DAW The Year's Best Horror Stories IV: A Davidson, H Clement, R Campbell, C L Grant and R A Lafferty

The first DAW The Year's Best Horror Stories, from which we read four stories in our last installment, was a reprint of a British anthology edited by Richard Davis.  The next two volumes in the DAW series consist of stories drawn from other Davis publications.  But The Year's Best Horror Stories IV, printed in 1976, is a US original edited by Gerald W. Page.  It looks like we have already assimilated four stories Page selected for the book, "Something Had to Be Done" by David Drake, "Cottage Tenant" by Frank Belknap Long, "No Way Home" by Brian Lumley and "The Glove" by Fritz Leiber, but its pages contain five as yet unread stories by people we are interested in: Avram Davidson, last seen flummoxing me with a story about a famous American crime I rarely think about; Hal Clement, whose science-heavy story "Proof" I recently enjoyed; Ramsey Campbell, author of "The Scar," among the many facets of which are incest, jewel thieves and doppelgangers; Charles L. Grant, famous as the writer of "quiet" horror (shhh!), and R. A. Lafferty, one of those wild and crazy sui generis SF authors like A. E. van Vogt and Barry Malzberg.  Let's investigate these five tales and take a stab at figuring out why Page included them in the first of his four outings as editor of The Year's Best Horror Stories.  (From VIII to XXII, the series was helmed by Karl Edward Wagner, author of the Kane stories and "The Picture of Johnathan Collins," which I in 2016 called "explicit" and tarbandu at PorPorBooks just recently called "unabashed gay porn.")

Oh, yeah, the great tarbandu back in 2020 reviewed The Year's Best Horror Stories IV, so after I have drafted my own assessments of today's tales I will reacquaint myself with what he had to say about the book and see if we are on the same page when it comes to the nine stories from the volume I will have read.

"And Don't Forget the One Red Rose" by Avram Davidson (1975)

"And Don't Forget the One Red Rose" debuted in Playboy alongside a Flashman piece by George MacDonald Fraser, an interview with Erica Jong ("I frequently go without any underwear at all"), and a goofy pictorial in which comic book heroines are depicted in compromising positions.  If you ever imagined Little Orphan Annie receiving oral sex from her dog or Lois Lane masturbating in a phone booth, well, you could have gotten a job at Playboy in the Seventies, I guess.  I'm reading "And Don't Forget the One Red Rose" in a scan of 1978's Getting Even: Gripping Tales of Revenge, where Davidson's story is accompanied by Robert Bloch's quite good "Animal Fair," and Robert E. Howard's "The Man on the Ground," among other stories by SF luminaries.  "And Don't Forget the One Red Rose" would also be reprinted in The Avram Davidson Treasury.

This is a joke story, but it is a sort of sophisticated joke story and is actually amusing.  I can't really convey the effectiveness of the jokes, which are mostly based on hyperbolic and absurd language, without actually telling them to you, which I won't do, but I will tell you I am giving this story a thumbs up and provide you the outlines of the brief plot (the story takes up just seven pages of Getting Even.)

Charley is an uneducated working-class dope who works alone in a shop reconditioning old gas stoves for resale.  Actual sales are handled by the shop owner, a fat jerk who has another business somewhere else in the area and only comes by on occasion to insult Charley and invade his space.  One day Charley makes the acquaintance of a mysterious Asian man, and is invited into the immigrant's home and place of business.  This refugee from the mysterious and perilous East sells elaborate ancient books and scrolls, one-of-a-kind masterpieces printed on the finest paper with the most exotic inks, full of esoteric knowledge and striking illustrations that Westerners would probably consider pornographic.  The prices of these books are not mere money; each can only be exchanged for a very specific collection of artifacts as rare and bizarre as the books themselves.  One of the books strikes Charley's fancy, and by a strange coincidence, if you look at things in just the right way, it seems Charley may be able to acquire the items for which he can trade the book, and, in so doing, pay back his boss for all the abuse the man has heaped upon him.

"A Question of Guilt" by Hal Clement (1976)

According to Page's intro to the story, "A Question of Guilt" was written for a vampire anthology that never saw print, and so its appearance in The Year's Best Horror Stories IV was its debut.  I am reading the story in The Best of Hal Clement, edited by Lester del Rey.

This longish story (like 40 pages here in The Best of Hal Clement) is not really a horror or a science fiction story, but a bit of historical fiction that celebrates science and the scientific method and criticizes religion and superstition.  Clement also tries to produce a human drama that will pull the old heart strings.

It is the 2nd century AD (I think.)  An intelligent slave from the provinces by chance escaped bondage and became a prosperous citizen of the Roman Empire.  He visited Rome multiple times, and there found himself a wife, but decided he'd rather live in a cave in the wilderness with his family: wife, kids, his wife's female slave.  

Tragedy struck!  All four of the sons the couple produced have had hemophilia, and three have died.  The father has dedicated his life to figuring out how to cure or treat the disease, and as the story begins he is returning to the cave after a long visit to healers in cities, including Galen of Pergamon.

Clement serves us up lots of dialogue scenes in which the man argues with his wife, who fears the disease represents a curse or a punishment from the gods or some such thing and that trying to treat the disease is pointless or even sacrilegious.  Similarly, there are scenes in which the wife's slave worries his scientific investigations are black magic.  But Clement also tries to win some points from the feminists, having the wife demonstrate intelligence and help her husband in his efforts to invent transfusion techniques.  Another of Clement's recurring themes is the pointlessness of people blaming themselves for misfortunes and being hard on themselves when they make mistakes--guilt is a waste of time, gets in the way of solving problems.  

The horror aspects of the story take up very little of the text.  Offscreen, the father kidnaps a stranger's kid and experiments on him.  When the fourth son dies (Clement has spent a lot of time describing this kid playing and expressing and receiving affection and so forth, in hopes we readers will be emotionally affected by his death) the mother disappears.  The father and the slave girl search the labyrinthine caves for weeks looking for mom; dad is sort of insane with grief and continues searching even when it is clear there is no hope of finding her alive.  Eventually the slave girl convinces dad that mom committed suicide by jumping down a deep pit.  Clement seems to be hinting that the slave girl is lying, trying to snap the man out of his funk.  Also of note, Clement earlier raised the possibility of the man having sex with the slave girl to see if their kids were also hemophiliacs; maybe we are meant to expect that the slave girl will end up as the man's second wife.  

The slave girl stops the grieving father from jumping down the pit himself after his wife.  She convinces him to continue his research into a treatment for hemophilia--it will be a boon to humanity, spare future women the loss of their children.  She suggests they travel the world, kidnapping kids and experimenting on them and then moving on to a new neighborhood before anybody catches on.  I guess the idea is that this behavior is how the legend of the vampire began, and Clement is trying to get us to think about the moral propriety of trespassing against social mores and the rights of others in the pursuit of the greater good, like all those Peter Cushing movies in which Dr. Frankenstein is committing all kinds of crimes in the name of advancing medical science.  "Sure, I'm torturing and murdering this person today, but I'm only doing it to lay the groundwork for saving countless lives in the future!"

"A Question of Guilt" feels long and slow and a little flat.  Clement spends a lot of time describing boring activities like making a bowl out of clay and a tube out of gold and so forth, while exciting activities like kidnapping a child and experimenting on him--to death!--are covered in a few lines of dialogue.  Still, the story is not actually bad.  Grade: Acceptable.     

"The Christmas Present" by Ramsey Campbell (1975 with an asterisk)

It looks like "The Christmas Present" debuted in an anthology of new stories published by Arkham House and edited by Page himself, Nameless Places.  "The Christmas Present" slightly stretches the concept of "new," as a version of it was performed on the BBC in 1969, but the story did not appear in print until this '75 book.  I am reading the story in a scan of Nameless Places, which I may return to because it has stories by David Drake, Brian Lumley, Lin Carter, Stephen Goldin, Carl Jacobi and Robert Aickman that I don't think I have read.

In this story Campbell tries to conjure up a mood and throw images at you, but keeps the actual matter of what is going sort of vague and mysterious.  At times it seems there may be an intellectual, I guess sociological, theory behind the story, but I'm not sure if we readers are to take the theory seriously or consider it pretentious and silly.

Our narrator is, I guess, a grad student or college professor, and it is late on Christmas Eve and the pubs and streets are crowded with revelers, mostly students who talk about cinema and Marx.  Our narrator has a party of like eight or nine people at his table at the pub.  A student they don't really know joins the group, and offers a present--it seems he has been looking for someone to give the present to, and settles on the narrator, who is the de facto leader of his crowd.

The party moves to the narrator's apartment on the upper floor of a house near an Anglican church and a graveyard that has recently been cleared, I guess the bodies taken away so the land can be put to other uses.  There are clues suggesting the mystery man with the mystery gift may be a ghost.  On the walk to the apartment he points out that the shadows on the front of the church make it look like a scary face.  As the group walks past street lights they go out, and there are no cars on the road, rendering the street very dark and spooking the partiers.

At the apartment, the mystery man refuses to dance and says quasi-Hegelian stuff like "A war is a clash between a myth and its antithesis" and then argues that "...there's nothing more frightening than people gathering round a belief....if a belief exists it must have an opposite.  That exists too but they try to ignore it.  That's why people in a group are dangerous."  This argument seems pretty incoherent--is Campbell intentionally putting semi-educated gobbledygook in this guy's mouth as a way of goofing on academics or at least faddish and pretentious college kids?  Or is this a set of beliefs Campbell takes seriously and is illustrating with his story here?

Anyway, the church bell rings at midnight, but it sounds odd, and then carolers singing a song nobody can recognize approach the house, enter, start up the steps.  The street is so dark the carolers cannot be seen.  I guess they are the souls of the dead who were evicted from their graves.  These weird carolers instill fear in the partygoers, who somehow make a connection between the carolers and the unopened mystery gift.  The narrator's girlfriend throws the gift in the fire, and the carolers vanish.  The mystery man won't say what was in the now destroyed box save that it was "Just something to give form to a belief....a sort of anti-Christmas present....The antithesis of a Christmas present.... An experiment, mate, you know."  I guess the box contained a bone or something else the dead souls would have wanted.

The narrator punches out the mystery man and efforts to arouse him are useless; as the story ends we have no idea if he will ever be revived.

I guess this story is OK...these stories in which you can't tell what the hell is going on can be frustrating; is the mystery man an actual ghost, or just a kid who, like an overconfident scientist who builds a super weapon or sacrifices people to advance medical knowledge, is foolishly putting the community at risk by meddling with phenomena he knows only a little about?  Difficult stories like this are easier to take from writers like Gene Wolfe and R. A. Lafferty because their stories are generally full of virtues--shocking surprises or ancient wisdom or beautiful sentences or deep human feelings or funny jokes--you can appreciate without really grokking what is going on under the surface.  Probably there are people who love Campbell's style and can appreciate a difficult story by him because they enjoy how he describes the light or the fog or a room's decor or whatever, but I find much of Campbell's verbose descriptions to be a little much, a thicket that obstructs my appreciation of the story rather than an adornment.

"The Christmas Present" reappeared in a short-lived Italian magazine, Psyco, that had characteristically awesome covers by Dutch master Karel Thole, a few Campbell collections, and Richard Dalby's Ghosts for Christmas. 

Whoa, that ghost has a good body.  Come right in and celebrate the Yuletide with me,
Miss Ghost, I'll even open the French doors for you, though I see you walking right through
 my fence, you know, just to be friendly like.

"White Wolf Calling" by Charles L. Grant (1975)

This one debuted in an issue of F&SF with a cool volcanic cover and the first installment of the serialized version of Robert Silverberg's The Stochastic Man.  I read The Stochastic Man in 2007 and thought it boring because too much of it was just horserace politics; I also felt the characters' behavior a little unbelievable.  A below average Silverberg.  This ish also has a letter from our hero Barry Malzberg in which he jousts not only with Alexei Panshin over Panshin's whole attitude about the history of SF and his assessment of the influence of John W. Campbell, Jr. but also with Joanna Russ over Russ's hostile review of Silverberg's Born with the Dead, a Silverberg I have read twice and after the second read found to be quite above average.  And there are two letters from Kurt Vonnegut in the letters column that all you Vonnegut fanatics will want to read.  

OK, on to the fiction that brought me to look into the April 1975 F&SF.  Oy vey, Grant here in "White Wolf Calling"'s first sentence makes Campbell look succinct.

Snow: suspended white water humping over hidden rocks, slashed by a slick black road that edged around the stumped mountains and swept deserted between a pair of low, peaked houses that served as unassuming sentinels at the mouth of the valley; drifting, not diving to sheathe needled green arms that bent and held in multiples of thousands, spotting indifferently the tarmac walk that tongued from the half-moon porch of the house on the right.

I was tempted to give this story a thumbs down then and there and move on with my life, but "White Wolf Calling" is only 12 pages long so I continued plowing through.

Grant's writing here isn't just too long and full of superfluous goop; I also question his word choices:

...as he took a frustrated poke at the soiled snow the village plow had left to harass his cleaning.

"Harass" is no good--you harass a concrete entity, in particular one with a psychology, not an abstraction like a process.  This kind of thing is like a speed bump or a pothole when I am trying to read a story--it totally takes me out of the mood the author is trying to generate and the plot he is trying to communicate.

Oh yeah, plot.  "White Wolf Calling" consists largely of an old married couple with the nicknames Mars and Venus talking about the various gossip and tragedies in their rural community.  This guy and that guy are drunks, an unfaithful husband was murdered by his wife, this woman had a skiing accident, there are no job opportunities in the area, the couple's twin sons both lost their greedy wives in some kind of railway accident, etc.  Reading this story is depressing and annoying, like talking to your parents whose only news is the medical problems their friends and relatives and neighbors, people whose names you don't even remember, are suffering.  

The protagonists' sons are losers and Mars and Venus blame themselves for being poor parents.  (A reflection of the story's being produced in the Vietnam era is the fact that they consider one of their sons' being a captain in the Army an element of his failure.)  A few years ago a Slavic immigrant, perhaps Czech, and his crippled wife and their young blonde son moved in across the street, and Mars has been acting like a surrogate father to the kid, whose own father is often away, ostensibly working in "the city."  Mars loves this foreign kid more than his own sons.  

The kid tells stories about a huge white wolf with green eyes--people who see the wolf soon die.  Mars and the kid are in the woods collecting firewood when Mars sees the wolf.  He embraces the kid and shifts as the wolf walks by so that the kid won't see the wolf.  Sure enough, later that day the kid is nearly--but not quite--struck by the car of one of Mars' reckless sons.  Has the protagonist saved the kid he loves?  No, this is a depressing story, not one about self sacrifice or heroism.  Mars is killed in a stupid accident, and as he dies it becomes apparent that the three Eastern European immigrants are werewolves who "feed on failure."  I guess in some occult way they are causing all these accidents.

The plot is OK, though its depiction of family life and career life is pretty dismal, like that we might expect of a piece of despairing mainstream literary fiction.  It is the style I am not crazy about.  Low end of acceptable.

"White Wolf Calling" has been reprinted in three different Grant collections.  

Am I reading this right?  Stephen King thinks Charles L. Grant is the 
greatest horror writer of all time?  Good grief.

"The Man with the Aura" by R. A. Lafferty (1974)

"The Man with the Aura" debuted in the final issue of Gerald Page's small press magazine Witchcraft & Sorcery, the successor title to his Coven 13.  All told, ten issues of Coven 13/Witchcraft & Sorcery were printed between 1969 and 1974; Page got some good art for this magazine from people like William Stout and Stephen Fabian, and this tenth issue has a cover by Jeff Jones and an interior Jones picture of a cat all you Jones fans and feline fanciers will want to see.  Oh yeah, this magazine has so many typos I can barely believe it.  Meow!

In "The Man with the Aura" we have an absurd joke story that is pretty amusing.  Lafferty's story here actually has quite a bit in common with the Davidson story in tone and in the type of its humor; I bitch all the time about how I hate joke stories but here today we have two good ones--glory be.  

A man describes to a friend his rise from poverty to the position of the most trusted and admired person in the world.  He was born a vulpine-faced sneak whom all suspected, and with good reason, as he was an inveterate though incompetent fraudster and thief.  But then he invented a complex apparatus, a battery of complementary high-tech devices integrated into his own flesh, that changed his "aura."  Thanks to the invention, people now trusted him implicitly, made excuses for him when anything went wrong, literally refused to believe their own eyes and ears when they were confronted with stark evidence he had committed blunders or transgressions.  Now unassailable, he committed the most heinous crimes, crimes so blatant that a child could solve them, and profited hugely from them financially and socially.  Much of the humor of the story is the catalog of these atrocities and the public's response to them, Lafferty exaggerating outrageously for comic effect.

Plenty of fun, and an example of Lafferty's use of blood and gore for comedic purposes and perhaps of a jaded view of human nature that recognizes the way in which people judge by appearances, which can be so deceiving, and make allowances for the physically attractive and the charismatic they wouldn't make for plain janes and the awkward.  Thumbs up!

In 1991, small Canadian outfit United Mythologies Press included "The Man with the Aura" in a little 69-page collection titled Mischief Malicious (And Murder Most Strange) and in 2015 Centipede Press reprinted it in the 316-page second volume of their Collected Short Fiction of R. A Lafferty series, for which "The Man with the Aura" served as title story.

**********

OK, now time to check in with tarbandu and see if there are major divergences between our opinions of the stories in The Year's Best Horror Stories IV that we have both read, all nine of them.

Hmm, no real fireworks, I'm afraid; we seem to basically agree about the stories.  I may be a little more generous; for one thing, tarbandu finds fault with Clement's entire career while I like much of Clement's work.  I also think I found Grant's "White Wolf Calling" less "oblique" than tarbandu did--I think Grant's story in the anthology is easier to understand than Campbell's.  For his part, tarbandu quotes a passage from Campbell's "The Christmas Present" that effectively illustrates the man's "purple prose."

If you are interested in DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories volumes you should check out tarbandu's blog, as he has read and blogged about a dozen of them; here are links to his assessments:

The PorPor Books Blog on DAW The Year's Best Horror 

I     II     III     IV     V    IX    X    XII     XIII     XIV    XV     XX     

While I don't usually read entire anthologies the way tarbandu does, I did read every story in the second DAW The Year's Best Horror series over three blog posts:

ONE  TWO  THREE 

and the eighth over four posts:

Un  Duex  Trois   Quartre

Well, that's a long blog post, five stories and a million links.  Congrats for reaching the end.  Next time we'll be returning to the 1930s.  See you then!