Stories by Fritz Leiber, Tanith Lee and Darrell Schweitzer about broken families and women at risk

In the last installment of MPorcius Fiction Log, we read one of Robert Bloch's better stories, 1949's "The Unspeakable Betrothal," which was reprinted in Marvin Kaye's 1995 anthology Angels of Darkness: Tales of Troubled and Troubling Women.  Before I close the browser tab with the internet archive scan of Kaye's book, let's read three more stories from it, one by Fritz Leiber (whose story "The Man Who Never Grew Young" I told you was "gimmicky" and "lame" in that last blog post), one by Tanith Lee (whom you know I am crazy about) and one by Darrell Schweitzer (whose 1983 novel The Shattered Goddess I had nice things to say about.)

"Game for Motel Room" by Fritz Leiber (1963)

Don't let my panning of "The Man Who Never Grew Young" fool you, I am a Fritz Leiber fan; not only do I have fond memories of reading the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories "Lean Times in Lankhmar," "Stardock," "Bazaar of the Bazaar" and "The Seven Black Priests" in my youth, but during the life of this blog I have praised "The Glove," "Ship of Shadows," "X Mark the Pedwalk," and "A Rite of Spring."  So I'm going into my reading of "Game for Motel Room," which first was printed in F&SF and would go on to be anthologized in SF Horizons 1 and Sex in the 21st Century (ooh la la!), as well as other places, rooting for Fritz.

Alas, Fritz and I are just not getting on lately.  "Game for Motel Room" is a childish joke story, the kind of thing I think is a waste of time.

A guy met a woman in a bar and they went to a motel in her Italian sports car and had sex.  Afterwards, she is prancing about the room, showing off her "trimly beautiful" body, and explaining that she is an alien on vacation who can read his mind and will live for thousands of years etc.; she tells him she will erase his memory of her startling admissions before they part.  At first the guy figures this is just a little game, but eventually begins to believe it.  From scant clues, he figures out that the space woman's husband is trying to murder her for her life insurance money.  (One of the story's jokes is that these superior aliens have a society just like ours with all the problems we on Earth have, wars and taxes and loveless marriages and so on.)  She has on her person a gift from her hubby that is a disguised bomb that can blow up the Earth.  Because she has the bomb with her, and the Earthman has explained how to avoid detonating it, she has all the evidence she needs to fly back home and sic the authorities on her husband.  She thanks the Earthman, as a sign of gratitude refrains from erasing his memory and simply makes it impossible for him to tell his story to anyone, and then jumps in her faux Italian sports car, which is really a space ship, and flies off.

Competent, but a lightweight trifle, reminiscent of a comic episode of The Twilight Zone.

"A Room with a Vie" by Tanith Lee (1980)

This is a story about how horrible family life can be, about the women who smother you with their needy love, about the men who abandon you after you have become reliant on them, about how you are bound to people whom you find it hard to love and who don't give you the love for which you ache.

Caroline is an artist.  In the past, she and her significant other, David, have taken a flat in a seaside town in the summer.  But their relationship is collapsing, and this summer they have not secured the room; at the last minute Caroline decides to go to the holiday town herself, to get away from David, whom she tells herself she is through with, but for whom, whenever she is troubled, she still feels a desperate need.

The holiday town is not the same without David.  There are somewhat scary teenage gangs roaming the streets, for example, and because she called so late, Caroline has to take a different room than the one she and David have rented in the past--this one is small and has a shared bathroom, and she has to share it with an annoying couple, a fat man and his wife who looks like a teen-aged girl, and their noisy brat.  This small room, Caroline learns, used to be rented for four months every year by a widower, Mr. Tinker.  Tinker lived eight months of the year with his daughter and her husband, but it seems that none of them was really comfortable with this arrangement, that it was an onerous obligation for the married couple, and Tinker thought of this little room with its view of the bay as his real home.  Tinker recently died, and several people have taken the room since then, but all soon left because they found the room mysteriously insalubrious.

Very quickly we get clues that indicate that the room is alive, that it loved Tinker and is now painfully lonely.  For example, one of the post-Tinker, pre-Caroline tenants scratched on the wall the phrase "a room with a vie."  Is this a mistake for "a room with a view," or are we to read "vie" as the French word for "life?"  The room has a smell that is variously described as "buttery," "milky," and "cowlike."  Caroline thinks back to her pathetic and irritating Aunt Sara.  Sara couldn't have children of her own, and desperately wanted a child, and directed all her maternal feelings towards little Caroline, keeping the six-year-old away from her friends and monopolizing her time, constantly crushing Caroline to her fat body, smothering her against her huge breasts, as if she wanted to engulf little Caroline in her cavernous and barren womb.  Caroline begins to think of the smelly little room as like a womb, as like Sara, as a stifling, smothering woman trying to fill with her the gulf left by the dead Tinker, as Sara tried to fill with her the lacuna in her life where she wished a child had been.

"Let me go," said Caroline.  "Auntie Sara, I'm all right, let me go.  I want to--please--"  

The story ends with gruesome and surreal scenes that perhaps strain the reader's credulity as Caroline fights for her independence.

As I have told you a hundred times I like stories about disastrous love relationships, and as I have told you several times I like stories in which a room and a character's feelings about the room, the way the room influences or reflects his personality, are described in detail (Proust of course does this, but an example closer to our classic SF hearts can be seen in Barry Malzberg's Herovit's World, in which Herovit's home office is described.)  So I was loving "A Room with a Vie" up until the end, which I think maybe went a little overboard.  When something impossible happens at the end of a weird or horror story, usually only one or a few people see it, or it turns out the viewer didn't really see it (he is insane or hypnotized), or there is some logical believable reason for it to have happened that makes it seem less impossible.  The thing that happens at the end of "A Room with a Vie" is witnessed by many people and is so unprecedented that it would be world news and change the way the whole of humanity looked upon life and the universe, and thus has a tone discordant with the rest of the piece, which is personal and small and realistic.

Despite my misgivings about the very ending, this is a good story and of course I recommend it.

"A Room with a Vie" was first published in New Terrors, an anthology edited by Ramsey Campbell with a cover that perhaps illustrates this very Lee story.  It has since appeared in two different Lee collections.

The cover illo of Arkham House's 1986 Dreams of Dark and Light is Max Ernst's La grande foret.
Joachim Boaz has a whole blog post on Max Ernst appearances on SF book covers that is worth
checking out--in the comments people talk about other modern fine artists whose work has
appeared on SF covers.

"Malevendra's Pool" by Darrell Schweitzer (1989)

This is a tragic story about knights in a medieval fantasy world in which people worship multiple gods and there are witches and monsters and so forth.  The main character and narrator, Vynae, is a crippled little boy who grows up in a war torn period, surrounded by ruined villages and soldiers and mercenaries and knights and refugees travelling back and forth.  His mother dies when he is young, and his father, an innkeeper, treats him badly, out of grief over his wife and frustration that his son is unhealthy.

Malevendra is one of the nine good gods, a goddess of sorrow and also, it turns out, vengeance.  Some few special people will encounter a vision of her pool, a pool made of her tears, and Vynae is one of those people.  The plot of the story follows Vynae's relationship with Malevendra, and Malevendra's relationship with two other broken people, one a witch who is raped by fighting men and with Malevendra's help seeks revenge on her rapists and on the world, the other a knight who seeks to atone for his sins.  This guilt-ridden knight acts as an intercessor between Vynae and Malevendra, and she heals the cripple and he starts his own career as a knight who fights in many battles.

This is a well-written, effective story that on the one hand sort of debunks chivalry and the glory of battle with its grimdark/anti-war elements, but still suggests that being a knight--a guy who pledges allegiance to a cause and some people and takes a million risks to maintain his oath and retain his honor--is something worthwhile.  I like it.

"Malevendra's Pool" first appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine, a periodical I have to admit I'd never heard of before which ran for fifty issues between 1988 and 2000.

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Oy, it's one heartbreak after another out there, isn't?  Hang in there, kids--we'll be talking about more short stories from the late 20th century in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!