Scream Along with B Copper, M St Clair and A Budrys

Followers of my twitter feed are all too aware that I spend a lot of time digging through piles of old paperbacks and magazines at antique stores.  Just a few days ago I took a look at a copy of Dell's 1970 Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Scream Along With Me, a paperback selection of stories from the 1967 hardcover anthology edited by Robert Arthur, Stories That Scared Even Me.  I balked at spending six bucks on this artifact, but decided to read three stories included in it by people we here at MPorcius Fiction Log have some interest in.  The stories: Basil Copper's "Camera Obscura," Margaret St. Clair's "The Estuary" AKA "The Last Three Ships" and Algis Budrys' "The Master of the Hounds."

Before we get to the main event, investigating these allegedly scary stories that are said to induce screams, I'll point out that I've already read and blogged about two stories from Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Scream Along With Me by major SF writers, Theodore Sturgeon's "It" and Thomas Disch's "Casablanca."  Also, note that I am reading today's three stories in a scan of Stories That Scared Even Me, not original printings or later reprints.  Plus, if you enjoy gazing upon Alfred Hitchcock's beautiful face, check out our last blog post, in which we read four stories from late 1970s issues of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

And, finally, note that the estimable tarbandu at The PorPor Books Blog is a fan of these Alfred Hitchcock anthologies and has read and blogged about all 25 stories in Stories That Scared Even Me, and talks about collecting Alfred Hitchcock anthologies and reading Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine in the comments to the recent blog post of mine I linked to above.   Make sure to check out what tarbandu has to say!       

"Camera Obscura" by Basil Copper (1966)

Here we have a long and somewhat tedious story that you might say constitutes a Christian story, or an anti-Semitic story, or a story that exploits readers' bitterness at their creditors, or perhaps all three.  "Camera Obscura" also bears some similarities to "A Christmas Carol," and is one of those "horror" stories that, instead of disturbing you by telling you the universe is horrible, seeks to comfort the reader with a wish fulfillment fantasy in which the universe is in fact just and punishes people the reader doesn't like.  Not a scary story.   

The individual sentences of "Camera Obscura" are all well written and there are plenty of interesting images, but the narrative moves very slowly and is repetitive, and the story is thuddingly manipulative--we know from the get go that we are not supposed to like the protagonist, so there is little suspense, as we expect all along that something bad is going to happen to this guy and that we are not supposed to sympathize with him when it does.    

Mordecai Sharsted is a moneylender.  He has a client, Gingold, an apparently wealthy man who has not been paying his debts on time, so Sharsted walks to Gingold's place in order to give the man a final warning before seizing some of his assets.  Instead of letting us make up our own minds about Sharsted, Copper just comes out and tells us that Sharsted has a "sinister, decayed look" and a "mean soul" and so forth, laying it on thick, making sure we know he is no good.  Much is also made of his poor eyesight, I guess a metaphor for how he can't see right from wrong or refuses to open his eyes to the light of Jesus or whatever, and his green lensed spectacles, a sort of cliched way of telling us he is careful with money.  Talk of eyes and eye glasses that limit light and restrict vision also constitute foreshadowing of what Sharsted is going to encounter in Gingold's house.  

Gingold lives high up on a hill in a crummy section of town with twisty labyrinthine streets; he wears white and I guess is supposed to remind us of God.  More than once the view from this house is compared to the view God must have of the Earth.  In Gingold's presence, Sharsted get a little tongue-tied and has trouble bringing the conversation to the point of his visit.  Way upstairs in his house full of valuable paintings and other artifacts, Gingold has an elaborate camera obscura that projects upon a table a bird's eye view of the town.  He shows this to Sharsted, and points out the home of a woman who owes Sharsted money; this woman can't pay her debts and will soon be evicted.  Gingold asks repeatedly if Sharsted will forgive this woman her debts; Sharsted will not.

Gingold has a second camera obscura that projects a weird altered vision of the town, all red and showing buildings still standing which have long since been destroyed and replaced.  Gingold directs Sharsted into this world.  Sharsted desperately tries to find his way home in this maze-like hell version of the town, running into animated corpses wriggling with worms who turn out to be thieves and confidence men of Sharsted's acquaintance, men and women long dead, his steps always bringing him back to a Christian chapel.  Sharsted then tries to make his way back to Gingold's to tell the man he will forgive the woman her debts, but it is too late, Sharsted has been consigned to hell forever.

Too long, too slow, too repetitive, too obvious; seeing as the actual writing style is accomplished, if you are the type of person who figures he shouldn't have to pay his debts and that the people who loaned you money should be tortured everlastingly, maybe you'll enjoy "Camera Obscura," but I am giving it a thumbs down.

"Camera Obscura" seems to have first seen print in The Sixth Pan Book of Horror Stories and people seem to love it.  Everybody resents his creditors!  Besides in Copper collections, "Camera Obscura" has appeared in multiple anthologies that compile favorite contributions to the long-running series of Pan Books of Horror Stories and Copper's story was even made into a short for the TV show Night Gallery.  According to imdb, the TV version of Mordecai Sharsted is played by the guy who portrayed the villainous WASP on Benson, and the moneylender has been rechristened "William Sharsted."  Hmm.

"The Estuary" by Margaret St. Clair (1950)

When it first appeared in Weird Tales, this story was titled "The Last Three Ships."  "The Estuary" is a merely tolerable filler story, and it is a little odd to see it in an anthology like this, as there is not a single special thing about it.  Was Robert Arthur friends with St. Clair or something?

There are a bunch of old Liberty ships rusting away in the harbor.  Pickard sneaks aboard them at night and steals components from them to sell--his faithless and acquisitive wife uses the money to buy a fur coat.  Pickard hires other petty thieves to aid him in his illegal scavenging of this government property.  These other men tell him that, while working in the decaying vessels, that they sometimes hear strange noises.  One of the assistant thieves vanishes, then another quits because he is so spooked by the sounds.  Pickard also has a weird dream one day.  Anyway, it turns out that people who die on these Liberty ships become zombies, and one night one of them, the accomplice who disappeared, kills Pickard and Pickard becomes one of the zombies.  Don't worry about Pickard's wife--she has to return the fur coat, but she gets another man pretty quick. 

A competent trifle composed of commonplace genre fiction elements.  St. Clair does the bare minimum in the relationship and personality departments, and chooses to make her story more jokey than scary and apparently feels no need to come up with an explanation of why the Liberty ships are turning those who die in them into the living dead.  Not actually bad, but unambitious and not scary.  

After the wholly unremarkable "The Last Three Ships" was included in Stories That Scared Even Me and the abridged paperback version of that volume it went dormant for some four decades, inexplicably rising from the dead in a 2013 anthology titled Horror Gems.

"The Master of the Hounds" by Algis Budrys (1966)

Budrys' work is usually about what it means to be a man, and "The Master of the Hounds" is devoted to comparing before us two different men who have gone through, or are going through, some kind of life-changing trial.  Which of them is a real man who gets shit done and appeals to women?  Is a real man a guy who dominates others and his environment by any means that comes to hand?  Is your manhood inherent in your physique, or in your will?  Do you have to be good to be a real man?

Our first contender in the who-is-a-man battle royale is Malcolm Lawrence, the New York artist.  He has an attractive wife whom we are told was a little plump ten years ago when they married, but now is lean with a long face and high cheek bones.  I guess the implication is that Malcolm is not bringing in enough groceries, even though this kind of sounds like he has upgraded his wife into a fashion model.

Malcolm has been working at an ad agency, but aspires to be a fine artist, and has quit the agency to spend a summer in a rented house on a quiet stretch of the Jersey shore, to get away from it all and see if he can come up with some real meritorious paintings.  We witness the Lawrences interacting and the wife seems to always kind of be nudging Malcolm, not-so-subtly pushing him around, trying to manipulate him because she is disappointed in him. 

To save money, the Lawrences took a house in what we'd have to call a failed development.  The developers only finished two of the seaside houses, and only one of them is well-maintained--the two completed houses are surrounded by half finished houses that are falling apart in the seaside air.  The Lawrences take the poorly maintained house, across the street from the well-maintained one, which they learn is occupied by a famous British Army officer, Colonel Richey, a veteran of the Second World War who was the senior British officer in a POW camp where he and other British officers were held year after year.  Richey's exploits were the subject of a fictionalized film which the Lawrences have seen.  (Budrys' story here was perhaps inspired by the 1963 film The Great Escape and the books which inspired it.)

Budrys does a good job making the first part of the story sort of creepy--the sad, abortive, rundown development, the Lawrences' first intimations about Richey's Dobermans, dogs Budrys tries to make seem scary which they see long before they actually meet Richey and learn they are living next to a celebrity.  In the second part of the story the Lawrences and Richey sit down and get cozy, drinking tea, and Mrs. Lawrence and Colonel Richey seem to be flirting right in front of Malcolm!  

Richey talks about his experiences in the German camp.  The British prisoners were digging an escape tunnel, a tunnel Richey didn't really want to see used, as it would be risky to do so and perhaps pointless besides--by the time the British soldiers would be usable to leave the camp via the camp the war would be over or nearly so.  The point of the tunnel in Richey's eyes was to serve as something for the prisoners to do, a goal to inspire teamwork and promote discipline.  A cave in that occurred while Richey was working in the tunnel crippled him--among other things, his genitals were rendered inoperative.  After the war, a journalist wrote about Richey's adventures, leading to the film and a trip to Hollywood for Richey top work on the film as a technical advisor.  British taxes being so onerous, Richey decided to stay in the US and got this house and acquired and trained the two Dobermans, a breed of dog he knew something about because the Germans used them as guards in the camp.

Richey makes it clear that he will use his Dobermans to make the Lawrences his prisoners, even his slaves, all summer.  Also clear is that Malcolm's wife thinks Malcolm is a loser and Colonel Richey some kind of evil genius whom Malcolm can never outwit--even though Richey the ruthless leader of men literally has no balls, he is more of a man than Malcolm the failed artist!  Wifey even discourages Malcolm from resisting the colonel's attempt to confine and control them, and when things come to a dangerous climax she blames her husband more than the psycho who is tormenting them (she may even be appreciating the torment!)

(The Alfred Hitchcock-related stories we've been reading today and last time seem to paint women in a pretty poor light, don't they?)

Who will live and who will die?  Will Malcolm come out on top and prove to himself and to his doubting wife that he is a man, or will the crippled Richey prove his superiority even though he cannot achieve an erection and is some kind of sadistic maniac?

A good thriller that is full of surprises but not cheap surprises--everything is foreshadowed and set up skillfully by Budrys.  Budrys is almost as good at details and images and sentence construction as Copper, but while Copper overdoes it and his fine sentences become burdensome and many only provide information that is extraneous or superfluous, Budrys' sentences all contribute to the story's effect.  Budrys' story also has believable and nuanced characters we can identify with, not just lame manipulative archetypes, and real suspense--we are not sure what will happen to the characters or how we are expected to feel about them.  Thumbs up for "Master of the Hounds," easily the best story we are reading today and the only one that is legitimately scary.

"The Master of the Hounds" debuted in an issue of The Saturday Evening Post with the Beatles on its cover, and has reappeared in Budrys collections and many anthologies, including Dennis Etchison's Masters of Darkness III and Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois' Dogtales!

We've blogged about the L. Sprague de Camp story in Masters of Darkness III and
the Harlan Ellison and Fritz Leiber stories in Dogtales! 

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So there they are, three stories selected by Robert Arthur to be reprinted under the prestigious aegis of the director of Psycho.  Algis Budrys' story is very good and absolutely deserves to be widely disseminated, Copper's is pretentious and ambitious and tells people what they want to hear and so it makes sense to reprint it, but the inclusion of St. Clair's banal piece constitutes a mystery.  Well, life is one mystery after another, I suppose.

I love dipping into these anthologies, but next time we'll be reading a novel.  See you then!

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

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

"Death of a Demi-God" by Basil Copper 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thumbs down!  

"Gray" by Charles L. Grant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Great White Space by Basil Copper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dark Love: K Koja, B Copper, R Campbell and K E Wagner

We just read three stories by the great Tanith Lee about disastrous sexual relationships.  This is a theme close to my heart, so let's see what other material of the same bent we can find.  At an antique store recently, I spotted a hardcover copy of 1995's Dark Love, edited by Nancy A. Collins, Edward E. Kramer and the ubiquitous Martin H. Greenberg-- tag line: "twenty two all-original tales of lust and obsession"-- and took a gander at the table of contents.  No Lee, no Malzberg or Wolfe, but still some authors we read.  In the MPorcius tradition of absolute cheapness I decided to save four bucks and read my four selections from Dark Love via the internet archive.  

Dark Love seems to have been a success, winning the 1996 Deathrealm award, which I had never head of until today, and seeing print in Britain and France as well as in America.  Our European friends seem to have gotten the short end of the stick, however, as the US editions of the book have a quite fine Mel Odom cover illustration (check out the even more beautiful original Odom work from which this cover was adapted here) while the French cover is pedestrian and the British cover is embarrassingly lame.  U-S-A!

I guess Stuart Kaminsky is a big deal, but I don't know that I have ever heard of him before

"Pas de Deux" by Kathe Koja

This is a pretty sophisticated piece of work.  The pace of "Pas de Deux" is quick and there is a lot of titillating sex stuff and some violence but Koja also weaves together plenty of compelling scenes that explore multiple engaging themes about life and human relationships, including the relationship of a person to his or her own body--does your body determine your fate?  Does your body, even more than your mind, represent the real you?  

Our main character is a woman who is living in poverty in a crappy apartment in a big city, trying to make it as a ballet dancer.  But she has a troubled relationship with dance--as a kid she wanted to play soccer, but her fat mother forced her to take up ballet, and the woman at the strip mall ballet studio told her "No sports for you, you've got a dancer's body."  Our protagonist left the world of dance for a while and now that she is back in it she is probably too old to really make it.  Many an evening she goes to night clubs where people dance to thrash metal and "steelcore," which I have to admit I've never heard of.  (I'm always learning!)  Her dancing of course is better than anybody else's, and many men hit on her and she brings them back to her apartment for one-night stands; she explains her philosophy to them after having sex with them.  

The dancer's relationship with men is a major component of the story and Koja includes flashback scenes of her with her chain-smoking father in her teenaged years and with her former long term boyfriend, Edward, who himself had a strange relationship with his first wife and his mother-in-law, Adele, a successful dancer who knew Balanchine well, or at least wrote a book purporting such.  Our main character reads Adele's memoir of her relationship with Balanchine, and it has a powerful effect on the dancer's mind, as do her memories of Edward's critiques of her face and fashion choices.  Perhaps the main theme of "Pas de Deux" is to what extent we make decisions and to what extent other people and other external factors (along with the body we got stuck with) determine our choices.  The main character again and again does things she tells herself she doesn't want to do, but asks herself, "what else is there to do?" 

In need of money, she contacts Edward but he wants sex in return for a "loan" she probably will never be able to repay.  She refuses to grant him any sexual favors, in fact strikes him.  So she gets a job at a used bookstore; she steals from the place and gets herself fired.  She then gets a job as a stripper.

At the same time she pursues her doomed quest to become a professional ballet dancer, our heroine is on a quest to find a man, a partner in life--Adele in her book advises women to "find your prince."  This quest is also doomed--the men the dancer meets at thrash clubs won't do (her body, she feels, will tell her which of the men is her prince, but her body rejects man after man, night after night) and she never even considers the repulsive men for whom she strips.

The dancer's sanity slips, and she stops eating, becoming skeletally thin, which does not endear her to her clients or her boss.  The story ends somewhat inconclusively, like a literary story--there is a climax, in which the dancer encounters Edward again and she beats him up and wrecks his house, but we have to assume this is not going to improve her life and career prospects and that if she doesn't take Edward's unwanted advice ("You're very sick, you ought to see a doctor") she is going to die soon.

Maybe like the Lee stories we read in our last episode, "Pas de Deux" is about women who seek love and when men aren't willing to give it to them they lash out at the man who let them down and/or society at large.  But this is no wish fulfillment fantasy that celebrates a woman empowered--it is all about how women are at the mercy of others, men and women both, and factors over which they have no control.

A good mainstream story about a creative person crushed by the world that has enough sex, violence and creepiness that it also provides the thrills we look for in genre fiction--thumbs up!  "Pas de Deux" has been reprinted in Koja collections in English and in French, the language of (noir?) love.

(An odd little note: the artist Patrick Nagel is mentioned twice in "Pas de Deux," but both times here in Dark Love his name is misspelled "Nagle."  I found an electronic version of Velo/cities, and in there the name is spelled correctly.)

"Bright Blades Gleaming" by Basil Copper

We've reads three stories by Copper during this blog's chevauchee across the interwebs.  I liked "The Knocker at the Portico," and "Voices in the Water" but gave "Beyond the Reef" the old black ball.  making sure to keep in mind the law of small numbers, we must acknowledge that "Bright Blades Gleaming" will determine if Mr. Copper has a 75% or 50% hit rating here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Fingers crossed!

"Bright Blades Gleaming" is well-written on a page by page and sentence by sentence basis, with Copper constructing an interesting character and offering strong images.  Of course I am a sucker for stories in which a sensitive young man lives in a big city in a tiny apartment and spends a lot of time on the crowded streets wistfully looking at young women--there was a time when I was such a young man!  But the plot of "Bright Blades Gleaming" amounts to little and the twist ending is pretty disappointing.  It is frustrating when a guy like A. E. van Vogt comes up with a plot full of crazy ideas and astounding events but his poor writing style limits how much you can really enjoy the wild ride, and it is also frustrating when a guy has a good style but only applies it to a plot that lacks any sort of emotional or conceptual punch or any thrills.  We'll call "Bright Blades Gleaming" acceptable.

The text of "Bright Blades Gleaming" is the diary of a late 19th-century young man who has just moved to Berlin.  He describes in detail his new room and his fellow tenants and hints that he is some kind of weirdo with "inflammatory views" who is often in trouble with the police.   As the story proceeds we learn he is an atheist who loves animals and refuses to step on beetles he finds under his seat at the restaurant but hates human beings, a failed medical student who finances his slacker's lifestyle of sitting in restaurants and parks staring at the girls who go by through clever thievery. 

The diarist studies the slaughter of cattle at an abattoir, buys surgical instruments and practices the art of dissection on some dolls.  He starts having horrible bloody dreams and wakes up one morning to discover indications that last night, presumably while out of his mind, he killed somebody.  He flees Germany for England, where Copper provides the in-your-face clues that confirm readers' suspicions that the diarist is Jack the Ripper.

We follow this dude for page after page as he tidies his room, follows a girl on the street, has tense conversations with his land lady, and denounces aged veterans, slowly learning how truly odd and sinister he is, but instead of some kind of climax in which he achieves some dastardly perverse goal or he is foiled by the authorities or some brave civilian, our supposed pay off is being told he is Jack the Ripper?  Copper's attempt to appeal to the audience's supposed fascination with Jack the Ripper is cheap and unsatisfying, a cop out--it is like he wrote only half a story, just the setting and the character, leaving the reader to supply his own climax and resolution.    

(Defenders of "Bright Blades Gleaming" might call it a mood piece or a character study.  Let's also note that Dark Love is dedicated to Robert Bloch, so maybe this story is an homage to the Jack-obsessed Bloch.)  

Besides in Dark Love, you can catch this rump of a story in the Copper collections Darkness, Mist and Shadow: Volume Two and Cold Hand on My Shoulder.    

"Going Under" by Ramsey Campbell 

This story feels long and glacially slow, with long meandering sentences that fail to engage the reader's interest or inspire any emotion and a tedious pace that leaves the story seeming to move in slow motion.

"Going Under" takes place in a tunnel that goes under a river.  The tunnel is part of the highway system, and to celebrate an anniversary of its opening it has been closed to automobile traffic to serve as the route of a charity walk--a crowd of people has come to buy a ticket, the money going to their favorite cause, AIDS or whatever, and then walk the length of the tunnel.  Blythe is doing this charity walk by himself, having had a fight with his wife.  Blythe is one of the first people to own a cell phone or mobile phone or whatever English people were calling them in 1995 and while doing the walk, crammed cheek by jowl with strangers in the dense crowd, he leaves wifey a voice mail and then takes an incoming call--these calls are critical, as Blythe has to get his alimony check to his first wife (I think it's alimony--the word "maintenance" is used) in the mail or he will be imprisoned, and he wants his current wife to put the check in the mail, which he stupidly didn't do himself.  The tension of the story is meant to come from the fact that he has trouble getting a signal and then the answering machine malfunctions and then he drops his phone and it breaks blah blah blah.  Campbell tries to make his story funny and/or disturbing by describing how fat everybody doing the charity walk is and how their bodies radiate heat and by having people make fun of Blythe for using a phone in public.  Blythe then goes insane and starts harming people in his feverish quest to retrieve his phone or borrow or steal some other person's phone.

Bad.  Maybe this crummy story serves as a historical document of a time when it was fashionable to envy people who had cell phones and used them in public.  Didn't Stephen King write an entire book about how cellphones are bad?  "Going Under"'s defenders might say that it seeks to evoke the claustrophobic stress of being in a dense crowd at a public event.     

People love Ramsey Campbell, and Stephen Jones included "Going Under" in a best-of-the-year anthology.  You can also find it in multiple Campbell collections.

"Locked Away" by Karl Edward Wagner

Wagner brings to our exploration of Dark Love the gross explicit sex we were perhaps sort of expecting, plus little jokes for genre fans, like a mention of David Drake (a romance novelist in this story's world) and to Bambi and Thumper from the James Bond film Diamonds are Forever.  

Pandora is an Englishwoman in her late twenties, a divorcee and owner of an antique store in North Carolina.  She wins a box of jewelry at an auction, and fancies for herself a heart-shaped Victorian locket she finds among the lot.  Pandora puts on the locket, the clasp of which she initially finds difficult to open.  When she does manage to open it, it triggers immersive dreams of rough sex in which she is the subordinate participant; Wagner graphic blow-by-blow descriptions of these episodes are like something out of a porn story.  Soon the locket clasp is opening freely, practically on its own.  Some of the dreams are essentially rape and torture fantasies.  When Pandora wakes up from the dreams she finds underwear or sex toys from the dreams in her possession, ejaculate on her face and blood leaking from her anus--was she having sex in another universe or with ghosts?  

It turns out the locket was owned by a spinster, a very religious woman, and, perhaps, the dreams are that old woman's sex fantasies, which she never expressed or experienced, but kept locked away in the locket.  (SF stories and porn stories often ridicule religious people, suggest religious people are hypocrites; I guess people who put science or sex at the center of their identities see traditional religion as a rival school of thought, a way of organizing the universe which they must supplant or perhaps just resent.)  But Wagner also suggests that Pandora is just a pervert, her sexual desires warped by abuse at the hands of her ex-husband, maybe even the result of brain damage from blows to the head.  As the story ends Pandora tosses away the locket, puts on revealing clothes, and arms herself with a knife--she is going to have rough sex with men she meets at a bar, or maybe her young employees, an attractive woman and a handsome gay man (there is a lot of lesbian sex and lots of gay vibes in this story), and unlike in her magical locket-triggered fantasies, she is going to be the aggressor, is going to leave the other participants bleeding.

A nasty exploitative thing, the supernatural elements an excuse to describe brutal homoerotic scenes of men abusing a woman, abuse the woman ultimately enjoys.  But competent, I suppose.  We'll call it acceptable.

"Locked Away" would go on to be reprinted in three different Wagner collections, all of which sport covers that leverage Wagner's biker image.

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Well, only one of these stories, Koja's, is actually good, though Wagner's seems to accomplish its (modest) goals.  Copper's shows ability but was disappointing, while Campbell's was emphatically not my cup of tea.  Of course, I'll probably read all there people again next time they pop up in some anthology that has caught my eye, maybe soon, maybe years from now.

Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth by Richard Lupoff, Basil Copper and Ramsey Campbell

Today we're reading three Lovecraftian tales from Stephen Jones's 2005 anthology Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth.  In our last episode we read stories by British writers Basil Copper and Ramsey Campbell that appeared in Jones's 1994 anthology Shadows Over Innsmouth, and today we take another crack at Copper and Campbell, and throw American Richard A. Lupoff into the mix.

I am reading the electronic version of the 2013 Titan books edition of Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth, made available to those of us serving time in Maryland by the Baltigore County Public Library.

"Brackish Water" by Richard A. Lupoff (2005)

Lupoff is a scholar who has written extensively about genre fiction icon Edgar Rice Burroughs as well as the history of comics; he has also penned lots of fiction.  The critics love his Space War Blues sequence; back in 2017 I read an early component of this project, "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama," a satire of Southerners (Lupoff is from New York City) that features an interstellar race war in which black scientists make zombies out of captured rednecks.  In the years prior to experiencing that "dangerous vision" I read Lupoff's novels Crack in the Sky (a dystopia about pollution and overpopulation with a multi-racial cast that Lupoff padded out with long discussions of his scholarly interests) and Sandworld (the story of college-educated white political activists protecting blacks and Hispanics from the abuses of a white ethnic cop...on another planet.)  I wasn't exactly crazy about this material, but I'm willing to read "Brackish Water" to see if Lupoff uses Lovecraftian settings and themes to further lecture us about racism and pollution.

DATELINE: The San Francisco Bay Area, during World War II.  College professor Delbert Marston is one of the world's best marine geologists, and the most eligible bachelor on the Berkeley campus!  For some reason his closest friend is an elderly spinster, the academic who mentored him.  She convinces him to forgo a concert (Marston loves classical music) to attend a meeting of a club of goofy college students.  These weirdies, The New Deep Ones Society of the Pacific, believe that the fish people described in Lovecraft's "Shadow Over Innsmouth" are real!  Even crazier, they are split into two factions: the faction that thinks the Deep Ones are mankind's implacable enemies and the faction that wants to make friends with the amphibian aliens!

Marston tells them that Lovecraft stories aren't real and leaves the meeting early, but the next part of the story reveals to us that his mother was an avid swimmer who disappeared beneath the waves when he was young, and, sure enough, Marston's body begins to change so that he only feels comfortable when underwater and develops a taste for raw sea food!  He becomes a virtual recluse, sneaking off to swim in the bay at night and working hard all day advising the Navy on anti-submarine defenses.  (I guess this guy doesn't have to teach classes--sweet gig!)

Marston is given the job of advising the Navy on the safest route out of Port Chicago for the ship carrying the atomic bomb.  Lupoff mentions repeatedly that there are many black enlisted personnel working at Port Chicago, all of whose officers are white.  In the story's final scene Marston is swimming underwater near the ship upon which the A-bomb is being loaded, and spots other fish people, like the one he is becoming.  It looks like they are planting a mine on the bottom of the A-bomb ship!  As foreshadowed at the meeting of The New Deep Ones Society of the Pacific and in an offhand remark by a naval officer, somebody, presumably one or all of the German, Japanese and American governments, has allied with or suborned some Deep Ones!  There is a terrible explosion in which Marston and presumably the Deep Ones frogmen are killed.

Lupoff appends a "Historical Note" about the real life disaster at Port Chicago, mentioning the theory (dismissed by the authorities) that the U. S. government intentionally detonated an atomic bomb there as a test, using the black servicemen there as guinea pigs.  I guess Lupoff wants us to sympathize with the Deep Ones and see them as exploited by land-dwellers, treated as expendable second-class citizens, the way blacks are mistreated by whites in America.  By making the fish people sympathetic (and downplaying the practices, like worship of an alien god and human sacrifice, that characterize them in the source material) we may judge Lupoff to be turning his back on major Lovecraft themes, even betraying Lovecraft's vision, but I suspect what he is really doing is following the Lovecraftian template but sliding the United States government into the "inscrutable and/or evil alien entity with irresistible power" slot usually occupied by the likes of Dagon or Cthulhu!  (Maybe the painful memory of doing my 2017 taxes is inclining me to this interpretation!)   

"Brackish Water" has some problems; in particular, some elements that end up not really going anywhere receive more ink than perhaps they deserve, making the story too long.  Marston's relationship with his mentor, for example, gets a lot of attention early on but then is just dropped, leaving a sort of loose end.  (I wonder if Lupoff included in the story a likable woman scientist in a position of authority to demonstrate his commitment to diversity; if so his options for resolving her relationship with Marston would be limited--he couldn't have them have sex or have Marston cause her death without undercutting his feminist message and/or his larger sympathy-for-the-alien message.)  Lupoff also engages in lots of discussion of San Francisco geography and architecture, 1930s automobiles (Marston has a 1937 Cord Phaeton) and classical music; maybe this is just padding, but it does sort of give a strong sense of time and place, and of course in Lovecraft's original story there is lots of talk about architecture and objets d'art.  I was kind of expecting a scene in which Marston was torn over joining the Deep Ones because it would mean abandoning forever the music he loved, or a scene in which he learned that the Deep Ones have their own complex and sophisticated music--as with the mentor, I feel like this music business constitutes a lost opportunity or loose end.

Despite these problems, I'm giving "Brackish Water" a mild recommendation because Lupoff does a good job of describing Marston's physical and psychological transformation into a fish person, and because making the Deep Ones good and the US government evil, flipping the script of Lovecraft's "Shadows Over Innsmouth," is outside-the-box thinking that deserves some recognition and adds some welcome variety when you are reading ten or a dozen Lovecraftian pieces in a row, as I am.

"Brackish Water" would go on to be included in two Lupoff collections, Visions and The Doom That Came To Dunwich.

"Voices in the Water" by Basil Copper (2005) 

Roberts is a London-based painter; largely thanks to the work of his wife, a talented salesperson and indefatigable woman of business who travels all over Europe and America selling his work to galleries and wealthy clients, he has made quite a bit of money.  The couple decides to buy a huge 16th-century mill out in the country and convert it into a studio, gallery and living space.

2005 edition cover

With his wife so often out of the country selling his work, Roberts spends lots of time alone in his huge new house, and the sound of the river flowing beneath his studio begins to get on his nerves.  He begins to hear voices in the "constant rush of the water," voices saying things like "Come to us!" and "Eternal life awaits!" and "Iä-Ryleh! Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä!"  His buddy Kent, writer of detective stories, comes over sometimes, but not very often.  In the closing pages of the story Kent visits the mill late at night at the behest of the police, to identify Roberts's body--it lies in the studio, by the open hatch above the rushing river, torn apart and drained of blood.

"Voices in the Water" is reasonably well-written and well-structured, Roberts, his wife (cleverly named "Gilda") and Kent are interesting enough characters, and the idea of hearing voices in presumptively white noise is a good one.  Most of the story is in the third-person, but there are entries from Roberts's diary.  (I thought it amusing that in his personal diary Roberts was punctilious enough to include the diaeresis in "Iä!")  What exactly is going on is perhaps a little muddled, though.  The voices imply that Roberts is one of the Deep Ones, like the narrator of Lovecraft's original story or Marston in Lupoff's contribution to Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth (they say, among other things, "You are one of us and we are reclaiming you!") but then why murder him?  I'm guessing that the body was not Roberts's at all, but a decoy; earlier in the story it is mentioned that a canoe was found overturned in the river and that no sign of its occupants was ever recovered.  The problem with my theory is that Kent identifies the body, but I guess references to the fact that some of Roberts's face is missing and that Gilda won't be asked to look at the body are clues that we can't trust Kent's identification.

I'm willing to give this one a mild recommendation.

On the last page of "Voices in the Water" Roberts's last painting is mentioned; we are told it is "vile" and depicts "some loathsome thing."  I decided to reread Lovecraft's famous story "Pickman's Model," to look for possible connections between it and Copper's story, written almost 80 years later.

"Pickman's Model" by H. P. Lovecraft (1927)

"Pickman's Model" has appeared in many
publications, including this British
 collection with a Richard Powers cover 

"Pickman's Model" is presented to us as the transcription of one side of a conversation, a Bostonian art lover telling one of his cronies about his relationship with Pickman, a painter of the macabre who has since disappeared.  Pickman's work was so horrifying that before he died many of his fellow artists and patrons of the arts had stopped seeing him socially (this was before James Carville published his magnum opus, kids.)  Our narrator was one of the last to drop him, and it wasn't because of how twisted and disgusting Pickman's art was--"Morbid art doesn't shock me, and when a man has the genius Pickman had I feel it an honour to know him....Boston never had a greater painter...." The narrator goes on to explain just why he dropped Pickman.

Pickman had a second, secret, studio in an old and slummy part of Boston, one where "foreigners" and "Dagoes" live.  "I've got a place that I don't believe three living Nordic men besides myself have ever seen."  He took our narrator to this dilapidated shack to show him his most extreme work ("I've let myself go a bit"), explaining that he believes you have to paint terror from life, just as you paint beauty from life, and this place is where "terror lives."

Lovecraft spends a lot of time describing these horrifying paintings, which depict monsters in historical and contemporary Boston slum and cemetery settings.  These monsters are shown murdering or eating people, among other things (one is an elaborate bit of gallows humor) in exacting detail.  The narrator stresses that these canvases are not in the least bit romantic, impressionistic or dream-like, but remarkably realistic--they bring to life an unacknowledged world that thrives under Boston in centuries-old tunnels, a world of ghouls who feed on the freshly-buried dead and occasionally ambush the living.  Then comes the punchline we have all been expecting for many pages--on his visit to the slum studio our narrator came face to face with evidence that Pickman, via the big hatch in his cellar studio, had access to this all too real world of man-eating monsters and was painting his most shocking work from photographs he himself took in those tunnels and graveyards.

Like Pickman in "Pickman's Model," Roberts in "Voices in the Water" had a cellar studio with a hatch to a dark subterranean world, and both artists disappeared into that world.  Copper's story certainly seems like it was influenced by Lovecraft's; perhaps it constitutes an homage.

"Raised by the Moon" by Ramsey Campbell (2001)

Isfdb lists this as a 2001 story, but doesn't list any places of publication before Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth in 2005.  (A mystery!)  Since 2005 it has been included in some collections and anthologies with sad sad amateurish covers.

Bill Grant is a grad student or something, driving near the seashore when his poorly-maintained automobile conks out near an almost abandoned fishing village.  He lodges with a working-class couple, Tom and Fiona, while he waits for a mechanic, based twenty miles away, to arrive the next morning.  The man of the house, a failed fisherman, blames the use of automobiles and electricity by the middle-classes for the dearth of fish and the village's bleak fate.

It transpires that the couple have an alliance or modus vivendi with the local Deep Ones--the fish people permit the last two humans in the village to eat dead Deep Ones.  Fiona feeds some Deep One flesh to Grant, and this, I think, begins the process of turning the young academic into a fishman himself!  As a fishman Grant will serve as, it seems, Fiona's surrogate child and perhaps a future source of food?

"Raised by the Moon" is a verbose story, full of long wordy descriptions of scenery and buildings and such, but I found Campbell's long sentences to be opaque jumbles of words rather than brushstrokes that conjured up vivid images.  With deliberate irony Campbell's characters all speak with cryptic brevity, something the author takes pains to point out to us readers.

The plot of "Raised by the Moon" is fine, if slight, but the style made it something of a slog--I feel like it requires more work than is justified by the pay off.  I'm torn between judging it barely acceptable and giving it a marginal negative vote...I guess I'll give Campbell the benefit of the doubt because I think he is making conscious artistic choices here, that my problems with the story are a response to those decisions and not to any incompetence on his part.

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In our next episode, if my psyche can take it, we'll be going back to the dawn of Yog-Sothery and reading weird tales from the roaring '20s!