Three stories by Zealia Bishop and H. P. Lovecraft

Cover of the 1970 first edition of
The Horror in the Museum
and Other Revisions

H. P. Lovecraft, August Derleth tells us, spent a lot of time "revising and correcting manuscripts of prose and poetry sent to him by a variety of hopeful writers."  One such writer was Zealia Bishop, who reported that Lovecraft made so many changes to her manuscripts that it made her feel like "a complete failure as a writer."  Ouch!

The above quotes come from my copy of the "Corrected Fifth Printing" (2002) of Arkham House's The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions, a collection of stories H. P. Lovecraft worked on to varying degrees but which were initially started by other writers. According to S. T. Joshi, the three stories included in The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions that were circulated under Bishop's name in the 1920s and '30s, "The Curse of Yig," "The Mound," and "Medusa's Coil," are "close to original works by Lovecraft," they being "based on the scantiest of plot-germs" provided by Bishop.

I've never read these stories before, and I haven't read any Lovecraft in a long time, so let's check them out.

"The Curse of Yig"

"The Curse of Yig" has been widely anthologized, and after first seeing print in Weird Tales in 1929, was actually reprinted in a 1939 issue of that magazine.  It seems that the weird fiction community has given this one its stamp of approval--let's see if I can concur or if I have to play iconoclast on this one.

Our narrator is an "American Indian ethnologist" come to Oklahoma to investigate Native American mythology about snakes and the snake god Yig.  Indians and old white settlers are tight-lipped when it comes to the topic of Yig, "father of all snakes," but the researcher gets an eyeful and an earful from a medical doctor at an asylum. Eyeful: a glimpse of a totally insane person who slithers around on the floor of his cell like a snake!  Earful: the story of this pathetic creature's origin, a tale of pioneer settlers from Arkansas whose efforts to build a new life in Oklahoma were plagued by their fears of snakes and obsession with the folklore of Yig!

This is a really good horror story, well paced, well plotted and well written.  Among its strengths is its setting.  I guess because of where Lovecraft himself spent his life, weird stories seem to mostly take place in New England or the New York area, so it is a nice change of pace that "The Curse of Yig" draws on the lore of the American West and the history of the pioneers and their interactions with Plains Indians.  The descriptions of flat expanses, unceasing winds and red dust clouds succeed in making Oklahoma as creepy as the ancient woods and decrepit towns of the northeast.

After "The Curse of Yig" has generated an atmosphere of looming dread with its descriptions of the landscape and the pioneer couple's nerve-wracking journey and settlement comes the climax, a powerful scene of terror.  One of the pioneers sits trapped in the dark, surrounded, desperate to decipher what horrible atrocities the sounds she hears and shadows she glimpses signify, what evils may momentarily be visited upon her; this tense scene is followed by revelations of soul-wrenching tragedy and sickening gore.

No wonder "Curse of Yig" has been so widely republished--it works flawlessly.  A horror classic!

"The Mound"

"The Mound" was written in 1929-30, Joshi tells us, but didn't appear in Weird Tales until 1940.  The version that Weird Tales published had been severely edited by August Derleth, we are told; The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions is the first place the "unadulterated" manuscript was published.

To my surprise, "The Mound" is practically a sequel to "The Curse of Yig," featuring as narrator the same ethnologist.  He is in the same part of Oklahoma, now investigating a haunted mound, upon the summit of which figures, thought to be ghosts of long dead Indians, are regularly seen.  Numerous people over the decades who have gone to investigate the mound have returned insane, or simply failed to return.

Our narrator goes to the mound and discovers an old manuscript from the mid-16th century, written by a Spanish explorer named Zamacona. This Spaniard found an entrance to a vast underground cavern, lit by radiation of some kind, where lies a tremendous city, that of the Tsath, humans who are direct descendants of those brought to Earth by Great Cthulhu itself over a million years ago!  The people of Tsath are immortal telepaths, and are served by a slave class composed of the product of a program that bred conquered peoples with animals, amalgamations of humans and machines we would now call cyborgs, and the animated dead.

Zamacona kept copious notes about Tsath society, which is a kind of left-wing utopia thanks to mechanization, technocracy, socialism and eugenics.  "In government," our narrator relates, "Tsath was a kind of communistic or semi-anarchical state....Family organisation had long ago perished, and the civil and social distinction of the sexes had disappeared.....Poverty was unknown, and labour consisted only of certain administrative duties imposed by an intricate system of testing and selection." Lovecraft/Bishop describe the evolution of Tsath society in some detail; in the period of the Spanish manuscript the easy life has turned the Tsath somewhat decadent, and they are losing interest in science and history and indulging more and more in mysticism devoid of sincere belief and sensuality--"principal occupations" include "intoxication, torture of slaves, day-dreaming," and "gastronomical and emotional orgies...."

(Lovecraft thought the 18th century was the height of civilization and regretted the War of American Independence, which I guess is why he flings all those British spellings at us.)

Disgusted by the treatment of the slave-classes, whose members are blithely disassembled and put back together again Frankenstein-style and tortured in the arena for entertainment by the Tsath master-class, and even serve as steeds and cattle (yes, a source of meat), as well as the orgiastic and sensual Tsath religion, the conquistador wanted to leave, but, for security reasons, the Tsath forbid his return to the surface. Zamacona was provided a swank city apartment and inducted into one of the "large affection-groups" which have replaced "family units" among these creepos--whoa, is HPL poaching some of Ted Sturgeon and Bob Heinlein's territory here?  The Tsath guaranteed Zamacona that his affection-group would include "many noblewomen of the most extreme and art-enhanced beauty"--hubba hubba!

During his four years among the decadent Tsath, whose degeneration was accelerated by the Spaniard's presence, Zamacona made three escape attempts, the second effort with the help of a Tsath woman who still cherished outmoded ideas of monogamy and had fallen in love with the surface dweller.  When they were caught she was tortured in the arena and her headless body turned into an undead slave, an automaton charged with standing guard on the mound of the story's title--her living dead cadaver is one of the "ghosts!"

The horror climax of the story has the narrator, the 20th century ethnologist, returning to the mound after reading the manuscript, digging an entrance to the world of Tsath, but then turning back in mind-shattering terror when confronted by an undead guardian whose cobbled together form includes pieces of Zamacona's body, indicating that the Spanish explorer's third attempt to escape was also a failure.  

The 60-plus-page "The Mound" has more in common with Lovecraft's famous "At The Mountains of Madness" (published in 1936 in Astounding but apparently written in 1931) and "The Shadow Out of Time" (also published in Astounding in 1936) than it does with the compact (16 pages) and economical "Curse of Yig," despite these two Bishop stories sharing a narrator and setting.  While "Curse of Yig" is a true horror story, all dread and shock, suspense and gore, "The Mound," like those two Astounding serials, is a science fiction story (with horror elements) about an alien civilization, complete with a detailed fictional history for that alien culture and an expression of Lovecraft's own elitist technocratic politics and interest in decaying, degenerate, peoples.

"The Mound" is good--the horror components and SF components all work--but it drags a bit (unlike "Curse of Yig," which feels like it is the perfect length) and it doesn't feel fresh--at times it really feels like a North American version of the Antarctican "At The Mountains of Madness" or Australian "The Shadow Out of Time."  It is more ambitious than "Curse of Yig," and has something to say about society, but is less entertaining.

"Medusa's Coil"

The history of "Medusa's Coil" is similar to that of "The Mound."  First written in 1930, a version that had been "radically revised and abridged" by Derleth was printed in Weird Tales in 1939; it wasn't until 1970 that the public had access to the original version when it appeared here in The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions.

A guy, our narrator, is driving at night through southern Missouri; when he gets lost and it looks like rain he stops at a decaying mansion to ask if he can stay the night. The decrepit old hermit who lives in the mansion tells its, and his own, story of decline.

The mansion, built in 1816, was originally the center of a plantation built by a transplanted Louisiana grandee, the grandfather of the current lonely owner, Antoine de Russy.  In the description of the estate's early-19th-century grandeur, we get a sentence which gives us an idea why in 2016 the people who run the World Fantasy Award stopped fashioning their trophy in the likeness of a Gahan Wilson caricature of Lovecraft:

There had been, at one time, as many as 200 negroes in the cabins which stood on the flat ground in the rear--ground that the river had now invaded--and to hear them singing and laughing and playing the banjo at night was to know the fullest charm of a civilisation and social order now sadly extinct.

Our narrator uses the word "negro," but in the telling of his tale de Russy says "nigger" more times than I could easily keep track of.

De Russy had a son, Denis, whom he sent to Paris to study.  Among the turn of the century decadents hanging around the City of Lights, Denis met a beautiful woman, Marceline, with long black hair (de Russy compares her to "an Oriental princess" you might see in an Aubrey Beardsley drawing; maybe Lovecraft has the Salome illustrations in mind here?) who was leading a sort of quasi-bogus cult of hipsters who claimed to believe in antediluvian magic.  Denis married this beauty with olive skin and hair that seemed to almost have a life of its own and brought her back to the Missouri plantation.  De Russy and the American-born black servants got a bad vibe from her, but one of the blacks on the plantation, a Zulu woman born in Africa over 100 years old named Sophonisba, doted on and fawned over Marceline.

One of Denis' buddies from the Sorbonne, American artist Frank Marsh, came for an extended visit and a sort of love triangle developed; Marsh and Marceline, both sensitive artistic types, had more in common with each other than either did with Denis, and spent a lot of time together.  Marsh started painting her picture and Marceline fell in love with him.  Things came to a head when it became apparent to Marceline that Marsh was not in love with her at all--in fact, he had come to the plantation to warn Denis that his wife was an evil monster linked to ancient Cthulhu and that whole R'lyeh crowd!  Marceline attacked Denis, and he killed her with a blow from a machete.  When he saw that her four- or five-foot long braid was still moving, that it had a life independent of Marceline's gory corpse, he decided to cut the hair off her dead skull so he could throw it in afire.  Mistake!  The braid moved like a snake, out of the room and into Marsh's room, where it constricted the painter to death python-style!  Denis then committed suicide, leaving poor Dad to clean up the mess; de Russy buried the three disgusting corpses in the basement.

But that's not all!  The US-born black employees started complaining of seeing a snake in the basement, and refused to go down there, while ancient Sophonisba started hanging out down there all the time!  The plantation's finances collapsed and soon de Russy was left alone.... or was he?  His story told, de Russy takes the narrator upstairs to see the painting, revealing the final, ultimate, horror--not only was Marceline an evil witch with monster hair, she had a proportion of African blood!  The figures in the painting seem to move, and in a fit of shock, the narrator wrecks the canvas, causing de Russy to panic--the painting has in the past spoken to him and demanded that he protect it!  Or else!  The men flee the house, but de Russy is too slow--the risen corpse of Marceline catches him.  Our narrator makes it to his car and escapes with memories which will haunt him to the last of his days!

This is a good horror story, though current sensibilities will recoil at the way it exploits whites' fears of blacks and men's fears of women.  It also touches upon a parent's worries about his children, the kind of jealousy that can spring up between friends when an attractive woman is around, and Lovecraft's common themes of decay (the passing of the Southern way of life as well as the collapse of a respectable family that traced its lineage back to the Crusades--remember that Lovecraft's own family could trace its ancestry back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony but by his lifetime was facing financial, psychological and physical collapse) and miscegenation.  The pacing is good, and the characters, driven by sexual and family relationships as are so many of us, are easier to identify with than your typical Lovecraft character, who is some kind of lone, alienated researcher.  The images--the collapsing mansion, the seductive woman, her animated hair slinking around like a serpent--are vivid and memorable.

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"Curse of Yig" was surprisingly good, and "Medusa's Coil" nearly as effective, while "The Mound" is an almost archetypal Lovecraft story; solid, but a little too long, in spots a little too slow and dry, and too reminiscent of other examples of Lovecraft's work.  I've enjoyed these stories, so more Lovecraft revisions in our next episode!  

1982 stories from Russ, Effinger, Ellison, and Platt & McCarthy

The cover illustrates "Starhaven"
by Platt & McCarthy

Back in February I read the Thomas Monteleone story from my copy of the January 1982 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.  Let's read some more from its 34-year-old pages.

"Souls" by Joanna Russ

Am I really going to read a forty-page story by a feminist college professor who (according to wikipedia) thought pornography was "the essence of evil in society?"  Besides seeming ridiculous, such an idea goes against all my free speech sensibilities.  What am I thinking?  Well, "Souls" won a Hugo and some other awards; let's see if we can figure out why.

"Souls" is set in medieval Europe, and is the tale of the Abbess Radegunde, narrated by an old man who knew her when he was a seven-year-old boy.  Radegunde is apparently some kind of genius--she was able to read at the age of two, and after an education in Rome could read and speak every conceivable language and was an expert on Christian scripture and classical literature.  She is also a skilled healer of broken bodies and soother of troubled minds.  Beloved by all for her extraordinary kindness and generosity, Radegunde also has great powers of persuasion, so that her words are always obeyed, making her the natural leader of the German village where her abbey is located.  This sounds like just the kind of protagonist a feminist college professor would dream up, a woman so good and so smart that everybody does whatever she tells them to!

When Vikings attack the village, Radegunde tries non-violent resistance and to appease the raiders by just handing over all the abbey's treasures.  This works about as well as you'd expect it to.  After half the villagers get massacred and all the young women get raped, Radegunde uses her uncanny abilities and extensive knowledge to heal the sole Viking casualty and to ease the mind of one of the rape victims, who has gone insane.

In the second half of the story we learn there is more to Radegunde than meets the eye!  She has vast psychic powers--she can see what is going on anywhere in the world and read and control the minds of people nearby!  She has contempt and pity for everyone because everybody is so selfish and greedy and hateful!  She doesn't believe any of that Christian gobbledygook herself, but is more than willing to tell everybody comforting lies like "your friends who got murdered by the Vikings are happy up in heaven!"

The crisis of the Viking attack spurs Radegunde's mind, and, casting her clairvoyance/remote viewing powers skyward, she discovers she is not really human, but a member of a peaceful space faring race!  I think she is on Earth to study us and try to improve us, her alien nature hidden from her own mind, kind of like in Doris Lessing's Briefing for a Descent into Hell.  Her true origin was concealed from her because our world is so evil that it would drive one of these goody goody aliens insane to live here--witnessing the evil of the Earthman, for these extraterrestrial paragons, is like being raped by a Viking!

Before the Vikings can drag her off to slavery Radegunde's true fellows arrive in their spaceship and whisk her away from our crappy planet!  (The Earthlings think she was carried to Heaven by angels.)

So, "Souls" is one of the many SF stories which damn the human race for its manifold sins by contrasting us with utopian aliens.  People love these kinds of stories--no wonder it won a Hugo!  But "Souls" is better than a lot of those other stories which denounce our civilization; Russ focuses on characters and their emotions, has a good writing style, and fills her story with lots of classical and medieval factoids.  Maybe this story really deserved that Hugo!

"Souls" is a long story, and Russ has room to fit in thought-provoking philosophical points and psychological theories.  One of the themes that comes up several times in "Souls," one that is reminiscent of Russ's "Zanzibar Cat," is the power of the storyteller and the artist.  The Abbess's storytelling helps mend the psyche of the rape victim, and, reminding me of Russ's abomination of pornography, Radegunde relates how nude statues she saw in Italy excited in her a sexual desire.  Reminding me that Russ was a lesbian, Radegunde explains that she never took a lover in Italy because men are universally evil--it was impossible for her to find one who didn't disgust her.  The idea that real men can't measure up to idealized depictions such as those of Greek gods also reminded me of one of the standard criticisms of pornography, that it damages real-life erotic relationships by creating unattainable expectations.

So, my fears that "Souls" would be an impenetrable New Wave morass or a leftist harangue were unfounded; this is a smoothly written traditional science-fiction story with a feminist edge; that edge doesn't overwhelm the literary virtues of piece, which is engaging and entertaining as well as polemical.  I didn't expect to be giving this one a positive review, but life is full of surprises.

"Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordsperson" by George Alec Effinger

In the intro to this story, editor Ed Ferman calls it "preppy science fiction." When I was a kid there was a lot of talk about preppies, jokes about them and their clothes and so forth, but I never met any preppies and really had no idea who they were or why I should be laughing at them. As an adult, of course, it looks to me like these jokes were just a lot of naked class envy, at least on the part of the people I knew as a kid.  Maybe actual preppies had a good sense of humor and enjoyed all the jokes.

Anyway, "Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordsperson" is a parody of Edgar Rice Burroughs' immortal classic A Princess of Mars, one of my favorite books.  What if, instead of an American Civil War veteran, an upper-middle-class college girl who loves to shop was magically transported to a war torn Barsoom?  Effinger doesn't produce a plot here, he just exactly copies various things that happen in Burroughs and has his broad caricature of a character slotted into the John Carter space, in the same way an episode of the Simpsons or South Park will have everything that happened in The Prisoner or Great Expectations happen to one of the cartoon's regular characters.

In my teens and twenties I thought this kind of thing was funny, but I'm 44 years old now, and I thought this story a waste of my time.  Presumably there are lots of people who find this story amusing--believe it or not, it has like ten sequels!

"The Outpost Undiscovered by Tourists" by Harlan Ellison

Gadzooks, another derivative joke story!  This one is a parody of the story of Christmas, full of ethnic jokes and references to 20th Century pop culture.  Kaspar (Chinese), Balthazar (black) and Melchior (Jewish) drive a Rolls Royce across the desert, following the star that marks the site of the messiah's birthplace.  Like the Effinger, I thought it lame, but I'm sure it has its partisans, people who think it hilarious that Balthazar calls Kaspar "Yellow Peril" and carries around the collected works of James Baldwin and a "hair-conking outfit," that Kaspar calls Balthazar "Black-is-Beautiful over there," and that Melchior is a hypochondriac who says things like "those latkes are sitting right here in my chest" and "You know, it's funny, but he [the baby Jesus] doesn't look Jewish."

"Starhaven" by Charles Platt and Shawna McCarthy

Ed Ferman tells us this is a "SF gothic."  You can believe I was hoping, praying, that this was not another feeble joke story.

"Starhaven" is a parody of or homage to those "gothic romances" in which an innocent young woman is swept off her feet by a wealthy man and, in his big old house, discovers sinister secrets.  The big old house in this story is the centuries-old space station, Starhaven.  Once aboard with her beau, the narrator discovers a secret door, meets the crazy great-grandfather, and is sexually enjoyed by clones of her boyfriend whom she initially mistakes for him.  Those clones are illegal, and so to protect the secret of their existence the great-grandpappy will now try to murder her! Fortunately the old robot butler and her boyfriend help her escape the station.  The fiance declares that he truly loves her, and is willing to give up his family's wealth to marry her.  The End.

Platt and McCarthy play it more or less straight ("Starhaven" feels more like a pastiche than a satire), and the jokes aren't too distracting or outlandish; I'll judge this one acceptable.

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If you follow the SF gossip you perhaps remember that a few years ago Barry Malzberg got in trouble with feminists because he admitted he thought some chick was hot or something; I don't recall the details.  I felt bad for poor Barry, but something in this issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction made me consider that Malzberg's suffering might be justly filed under the heading of "poetic justice."  The first letter in the magazine's letter column is from Charles Platt, who is writing to defend himself from a claim by Malzberg in the pages of F&SF that Platt doesn't care for women writers.  Platt spends the letter, of which I provide a scan here, detailing the evidence that he likes the work of numerous female writers and has supported women authors in his capacity as an editor of books and periodicals.  It makes it a little harder to sympathize with Malzberg as a victim of unfair charges of sexism if he himself has made a practice of levelling, apparently unfounded, accusations of sexism at other members of the SF community.  I wonder if Malzberg ever explained or apologized for his comments about Platt.

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This is a good issue if you are into joke stories or feminist topics--Michael Bishop's Books column includes much discussion of stories by women, including two stories by Russ.  The Russ and Monteleone stories justify my own purchase, and there are still three pieces of fiction in the magazine I haven't read yet.

     

Ben, In the World by Doris Lessing

"He couldn't manage an aeroplane, he couldn't manage luggage, what's he going to do in a place where people don't speak English?"

"I've thought of everything, Reet."  And he detailed his plan.

The same day I brought Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child back to one public library I borrowed the sequel from another, eager to see what happened to Ben, the monstrous child introduced in the 1988 novel.  Ben, In the World was published in 2000; I read the public library's first edition of the Harper Collins hardcover.

The tone of Ben, In the World is very different from that of The Fifth Child.  The 1988 novel was a kind of horror story, primarily confined to a single setting, full of claustrophobic menace--at any moment Ben might commit some atrocity, and even when he wasn't killing a pet or attacking a sibling, you could feel the fear and psychological damage suffered by his middle-class family's members as his mere presence ruined their happy lives and strained their formerly warm and loving relationships with each other.  Ben, in the World is a sort of sad sack Candide thing about the downtrodden and income inequality, stuff you can read in any newspaper or magazine any day of the week, in which Ben travels around Europe and Latin America associating with various criminals who take advantage of him and prostitutes who sympathize with and help him.  There is also a pretty conventional animal rights angle and one conventional but effective comic scene which I thought the highlight of the book.

In The Fifth Child the story, while its narration was a detached third person, was more or less told from the point of view of Ben's family.  Ben was a mysterious, menacing "other," a force (perhaps evil, perhaps just alien) which wrecked people's happy lives.  This sequel is told (again, albeit somewhat coldly and distantly) from the point of view of Ben and the poor people who love him.  In this telling Ben is a stranger in a strange land, a lost soul in an evil world; Ben is the victim, and the world the villain, unlike in the first volume, in which Ben was the menace who shook the world of his family, shattering everybody's peace of mind.  The Fifth Child was about a family and its harrowing story, Ben, In the World is about the world and how crummy (middle-class) people are, and is full of the bourgeoisie-exploiting-the-proletariat stuff and laments that it is money that makes the world go round that you might expect from a former member of the British Communist Party.

The start of the novel reminded me of horror and science fiction stories in which we see the world through the monster's eyes, briefly inhabit its alien values and desires. (I'm thinking of A. E. van Vogt's "Black Destroyer" and "Vault of the Beast" specifically, but it is a pretty common device.)  Ben stalks through London, in fear of everybody, driven by hunger so that he catches birds and eats them raw, animated by a hatred for his brother Paul, so that when he sees Paul in a park he has to restrain his manic lust to murder him.  But then the novel shifts its focus to other characters.  In The Fifth Child those who observed Ben, middle-class people, did so with fear; in Ben, in the World there are several lower-class characters, mostly women, who sympathize with and help Ben.

One such character is Rita, a seventeen-year-old prostitute.  She likes Ben because of the violent way he has sex with her, ripping away her clothes and entering her from behind before she can provide affirmative consent.  "This experience--a rape, that was what it amounted to--ought to be making her feel angry...but she had been thrilled by that double rape...the teeth in her neck...the grunt like a roar."  In The Fifth Child Ben was repeatedly compared by characters to a goblin, troll or gnome; in Ben, In the World he is again and again described by people as a "yeti."  When he is naked, women notice how unnaturally hairy his back and thighs are.  Less cryptozoologically, his behavior, his barks and roars, his fondness for raw meat, liken him to an animal.  When Rita describes her experiences with Ben she relates that "...it hadn't been like being with a man, more like an animal.  'You know, like dogs.'"

Ben is stupid and ignorant, and easy prey for manipulative characters who apparently represent the middle class.  When doing casual work, building contractors and Polish college students cheat Ben of his wages or just pick his pocket.  Rita's pimp, a former thief who gets in a bind when he invests in the stock market, becomes a millionaire by sending Ben to France on a risky mission as a drug mule.  The pimp even joins the aristocracy by purchasing a title!  (Lessing spends lots of time describing secondaty characters' backstories, mostly how they came from broken families living in poverty and took up petty crime or prostitution, and on how their lives proceed after their connection with Ben ends.  The book, as the title hints, is about "the world" as much as it is about Ben.)

The most entertaining part of the book is the tense and comic sequence covering Ben's trip to France with the massive shipment of hard drugs.  Ben is so childlike, so ignorant and stupid, he doesn't even know what he is doing, and almost queers the deal--other characters have to strive to keep him on course.

Once on the coast of France, Ben, who can barely communicate in English much less French, and who hates the bright seaside sun, is at a loss (Rita and her pimp didn't arrange for their patsy to return to England.)  Then an American film-maker spots him and decides to make Ben the star of a movie about a primitive race of jungle dwellers!  He takes Ben to Brazil, where Ben meets another seventeen-year-old prostitute, Teresa, a peasant whose family left their village because of some dustbowl thing and moved to the favelas of Rio.  Teresa is beautiful, and made money and met the movie guy turning tricks at a hotel.  Much to Ben's frustration Teresa won't have sex with him, but Teresa does take Ben under her protection.

And Ben does need protection!  An American mad scientist learns of Ben, the genetic throwback, and, like in E. T. and the recent tedious remake of E. T. with the interminable train crash scene, Ben is seized so experiments can be conducted on him but then rescued by Teresa and her new boyfriend, a guy from an abandoned village like hers.  It is easy to rescue Ben because the mad scientist doesn't put a guard on Ben.  Ben is in a cage, in a filthy room full of monkeys and cats and dogs who are being experimented on, a scene which reminds the reader of the "institution" from The Fifth Child.    

One of the more interesting aspects of the novel is its skepticism or even hostility to science; Lessing compares science to a religion, and portrays not only fanatics like the American scientist but a disillusioned worshipper in Teresa, who once held science and scientists in awe but then sees the way they treat animals and Ben in pursuit of their faith.

Another good thing Lessing does with Teresa is portray her relationship with her new boyfriend.  Not only is their love sort of touching, but the way Teresa's self-appointed role as guardian of Ben interferes and inhibits this new relationship is a subtle reminder of how Ben ruined the once happy relationship of his parents back in England.

Teresa and her love interest take Ben to the Andes, where there are rock paintings of people much like Ben.  I thought maybe Lessing was going to give Ben a happy ending and have him discover a lost tribe of people like himself.  (This kind of thing happened in Michael Bishop's Ancient of Days.)  Instead Ben throws himself off a cliff to his death.  Teresa and company decide this is for the best, and the book's final line is Teresa's teary confession: "...we are pleased that he is dead and we don't have to think about him."

Ben, In the World is well-written and has plenty of good scenes so I don't hesitate to recommend it, but it was not really what I was hoping for.  The Fifth Child was an atmospheric, mysterious, tense work about people that I could identify with who were in trouble; Ben, In the World is a brightly lit satire primarily concerned with banal hot button issues.

I'll definitely read more Lessing, probably Briefing for a Descent Into Hell or one of the Canopus in Argos books next.  We'll see what the area libraries have to offer.

Three British Horror Stories: Coppard, Lumley, and Campbell

This weekend I was able to drag myself away from Gemcraft 2: Chasing Shadows long enough to read three horror stories; I didn't specifically set out to read British stories, but after I had read them that was the only thing I could think of that tied them together.

Utamaro print mentioned in "Arabesque"

"Arabesque: The Mouse" by A. E. Coppard (1920)

Science fiction writer Michael Bishop, in the notes section at the back of his collection Brighten to Incandescence, praises "Arabesque: The Mouse," a story by A. E. Coppard. I'd never even heard of Coppard, but a book which includes "Arabesque: The Mouse" is available for free at the Internet Archive, so I decided to check it out.

This story is full of stirring, even shocking images.  A middle-aged man sits alone in an apartment with a Russian novel; an Utamaro print showing a woman nursing a child hangs on the wall.  The man observes a mouse, and then reminisces about his unhappy life.  He recalls coming home as a child to find his mother squeezing her breasts and spraying her milk into the fireplace.  This is one of his last memories of his mother, because the next day she was run over by a horse drawn cart.  The cart crushed her hands, so a surgeon amputated her hands; despite (or because) of this treatment, she died that night.  More unhappy reminiscences and scenes follow.

As the title suggests, this is not a plot-driven story, but a sort of grotesque decoration on the themes of women's breasts, heart beats, and severed hands, and the power of memory to weigh us down, misguide us and make us unhappy.  A strange and effective story.

"Snarker's Son" by Brian Lumley (1980)

S. T. Joshi, the literary scholar and atheist activist who has done so much that fans of weird fiction and literate horror are thankful for, seems to really have it in for Brian Lumley.  I admire Joshi, but I have enjoyed quite a bit (not all) of the Brian Lumley I have read.  Lumley doesn't have a lot of literary pretensions, and doesn't take the philosophical underpinnings of  H. P. Lovecraft's work very seriously.  Often Lumley just uses Lovecraftian images or ideas as furniture or settings for adventure stories.  When those adventure stories are good, they are fun.  So, when I had a chance to buy Screaming Science Fiction for ten cents, I did so.  To my surprise this was a signed edition.

The first story in Screaming Science Fiction is the quite short “Snarker’s Son.” A lost little boy is helped in finding his father by a London police officer. The boy is from an alternate universe (where the British capitol is “Mondon, Eenland”) and in reuniting the child with his father the policeman is transported to this strange world. Confused, the police officer fails to follow the natives' curious advice and gets eaten by a monster.

This is a pedestrian story; there is just not much to it, and nothing new. How the boy and then the bobby travel between universes is not explained, and neither is it explained why in Mondon the lights are shut off at 10:30 PM and everyone hides inside, nor is it explained why or how the underground train tunnels are now home to giant monsters. The alternate universe city with a stringent black out reminds me of the alternate universe New York in Frederic Brown’s What Mad Universe (1949), and the scene with the monster at the end seems to have been inspired by the appearance of the monster in the penultimate chapter of H. P. Lovecraft’s 1936 “At the Mountains of Madness.” (The narrator of the novella and his comrade repeatedly compare the tubular protoplasmic monster that emerges at speed from a cave tunnel to a subway train.)

“Snarker’s Son” is an inoffensive but forgettable trifle.  

"Getting it Wrong" by Ramsey Campbell (2011)

I read this in A Book of Horrors, edited by the indefatigable Stephen Jones, author and editor of over 120 books.  In the intro to the anthology, Jones complains about the current trend of "horror" stories that are really romance novels or detective stories starring vampires, werewolves and zombies.  A Book of Horrors aims to appeal to people who want stories that are truly scary or disturbing.

I have an ambivalent attitude towards Ramsey Campbell; I have liked a few of his stories, but have found many to be uninspiring.  I haven't abandoned hope, though, of becoming a Campbell fan, and with fingers crossed started "Getting it Wrong."

A murderous psycho has kidnapped a woman who works at a movie theater.  He asks her film trivia, and if she gets a question wrong, he tortures her!  Fortunately, the psycho allows his victim to telephone a friend for help answering the questions.  Unfortunately, the colleague she calls thinks it is all a joke and doesn't try to give the correct answers!      

This story is reasonably well-written, and Campbell adds layers of alienation and frustration to it - the colleague is a film nerd with no friends who has been frustrated in his career as well as his social life.  The problem with the story is that it is clear what is going on after like three pages, but the story is 15 pages long, so there aren't really any surprises or shocks for the last 80% of the story.  People who like old films (James Dean, Cary Grant, Alfred Hitchcock, The Three Stooges) may enjoy all the movie references.

"Getting it Wrong" is a little better than the Lumley, but not much.

*****************

Of the three stories, only Coppard's "Arabesque: The Mouse" is really scary or disturbing.  Michael Bishop has not steered me wrong.  The Lumley and Campbell are competent but uninspired; both men have done better work.   

Tanith Lee & Michael Bishop Horror Stories from 1983

On the weekend I purchased this 1997 paperback edition of a 1983 anthology of horror stories (note the skulls and crows on the cover - scary!) at Half Price Books for one dollar because there were stories in it by Michael Bishop and Tanith Lee.  Gallery of Horror (hardcover title: The Dodd Mead Gallery of Horror) was edited by Charles L. Grant.  On the first page a very cool stamp indicates the book was once in the library of a William L. Trotter.  Trotter must have been a serious reader; if the pen marks on the contents page are his, he read every story and even noted how many pages long each one was!  When I get an anthology like this I usually look at the contents page, dismiss half the authors because I have never heard of them, a third of the authors because I have heard of them and don't like them or don't care about them, then read one or two of the remaining handful of stories.  I envy your discipline Mr. Trotter!

So far I've read two of the included stories, those by Michael Bishop and Tanith Lee, whose work I have discussed a little on this blog before.

"Gravid Babies" by Michael Bishop

Written in the present tense, "Gravid Babies" is a humor piece (bleh) about an academic couple in Carrion City, Colorado, where the sole significant employer is a hospital for werewolves.  Mary is the head psychiatrist at the hospital; she also works to promote the large oeuvre of the popular female novelist who provided the scholarship that financed Mary's education and who financed the construction of the hospital.  Her husband Russell is a stay-at-home dad who is taking a correspondence course that trains ghostwriters of celebrity biographies.  One of his assignments is to copy chapters word for word, long hand, from Rousseau's Confessions.  Another is to pen chapters of an autobiography "of an unforgettable character."  Mary arranges for Russell to have an interview with a werewolf to provide him raw material for this assignment, and disaster ensues after the werewolf bites Mary and Russell's infant daughter.

I am not interested in horror comedy, horror parodies, horror satires.  Edward Gorey, Charles Adams, Gahan Wilson, the "Scream" movies, "Shaun of the Dead," Hello Kitty as Cthulhu, all that stuff leaves me cold.  I am also sick of humor based on pop culture references like you find on "The Simpsons" or "South Park," both of which I enjoyed for their first five or ten seasons.  So I am not the audience for "Gravid Babies," with its jocular references to Hollywood werewolves (like calling lycanthropy "Chaney's Syndrome"), 1983 personages like Studs Terkel, Alexander Haig, Ronald Reagan, David Stockman, and Donkey Kong, and even Peanuts (a day care center is named after Lucy van Pelt.)  Some of the jokes are clever, but didn't make me laugh, and I suppose the idea of a prepubescent girl giving birth to a litter of dogs is pretty horrible, but in the context of this silly jokey story it didn't horrify me.

So, thumbs down for this one. 

"Nunc Dimittis" by Tanith Lee

All you classical scholars and devoted Catholics out there already know that nunc dimittis means "now you dismiss."

This is one of Lee's stories in which she romanticizes, or at least makes sympathetic, decadent, perverted, and evil people.  I guess you could say this is a kind of mood piece, sad and sentimental, but also a bit twisted.  There is a lot of description of people's beautiful hair and clothes, people are said to move like dancers, beyond the rain-spattered window stand gaunt and leafless trees in the grey morning light, that sort of thing.  When I see those pale women in black clothes with long black hair (I used to see them out east on the street and in the subway, now I just see them on TV selling mummies and automatons) I always think this is what they are going for. 

A many-centuries old vampire princess living in an unspecified 20th century European city is growing weak, her beauty fading.  Her devoted servant, Vaselyu Gorin, is also feeling the years; in fact, though he retains his physical strength, in a few days he will be dead.  Gorin ventures out from the vampire's beautiful home into the town, sits in cafes sipping coffee and stalks the streets, looking for someone to replace him as the vampire's servant.  He encounters a beautiful young man with eyes like a leopard's pelt who calls himself Snake.  Snake survives by mugging old people and acting as a bisexual gigolo and prostitute.  A perfect candidate.  Over the next few days Gorin watches jealously as Snake goes through the same process Gorin himself went through over a century ago.  When Gorin heads off to his grave he knows that the vampire princess, who raised him from the gutter and taught him to love fine art and music, took him all over the world and taught him eight languages, will do the same for Snake, and that in turn Snake will revivify her, and she will once again plague the populace, a beautiful huntress.

This is a well-written and entertaining story, but at the same time you can see it as ridiculous.  Readers may laugh or roll their eyes at the names, for example.  (The princess's name is Darejan Draculas - the extra "s," Gorin tells Snake, denotes that she is from a different branch of the famous vampire family.)  The story is also ambiguous, even confusing.  To what extent is the reader supposed to admire and sympathize with these people because of their beauty, taste, and deep feelings, and to what extent be revolted by their crimes?  Is the story a reminder of the seductiveness of evil, or a subtle dig at aristocrats (or rich people in general) who may have good qualities and abilities but take advantage of their inferiors?  Could it be a story about the sacrifices people make for love, or how those we love exploit us?

Maybe one of the strengths of the story is that, while it is pretty clear what is going on, what it means and how we feel about it is reflective of the reader's own beliefs and experiences.  "Nunc Dimittis" is worth reading, in any case.

*************

So far, one for two, as people who watch sports say.  And "batting .500."  I think they also say that.  I will probably read a few more stories in this collection before issuing a final ruling.  I wish old William L. Trotter had put a grade next to each title, as well as a check mark and page count.  Then I could admire his taste as well as his discipline, impressive stamp, and arithmetical skills.     

Ancient of Days by Michael Bishop

Last month I read Michael Bishop’s “Blooded on Arachne,” a pretty good short story. Joachim Boaz at sfruminations and Jesse at Speculiction both recently gave quite positive reviews to Bishop works. I knew there was a copy of Bishop’s Ancient of Days on the shelf at the Des Moines Central Library, so decided to check it out while in Des Moines last week. It was absent from its place amongst the many Anne Bishop books, and to my surprise there wasn’t even a record of the book in the online catalog. Was I thinking of a different library? I had just seen it here a month ago, hadn’t I? Luckily, I found it while poring over the many shelves of the vast book sale, and purchased it for a mere 25 cents.

Ancient of Days is a novel in three parts. In the first part, “Her Habiline Husband” (yes, as in his award-winning novel No Enemy But Time, an element of this Michael Bishop book is the sexual relationship between a 20th century human and a prehistoric hominid) we meet the principal characters, Paul Loyd, owner of a gourmet restaurant in a small Georgia town, his ex-wife, successful artist RuthClaire, and “Adam,” shipwrecked member of a tribe of homo habilis who have survived in African caves for thousands of years, only to be, unbeknwost to the outside world, enslaved in the 19th and 20th centuries and dragged to the Caribbean. This 70 page section of the 350 page book is partly about the response of 20th century Americans to the appearance of this prehistoric man in our modern world, partly about the personal relationships of Paul, RuthClaire, and Adam, told by narrator Paul.

In some ways “Her Habiline Husband,” which originally appeared on its own in 1983 as a novella and was nominated for a Nebula, is like a conventional, non-SF story. Paul hopes he can get back together with the sexy RuthClaire and is jealous of her relationship with Adam, religious broadcasters and racist bigots object to Adam and his relationship with RuthClaire, the KKK kidnaps the main characters and then the police and the Georgia version of the FBI investigate. One of the remarkable things about the story is the rather mundane reaction most of the characters exhibit to Adam’s appearance: to Paul, Adam is a romantic rival; to the KKK, Adam is a miscegenating nigger; to the government, he is an illegal alien; to black activists, he is the victim of white exploitation. The astounding appearance of this living fossil does very little to change people’s worldviews, an interesting tack for Bishop to take, and not necessarily the one we expect in SF, the genre that often portrays paradigm shifts and aims at evoking “a sense of wonder.”  Instead of something amazing happening and our world being forever changed, something amazing happens and everyone continues on with business as usual.

The more science-fictiony aspects of the story relate to an ambitious young scientist who wants to get his hands on Adam to study; the other characters accuse him of being more interested in Adam as a vehicle to receiving government grants than as a source of groundbreaking knowledge. There is also a joke reference to A. E. Van Vogt (page 32 of this edition) which I got a kick out of. (Van Vogt was a fan of Bishop’s, apparently.) “Her Habiline Husband” also has lots of religious undertones and overtones; among other examples, Ruth Claire’s estate, formerly Paul’s, is called Paradise Farm, and much of Ruth Claire’s art consists of paintings of angels. (After Adam achieves fame, she paints a series on the evolution of mankind.)

Bishop is a good writer and the characters are all interesting, and “Her Habiline Husband” is a good story.

The second part of Ancient of Days, “His Heroic Heart,” picks up the story of Paul, RuthClaire, and Adam some months later. In less than a year Adam has learned how to drive a car, can read and write (via a typewriter) in English, and speak in sign language. Fascinated by religion and concerned about the status of his soul, Adam reads C.S. Lewis and other religious writers and arranges a meeting with a televangelist. Adam has also taken up painting, and has an exhibition at a gallery. Eventually he even has surgery to his jaw that allows him to speak.  Instead of transforming our world, Adam, a great scientific discovery, is himself transformed so to better fit our world.

RuthClaire gives birth to her and Adam’s son, and the KKK kidnaps the child, so there’s a lot of business with ransom notes and police detectives and phone taps. This police procedural stuff doesn’t interest me very much, and Bishop doesn’t make it particularly tense or exciting.  (In general, Bishop's writing makes little emotional component, at least in this book.)

Bishop addresses various 1980s controversies, and as one who lived through these controversies I have to admit I found these parts of the book a little tiresome. Bishop and his characters offer opinions on the Muriel boatlift, public funding of the arts, obscenity in art, defense spending, 24-hour cable news, televangelism, and performance art. Even the Cabbage Patch Kids get a mention.

“His Heroic Heart” is even more like a conventional piece of mainstream fiction than “Her Habiline Husband,” and is twice as long. It is well written, but the story is sort of mundane, and it doesn’t deliver the sort of things we look to SF for; it is simply the story of a sophisticated middle-class mixed-race family in the U.S. South being preyed upon by racist working-class jerks. I suppose the SF element is provided by Adam and his religious awakening and evolution; there are hints that he has the potential to be a Christ-like or Gandhi-like figure of great wisdom who is willing to forgive those who have trespassed against him, but this sort of thing takes up few pages. I was disappointed.

The last section of Ancient of Days, “Heritor’s Home,” is 100 pages long. Adam and RuthClaire have left Georgia and now live on a tiny Haitian island, where they are in contact with the last living group of homo habilis, a tiny doomed tribe of four individuals, none of whom will reproduce. Scientists hope to study the habilines, and Adam and company try to keep the habilines hidden from them. Paul and his new wife go to Haiti to visit, and there is a lot of material about her jealousy of RuthClaire and Paul’s jealousy over his wife’s former boyfriend, one of the intruding scientists. Adam’s religious beliefs and practices have shifted; he is now acting as a voodoo priest, which gives Bishop a chance to tell us all about voodoo. In fact, the book climaxes with a six page voodoo ritual and then a 13 page surreal scene in which Paul communes with his Pleistocene ancestors and a voodoo god.

I found much of “Heritor’s Home” boring; sadly, Ancient of Days gets worse as it proceeds.

As I have suggested, Bishop is a good writer and his characters are complex and interesting. However, Ancient of Days, which feels quite long, is lacking in the plot department, and collapses at the finish line. The anti-racist thriller melodrama, the tepid satire of the Reagan era and of ambitious scientists, the sexual jealousy stuff, and the musings on religion add up to a barely acceptable story, something I can recommend but not very enthusiastically. Readers may want to read the 75 page novella “Her Habiline Husband” and stop there.