabella and her enemies, the way they tortured her and the way Arabella wreaked her terrible revenge and in the process put her soul at risk!  One of the strong points of the story is its ambiguity.  Barrington does not describe what abuses Arundel inflicted upon him: "...I will not detail the tortures, both physical and mental, which that handsome, heartless boy inflicted on me...."  It is hard not to suspect that Arundel was raping and/or sodomizing Tobias, but since no other person noticed Arundel's crimes, it also seems possible an envious Tobias was just making the crimes up to justify his hatred!  Another bit of ambiguity lies in Arabella's motives--she says she is telling Tobias about her experiences with witchcraft in order to warn him against risking his immortal soul by indulging his hatred, but if she doesn't want him to risk his soul, why does she give him a detailed description of how to contact the Devil and murder his tormentor?  Linked with this ambiguity is one of the story's major themes: that people who can appear innocent and good to the world--as Arabella, Arundel, and Barrington do--can secretly harbor in their hearts a terrible hate and in fact be responsible for monstrous unsuspected crimes...or suffer crushing guilt from crimes they only fancy they committed.

Thumbs up! This is one of the most conventional works in Quark/4, and I feel comfortable recommending it to anybody who likes horror stories of a somewhat old-fashioned sort—unlike Lovecraftian cosmic horror and splatterpunk, this is a story that takes Christianity seriously, and while there is some gore, the story doesn’t rely heavily on disgust to achieve its effects. Because it was written by a woman and women’s sexuality and rivalries between women are important plot elements, maybe this is a story feminists and students of women in SF should seek out. A final interesting thing about "The True Reason for the Dreadful Death of Mr. Rex Arundel": some of the striking images in the tale strongly resemble images Adam created via those collages of hers I linked to.

I like this well-written story, but "The True Reason for the Dreadful Death of Mr. Rex Arundel" is Adam’s only fiction credit at isfdb, and isfdb does not list any reprintings of the piece. Too bad!

"Acid Soap Opera" by Gail Madonia

Unlike Helen Adam, Gail Madonia doesn’t have an extensive Wikipedia page. It does seem possible that this same Gail Madonia contributed to the feminist underground comic Manhunt! and wrote a book about coin collecting.

Like Helen Adam’s story, it appears that "Acid Soap Opera" never escaped the confines of Quark/4.  Unlike Adam's quite good story, Madonia's is irritatingly bad, almost unreadable.  "Acid Soap Opera" is a total waste of time, ten pages of lame jokes and lame vignettes. It is about—I think—a pig man, Oink X, a famous writer, who gives his first ever TV interview.  Integrated into Madonia's story of Oink X's TV interview are vignettes about family and sexual relationships--these relationships are vulgar and unhappy.  Maybe these are anecdotes Oink X tells the audience, or samples of his writing?  Madonia tries to enliven her material with "word play"--odd spellings, rhymes, esoteric words--but while reading "Acid Soap Opera" my eyes glazed over and my mind wandered, so I have to admit I no more than skimmed a third or half of its pages.  I woke up in time to catch that in the penultimate line of the story Oink X says "That’s all, folks” into the camera.

I guess "Acid Soap Opera" is a satire of popular culture and TV in particular--maybe Oink X is specifically a spoof of some writer feminists had a beef with, like Norman Mailer or Tom Wolfe, and maybe the TV interviewer is supposed to be like Dick Cavett or Merv Griffin?  Maybe Madonia's satire would have felt fresh and sharp back in 1971.  Still, I have to give this one a severe thumbs down.

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We'll finish up with Quark/4 in our next episode.  Nota bene: I have already opined about later printings of two stories that appear in Quark/4, Thomas Disch's "Bodies" and Larry Niven's "The Fourth Profession," so I will be skipping them.  They are good stories I strongly recommend to you, however.