1980 stories by Manly Wade Wellman, Tom Godwin and Charles L. Grant

There was a period during my residence in Ohio when I was seized by some kind of competitive mania or acquisitive impulse and bought lots of old SF magazines at a flea market and on ebay.  Here in the new house I just unpacked an entire box of these magazines, and decided to look into one--the lucky winner was the March 1980 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, a "SPECIAL ALL-STAR ISSUE" with a picture of a robot cowboy on the cover.  

This issue includes a hostile review by Algis Budrys of Doris Lessing's Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta--Budrys alleges that it is written in "Bureacratese," that Lessing's science is bad, and that the plot is full of old SF clichés that other SF writers have already worn out.  (In 2015 I wrote about Lessing's Briefing for a Descent into Hell, The Fifth Child and Ben, in the World but have yet to read Shikasta or any of the Canopus in Argos books.)  There's a long letter from Sam Moskowitz on the occasion of F&SF's 30th anniversary.  Moskowitz praises F&SF for its never flagging high standards, and tells some engaging stories about his relationship with F&SF's editor from 1949 to '58, Anthony Boucher, and the first time Boucher bought an article from him.  And there's an ad for Michael Bishop's Catacomb Years, which I own but have not read.  (Joachim Boaz loved it.)  So I guess I got my money's worth when I bought this magazine, even before I have read the three included stories I have selected for discussion today, those by Manly Wade Wellman, Tom Godwin and Charles L. Grant.

"What of the Night" by Manly Wade Wellman    

Dale Parr is exploring a mountainous region of the rural American South when his car breaks down on an unpaved road in front of a decrepit house.  He takes shelter from the rain within and falls asleep.  When he wakes up the house is in better shape and he meets a beautiful young woman, a middle-aged scholar, and a shy butler; Parr suspects they are ghosts.  The scholar, who it turns out is studying witchcraft and has a pentagram printed on a table in his well-stocked library, and the woman, who it turns out is a portrait painter, try to charm Parr and trick him into participating in a magical ritual that will trap Parr in the house along with them--they have been trapped there a long long time and are bored and lonely.  The butler, a sort of amateur scientist and inventor, loves the woman and is jealous of the attention she is lavishing on Parr, so he helps Parr escape.  Parr finds a multi-talented clergyman who not only gets his car running again but frees the souls of the three ghosts or revenants or whatever they are from the house.

A competent if somewhat ordinary tale of the supernatural that has a happy ending and endorses conventional Christianity.  "What of the Night" would be reprinted in several places, including the 1987 Wellman collection The Valley So Low and the 1988 anthology Dixie Ghosts.

"Before Willows Ever Walked" by Tom Godwin  

Back in 2014 I wrote a marginally negative review of Godwin's 1958 novel The Survivors AKA Space Prison, and in 2019 judged his 1953 story "The Mother of Invention" acceptable.  Let's see if this piece, which I believe is Godwin's last and has never been reprinted in English, is more to my taste.

"Before Willows Ever Walked" is the story of a cruel legacy hunter.  Derken has made friends with a wretched old drunk, Smith, a man of means who is on his last legs.  Derken puts the dying man up in his house in the desert and tends to him and runs his errands and so forth, and Smith, thinking he has no living relatives, has made Derken sole beneficiary of his will.  But as the story begins, Smith, who has like a week to live, learns his granddaughter Mary did not die in the car crash that killed her mother, as Derken has been telling him.  Smith wants to change his will to include Mary, meaning Derken won't be getting that $500,000 he has been dreaming of while washing Smith's dishes and burning Smith's letters from Mary!

The narrative follows Derken's efforts to secure the money by tricking and murdering Smith.  The fantasy element of the story has to do with Joshua trees.  There are Joshua trees all around Derken's house, and Smith loves Joshua trees, thinks they have feelings and thoughts and are perhaps the remnants of a noble lost race with magic powers, etc.  Derken hates Joshua trees, finding them creepy.  Much of the text of the story is about how the trees become an obstacle to Derken's evil schemes and ultimately foil them through a series of what might appear to outsiders to be strange coincidences.  

This is a competent but unremarkable sort of weird story.  If you read the wikipedia page on Tom Godwin you will see he had a difficult life full of tragedy and alcoholism; presumably the tone and themes of the story reflect his own sad life.  This adds a little interest to "Before Willows Ever Walked," but judged on its intrinsic merits here in the pages of F&SF, it is merely an acceptable eerie story in which the universe metes out justice to a wrongdoer.

"Secrets of the Heart" by Charles L. Grant

Fixture of the horror community Grant's "Secrets of the Heart" would soon reappear in his collection, A Glow of Candles and Other Stories, and, having been nominated for a Nebula, Nebula Award Stories Sixteen. 

Miriam, our narrator, is a little girl, one of those kids like the brat in Jerome Bixby's famous "It's A Good Life" who has tremendous mental powers and can basically make anything happen.  Having destroyed her parents long ago she lives alone in a house and lures people inside and traps them with her, with the expectation that they will treat her like a princess.  Inevitably, she becomes dissatisfied with their behavior and destroys them.  This story chronicles one such episode; at the end of the story we are presented with the possibility that Miriam is going to leave the house and radically alter the entire world.  

I think this story may be striving to say something about human nature, about how we are all bad--all the characters are broken or criminal and one of the characters, a child molester, says "we all have secrets of the heart" and Miriam, at the end of the story, says to us "being nice all the time can be very, very boring" as if it is some universal truth.  I suppose this makes "Secrets of the Heart" more of a true horror story than are Wellman's and Godwin's stories--in the worlds of "What of the Night" and "Before Willows Ever Walked" there are some good beings out there and mercy and justice exist, but in Grant's world as depicted in this story it is evil all the way down.  "Secrets of the Heart" may also be a satire of the idea monotheistic religions put forward that a being of absolute power could be perfectly good--Miriam is omniscient and omnipotent, but is petty and selfish and casually murderous, as well as psychologically uneasy, rationalizing her atrocities and even considering suicide.

This story is OK, no big deal.

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So, all three of these stories are of professional quality, but are unremarkable, doing little that is new or striking.  Oh, well.