We've actually already read a bunch of things Dziemianowicz and company selected for To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare, and here are the linkerinos to prove it:
"The Black Stone" by Robert E. Howard
"Ubbo-Sathla" by Clark Ashton Smith
"Scarlet Dream" by C. L. Moore
"The Dreams in the Witch-House" by H. P. Lovecraft
"The Isle of the Sleeper" by Edmond Hamilton
"The Unspeakable Betrothal" by Robert Bloch
"Perchance to Dream" by Charles Beaumont
"Ubbo-Sathla" by Clark Ashton Smith
"Scarlet Dream" by C. L. Moore
"The Dreams in the Witch-House" by H. P. Lovecraft
"The Isle of the Sleeper" by Edmond Hamilton
"The Unspeakable Betrothal" by Robert Bloch
"Perchance to Dream" by Charles Beaumont
(Does anybody ever click these links? The interns are always bitching about how long it takes them to copy and paste these links sections together, and I assure them that they are doing God's work, but maybe their time would be better spent out in the yard pulling weeds and stomping on spotted lanternflies or something. Hell, probably my time would be better spent doing such things.)
At like 500 pages, To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare is full of stories new to me that look like they are worth reading, and today we'll explore four of them, tales by the inventor of the immortal Count Dracula, Bram Stoker; a guy I suspect is overrated, Hugh B. Cave; intimate associate of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, Donald Wandrei; and finally a guy I think I have only ever read one story by, but who has a long list of published SF stories, Nelson S. Bond.
"A Dream of Red Hands" by Bram Stoker (1894)
(We read a short story by Stoker, "The Judge's House," back in 2021 when we talked about the March 1935 issue of Weird Tales.)
Here in "A Dream of Red Hands" we have a Christian story of redemption. Stoker's narrator is a gentleman and a writer who develops a friendship with a kind and generous working man who lives alone in a hut on the moor. One day the narrator comes calling to find the worker quite ill. The sick man says he can't sleep because God is punishing him with a terrible dream! Eventually the narrator learns the dream and its genesis. Years ago the worker was in love with some chick, and some scoundrel of a gentleman seduced her and ruined her life, and, in a sort of fit triggered by the rascal speaking disparagingly of the woman he had taken advantage of, the worker killed the gentleman and hid the body. Now the worker knows he is barred from heaven; in the dream that has been plaguing him, angels keep him from entering paradise because his bloody hands make filthy the white raiment worn by those permitted to pass through the pearly gates.
The narrator assures the man that God is merciful and if he truly repents and does good deeds he will, after all, be permitted to enter heaven. The murderer moves away, and years later, by coincidence, the narrator is close to the scene when the worker sacrifices himself to save a fellow worker during an industrial accident. The narrator sees the murderer's corpse; the circumstances of the accident have bleached the man's hands white, and the narrator is sure the man has been forgiven by God.
A well-written story, and one ripe for class and gender analysis at the hands of historians and social scientists for its depiction of Victorian attitudes about class (among other things, we see one gentleman outrageously abuse members of the working class and another act as a wise guide to them) and religion.
It looks like "A Dream of Red Hands" made its debut in the weekly newspaper The Sketch and has seen book publication in the oft-reprinted collection Dracula's Guest and other Stoker collections.
Of these nine stories I only gave two positive reviews, but only one received a clear cut condemnation; running the numbers shows Cave's record to be better than I recalled; I guess my recollection is still dominated by my bad experience with a late novel of Cave's which I read before this blog sprang from my pate like Athena from the head of Zeus. We'll see how today's Cave story, "The Watcher in the Green Room," which made its debut in an issue of Weird Tales with a Margaret Brundage BDSM cover and a Conan story with a good setting and good villains, affects my opinion of Cave's body of work.
Well, on the first page of the story I am reminded that I don't like Cave's writing style; in this story he tries to be fancy and elaborate but sentences like this one end ups being clunky:
"He stood staring, apparently unaware that the hour was midnight and that the rain which had fallen steadily since early evening had made of him a drenched, disheveled street-walker."(Rain doesn't make you a street-walker, for one thing, and how would this guy's lack of awareness of the time be made apparent to others by the fact that he is staring? Is it abnormal to stare at certain times of the day? Are there certain behaviors we expect of people at midnight? Cave would be better off just straightforwardly telling us what he wants us to know instead of adding in superfluous phrases and concepts.)
On the other hand, the plot of "The Watcher in the Green Room" is not bad, and there are some good images. Our "plump, stumpy" protagonist, Anthony Kolitt, lives in a city in an upstairs apartment--through the window over his bed comes green light from a neon sign on a nearby roof; this green light illuminates and casts shadows from Kolitt's oversized bureau, which we quickly learn is where Kollit has hidden the body of the complaining wife he murdered five days ago. He thinks of the bureau, and/or the shadows it casts at night, as a "beast" which has swallowed up his annoying spouse and even as a friend.
The narrative describes Kollit's psychological state as he plots to escape the apartment with the body and has to deal with visits from his concerned neighbors--he told them that his wife left him and they are worried about his heavy drinking. Most of these neighbors Cave makes ethnic stereotypes, I guess some kind of reflection of life in the melting pots/glorious mosaics that are American cities (perhaps a sarcastic or derisive one--I don't know much about Cave, but we know that his more famous Lovecraft was no fan of ethnic diversity.) The most significant neighbor is a "Latin" "psychopathist" whom it is hinted may be a homosexual. This guy, Bellini, foreshadows the story's gory climax by cautioning Kollit not to imagine that the bureau is an animal, as one's imagination, he warns, can bring to life dangerous monsters.
Also noteworthy are slight "meta" elements of "The Watcher in the Green Room"; Kolitt goes out and sees a movie about a wizard or mad scientist who summons a monster which destroys him, Kollit listens to a scary drama on the radio and reads a "weird detective" story. This consumption of genre fiction, in concert with the effects of booze and Kollit's fears of being found out by the cops, energizes his imagination to summon his own doom.
IMHO, Cave messes up the ending of the story a little. We know from early on that Mrs. Kolitt's body is in the bureau, so the real shock ending is that a monster appears, eats half of Kolitt and then climbs out Kollit's window. But instead of making this incredible event the focus of the final scene, Cave extends the story further to include a scene of Bellini and the cops discovering the wife's dismembered corpse, and the story's final line is "It is his wife," as if this is a shocking revelation, when it is not at all a surprise to us readers. (If I was Cave's editor, I would have told him to make the Bellini-and-police scene a foreword, so the story would end with the discovery of Kollit's half-eaten body and the trail of green slime leading out the window.)
I'll call this one acceptable. "The Watcher in the Green Room" would go on to be included in Cave collections as well as Christine Campbell Thomson's 1934 hardcover anthology Terror by Night and a 1952 issue of Donald Wollheim's Avon Fantasy Reader.
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| You might know "The Witch from Hell's Kitchen" as "The House of Arabu" |
"The Lady in Gray" by Donald Wandrei (1933)
Look at all those upwards-facing arrows! I guess I'm a big Wandrei fan! Figures don't lie!
Whereas I found Cave's "The Watcher in the Green Room" poorly written but supplied with a good plot, I'm afraid "The Lady in Gray" is well-written, with many terrific images, but has a slight plot.
The narrator tells us he is about to commit suicide. He relates how all his life he has had terrible terrible dreams, and how he has tried a multitude of drugs and therapies and consulted shrinks all over America and Europe in an effort to free himself from these nightmares, to no avail. Wandrei does a good job succinctly summarizing these dreams--with a minimum of verbiage, he summons up exciting, vivid visions. (It is noteworthy that Cthulhu and other Lovecraftian staples figure in the dreams--I guess this story is set in the "Cthulhu Mythos.")
The narrator fell in love with and became engaged to a woman with a gray personality and gray eyes named Miriam (you know, like Felix's adorable girlfriend, who always seems so much more suitable a life partner than the somewhat annoying Gloria.) Miriam was killed in a plane crash the day before their wedding was to be held, and then the narrator started having dreams about her in which he and she travel in impossible ways to horrible alien environments, even interacting with a sort of monstrous slug or worm. When the narrator awakes he is greeted by physical evidence that these dreams have been in some sense real, that he really has been to slimy seas and met a huge disgusting worm with a sort of face. Upon awakening from the most recent of these dreams, the narrator found Miriam's animated corpse sitting beside his bed, which triggers his determination to slay himself. I guess he and Miriam will now spend eternity together, exploring the universe via esoteric means.
I guess in the end I'm giving this one a marginal "good" grade, seeing as it is full of so many good sentences and striking images. I kind of wish more was going on, however, or that whatever is going ono was more clear to my dim understanding.
"The Lady in Gray" first saw print in an issue of Weird Tales with one of my favorite Brundage covers; a masterpiece of Yellow Peril drama with better composition and use of color that Brundage's average. The story would go on to be included in, among other places, the Donald Wandrei collection The Eye and the Finger and Ramsey Campbell's Uncanny Banquet.
"Prescience" by Nelson S. Bond (1941)
Dr. Barton, psychiatrist, is having a case of the Mondays! He is sick of his job, sick of dealing with neurotics all day, every day. "They're fools--the whole lot of them!" he vents to his nurse. You see, Barton knows that all neuroses stem from fear--specifically, fear of the afterlife, and that this is foolishness, because there is no need to fear the afterlife.
At the end of the day, a working-class woman comes to see Dr. Barton; nearly all of Barton's patients are middle-class, and in his tirade to his nurse he even made the claim that "the laboring classes of our race," like "'backward' or 'pagan' people" rarely suffer neuroses because they have no fear of the afterlife, so this housekeeper, Mrs. Williams, is an unusual case. Williams tells the shrink that she often has prescient dreams, that during the course of her days she often realizes that the quite ordinary event she is living through is proceeding exactly as something experienced in a recent dream. As the events are occurring in real life, she can't change her course of action, but feels compelled to do precisely what she did in the predictive dream.
Barton doesn't take this woman too seriously, thinking she is just experiencing the very common phenomenon of deja vu. However, he decides to conduct a little experiment on Williams, feeling free to take unusual measures with her because she lacks social standing and the ability to damage his reputation. He hypnotizes her, making her think she is asleep, and she has one of her prescient dreams, and in her trance describes it to him. The dream, however, presages no quotidian event, but a devastating fire at the house where she works. As she describes climbing out onto the fire escape, Barton orders her to return into the burning house, insisting the fire is a mere illusion and harmless. Under his hypnotic influence, Williams, in her dream, climbs back into the burning building and chillingly describes the agony of burning to death and then the behavior of the demons and the damned in Hell!
Barton finds Williams' description of death and the afterlife curious, but unimportant. He releases the woman from her trance; as usual, she remembers none of what she dreamed. Barton sends her home, figuring he has cured her. But the next day he reads a story in the newspaper--Williams has died in a house fire! Witnesses report seeing her escape the conflagration and then climb back into the burning house to be killed! Barton realizes that Hell is real and he goes insane!
This is a pretty good story; maybe Bond deserves more screen time here at MPorcius Fiction Log.
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It looks like Dziemianowicz, Weinberg and Greenberg made good selections for this anthology, performing a service for their clients at Barnes & Noble and SF fans everywhere. We'll read more stories from To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare soon.
(But before we part, one final link! To the trailer for the mediocre 1968 giallo Nude... si muore, a movie that is pretty disappointing as a whole, but has a good sex-and-violence opening and perhaps my favorite giallo vocal theme, a fast-paced song (perhaps inspired by the theme of the Batman TV show) with English lyrics all about nightmares. I highly recommend the first five minutes of Nude... si muore, but after the opening credits have rolled it's a whole lotta zzzzzzzzzz....)
I alson am a big fan of Dracula. The only flaw is tghe American character who is poorly written.
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