"The Goddess of the Cats" by Thomas N. Scortia (1973)
Most of the stories in Men and Malice are new to this volume. "The Goddess of the Cats" debuted here, and would be reprinted in the 1975 Scortia collection Caution! Inflammable! I own a 1976 paperback edition of Caution! Inflammable! and started reading it in 2019, but somehow never got around to reading more than half of it. More recently I read Scortia's "Someday I'll Find You" and declared it "barely acceptable," his "The Avengers" and called it a "half-baked clunker" and his "Gag Rule" and denounced it as a "total waste of the reader's time." Well, we won't let our previous experience with Scortia prejudice us against this production here--the best performer can have an off day and the most lackluster shooter can score a lucky hit.
Miguel is a Mexican living in California. He hates the English language. He hates wearing shoes. He hates Christianity. He is filled with pride at his talents. In the first paragraph of the story he has sex with some woman for whom he has contempt. Miguel sounds like he belongs in the legislature, but in fact he is a guy who makes mosaic murals.
Miguel is living among the metal buildings and white people he detests because he got a job putting up a mural of a sea monster, a creature he dreams about at night, a creature with the head and torso of a stacked chick, but whose underparts are like those of some kind of scaly squid or octopus. The mosaic mural is above a fountain at a new apartment complex. The project was begun by an American named Warburg, but Warburg went bankrupt and sold it to a French Canadian. Miguel hates this Canadian as much as he does the Yanquis--this Quebecois has the temerity to expect Miguel to help with physical labor as well as install the mural, as if he was just some hired hand and not a talented artiste!
Because of the venue I am reading it in, I expected "The Goddess of the Cats," despite the title, to be a straight detective story, while the first few paragraphs of the story led me to suspect "The Goddess of the Cats" was going to be a "liberal" wish-fulfillment fantasy about how mean Americans get their just comeuppance from a noble non-white immigrant. One can certainly interpret the story along those lines, but there are additional nuances and layers that make "The Goddess of the Cats" more interesting and more challenging. Scortia's story has strong weird, even Lovecraftian, elements, and Miguel is not necessarily the kind of guy who is going to enjoy the sympathy of college-educated progressives from the start of the story to its gruesome finish.
Miguel is a sexist who thinks women should be subordinate and that if they get out of hand a good beating is in order who, back in Mexico, lives among worshippers of monster-gods who practice human sacrifice. When the white woman with whom Miguel is regularly having sex, a sculptress, decides to kick Miguel to the curb and share her bed with the French Canadian instead, Miguel tries to summon monsters (great cats of some kind) to destroy the Quebecois. Then, in the story's climax, Miguel rapes the sculptress--after Miguel has beaten her down and penetrated her, she begins to enjoy being used this way.
In the end, the Canadian and the sculptress are both dead, and the cops shoot down their killer, Miguel, as he resists arrest. Are the monstrous felines who mauled the Canadian, and the aquatic goddess to whom Miguel dedicated the heart he tore from the still-living sculptress' chest, real, or just Miguel's hallucinations, perhaps drug induced?
A good story in which a lot is going on, all of it compelling. So much fiction is larded with fat and obscured with superfluous frills, but Scortia here only gives us sentences which offer value to the reader. Fans of Yog-Sothery, nasty sex and genre fiction that is about art and design or tries to say something about class conflict and ethnic conflict in North America (we've got an Hispanic who follows the native religion and tries to break out of his working-class background to achieve middle-class respectability among whites, a culturally sophisticated Jew who somehow screws up his finances, a red-headed slut who loves getting banged by foreigners, and a middle-class French Canadian Christian who has vulgar taste) should certainly check "The Goddess of the Cats" out. And maybe I should read more from Caution! Inflammable! some day.
"Down the Long Night" by William F. Nolan (1957)
Unfortunately, "Down the Long Night" is one of those less-than-credible psychological stories, rather than an actual weird story, plus one of those stories set in a hall of mirrors and funhouse at an amusement park or carnival. The whole thing feels banal and overwritten, with too much description of the locale but not enough characterization and emotion, and then in the end comes the confusing twist that you don't feel like bothering to figure out because you could not care less about the characters and the whole story just feels bogus anyway, lifeless and mechanical, like Nolan is just going through the motions. Thumbs down! "Down the Long Night" is not a joke story, though, I'll give it that.
Alan is a Hollywood screenwriter who pens detective thriller screenplays. Yes, this is one of those stories in which a guy who writes genre fiction finds himself in a genre fiction scenario. To me, this kind of thing (like the chase in the funhouse) feels very tired. Anyway, Alan is affianced to a hot chick, Jessica, who until recently was dating Alan's pal, Paul. Paul is the Bohemian intellectual type, neurotic and odd. Paul has called Alan up, saying he is in trouble, that Alan has to come meet him at the amusement park after dark, in the funhouse where the hall of mirrors is, because he (Paul) is hiding from the cops. Apparently Paul hangs out at this amusement park all the time.
Once Alan is lost in the funhouse, Paul begins playing with him, getting revenge--Paul knows his way around in the dark, and has access to the control panel and can turn on and off the lights and so forth. He also has a gun and a big knife. Alan finds Jess's naked dead body--Paul slew her, and is going to slay Paul next! There are chase scenes and fight scenes meant to be tense, and Paul accuses Alan of using him, alleging that Alan owes Paul his career and repaid Paul by spreading lies about him that ruined Paul's own career as well as his relationship with Jessica so Alan himself could get his mitts on Jessica. We also get some suggestive insights into Alan's own perhaps abnormal psychology. Paul ends up dying and Alan surviving, but when the police show up we can't be sure which of the two is the real villain, or what exactly happened, as Alan is an unreliable narrator who apparently compartmentalizes and forgets unpleasant memories--such as sabotaging other people's reputations--so maybe it was Alan that set up Paul and killed Jessica rather than the other way round. Bewildering and frustrating.
After reading the story in Men and Malice I took a quick look at a scan of the 2000 Nolan collection Down the Long Night. Nolan in that volume provides an intro to "Down the Long Night" in which he tells us the plot of the story is a collaboration between him and Charles Beaumont, and that some of the prose is actually Beaumont's. (There is no mention whatsoever of Beaumont in Men and Malice.) Nolan also talks about how Beaumont was his best friend and Beaumont was awesome, etc. So I guess Beaumont fans, whom I am led to believe are legion, should check out this story, no matter how lame and annoying I find it. Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we encourage people to make up their own minds after consulting the primary sources.
"Amphora" by Avram Davidson (1973)
Scortia's and Nolan's stories are very much California stories, set in the Golden State and featuring California characters (the artsy types with low morals, the cultist, the Mexican, the entrepreneurial Jew, the screenwriter, etc.) but Davidson's is set on the coast of Spanish West Africa and stars an international cast of people who have nothing to do with California. And while Scortia's and Nolan's stories are pretty damned serious, Davidson's is written in a sort of light jocular style. Now, you know I hate joke stories as a general rule, but there are some SF writers, like Jack Vance and Barry Malzberg, who can thread the needle and include in stories humor that is actually funny and that doesn't undermine the actual plot, atmosphere or SF content of a story. Today Davidson proves to be one of those guys. Here's a good sample of the subdued, character-based humor to be found in "Amphora":
The captain of the chartered boat sat in the shade of the cooktent drinking hot bottled beer, watching his one-man crew (who also acted as cook) play dominoes with the local headman. As the cook-mate made up his own rules and the headman simply cheated, the game was not without interest. Of the three natives who had shown up for work today--sometimes none appeared, sometimes the whole tribe--one sat cross-legged, looking at the pictures in a tattered and greasy Spanish comic book, and the others took turns searching one another's hair for lice.
It isn't nice or politically correct, but this humor is legitimately amusing and not absurdist or farcical but founded on real life human foibles and experiences, so it doesn't cause distraction or threaten suspension of disbelief.
The characters. Thomas Jefferson Northrup is an oil man from Oklahoma as well as an amateur archaeologist who fancies himself the next Heinrich Schliemann. He thinks the ancient Greeks had a presence here in northwest Africa, and he is here to prove it. Luigi di Benedictus is a Swiss inventor who is driving his experimental amphibious all-terrain-vehicle all over Africa on a test run. Gladys Northrup is T. J.'s less than faithful wife (she married him for his money) and she is having an affair with Eddy, T. J.'s assistant.
The plot. T. J. has spent most of his oil-derived millions on his crazy archaeological expeditions all over Latin America and Africa, and Gladys and Eddy hope the old man keels over sooner rather than later so there will be some money left for them. A local, Ali, is pissed off at T. J., so Gladys and Eddy come up with the idea of giving Ali a rifle and instructions to hunt them a gazelle or something for dinner, in hopes Ali will take this opportunity to murder T. J. T. J. has taken a ride with Benedictus in the Swiss engineer's oversized ATV to a site where he hopes to find amphora and thus prove his theory. Gladys drops the key to the gun rack in the bay, and Eddy pursues it to the bottom of the bay, where it falls into the mouth of an amphora buried in the sand. Trying to retrieve the key, Eddy gets his hand stuck inside the amphora and drowns and gets eaten by an octopus. Meanwhile, T. J., while looking for amphora, has found oil and will get rich again. The excitement of the new oil project leads T. J. to forget all about his theory that the Greeks were active down here, a theory he will never know was proven true by his vanished assistant, whose place will be taken by Benedictus. Goofy nerds T. J. and Benedictus, it appears, will live happily every after, pursuing their passions and making a stack of money, while villainous Eddy is dead and vile Gladys will have to live with the guilt that her evil led to the death of her lover--it is hinted she will go insane.
A fun little story. Thumbs up!
**********
Alright, a decent crop of stories. Obviously I thought Nolan's story was bad, but it still has value if you are a student of the genre, if only because of the Beaumont connection. So not a total waste of time. Scortia's story is a successful effort to marry the weird story, the exploitative sex and gore thriller story, and a sort of racial/class justice story and even manages to be a story about the power of art and the role of aesthetics in our lives. Wow. The Davidson is also about human passion and human evil that leads to death, but it has skillfully employed elements of humor and a more conventional, more comforting sense of justice.
More anthologized crime when next we meet here at MPorcius Fiction Log.
No comments:
Post a Comment