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.

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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.