Merril-endorsed 1958 stories by R Silverberg and C Simak

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading stories by authors whose names begin with "S" that were published in 1958 and recommended by every New York newspaper's favorite SF anthologist, Judith Merril.  Last time we read stories by Margaret St. Clair, Thomas N. Scortia and John Shepley.  Today we've got stories by two big names in the SF world, Robert Silverberg and Clifford Simak.

"The Man Who Never Forgot" by Robert Silverberg

"The Man Who Never Forgot" debuted in an issue of F&SF with a story by Poul Anderson we read back in 2021, "The Last of the Deliverers," and stories we have yet to consume by Chad Oliver and Avram Davidson. [UPDATE 4/30/2025: Further research indicates I read the Avram Davidson story in question, "I Do Not Hear You, Sir," back in 2018.  Oops.]  Maybe we'll come back to this ish soon.   

I talk too much about how SF readers want to simultaneously be members of an oppressed minority and members of an elite with special powers--I just did it in my last blog post--but here we have another example.  The protagonist of "The Man Who Never Forgot" has super intelligence and a super memory and this causes others to resent him, to make fun of him, to shun him.  He leaves home in his early teens to travel the country, forging no long-term relationships as he moves from city to city, state to state.  

Around age 30, by chance, he encounters his mother and realizes he has changed, that he has grown up--maybe he can have normal healthy relationships, build a family, contribute to the world.  "The Man Who Never Forgot" has a happy ending, but one more like that of a realistic and mature piece of literature than that of a run-of-the-mill SF story--instead of resolving the plot by going on a campaign of revenge or leading a paradigm-shifting revolution that changes the world, the protagonist changes himself.  Good advice for all you angry young men out there!

"The Man Who Never Forgot" is more like a character study then an actual story, and the plot just sort of resolves itself, but Silverberg's story is an engaging and smooth read nonetheless.  Grade: the high end of acceptable.

Silverberg included "The Man Who Never Forgot" in the 1974 anthology he edited, Mutants, and it has appeared in a few other anthologies as well in addition to numerous Silverberg collections.

"Slice of Life" by Robert Silverberg

This baby debuted (under the Calvin Knox pseudonym) in the same issue of Infinity which offers a story by John Bernard Daley which we've already read, "Wings of the Phoenix," and a Clifford Simak story we are about to read.  Merril was really into this issue of Infinity!

Here we have a story that questions the desirability of utopia and also romanticizes the figure of the great artist, and yet again depicts with sympathy the alienated young person who is superior to the common run of humanity.  "Slice of Life" is about as good a read as "The Man Who Forgot Everything," but the plot works better because a main character faces a dilemma and must make a difficult decision.

It is the future!  Not only is everybody healthy and happy, but everybody has empathic psychic powers and their ability to sense other people's emotions facilitates healthy human relationships.  But little Danny, eleven years old, three years ago fell out a fifth-floor window and his leg bones were smashed to bits--he has been bedridden ever since--and lost his psychic abilities!  Cut off from psychic rapport with other people, Danny has almost entirely stopped communicating with other people, and he doesn't read books or listen to music either--he just sits in bed all day and daydreams, just grunting in response to his parents' efforts to speak to him. 

A therapist comes to visit Danny, hoping to cure his psychic disability.  (Don't worry about his leg--this is the future and as soon as he is fully grown they'll saw that thing off and give him a robot leg.)  The therapist realizes Danny has constructed an elaborately detailed dreamworld where he has adventures with a wide cast of characters.  The headshrinker is astonished by how vivid and thrilling is the fantasy world Danny has conceived; Danny, he realizes, is one of the world's great artists!  Such artists have been few and far between since modern society became as peaceful and stable as it is today, because the minds of great artists are generally some cocktail of unhappiness, ill-health, alienation, and perversion.  The therapist thinks of Beethoven ("deaf"), Mozart ("a sickly pauper"), Leonardo and Shakespeare ("sexual deviates")--seeing as today there is no poverty, no physical illness, no mental illness, there are today no Beethovens, Mozarts, Leonardos or Shakespeares!  The therapist is confident he can bring back Danny's psychic powers, but he is equally confident that if he neglects to cure Danny, the kid will become the greatest artist of the age and produce work that will delight millions!  So he lies to Danny's parents, saying he can't cure the boy, but assures them that their son will grow into a great man.

"Slice of Life" has not been reprinted widely, even though Merril really liked it and I think it is fine; besides Infinity it looks like it only ever saw print in John Carnell's New Worlds.

"Leg. Forst." by Clifford Simak

So we move to the second "S"-man we'll be talking about today, Clifford Simak, and our second story today from the April issue of Infinity.  I like Simak but his anti-city and pro-primitivism (people call this "pastoralism," I guess) attitude can get on my nerves.  (I do not think the world would be a better place if all the humans except some Plains Indians died and the Earth was taken over by robots, intelligent dogs and intelligent ants.)  Well, let's see if Simak is pushing some wacky line with this story, which certainly has a wacky title.

It is about two thousand years in the future.  The human race has expanded throughout the galaxy, and today has commercial relationships with untold numbers of alien civilizations.  

Our hero is a widower who, following retirement from business as an interstellar importer/exporter (he was a pretty sharp dealer, he'll have you know) and the death of his wife, took up stamp collecting--with a passion!  Over the last twenty years he has amassed a first-class collection of stamps from all over the galaxy as well as deep knowledge about the stamps of many nonhuman races, even though his only living relative, a nephew who himself is trying to make it in the business world, and his nosy neighbors are always trying to waste his time.

The plot of "Leg. Forst.," a story of almost forty pages, has many moving parts, but they all move smoothly together and make internal sense and all aspects of the plot are pretty entertaining.  Even if the idea of stamps being used to pay for the shipping of documents and goods between solar systems is kind of silly, it and other SF concepts in the story are fun, and Simak's light and pleasant style carries you along and soothes away any desire you might have to pick apart the logic of the story.

To put it briefly, a series of coincidences involving traditional comic elements--a buttinski widow who is trying to seduce the stamp collector with her cooking; a woman who is scared by a mouse; an absent-minded old hobbyist whose apartment is an absolute mess of clutter and who is clumsy enough to spill broth on a rare stamp--leads to a world-wide paradigm shift when the stamp collector and his nephew accidentally revive, and then in pursuit of profit intentionally propagate, intelligent alien spores which can read minds and which have a passion for order.  Employing their amazing telekinetic and telepathic powers, these spores not only render the physical Earth neat, tidy and efficient, but also the social and political Earth, compelling people to behave honestly and generously.  The stamp collector, who has contacts all over the galaxy, enjoys access to an antidote to the spores' effects which will allow him to continue behaving selfishly when he feels like it, giving him a leg up on every other Terran.

Thumbs up for this fun and creative story.  Maybe Merril liked "Leg. Forst." because it is fun, or maybe because it serves as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for leftists who dream of some deus ex machina power reining in business people and making the entire human race toe a line.  Either way, a good choice on Merril's part.

"Leg. Forst." would go on to be reprinted in quite a few Simak collections.

"The Big Front Yard" by Clifford Simak  

This Astounding cover story won a Hugo, so has the endorsement not only of the idiosyncratic Merril but a sizable contingent of the active SF community.  (We've already read a story from this issue of John W. Campbell Jr.'s genre-dominating magazine, Pauline Ashwell's "Big Sword," which we mildly recommended.)  

"The Big Front Yard" bears some similarity to "Leg. Forst."  There's the protagonist, a charming sort of rascal.  And the aliens who help him out, unbidden and by surprise.  And humans who seek to profit by the aliens' special abilities.  And the ending in which Earth life is going to be irrevocably changed thanks not the the action of the government but relatively humble small business people.

Our protagonist is a handyman and antiques dealer in the upper mid west--people keep calling him a "Yankee" and implying a "Yankee" is a serious sharp efficiency-minded businessman who gets good deals by skillful "dickering."  Simak also portrays the handyman as a good person who treats people fairly and loves his dog to death and would do anything for this beast, and as a man jealous of his liberties when it looks like the government is going to trample on him, and a man with a spiritual connection to his ancestral home.  (This dude is alike an amalgam of stereotypes of the sympathetic American, or what Americans like to think of themselves as, at least before America became a nation of obese pot-smoking porn-addicts.)  

Weird, but welcome, stuff starts happening around the house.  For example, a  black and white TV our hero was supposed to fix for the wife of the richest man in town gets fixed while he isn't looking and now can receive color images--images more clear than any color TV reception the richest man in town has ever seen.  Moneybags owns a computer factory and wants to bring the TV to his factory to see if his techs can figure out what makes the improved TV tick so he and the handyman can get rich off this new technology.

The mysterious unseen aliens fix other broken stuff, and eventually construct a star-system spanning portal inside the handyman's beloved old house.  The handyman, if he steps out his back door, finds himself in America as usual, but if he steps out the front door he is in a desert on an alien world.  

This is a longish story and there are little subplots but the main thrust of the story is that the handyman, a man of business who loves to make a profit but who recognizes that good business is based on knowing how to treat people, proves better able to deal with the aliens who eventually show up (and are also serious but essentially fair-minded business people) than do the government people who invade the town when the world becomes aware of the portal, and, because the portal between worlds is on his property, and the only man available who can talk directly to the aliens is the local dimwit who happens to be a telepath (and whom only one man in town--the handyman--ever treated decently), the government people have to let the handyman take the lead in handling Earth's interstellar diplomatic and commercial efforts.    

I like the story's ideology and its speculations on the nature of interstellar trade, and the characters and their relationships are pretty good, so even though the aliens themselves are a little too cutesy, thumbs up for "The Big Front Yard."  When Simak soft pedals his pastoralism--just portraying small town people in a positive light and confining his attacks on city folk to government lackeys--his work is fun.  A good pick by Merril and an understandable Hugo win (it beat Jack Vance's "The Miracle Workers," C. M. Kornbluth's "Shark Ship," Fritz Leiber's "Deskful of Girls" and Pauline Ashwell's "Unwillingly to School" among other novelettes I haven't read.)  "The Big Front Yard" would be reprinted in many anthologies and Simak collections.

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I can't disagree with Merril's picks here, which is nice.  We also might see these stories as good representatives of their authors' bodies of work.  One of Silverberg's most acclaimed novels, Dying Inside, is about the psychological life of a psychic, his use of his powers and how it affects his relationships and how he responds as he starts losing his powers.  (I read Dying Inside while I lived in New York, when my meat space life was interesting enough that I would never have started a blog, and I recommend it--I mean the novel, not just living in New York.)  The Simak stories share the concerns of Golden Age science fiction (Simak started his career in the early 1930s) with paradigm shifts and new technologies and human interactions with aliens, while also forefronting the lives and relationships of simple (on the surface as least) "down home" characters and subtly attacking the elites in Washington and elsewhere.

Let's hope out next batch of 1958 stories by "S" authors is as comfortable as this one!

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"S" is only the latest letter in our long alphabetical march through the honorable mentions list at the back of the fourth of Judith Merril's "Best of" anthologies.  Here find links to the previous stops on our campaign, those from from A to R.

Poul Anderson and Alan Arkin
Pauline Ashwell, Don Berry and Robert Bloch
John Brunner, Algis Budrys and Arthur C. Clarke
"Helen Clarkson" (Helen McCoy), Mark Clifton, Mildred Clingerman and Theodore R. Cogswell
John Bernard Daley, Avram Davidson and Chan Davis
Gordon R. Dickson 
Charles Einstein, George P. Elliot, and Harlan Ellison
Charles G. Finney, Charles L. Fontenay, Donald Franson, and Charles E Fritch
Randall Garret and James E. Gunn 
Harry Harrison, Frank Herbert and Philip High
Shirley Jackson, Daniel Keyes and John Kippax

Damon Knight and C. M. Kornbluth
Fritz Leiber, Jack Lewis and Victoria Lincoln
Katherine MacLean, "T. H. Mathieu" (Les Cole) and Dean MacLaughlin 
A. E. Nourse
"Finn O'Donnevan" (Robert Sheckley) and Chad Oliver
Avis Pabel, Frederik Pohl, and Robert Presslie

John T.Phillifent, Kit Reed, Mack Reynolds, and Charles W. Runyon      

Proprietors of Fate: B Copper, C L Grant and P Z Brite

A comment on this here blog from Will Errickson of the great Too Much Horror Fiction blog and Stoker Award-winning Paperbacks From Hell inspired me to look at the covers of some mid-Nineties publications from White Wolf, and I chanced upon 1996's Proprietors of Fate, an anthology with a cover and interior illos by Mike Mignola, one of my brother's favorite artists.  Why not read some stories from this book, stories by people in whom I have some interest?  The stories in Proprietors of Fate are apparently set in White Wolf's "Gothic-Punk" gaming milieu The World of Darkness in which the players take on the roles of vampires and werewolves who fight against the unfairness of modern capitalism.  In the 1990s I would have rolled my eyes at this ridiculous and childish concept and called it g** and r*******, but Basil Copper, Charles L. Grant and Poppy Z. Brite are probably up to the task of concocting good stories no matter how pandering and silly might be the angsty teen "I'm an oppressed minority and a superhero" theme in which they have to work, right?

"Death of a Demi-God" by Basil Copper 

isfdb is telling me the version of "Death of a Demi-God" in Proprietors of Fate was altered by White Wolf, so I am reading the story in an e-book edition of the second volume of the Copper collection Darkness, Mist and Shadow in hopes of finding there a Copper-approved text.  I feel it my duty to warn you that this electronic version of the collection is chockfull of missing punctuation and annoying typos; e.g., "we must be folly alert," "feint applause," and "unproved" for "improved."  Oy.

(A version of "Death of a Demi-God" that isfdb specifically states is "definitive" can be found in the 2002 collection Cold Hand on My Shoulder, but I can't find a scan of that book.)

"Death of a Demi-God" is a police detective story set in an unnamed American city, the kind of American city where people suffer "anaemia," drink tea by the fire in the "sitting room" and go to a "late night chemist" to have their prescriptions filled.  These Americans say things like "Should not you see a doctor?" and "fortnight" and "old chap;" the "workmen" among them carry around "gimlets" while the police officers don't do paperwork and have meetings at the "station" but at the "Bureau."  What?

Ryan is our main character, a cop with a wife twenty years younger than he; he and cigar-smoking Grady are working on the case of a woman who was decapitated by her husband with an axe.  At night, Ryan starts having dreams of a hot naked blonde and a dark figure in a hat with glowing eyes--when he wakes up he has little wounds on his neck.  Copper describes three of these quite similar episodes to us in some detail--this story is long, over 50 pages.

The prime minister of France is coming to the city and Ryan and Grady are given the job of watching for trouble from the upper stories of a warehouse as the Frenchman's procession passes below them.  (Wait, aren't they detectives?  Do detectives get assigned this kind of grunt work when a murderer is on the loose?)  Ryan will be on the roof and Grady at a window two floors down, so Ryan gets a slate and and a piece of chalk so he can, if necessary, write a note on the slate and lower it down to Grady's window on a string.  (Wait, don't they have radios?)  So many people are out on the streets hoping to catch a glimpse of the French prime minister that Ryan and Grady can't find any "public conveyance" to the warehouse where they are to keep watch so they walk there from the police "Bureau."  (Wait, this town doesn't have police cars?)  They remark that the "Army" will also be acting to protect the Frenchman's procession.  (Wait, is the United States Army typically used in such a fashion on domestic soil?)  The "militia" is also on the scene.  

The man who murdered his wife shows up and tries to murder the French minister but is caught--not through any action of Ryan or Grady, but that of minor characters.  Our guys are there at the interrogation, though, where the murderer commits suicide by jumping out a window before divulging much of anything to the cops.

Ryan's vampiric dreams stop for a few months, then start up again.  A minor character is killed by a vampire, and we readers wonder if Ryan is now a vampire but doesn't know it.  Ryan begins to feel that he is being watched.  Then comes a big day, a major assignment, one on the scale of the French prime minister episode.  Ryan is given a spot at which to sit, apparently as a guard, but then feels compelled to leave the spot--he finds himself in the clutches of the evil people from his dream, the naked beauty--she turns out to be his wife--and the man with the hat and red eyes--he turns out to be a living corpse!

The twist ending of the story explains all the puzzling oddities about the city in the story and about people's vocabulary and behavior.  "The Death of a Demi-God" does not take place in the 1990s, as I stupidly assumed (the background on World of Darkness, linked above, talks all about skyscrapers and punk rock and film noir and other 20th-century stuff so set me up for a fall); it takes place in 1864-5.  The city in Copper's story is Washington, D.C.!  Ryan was given the job of guarding Abraham Lincoln's box at Ford's Theatre, and vampires used their diabolical powers to draw him away from his post so the President could be murdered!

This story is not enjoyable.  The murders don't feel connected, none of the detective work is interesting, the main character doesn't do much of anything, the supernatural elements are banal.  The characters don't have personalities or compelling relationships and don't win your sympathy, the story lacks tension and is poorly constructed, with a sort of climax when the murderer is found and then a dull segment followed by the real climax that comes from out of nowhere with no buildup.  As for the central gimmick, I found all the clues that this was the 19th century bewildering and distracting, assuming they were errors rather than part of a clever ruse, and the final revelation irritating.

Thumbs down!  

"Gray" by Charles L. Grant

Here we have a story by the famous practitioner of "quiet horror" which it seems may never have been printed in any other venue.  It is not only Mignola collectors who need a copy of Proprietors of Fate, but Grant fanatics!

The themes of "Gray" are more what I expected from a World of Darkness story--a depressed werewolf kills white people in his quest to defend nonwhites from capitalism--but like Copper's "Death of a Demi-God," Grant's story is about a famous 19th-century event and Grant tries to spring that fact on you as a surprise.

Our main character is a scout with the U S Army in the West, the racist white men think he is half-Native American because he is such a good tracker, but the reality is that he is a werewolf!  The werewolf is sympathetic to the Indians, and uses his position as a scout to lead the white imperialists into ambushes.  At the end of the story we learn he has lead Custer (who is never named, but identified by his blonde hair) to Little Big Horn.  There is also some business about the werewolf and the Indians he is helping not really getting along; even though by killing white people the protagonist is doing the right thing, he is also a tragic anti-hero, committing blunders himself and suffering the tragedy of having his favorite horse killed by natives.

This is a competent but slight story that maybe you'll enjoy if you like seeing white people laid low, in particular if you have some kind of resentment of blondes.  We'll call "Gray" barely acceptable.

Mike Mignola illustrations for "Gray" and 
"Mussolini and the Axeman's Jazz"

"Mussolini and the Axeman's Jazz" by Poppy Z. Brite

This story was a success, getting reprinted in Stephen Jones' The Best New Horror: Volume 8 and a stack of Brite collections.  Maybe this will be the one actually good story we read today?

Brite starts out by just telling you the following scenes are set in Sarajevo in 1914, which is a nice change of pace.  People my age will remember that in 1995, when Proprietors of Fate was published, Sarajevo was a focus of world attention because of fighting in the region which continued throughout much of the 1990s.

Anyway, Brite describes the murder of Arch Duke Francis Ferdinand and his wife Sophie capably over four pages.  While not bad, I have to wonder how useful this material is--if I wanted to read about this heinous crime, couldn't I just read about it in any one of scores of history books?  

The scene shifts to 1918 and New Orleans, a town Brite portrays as dirty and crime-ridden.  The ghost of the Duke accosts an Italian-American resident of NOLA, a former cop who has lived a tragic life.  Behind his murder, the Duke informs the ex-cop, was a centuries-old Sicilian wizard, Cagliostro.  Currently, Cagliostro is manipulating Mussolini!  Ferdinand the ghost wants the American to slay Cagliostro, who is currently in the Big Easy disguised as a grocer.  When the man refuses, the ghost takes over his body and starts killing grocers with an axe--the Duke knows the wizard Cagliostro is living as an Italian grocer, but he doesn't know which one.  This campaign of murder Brite, it turns out, based on a real life killing spree I never heard of before. 

Cagliostro Brite portrays as a bleeding heart liberal who can see the future and only kills people to achieve a better future.  The wizard aims to manipulate Mussolini into undermining Hitler.  When the ghost-inhabited body of the ex-cop finally arrives at Cagliostro's place the wizard easily neutralizes it.  Then he pens a letter to a newspaper in the voice of the serial killer urging people to play jazz music on a particular night--the letter is a real artifact that Brite is just reproducing here.

The final scene of the story suggests the Axis powers lost World War II because of Mussolini's bungling, a product of Cagliostro's murders and manipulations.

Besides being, like Copper and Grant's stories, a fantasy explanation of various gory historical events, it is possible Brite means her story to be a satire of people who hope to improve the world by murdering people, or, maybe, a vindication of such people--Brite only has nice things to say about Cagliostro, though some of these nice things may be ironic or sarcastic.

We'll call this one mildly good.  The plot is OK and the style is pretty good, but the tone is a little too variable, with somewhat goofy joke scenes as well as very serious scenes and scenes in which horrible wounds are dwelt upon splatterpunk style.  

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If I had known these stories were going to be alternate history tales in which bargain basement Draculas, Wolfmans and Merlins were the secret manipulators behind famous battles and the world-shaking murders of statesmen I would not have read them because I don't find such stories entertaining.  But here we are, sadder but wiser.  

(Whatever I think of these stories, though, I am probably going to be reading Copper, Grant and Brite again.)

Proprietors of Fate is the second volume of a trilogy of anthologies edited by Edward E. Kramer, whom I just now am realizing is some kind of predatory homosexual who has been arrested time and again for violations involving minors.  (Again, I am sadder but wiser.)  The first Dark Destiny volume, Dark Destiny, includes a solid Robert Bloch story, "The Scent of Vinegar."  Kramer also had a hand in editing Forbidden Acts, which contains stories by Kathe Koja and Barry Malzberg, Steve Rasnic Tem and Karl Edward Wagner full of perverse sex, and Dark Love, from which we just recently read stories with uncomfortable sex themes by Koja, Wagner, Ramsey Campbell and Copper.

Next time on MPorcius Fiction Log: short SF from the Eisenhower era which (probably) will lack uncomfortable sex themes and gore in the splatterpunk style. 

Richard Matheson: "Little Girl Lost," "The Doll That Does Everything" and "The Funeral"

Let's read three more stories from the Richard Matheson collection titled The Shores of Space.  We've already read a bunch of them--check out these links if you are so inclined:  "Trespass," "When Day is Dun," and "The Curious Child"; "Being," "The Test," and "Clothes Make the Man"; "The Last Day"; "Pattern for Survival."  I'm not going to blog about the most famous stories in The Shores of Space, "Blood Son" and "Steel," because I've already read the former (I recommend it) and I already know the story of the latter from seeing a TV version of it and hearing talk of a cinematic version.  I own a 1957 paperback copy of The Shores of Space, but as you can see at one of the posts linked above, it is falling apart and it is a hassle dealing with it so today I am reading a scan of a 1969 Bantam printing.

"Little Girl Lost" (1953)

This story debuted in an issue of Amazing that has one of the least attractive covers I have ever seen on a big name SF magazine.  "Little Girl Lost" has also been filmed for television, isfdb is telling me, but maybe I won't remember it.

OK, I remember it, but it is short and pretty good, so it wasn't annoying to experience the text version of "Little Girl Lost."  Told in the first person, from the perspective of the father, the story is about how a little girl falls through a temporary portal into another dimension and her parents are frantic trying to find her--they can hear her calling for help, but cannot see her.  We get some incomprehensible jazz about how a one-dimensional world is a line and a two-dimensional world is an infinite number of lines and a three-dimensional world is an infinite number of planes and so on, but mostly the story is about the emotions of the parents and Matheson does a good job with that so thumbs up.  A dog is the hero of the story, all you canine lovers should take note.  The plot is resolved by luck more than initiative or logic or strength or whatever, but that adds to the fear element, so is actually a benefit more than a detriment to how well "Little Girl Lost" operates as a horror story.

"Little Girl Lost," an above average piece of work, has been reprinted many times. 

"The Doll That Does Everything" (1954)

Here we have a lame joke story, overwritten and perhaps offensive.

A married couple consists of a male poet and a female sculptor; neither is very successful financially.  Their toddler keeps destroying their work, and the rest of the house besides. The poet talks about killing his son, using some rarely seen words (this is part of the overwriting) and repeating himself (yeah, more overwriting) for comic effect.

The parents have the idea that a companion for the kid will keep him under control. They purchase a robot child which will grow at the normal human rate, maturing alongside their real child.  But instead of pacifying their little hellion, the robot makes things worse, as junior figures out how to get the robot to help it in its destructive pursuits. So the parents murder their son and raise the robot in its place, a ruse which succeeds for many years.

Thumbs down.

After debuting in Fantastic Universe, "The Doll That Does Everything" would go on to be reprinted in an anthology edited by Roger Elwood and Vic Ghidalia with one of the worst covers I have ever seen on an SF book.  In an afterword to "The Doll That Does Everything" in its appearance in 2005's Richard Matheson: Collected Stories, Volume Two, Matheson talks a little about his relationship with Charles Beaumont and how it influenced this story.   

"The Funeral" (1955)

Here's another Matheson story adapted for use on the boob tube, but I am confident I don't know this one because I don't think I've ever seen Night Gallery.

The name "Beaumont" appears casually in the first line of "The Funeral," making me think this must be a joke story, and my suspicions are confirmed when I find "The Funeral," like "The Doll That Does Everything," to be overwritten, presumably for comedic effect. Try this sentence on for size:

His cardiac muscle flexing vigorously, he forced back folds of sorrowful solicitude across his face.

Ouch!

The foundational joke of the story is that a vampire comes to a funeral home, wanting a funeral for himself. The funeral director is scared and even faints during the service, which is attended by a witch, a werewolf, a hunchback named Ygor, etc., and which devolves into a brawl in which the various monsters use their supernatural powers on each other. The monsters wreck the place, but pay for all repairs, so the funeral home makes a tidy profit.  In the final scene a Lovecraftian entity, shapeless and tentacled, arrives at the funeral home, the establishment having been recommended to him by the vampire.

I hate this kind of thing (I never cared for The Addams Family, for example, though I love The Munsters because I like the actors and the plots are traditional sitcom things just in horror drag) so thumbs down.  Waste of time.

"The Funeral" first appeared in F&SF and has reappeared in numerous Matheson collections (I own it in two different books) and a small number of foreign-language anthologies.  Matheson's afterword to the story in Richard Matheson: Collected Stories, Volume Two is about Matheson's work on Night Gallery and Star Trek; it seems that Matheson came up with lots of scripts for these shows that were rejected.  For even the best of us, life is a series of defeats.

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I guess people love joke stories--"The Funeral" is in the Penguin Classics The Best of Richard Matheson.  I rarely like joke stories myself, so today was not a good day for the blog.  I look to fiction for sincerity, and I found it in "Little Girl Lost," easily the best story we read today.

More short horror-themed stories await us in the next thrilling episode of MPorcius Fiction Log--show up if you are confident your cardiac muscle can take it!

The Great White Space by Basil Copper

"Keep trying,” Scarsdale told me, almost savagely. His bearded face looked more like a Viking than ever as he gazed about him, his revolver cocked and ready for use. I remembered then the fate of the dwarf Zalor and realised what had never been absent from our leader’s mind; that this underground world harboured many ancient and evil things which would only reveal themselves when they were ready.

Before I left on my travels to North Carolina and New Jersey (greatest state in the Union) we read Basil Copper's Jack the Ripper prequel "Bright Blades Gleaming" in the 1995 anthology Dark Love and were impressed by the style, though we found the plot and resolution underwhelming.  In the comments to that blog post about four selected stories from Dark Love, a well-read gentleman, Pliny the Ill, recommended Copper's 1974 novel The Great White Space.  So let's check it out!  The jacket of the Robert Hale edition of The Great White Space, a scan of which I am reading, claims that Copper has been "hailed in America as the best writer of fantasy since H. P. Lovecraft," and the novel is dedicated to Lovecraft and August Derleth, while the first page introduces us to a character named after Clark Ashton Smith, so we have every reason to hope we are about to indulge in a feast of weird Yog-Sothery and cosmic horror.

Pliny the Ill called The Great White Space a Lovecraft pastiche, so we have no reason to be surprised when we immediately learn that the novel comes to us in the form of the memoir of a man who wants to impart to us knowledge only he possesses, a man whose mental health we have reason to question, a man who warns that a terrible future awaits mankind!  And a man who, among the five men of science who went on a secret expedition to a remote location, was the only one to return!   

Our narrator, Frederick Plowright, was a successful photographer of the exotic, and had made a fortune recording on film remote locales and unusual animals while on dangerous expeditions when he was contacted by famed explorer and academic Professor Clark Ashton Scarsdale.  Scarsdale is setting up a return expedition to a site he was forced by terrible danger to flee after only briefly exploring it, a site the exact location and nature of which he refuses to divulge, even as he invites Plowright to join the team he has assembled--himself, electrical engineer and geologist Van Damm, historian and radio expert Holden, and Egyptologist and cartographer Prescott.  Plowright agrees to accompany the expedition and chronicle its progress and findings photographically, as well as lend his physical strength to the undertaking--The Great White Space is full of foreshadowing of how dangerous this expedition is going to be, and the intimation from Scarsdale that physical strength that eggheads Van Damm, Holden and Prescott cannot supply will be necessary is one of many such hints.

The Great White Space, about 180 pages split into 20 chapters, is kind of long and the pace is deliberate, with Copper providing lots of descriptions and many images.  Copper spends four chapters introducing us to the characters, each of whom he tries to give a personality--particular attention is given to the relationship between expedition leader Scarsdale and second in command Van Damm--and the preparations for the expedition.  The four scientists have constructed, and along with Plowright test and train on, four fully enclosed metal vehicles with treads that are operated with a complex series of levers.  Scarsdale also insists the expedition bring along sidearms, rifles, elephant guns, hand grenades, and belt-fed machine guns mounted on tripods--Copper doesn't give a manufacturer or model name for these machine guns, and refers to them variously as "light" and "heavy," leading to a little confusion as to how to visualize them. 

Our band of heroes, whom we know are doomed, leaves England and in Chapter Five is at the walled town of Zak in a mountainous region of Asia.  With a local guide, Zalor the dwarf, they travel across a desert in the four tractors to the village of Nylstrom, 200 kilometers off.  In Chapter Six, in the village, Zalor is discovered to be some kind of traitor and thief but the dwarf escapes.  In Chapter Seven the tractors grind forward to the cyclopean entrance at the base of the Black Mountains that opens onto a vast series of caverns and tunnels.  The five explorers enter a subterranean world lit by a mysterious phosphorescence, marching mile after mile, discovering strange inscriptions, a vast staircase with risers two feet high, jars five feet tall in which are interred human-sized insects whose remains fully dissolve after fifteen minutes of exposure to air, a city of windowless towers in a cavern whose ceiling is so high above it cannot be seen.  Who could have built this ancient city, these tunnels thousands of years old, carved them out of stone that is harder than granite?  The expedition comes upon the dead body of Zalor the dwarf--how did he get ahead of them?  Leaving behind the tractors, our guys cross an underground sea in inflatable boats and then advance on foot, pushing or pulling a trolley which carries weapons and equipment.  Occasionally the narrator hears the sound of leathery wings.  As the men advance deeper into the labyrinth a regular thumping sound, like the beating of a monstrous heart, grows steadily louder.  The most skittish of the scientists, Holden, left alone on guard duty, spots an enormous hopping creature in the distance and fires a machine gun at it--the monster escapes but leaves a trail of slimy gore.      

Copper describes each step of this journey, all the quotidian events of setting up camp, testing equipment, taking notes, taking photos, consulting the weird old book The Ethics of Ygor, who is on watch when, etc., in a pretty straightforward fashion; these many chapters of desert and subterranean travel are a smooth read, even if nothing much is happening.  I found this material entertaining, but it is fair to wonder if it substantially contributes to anything besides the novel's length. 

By Chapter Sixteen, Holden is incapacitated; have the sights of Zalor's mangled body and the hopping creature disordered his mind?  Or has something sapped his very physical strength?  Van Damm stays behind with the stricken man and Scarsdale, Prescott and Plowright, armed to the teeth and equipped with special goggles, advance into a brightening light that pulses in time to the throbbing.  The light, they discover, comes from a big chamber which includes a portal to other planets--this portal is the Great White Space of the title.  Within the chamber of the Great White Space they see oversized and hideous blob aliens with tentacles and claws, and in Chapter Seventeen must fight them; Prescott is devoured.  As they retreat, Scarsdale explains to Plowright that his mission has been to study the aliens and try to make friends with them and, failing that, collect evidence with which to convince the world of the danger posed by the aliens.  In Chapter Eighteen, Scarsdale and the narrator return to find Holden dead and Van Damm, apparently, captured by the monsters!  The state of Holden's corpse drives Plowright temporarily insane, but Scarsdale slaps him sane, and the men try to rescue Van Damm.  They fight and kill a bat-monster fifty feet tall, but it has already sucked the juices out of Van Damm with its proboscis.  They fight some more hopping jelly-creatures.  Luckily the aliens don't have any firearms.

In Chapter Nineteen, Scarsdale disappears while the exhausted Plowright is asleep.  After waking, our narrator finds the Professor among the aliens, not just the blobs and bats but also insect men, the live counterparts of the mummies discovered earlier.  Plowright tries to rescue Scarsdale, but something he sees sends him fleeing--we learn in Chapter Twenty that the narrator saw that the living essences of Zalor the dwarf, Van Damm, Prescott and Holden had been integrated into the jelly-like slug aliens, and that Scarsdale's body seemed to be controlled or partially taken over by aliens.  After a brief description of Plowright's return trip through the tunnels to the surface and then from the Black Mountains back to England, during most of which he was half-insane and feverish, and a prediction that the aliens are about to conquer Earth, come the last lines of the novel, in which in all-caps our narrator presents the theory that even before the expedition began Scarsdale was working, willingly or otherwise, for the aliens--maybe the expedition was mounted so the aliens could integrate into their consciousnesses such experts on Earth history and science as Van Damm, Prescott and Holden.

I enjoyed reading The Great White Space but after finishing it I have to admit it doesn't add up to much and the structure and organization of the novel have some real problems.  Copper devotes a lot of time to stuff like the relationship between Scarsdale and Van Damm, and the way the tractors operate, that don't actually have much effect on the plot.  These descriptions are entertaining enough, but they take up so much time that you expect a pay off, that Van Damm is going to sacrifice his life to save Scarsdale or vice versa, or that the tractors are going to be critical to overcoming some obstacle or winning some fight or are going to protect Plowright from radiation or a barrage of arrows or something.  In the event, Copper could have dispensed with the tractors and had his characters cross the desert and explore the first series of tunnels in trucks or on horseback or astride camels.  The fight scenes don't make a lot of sense, and are not very exciting.  Mysteries about Zalor's ability to get ahead of the expedition when the Englishmen have tractors and the dwarf doesn't, and what the hell Zalor was up to anyway, and about Holden's health, are not resolved as far as I can tell.  I missed why Plowright's physical strength was mentioned repeatedly--Scarsdale doesn't need him to lift anything heavy or anything like that, as far as I can recall.  (Maybe the aliens wanted a youngish specimen for study?  But it is implied that they allowed Plowright to escape....)  It feels like Copper wrote this story as he went along, including cool elements thinking he would do something with them later, and then leaving them in later drafts anyway even though he never came up with a cool function for them within the context of the plot.

I can recommend The Great White Space mildly; I enjoyed it while I was reading it, but I don't think it is going to make a deep impression on me--there isn't much that is special about it, though Copper's style renders all the scenes except the battle scenes in the last fifth or so of the book a pleasant and smooth reading experience.  The Lovecraftian completist will find The Great White Space an easier pill to swallow than a lot of the incompetent junk we read by August Derleth and Frank Belknap Long--Copper is much better at putting together a sentence than those guys.

Best of Pulphouse: E Bryant, G A Effinger, H Ellison, K Koja, & T F Monteleone

OMG, it's another crazy recent anthology.  (Yes, at MPorcius Fiction Log the 1990s count as recent.)  In our last episode we read four stories from a 1990s anthology full of perversion, Dark Love, and today we've got five stories from 1991's The Best of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, which perhaps will also be full of wacky gross material?  In her foreword, a banal thing about how most players in the publishing industry play it safe, producing boring derivative commodified goop for the masses, but the heroes at Pulphouse Publishing flout the conventional wisdom and take risks and offer real art for the discerning, critical darling Kate Wilhelm promises surprises and warns we may be angered by what we read.  It is easy to laugh at the self-importance of self-appointed leaders of the rebellion against the homogenization the results from bourgeois capitalism and democracy, but at the same time I am hoping that Rusch and Edward Bryant, George Alec Effinger, Harlan Ellison, Kathe Koja, and Thomas F. Monteleone can cash the check that Wilhelm is writing.  Let's see.

"While She Was Out" by Edward Bryant (1988)     

"While She Was Out" was a hit with wide appeal and since its initial appearance in the first issue of Rusch's Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine it has been reprinted in four anthologies, including some kind of feminist anthology full of purportedly "inspiring prose" and a book promising "EXTREME HORROR."  Looks like we are starting off with a bang.

Della's husband Kenneth drinks beer and watches sports on TV and complains about her cutting jokes and her giving the twins too many cookies.  Their marriage is in trouble; Della often dreams of leaving Kenneth, even vocalizes these dreams in his presence.  Della takes night classes, learning how to repair the car herself and learning self defense--I guess a sign she is trying to be independent--and he just makes fun of her.

Tonight, while Kenneth watches ESPN, Della goes out to the mall to pick up Christmas stuff--the big day is approaching!--and tampons.  The parking lot is crowded, and Della is annoyed that somebody has parked an old oversized car across multiple spaces.  She writes a sarcastic note and puts it under the car's windshield wiper.  

The car turns out to be in the possession of four young thugs, one from each major racial demographic--we've got a white thug, a black thug, a Latino thug and an Asian thug.  The thugs do not appreciate Della's brand of humor.  Over fourteen or fifteen pages Della has to run from these criminals or fight them; stuff she has learned in night school helps her to survive and in fact slay all four of these creeps.  Bryant describes everybody's injuries, and Della's physical and psychological experience of killing the four young men, in great detail.  The last creep to die, when he has the upper hand (so he thinks!), tries to seduce Della into joining him in his life of crime, he somehow guessing she is unsatisfied with her marriage.  The story ends with an homage to Dirty Harry, with Della pointing an empty gun (she emptied it into one of the punks) at her husband and pulling the trigger before telling him they have to talk.  Having defeated murderous enemies, Della has proven her strength and gained confidence and is now in charge of their relationship.  Hear her roar!

This is a good crime/adventure story and a feminist story in which a woman overcomes men who want to exploit her.  It doesn't really feel like a preachy left-wing thing, though, in part because Bryant includes the kinds of jokes which progressives today wouldn't make, jokes that make light of the Third World and people born with disabilities and liberal fascination with them (e.g., the biggest Christmas gift of the season, the one the twins are begging for, is "The Little BeeDee Birth Defect Baby.")  I almost wonder if Bryant slyly wrote a story to specifically appeal to liberals and leftists and then included in it these little land mines that would make them squirm. 

Thumbs up!  Our Pulphouse adventure is off to a good start!

Raw material for your new favorite Venn Diagram:
the intersection of "inspiring prose" and "extreme horror"

"Chopped Liver" by George Alec Effinger (1989)

This one only ever appeared in the fifth installment of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine and in this Best of volume.  "Chopped Liver" is a joke story with an urban Jewish flavor, people saying "tsurris" and mentioning "the Hadassah ladies" and eating "flanken" and "farfel" and so forth, and it is actually funny, making it a rarity among the joke stories I encounter here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  

The humor is mostly in the style, though the plot is also sort of funny.  Butcher Morton Rosenthal is sick of his wife and decides to murder her, and we follow his plotting and execution of his murder plan and then his efforts to conceal the atrocity, and the final twist of fate that sends him to the afterlife in the wake of his wife.

"Chopped Liver"'s milieu and themes--city life and disastrous sexual relationships--are right up my alley, and it actually delivers laughs, so I have no hesitation about giving it a hearty thumbs up.  Black humor fans should certainly seek it out.

"She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother" by Harlan Ellison (1988) 

Like today's stories by Bryant and Monteleone, Ellison's "She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother" was in the very first issue of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine.  In the intro to "She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother" here in The Best of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, Rauch announces that Ellison is working on a three-volume set of short stories for Pulphouse Publishing--Ellison was famous for conceiving large scale projects which were never completed, and maybe this three-volume set is another of them. 

A guy wakes up, hearing music, and tries to remember the dream he just had and then reminisces about times in his life when he heard pieces of music in exotic places.

It was the music no one was playing that I had heard at Stonehenge, ten years ago. It was the sound of the pan pipes at Hanging Rock thirteen years ago, and the notes of a flute from the other side of the Valley of the Stonebow eight years ago. I had heard that recollection in a cave in the foothills overlooking the Fairchild Desert and, once, I heard it drifting through a misty downpour in the Sikkim rainforest.

There is also an extended metaphor about the past being a desert and the narrator only having eyes to see the past on one side or something like that; I had trouble keeping awake enough to figure out what this metaphor was trying to tell me.  Too much of "She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother" is this kind of mind numbing goop, multiple paragraphs that are self-contained labyrinths that take you nowhere if you bother to puzzle them out.  Already on the first full page of the story I was flipping through the succeeding pages, counting how many pages of this jungle I had left to machete my way through--thirteen to go!  

The narrator gets out of bed finally and drives around Scotland, listing for us all the towns he drives through and the highways he uses, describing his ventures into stores to buy food and other items.  This story is a series of lists.  

Punctuating the lists are clues about the narrator's companion, his girlfriend of fifteen years, Camilla.  Is Camilla an hallucination?  A cripple?  Maybe some kind of r--I mean a person suffering a developmental disability?  An animal?  Camilla guides the narrator to a remote cliff, to a hidden cave, where he meets Camilla's family of scaly monsters who eat mundane human beings, live for over a hundred years, and reproduce through incest.  We get lists of mutilated corpses--this one's genitals have been removed, this one's face is gone, etc.  And lists of clothing stolen from the monsters' victims, clothes spanning centuries of history.  We also get a list of the narrator's injuries after a dangerous fall.

Will the narrator join this family of monsters?  Camilla seems sincere when she says she loves him!  They won't eat him, will they?  Or will the narrator escape and come back with explosives and weapons and try to annihilate the monster family, like in a Lovecraft story ("The Shunned House," maybe)?  We can't be sure what course the narrator is going to take as the story ends.  After the story proper we get an excerpt from a reference book on crime, an entry about Sawney Bean, a famous figure of Scottish legend--Camilla's family are the descendants of the Bean clan.

The plot of this story isn't bad, but the style is annoying and the first few pages, all the jazz about music and the puzzling metaphor, are a turn off and are superfluous besides--music doesn't figure in the actual story of the monster love affair and the monster family, as far as I can tell.   

"She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother" is one of those stories that, as the hours since reading it go by, and you forget the frustratingly useless passages that should have been stricken by an editor and the irritating style, leaving only the actual plot in your mind, starts seeming a lot better than it did when you were actually reading it.  While I was reading it I thought I was going to give it a thumbs down, but with the passage of time, that which heals all wounds, maybe I have to say this thing deserves a grade of "barely acceptable."

Karl Edward Wagner, whose violent pornographic story "Locked Away" we just read, selected "She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother" for The Year's Best Horror Stories XVII and after that it reappeared in the Ellison collection Slippage (published as Derapages over in Gaul) and a German anthology on the theme of cannibalism.

"Illusions in Relief" by Kathe Koja (1990)

Koja had our favorite story from our last blog post, so we have high expectations for her today.  No pressure, though, KK!  Rauch in her intro to "Illusions in Relief" here in the Best of anthology warns us the story is subtle and we have to concentrate to receive its "message."  Oy, the pressure is now flowing in the opposite direction, and it doesn't feel good!

Joseph is an artist who lives alone in a house.  His work consists of collages made from images he cuts out of old magazines and elsewhere with an X-acto blade.  Somehow, people--erroneously Joseph is sure--think he or his collages can cure their ills, and they crowd around his house, staring in through the windows and leaving him offerings (including periodicals from which he draws images for his collages) and mail him letters and photos describing their diseases and deformities.  When he goes out to shop they beg him, grab at him, accost him at the store.  Joseph's sanity is questionable--he hears voices and suffers hallucinations--so we readers wonder to what extent to believe in the crowds outside and their antics. 

An old man with a green spot on his arm comes by, and Joseph lets him in.  This figure is the most doubtful yet, the most likely we readers are inclined to believe illusory.  The old geezer stays awhile, and while he is there Joseph has fewer mental illness symptoms, his output of collages increases, and the crowd outside stops growing.  The old man offers some ancient wisdom (e. g., "Everybody gets what they don't want....The trick is to find a way to want it") and encourages Joseph in his work.  The green spot grows until the old man is entirely green.  One morning the green old man isn't there.  Joseph hands a collage to a disfigured girl at the door and Joseph's own hand starts growing green!

Alright, what the hell is going on?  What is the message Rauch told us is here?  Is the old man an angel or some other messenger of God come to aid Joseph?  The old man, when Joseph inadvertently prompts him, speaks approvingly of Jesus:

"I want you to work.  You get where you're going the way you're meant to get there.  If you don't jerk yourself off with a lot of shit about guilt.  Save your own fucking soul, you know?"

"Jesus. Philosophy."

"Jesus is philosophy."

The color green in the story, clues suggest, represents peace and goodness, and the old man seems thrilled that he is turning green.  Is the message the old Stoic and Serenity Prayer thing, that you have to accept, even embrace, the world as it comes to you, the things you can't change?  But what is up with the crowd, the people who think Joseph or his collages can heal them?  And Joseph's hand turning green?  Has Joseph's tutelage under the old geezer given him the power to heal, the power others have been feverishly attributing to him despite his denials?  Maybe this story is about how other people's expectations of you can influence your personality and abilities?  Or about the relationship between the artist and his most devoted fans, how each influences the other, for good or for ill?        

I don't know, maybe I didn't concentrate enough.  Still, a good story, well-written and with compelling images.  "Illusions in Relief" was reprinted in the 1998 Koja collection Extremities.

"Nobody's Perfect" by Thomas F. Monteleone (1988)

Editor Rauch warns readers of The Best of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine that "Nobody's Perfect" is a feminist story, and our two main characters fit the bill: Salazar the serial killer of women and cannibal, a predatory man who hates contemporary art and thinks the Apocalypse is around the corner; and Lydia the young liberal do-gooder--the sadness and injustice of the world gets Lydia down sometimes, but don't worry, her "absorption" of "the world's pain" and the pain of her own personal tragedies (as we will learn, she is a victim of the establishment or patriarchy or whatever you want to call it) hasn't weakened her, but made her "stronger and more positive in the long run."

Salazar decides to answer an ad calling for volunteers to read books into a recorder for the blind (I did this in grad school--not as a volunteer, of course, but for money), figuring it will provide him the opportunity of meeting bookish girls upon which to prey.  Sure enough, he meets the beautiful blonde Lydia and gets a date with her.  He is in for a surprise when they meet for the date--at the volunteer meeting, Salazar was staring at Lydia's perfect breasts so intently that he didn't notice her disability--her right arm is "withered" and "flipper-like," her mother having been prescribed thalidomide.

Monteleone describes in detail how Salazar kidnaps Lydia, putting duct tape over her mouth, cuffing her into semi-consciousness, chaining her up in his basement close to the stew pots and rotisserie, cutting her clothes off, etc.  Monteleone also offers us insight into both characters' thought processes and psychological states.

Our somewhat ridiculous twist ending, which, along with the somewhat over-the-top stereotyped characters, is making me wonder if this story isn't something of a sly joke, has the accumulated sadness and humiliation of a lifetime, which Lydia has always turned into strength, plus her rage at Salazar's evil, transform her withered arm, heretofore almost totally immobile, into a super arm with which she kills Salazar with a blow and then breaks her chains.  The last line of the story assures us that Lydia's super arm is going to stay super.

If we accept this story as sincere, I guess it is an allegory of how women and minorities can and have used the pain they have suffered at the hands of the white man to give themselves the strength to accomplish all their amazing achievements.  At least that is what I would tell my colleagues if I was still taking graduate level courses in the humanities and social sciences.

(This story is kind of reminding me of that Steven Spielberg TV episode in which a guy repairs his stricken B-17 by drawing the needed parts cartoon-style on his pad in that the whole production is very professional but the climax, which is supposed to be an uplifting evocation of the human spirit or whatever, might come off as absurd and silly.)      

Whether parody or dead serious, "Nobody's Perfect" is well put together; we'll mildly recommend it.  It is more like an inspiring adventure story or fantasy, or the origin story of a comic book superhero, than an actual horror story, though.      

After its debut in the premiere issue of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, "Nobody's Perfect" was reprinted by Karl Edward Wagner in The Year's Best Horror Stories XVII and by John Betancourt in 1996 in New Masterpieces of Horror (republished in two volumes in 2005 as Horrorscape); you can also find it in the Monteleone collection Fearful Symmetries.

**********

Even though I would cut away pieces of Ellison's story as ruthlessly as Salazar cut off Lydia's clothes, and even though I am not bright enough to grok what Koja's story is all about, I have to hand it to Rauch for publishing and then reprinting these five stories, none of which is bad (80% of them are actually good) and all of which are edgy or wild in some way or other.  A worthwhile reading experience.