Whispers II: Brennan, Grant, Russell, Jacobi and Weinstein

Let's tackle five more stories from Stuart Schiff's 1979 anthology Whispers II.  Can anyone challenge the hold of R. A. Lafferty's "Berryhill" on the title of "Best Story in Whispers II?"

Patty cake, patty cake...

"Marianne" by Joseph Payne Brennan (1975)

Tuna, rubber, little blubber in my igloo...

I've never read anything by Brennan, but the Wikipedia article on him makes him sound like a fascinating guy with an interesting career: working at the Yale Library, publishing scores of stories and hundreds of poems, managing his own horror magazine and his own poetry magazine.  Let's get a taste of what this guy is all about!

"Marianne," which is like a page and a half long, describes a lonely tourist beach in chill October, the wind making padlocks clank and the grey waves and the cries of gulls and all that.  A guy goes to the water's edge and cries out the name of his girlfriend (or wife?) who drowned there.  Her corpse rises up and claims him for the sea!

This is fine for what it is, I suppose...it kind of feels like part of a larger work, like the end of a story of a disastrous relationship or the prologue of a story about aquatic zombies.  Acceptable.

"Marianne" first appeared in Whispers #6-7 and would be reprinted in the Brennan collection The Borders Just Beyond.

"The Fourth Musketeer" by Charles L. Grant (1979)

I've read a few Grant stories over the years.  There was that piano-playing witch, the sarcophagus found in a secret room in a Connecticut house, and those stories about robots and tyrannical governments and creepy New Jersey women.  "The Fourth Musketeer" was original to Whispers II and I don't think it ever appeared anywhere else.

"The Fourth Musketeer" is about mid-life crisis, and I guess about masculinity and gender roles.  Everett Templar is forty, and has quit his job and left his wife, and ridden a bus to the neighborhood of his childhood.  There is a lot of description of his aches and pains and his failing memory (the title of the story refers to the fact that he can't remember the names of all of Dumas's Musketeers) as well as of the landscape of his youthful haunts.  In flashbacks we see he quit his job because his superiors at the office thought he should act his age, that with his long hair and loud music he was starting to appear like a hippie and that might drive away clients; it is also hinted that his wife was a nag who complained about his toy trains.

Having been away from home for some months (he can't remember if it was two months or six months or something in between) he decides to telephone his wife and gloat (and maybe negotiate a reconciliation?)  But when Templar speaks into the phone his wife can't hear him, and we readers are given reason to believe that Templar is not really alive, that he is a ghost, or something--it's not really clear, at least not to me.  Maybe his inability to be heard, his lack of a voice, is symbolism for alienation and marginalization?

This is an OK mainstream story about a guy unhappy with his family and job with a little supernatural stuff tossed in.

"Ghost of a Chance" by Ray Russell (1978)

Oh no, it is Ray Russell, the guy who worked at Playboy and wrote lots of short-short stories that I think are a waste of time.  Let's see how Russell uses the two pages he usually limits himself to this time.

"Ghost of a Chance" is like a story written by a child.  (If you were paying me to sell the story I would say, "It's a whimsical flight of fancy into the macabre!")  One dude says there are no ghosts, that no proof of the existence of ghosts has ever been produced.  A second dude says he will prove to dude #1 that ghosts exist by committing suicide in front of dude #1 and then haunting him.  Bang goes the revolver!  After the police have left, sure enough, dude #1 sees a glowing form with the face of dude #2.  But dude #1 just figures it is a guilt-induced hallucination, and dude #2 laments that he killed himself for nothing.  It's like a skit from The Carol Burnett Show or something (you know you can see Tim Conway shooting himself in the head and then going "Wooooooooo...Harvey Korman...I am haunting you....")

A waste of everybody's time. "Ghost of a Chance" first appeared in Whispers #11-12 and would later appear in the Russell collection The Devil's Mirror.   

"The Elcar Special" by Carl Jacobi (1979)

Oh no, it is Carl Jacobi, the guy who wrote a story that was so bad it made me angry.  I feel like that fit of dismay and rage occurred just a week ago, but here I am giving Carl Jacobi another chance!  Don't believe what the beggars that hang around Dupont Circle say--I am a generous man!

The narrator of "The Elcar Special" is a loser, a 32-year-old who lives with his mother and keeps getting sacked from poorly paid jobs due to incompetence and negligence.  He gets a job helping to maintain the fleet of pre-World War II cars owned by a collector.  The prize possession of this collector is an Elcar used by Lillian Boyer the woman daredevil in her act, which consisted in part of climbing out of a moving car and onto an airborne airplane.  (I have to admit that I was a little surprised to find that Elcar and Boyer were real.)  Associated with the car is an unsubstantiated tale about the psychiatrist who bought it from wing walker Boyer, my new feminist hero.  This headshrinker married a Caribbean woman, a woman who practiced obeah.  When their marriage started falling apart the shrink killed the woman by running her over with the Elcar.

After setting the scene and presenting the characters, Jacobi bangs out a mediocre but not quite irritating supernatural story about the narrator driving the car, feeling a presence, thinking he has been transported from the roads of America to the roads of Martinique, picking up a sinister man and then running over a dark-skinned woman, only to wake up in the hospital, having crashed the Elcar.  The cops wonder why a shred of a woman's dress is stuck to the bumper of the wrecked Elcar.  Dun dun dun!

This is an unremarkable, standard issue horror story, which is an improvement over the half-baked abortion of a Jacobi story I had to endure a week ago.

"The Elcar Special" first appeared in Whispers II, and was included in the 1994 Jacobi collection, Smoke of the Snake.     

"The Box" by Lee Weinstein (1976)

Weinstein has four fiction credits at isfdb, and this is the first.  Its initial appearance was in Whispers #9, and Schiff also included it in his Mad Scientist anthology.

"The Box" is actually a good story, which is refreshing after reading so many poor and mediocre stories in a row.

The story takes place in a medical museum, which Weinstein describes in detail, all the skeletons, model eyes, jars containing diseased organs and deformed fetuses.  Every week for years a guy has come to the museum; today he comes in carrying a package--he's never brought a package before.  He picks the lock on a glass cabinet containing malformed fetuses, begins shifting a jar containing a baby with one eye.  He makes enough noise to alert the guards, who come to stop him, and we learn that the cyclops is his own son, and today would have been his 21st birthday--in the package is a wreath.

This is a sad and surprising story, and quite well-written, the second or third best tale in the anthology so far, a story which relies for its effects on universal human feelings for one's own flesh and blood and not supernatural nonsense or extravagant gore.  Thumbs up! 

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Five stories and only one you can consider a noteworthy success in the lot?  Sad!  Well, we'll be reading four more stories from Whispers II in our next blog post, and maybe we can dig up another story or two that is in the same league as those of Lafferty, Davidson and Weinstein. 

Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII: The Final Battle: Steve Sneyd, Charles L. Grant, Harlan Ellison & Richard A. Moore

I see a light at the end of the tunnel!  Today we are reading the final four tales from Karl Edward Wagner's The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII, DAW No. 393, published in 1980.  This batch includes two famous writers, Harlan Ellison and Charles Grant, and two I am not familiar with, Steve Sneyd and Richard A. Moore.

"A Fly One" by Steve Sneyd (1979)

This is a brief (six and a half pages) first person narrative from a British detective, Vrczynski, whom Sneyd makes a point of telling us is foreign-born. A fourteen-year-old girl has been murdered; there are signs of sexual assault.  Vrczynski has no clues, but when a freakish hunchback comes into the station he realizes, in a flash of intuition, that this weirdo is the killer. The freako explains to the gumshoe that he needed the blood of a virgin to complete the magic spell that would give him wings--as Vrczynski watches the wings start bursting out of the sorcerer's hump! Vrczynski rips the wings off, and keeps them at his home, in alcohol, as a trophy!  The wizard, who was proclaiming that he was the next stage of human evolution seconds before Vrczynski tore his wings off, goes to whatever British people call the funny farm...maybe "nuttery?"

This is a cynical story, depicting a fallen, corrupt world.  The cops beat and trick the prisoners to get information, the family members of the slain girl either don't care she is dead or use the opportunity to get attention, the way the evil wizard guy has to murder a vulnerable, innocent, person to work his spell implies that the only way to "get ahead" and "make progress" is by exploiting others, and Vrczynski acts as judge, jury and punisher, ignoring the long English tradition of a jury trial.  Maybe, like Russell Kirk's story about criminals in this same volume, it makes sense to consider this story in the context of rising crime rates in the 1970s.

One thing to ruminate over is why Sneyd has the detective be foreign-born.  To provide an outsider's view of British society?  To emphasize the decay of British culture by having the smartest and hardest-working character in the story be one of non-British background?  To provide a chance to accuse the police force of discrimination (Vrczynski claims few foreign-born officers achieve seniority)?  Maybe Vrczynski is a refugee from communism (his name sounds Polish, right?) and so he serves as a reminder of international conflict and/or government tyranny?

A good story: economical, atmospheric, and full of interest.  Like Dennis Etchison's "The Dead Line," "A Fly One" was first published in Whispers 13-14.  It would be included in Whispers III in 1981.

"Needle Song" by Charles L. Grant (1979)

Like Harlan Ellison's "In the Fourth Year of the War," "Needle Song" was first unleashed on the world in Midnight Sun #5.  It has been reprinted a few times, including in the 2012 collection Scream Quietly: The Best of Charles L. Grant.  As you probably know, Grant is famous for practicing and advocating for "quiet horror." How sotto voce is "Needle Song"?

Pretty sotto voce, but with a bloody gong at the end.  The ten pages of the story switch back and forth between brief paragraphs in italics about an old blind woman and long passages in normal type about two kids, Caren and Eric.  It seems that Hawthorne Street was a happy neighborhood where everybody got along and people had decent jobs and stable families.  Then a blind old woman moved into the house number 136. This weird character refused to interact with the rest of the neighborhood.  Then she began regularly playing the piano at 9:00 PM; the music could be heard throughout the neighborhood.

The town suddenly has good luck; people were winning lotteries, getting raises, Caren's brother got into a high class university, and little Eric was discovered to be a musical prodigy!  But then the little concerts ended.  Everybody's luck turned sour; people lost their jobs, Caren's brother became a drug addict, the lawns and trees started dying, a house burnt down.  Then the music starts up again, irregularly.  Eric and Caren believe that the old woman is sucking the happiness and good luck out of the town.

The italicized paragraphs suggest they are on to something--the blind woman, after one of her little concerts, takes a magic needle and sews colors onto a black square of cloth.  "One day, she thought, she would sew herself a new dress of a thousand colors and be young again."

Caren and Eric, after abandoning schemes to shoot or decapitate her, try to foil the witch by relating happy memories to each other and laughing enthusiastically during one of her sorcerous serenades; they think this will show the witch that she can't hurt them and convince her to give up and leave.  They believe they have succeeded, but then Eric slips and smashes his mouth into the corner of a table, ruining his hopes of a career as a trumpet player.

This story is just alright.  The mechanism of what the witch is actually doing is a little mysterious, what with all the starting and stopping, the good and bad luck, etc. Maybe her music at first brought good luck to the town, and then took the luck away, like how a farmer fertilizes and seeds a field before reaping it.  There are also hints that the entire region or nation is suffering some kind of economic downturn, that the witch travels from town to town devastating one after the other.  The central idea is OK, but the way the story is constructed is kind of confusing, the style is pedestrian and nothing about the story evoked any emotion.

"All the Birds Come Home to Roost" by Harlan Ellison (1979)

I always associate the phrase "the chickens come home to roost" with Malcolm X and Ward Churchill and the idea that murders like those of JFK and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were retribution or poetic justice inflicted on whites because of Western misdeeds of the past like slavery and colonialism.  The phrase is used more widely however, and apparently originated in the early nineteenth century.  Ellison modifies it to "birds," I suspect, as a reference to the use of the word "bird" to refer to a pretty girl, and maybe because "chicken" evokes comedic images, like rubber chickens or the funky chicken dance, while "bird" is somewhat poetic.

"All the Birds Come Home to Roost" first appeared in Playboy, and has been included in a number of anthologies, like 2013's Psycho-Mania and The Playboy Book of Science Fiction, as well as the 1987 Essential Ellison collection.

Michael Kirxby is a lawyer, in bed with a girlfriend.  He tells her about the unhealthy relationship he had with his wife of some 20 years ago, Cindy, how her infidelities and psychological problems made her difficult to deal with, how while under the stress of studying for the bar one day he snapped and gave her a terrific beating.  And how he divorced Cindy and she ended up in a mental institution.  "She very nearly took me with her to the madhouse.  I got away just in time."

After this confession, over the succeeding days, Kirxby has apparently random encounters with former girlfriends.  He comes to realize that he is meeting all of his lovers in reverse order; each woman from his past he meets and sleeps with brings him one step closer to Cindy, his first lover.  When he meets Cindy again will she exact some terrible revenge?  As he continues to meet women from his past he becomes more and more desperate and more and more mentally unhinged.

Ellison writes the story in a smooth style, and it is well-structured.  It didn't inspire any feeling in me, though, with its clever but incredible central idea and unsympathetic protagonist.  It reminded me of an episode of The Twilight Zone or one of those old EC Comics, though with its numerous references to the unsavory side of sex (e.g., "the wet spot," erectile dysfunction, and female frigidity) it is one that cries out for an "adults only!" label.  Moderately good.

"The Devil Behind You" by Richard A. Moore (1979)

This is a good finale to the collection; "The Devil Behind You" is genuinely suspenseful, surprising, and depicts something horrible.  At seven pages it is nice and tight.

An eight-year-old boy from a broken family loiters in the woods by the church on Sunday rather than attend services; the rabble-rousing preacher scares him, and the congregation doesn't like him because of his disreputable mother and absent father.  In the woods he is accosted by an escaped convict, who forces him to sneak into the church to steal a set of keys for one of the cars in the parking lot.  The impressionable child thinks the criminal may be the Devil himself, to the felon's amusement. In the final paragraph of the story the child makes a bold move that I thought would save his life, but I, like he, had been tricked--the boy's brief and unhappy life is over.

A crime story (it first appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine) in which a small boy is murdered perhaps deserves to be called exploitative, but, for me, it achieved the goal that Wagner set for the stories he selected for this anthology: it created "a convincing mood of fear and unease."  (Despite Karl and I liking it, "The Devil Behind You" is Richard A. Moore's only fiction credit at isfdb; there is also a "Richard Moore" listed who has two stories.)

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The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII as a whole has to be counted a success; of the 16 stories all but two or three show merit, and even the clunkers (the anti-gun story and the ghost motorcycle story) are odd and memorable in an amusing way.  The collection shows great variety; there are stories by famous authors and stories by new and minor writers, left-wing and right-wing stories, stories sympathetic to religion and hostile to religion, supernatural stories, science-fiction stories, psychological stories, and realistic crime stories.  Wagner, in his first time up at bat as editor of The Year's Best Horror Stories, did a solid job for DAW and the speculative fiction community, and I feel comfortable recommending The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII to horror fans.      

Three Tales of The New Mind: Lafferty, Malzberg, and Green

ISFDB image

On the weekend I read a story by Charles L. Grant from Frontiers 2: The New Mind; it was pretty good.  So, what else does The New Mind, a paperback from 1973 of original stories edited by Roger Elwood, have to offer? 

The New Mind includes an introduction by Frederick Pohl that perhaps provides an interesting snapshot of early 1970s attitudes.  Pohl argues that technology has ruined the world, and also suggests that the two parent family is "rigid" and may very well have driven us all insane.  Pohl thinks maybe things would be better if we all grew up in communes; if communes don't work, hopefully some other unspecified changes will save us: "...there are changes coming.  They are coming because we need them...."

On a less apocalyptic note, and perhaps more in keeping with the "new mind" theme, Pohl also pokes fun at people who believe in psychic powers or UFOs, but suggests that these beliefs are no more irrational than a belief in God.  He tells us that many intelligent and well-educated people, including "famous men in the hard sciences" whom he has met, believe in ESP.  Pohl himself does not believe such things, but admits that he wishes he could: ESP and similar phenomena might provide a means to solve all our problems, and the arrival of aliens would be fun and exciting!

Back cover of my copy

Besides Pohl's amusing intro, over the last few days I read three stories from The New Mind, R. A. Lafferty's "Four Sides of Infinity," Barry N. Malzberg's "Opening Fire," and Joseph Green's "Space to Move."

The back cover of Frontiers 2: The New Mind advertises Frontiers 1: Tomorrow's Alternatives and assures us that further volumes in this series are in preparation.  However, as far as I can tell no Frontiers 3 ever appeared.

"Four Sides of Infinity" by R. A. Lafferty

R. A. Lafferty, because he writes in an unusual style and has a range of interests and attitudes quite different from most SF writers, is always worth checking out.  When I first read Lafferty I didn't quite appreciate what he was trying to do, but he quickly grew on me.  As with Barry Malzberg or A. E. van Vogt, you have to embark on a story or novel by Lafferty with a different set of expectations than you do when you read a more conventional piece of work.

"Four Sides of Infinity" (about 40 pages) consists of four separate stories about the same odd collection of characters living in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which Lafferty tells us is "the Athens of mid-America."  Some of these four tales would later appear on their own in collections of Lafferty's stories.  In these four stories we see Lafferty's Christian faith and wacky sense of humor.

The first ("The Ungodly Mice of Doctor Drakos") is about a scientist whom we are invited to think of as the Devil (his name is "Drakos," after all) who creates artificial life in the form of mice.  The other characters, which include a literature professor, a political manipulator, a seismologist, an Australopithecine houseboy, a female ghost, a life-sized animate doll, and Lafferty himself (whom the other characters call "Laff"), object to Drakos playing God, and the mice are destroyed in a fierce lightning storm.

The second story ("The Two-Headed Lion of Cris Benedetti") is about how a literary professor claims to be a fan of an Irish writer who does not, in fact, exist, even forging books to put over this fraud.  His friends and students are fooled, and, fired by the prof's false enthusiasm, go so far as to organize a visit from the fictional writer.  The professor is flabbergasted when the students send money to Ireland and two imposters answer the summons; these two old Irishmen come to blows and the American professor who "created" them is grievously wounded in the fracas.

The third story ("The Hellaceous Rocket of Harry O'Donovan") follows the political manipulator's efforts to create and own a senator.  He gets together a used car salesman to be "the mask," a skilled writer to be "the pitchman," and an able manager to be "the brain."  The used car salesman does poorly in the primary race until the fourth man, without whom no politician can succeed, comes on the scene and joins the campaign--the fourth man is the Devil!  The used car salesman becomes candidate for his party, but then the lit professor and the Australopithecine houseboy perform an exorcism, driving out the Devil.  The used car salesman loses the election and the manipulator is frustrated in his designs.

The final story ("The Wooly World of Barnaby Sheen") is about the seismologist.  He builds a scale model of a section of the Earth's crust upon which to perform experiments in tectonics.  The female ghost uses her unearthly powers to bring this tiny world to life, but disaster occurs when a volcano erupts on the little world, setting the seismologist's house on fire.

These four crazy stories are full of satire, wacky jokes, and bad puns.  One of their uniting themes is the folly of counterfeiting and fraud.  Four of the characters try to take on God's job of creation, and all four suffer for it.  Another theme is the vague, or "contested" as they might say in academe, definition of who is alive, and who is human.  The two female characters are undead, a ghost and a doll animated by the spirit of a dead girl, and then there is the houseboy, an Australopithicus. 

A fun read.

"Opening Fire" by Barry Malzberg

This story is six pages long, and is split into six chapters.

Humans have met a peaceful alien race, and an elite team goes out to negotiate with them.  One member of the team, our narrator, a mathematician, has failed all the psychological tests designed to weed out bigots and xenophobes--he finds the aliens disgusting and repellent, and his gut tells him they will try to outwit and dominate humanity.  The authorities decide to let him on the team anyway; humanity's instinctive suspicion and fear are probably a valuable evolutionary trait which has protected mankind from extinction in the past, and the authorities figure this aspect of human life deserves a seat at the table.

Malzberg leaves it somewhat ambiguous whether the bigoted mathematician is justified in his fear or not.  The aliens are pretty mysterious (all the meetings are on the Earth ship, no human gets to see the inside of the alien ship) and they aren't really all that peaceful (they say they are in a war with another alien race the humans have never met, and they want to buy Earth weapons from the humans.)  The captain of the Earth ship, after negotiations are concluded, hands our narrator over to the aliens, who kill him with a ray gun, saying that, for there to be peace between them and the Earth people, all such bigots must be eliminated.    

Not bad; if you care to, you can spend quite a bit of time trying to figure out if the narrator deserves to be killed for being a xenophobe, or if his death proves that the humans really should be suspicious of the aliens, or if the point of the story is that life is horrible and makes monsters of us all.

"Space to Move" by Joseph Green

In his preface to The New Mind, editor Roger Elwood says, "Barry Malzberg, Joseph Green, and Frederick Pohl need no introduction."  I must beg to differ; I'd never heard of Green before.

Compared to the Lafferty and Malzberg, "Space to Move" is an ordinary, traditional story, but it is not bad.

Ken is a graduate student, flying around in space in a university FTL scout ship, gathering data for his dissertation.  The ship's computer consists of a disembodied human brain, that of a young woman killed in an accident, Flo.  They discover a crashed alien space ship; it turns out these aliens had the technology to transfer minds from one brain to another.  Flo misses the physical sensations of having a body, and convinces Ken to use the alien machinery to shift her mind from her brain into the brain of an alien bird.  Flo then flies away to a life of freedom.

I have been reading so many downbeat and pessimistic stories that I thought Flo was going to figure out some way to steal Ken's body or something like that, but this is actually a story with a happy ending.

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Three enjoyable, interesting stories; The New Mind is a good anthology, and I am glad I bought it.  

Three Stories by Charles L. Grant: "Crowd of Shadows," "Quietly Now," and "The Magic Child"

Charles L. Grant, my fellow Jersey boy, is a big deal in horror publishing.  People who care about horror, like Tarbandu and Will Errickson, have read his stories and his anthologies, and have educated opinions about him.  Three books currently in my possession contain stories by Grant, so this weekend I read them and made progress constructing my own opinion about his work.

ISFDB image of cover and spine

"A Crowd of Shadows" (1976)

I recently took custody of a hardcover copy of Nebula Winners Twelve, edited by Gordon R. Dickson.  The cover illustration of this volume is almost incomprehensible, at least on my withdrawn library copy.  The first story in the book is Grant's "A Crowd of Shadows," which first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and won Grant the Nebula for Short Story.

This is a well-written story about racism/bigotry/intolerance with an effective trick ending, so I'm not surprised it won the Nebula, which is awarded by professional SF writers.  In the future, androids who are almost indistinguishable from humans are common, but are afforded no legal rights and are widely looked down upon.  The narrator of the story goes to a what I guess you would call a small seaside tourist town, where he encounters a teen age boy with a number printed on his arm (yes, like a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp.)  These numbers indicate he is an android, and he is apparently owned by human couple who like to pretend he is their real son.  An old man calls the boy a "robie," an anti-android slur, and soon the old man turns up dead.  There is another murder, and the town is in an uproar.  A mob kills the boy, and it is revealed that, in fact, the boy is human and the parents are androids: the boy was a rich orphan who wanted the experience of having real parents, and pretended to be an android to show his solidarity with the oppressed artificial people.

It is not clear (to me at least) who really committed the murders; maybe the kid ordered one of his parents to commit them?  I think Grant often leaves these kinds of mysteries hanging in his stories.  The real point of the story is that people, even people who think themselves liberal, like the narrator, can be prejudiced and tribal, and feel a need to look down on somebody.  "A Crowd of Shadows" pushes the idea of what constitutes bigotry to the limit, because it is pretty clear the androids are no more alive and have no more feelings than a microwave or an automobile.  The androids are just machines, and the fact that people respond to them with friendship, sympathy, love or hatred says something about human nature.

A pretty good story; I liked the style and the surprise ending, which actually did surprise me.   

"Quietly Now" (1981)

"Quietly Now" appears in Tales of the Dead by Bill Pronzini, a copy of which I still have not returned to the library.  (The Iowa Library Association's SWAT team is probably studying my house on Google Maps as we speak.)  As Pronzini tells us in his intro to the tale, this is a story of "quiet horror," the type of story Grant has written and advocated his entire career.  "Quietly Now" is in the thick anthology's third section, which is entitled "Ghoul!"

This story takes place in suburban northwestern New Jersey, where a writer who has been divorced three times lives in an apartment complex near a school.  This part of New Jersey is almost rural, with lots of hills and woods, the setting of newspaper stories and rumors about tourists and hikers getting lost in the wilderness and dying of exposure, their bodies then partially eaten by animals.

This story feels long and slow; there are some passages consisting of description that made my eyes glaze over: "He stood in front, just below the once-belled steeple, and directly ahead the ground sloped gently toward the highway; beyond, a steeper incline, and behind a row of thick-boled elms the apartments began, rising and falling on the gentle swells of the old farm until the woodland reasserted itself, dark with noon shadows."  Oy!

Teaching at the school is a tall creepy woman whom the kids consider a vampire and who has arguments with the school janitor, who is a friend of the writer.  When a student and then the janitor turn up dead and mutilated, the writer investigates the creepy teacher.  But it turns out that a different character altogether, a mother of two who is attracted to the writer, is the murderous ghoul.  This woman had only appeared briefly in the story, and I had forgotten about her and never suspected she was the killer.    

Grant's idea of having the ghoul be a jealous woman who murders the writer's on-again-off-again girlfriend and then turns the writer into a ghoul so he can be a father to her kids is a good one, as it ties into the everyday anxieties men have about their relationships with women and children.  But the execution of the story was weak, with too many red herrings and not enough attention paid to the woman who turned out to be the monster.  There is also a scene which I didn't even understand, with the writer coming home to find evidence of a break in: his door is ajar, there are deep scratches around the lock, and inside he finds his drapes closed.  Then all of a sudden the drapes are open and there are no scratches on the door.  Was this an hallucination?  Or evidence of the ghoul's magic powers?

"Quietly Now" didn't hold my attention, and was confusing--thumbs down.

 "The Magic Child" (1973)

This is one of Grant's earlier stories, and appears under the name "C. L. Grant" in the anthology Frontiers 2: The New Mind.  Roger Elwood edited this collection of all-new stories.  I believe this is "The Magic Child"'s only appearance in English.

ISFDB image of cover of edition I own

This is a slightly experimental story--maybe we should categorize it as "New Wave."  It consists entirely of dialogue, and has no quotation marks.  The speakers are a government agent, whose speech is in italics, and a teenaged boy of below average intelligence, William Peter 777M1, "Billy" to his friends.  The government worker is interrogating Billy, and drugs him to ensure he is telling all. Thus we hear his sad story.

"The Magic Child" takes place in a future totalitarian world, in which the "scientific" government, ostensibly due to overpopulation, controls everyone's life.  People are only allowed to have a certain number of children, determined by their assigned social class; retarded or antisocial children are euthanized; and most people are given drugs to suppress their imaginations!     

Billy, apparently, was born normal, but an illness damaged his brain, lowering his intelligence.  Billy's parents somehow convince the government (which is represented at the local level by robot police called "Monitors") that Billy is dead, and hide Billy in their tiny apartment.  (Billy's father is one of the creative class allowed to retain their imaginations, and has access to the government records; he plans to forge necessary documents for Billy when his son reaches adulthood.)  When Billy accidentally kills his parents he is discovered by the authorities.  After his interrogation Billy is put to death.

This is an effective story: the experimental structure actually improves the story by making it more economical and more direct.  I quite like it.

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Perhaps unexpectedly, of the three stories I read by Charles L. Grant this weekend I liked the two science-fiction stories and didn't like the horror story.  This may be partly because a future of androids or a merciless totalitarian government is more interesting to me than a guy with women trouble in 1970s New Jersey.  The important differences, however, lie in the structure, clarity, and leanness of the stories; the SF stories are well-paced and economical, while the horror story is slow, confusing, and bloated.

I enjoyed "Crowd of Shadows" and "The Magic Child" enough that I hope to come across more of Grant's SF in the future.  As for the horror...well, the jury is still out.

Three Beastly Tales from Tanith Lee

For four bucks I recently purchased a hardcover edition of The Gorgon and Other Beastly Tales, a collection of early '80s stories by Tanith Lee.  This hardcover was printed by DAW in 1985, apparently concurrently with and with the same contents as a paperback edition.  The jacket of my copy has "BOOK CLUB EDITION" printed on the inside flap.  This book has no intro or afterword or anything like that, and not even a table of contents!

"The Gorgon" (1983)

This story first appeared in Charles L. Grant's Shadows 5.  Lee's name is the first listed on the cover.

An American writer takes a house on a small Greek island in order to write.  Visible not far away is an even smaller island, and he becomes obsessed with it, neglecting his writing to stare at it and to try to convince the locals to take him there.  The natives are scared of the island, but our narrator ignores their apparently superstitious fear and swims out to the island.  There, he meets a mysterious woman who wears a mask, a sophisticated and well-educated woman with a fine house and two servants.

The people on the main island believe a gorgon, like Medusa, haunts the island, but the story turns out to have no supernatural or science fiction content.  The woman, in fact, was born with a sort of birth defect that renders her horribly ugly, in fact looking like the depictions of Medusa you see in ancient reliefs, all bug eyes, grinning teeth, protruding tongue.  Her hideousness has forced her to remain a recluse.

Our narrator is shocked by the woman's appearance, and knowledge of her tragedy has a powerful effect on him.  He abandons his writing career, the tragedy of the gorgon woman having convinced him that life is futile - metaphorically, the sight of her has turned him to stone.
 
Lee's writing is lucid and smooth, forcing me to break out one of my overused stock phrases and describe it as "a pleasure to read."  All the sentences are clear and conjure up images or feelings that contribute to the story.  The ending is very satisfying, because while it is a surprise (at least it was to me), it is clearly foreshadowed, so I didn't feel like I had been tricked.  I don't doubt that "The Gorgon" deserved the 1983 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction which it won for Lee.

Just this year Lee was interviewed for Nightmare Magazine, and answered (sort of) some questions about "The Gorgon."  

"Anna Medea" (1982)

This is a well-written and entertaining, but essentially ordinary, horror story.

Claude Irving lives on his country estate in England with his wife Chloe and their two children.  (I guess it is the Victorian period, it seems that there is rail service but no automobiles yet.)  Irving's kids are a nightmare to deal with, always playing practical jokes which involve small dead animals and commiting other nuisances.  The Irvings have hired and lost fifteen governesses to their terrorism.  The most recent and current governess, a stern black-haired woman with a vaguely foreign face named Anna Medea, however, has managed to reform their behavior.  Despite this, Anna Medea makes Chloe uncomfortable, and she urges her husband to fire the woman.

Time spent reading up on the occult in the library, and the reports from the groundskeepers of mysterious forms in the night and of mutilated animals, convince Irving that Anna Medea is some kind of lycanthrope who is fattening up his kids for dinner.  He lets her go, and loads up his pistol with silver bullets and stalks the grounds at night; when he sees a lupine form he blasts it, only to find that he has killed his wife.

Of course the police don't believe his crazy story, so Irving is hanged, and then his children, werewolves like their mother, are free to terrorize the English countryside.  Anna Medea was not a monster, but some kind of sorceress who had been using her arcane knowledge to get the kids under control.

"Anna Medea" first appeared in Amazing, and in 2009 was included in Tempting the Gods, the first volume of The Selected Stories of Tanith Lee.  I liked it.

"Meow" (1982)

"Meow" tells the story of a wealthy young woman, orphaned when her parents die in a car crash.  They leave her their house and their five cats.  Shy, with no friends or family, the girl becomes unhealthily attached to the house and the cats, to the point at which she begins acting like a cat herself, scratching wooden furniture and eating from a bowl on the floor.  We hear this story from the point of view of the woman's cat-hating boyfriend, an aspiring novelist who pays the rent by doing a magic act.

Like "The Gorgon," this story first appeared in one of Charles L. Grant's Shadows anthologies.  I guess this means they count as "quiet horror," and it is true that nobody gets tortured or dismembered or even killed in either of them.  (Well, not counting the pigeon.)

An enjoyable story.

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Three above average stories, one of them, "The Gorgon," different and surprising.  So far I am quite pleased with The Gorgon and Other Beastly Tales.

Three More Mummy Stories: Wollheim, Williams and Grant

Let's return now to the copy of Tales of the Dead I borrowed from the library, to read three more stories from the section of the book which reproduces editor Bill Pronzini's 1980 anthology Mummy!

"Bones" by Donald A. Wollheim (1941)

I've already enjoyed Wollheim's work as an editor; in 1971 Wollheim founded the famous DAW Books, and I own and have read books by Jack Vance, Tanith Lee, A. E. Van Vogt, Lin Carter, Theodore Sturgeon, and others, published by DAW.  But until today I had never read any of Wollheim's fiction.

"Bones" first appeared in Stirring Science Stories, a magazine that lasted four issues, which Wollheim edited.  According to Wikipedia, Wollheim had no budget to pay for fiction, so he and his cronies wrote all the stories, often under pseudonyms.  According to ISFDB, one story Wollheim wrote was credited to "X" and titled "!!!"

"Bones" feels amateurish and overwritten.  "Half conquered by the smell of the antique houses, the subtle vibrations of past generations still pervading his spirit..."  Not too good, and the entire story is like this.  "...his nostrils were assailed by the inescapable odor of all such institutions - age!"  "The silence assailed his ears with a suddenness that all but took his breath away."  "Shortly Dr. Zweig announced himself ready to attempt the final work toward actually bringing the now pliant and vibrant corpse to life."  "The air was supercharged with tension, horror mixed with scientific zeal."  Oy.

The plot of this 7 page story is similar to Edgar Allan Poe's "Some Words with a Mummy": a guy is invited to be part of a group of intellectuals attending the unwrapping of a mummy, the mummy is electrified and comes to life.  But while in Poe's satire the mummy criticized democracy and American architecture, "Bones" is a mood piece with a trick ending, and when the mummy tries to speak, it falls apart.

Not very good.  

"The Vengeance of Nitocris" by Tennessee Williams (1928)

When you are reading from a book called Mummy!, you might think that you will not be exposing yourself to the work of great figures of American literature.  Well, you could not be more wrong!  Tennessee Williams, who penned A Streetcar Named Desire ("Stella!") and The Glass Menagerie ("gentleman caller") and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ("Big Daddy") was published in Weird Tales, the August 1928 issue, with this story long before he was the toast of Broadway.  "The Vengeance of Nitocris" appeared in the same issue as a story by Robert Howard about Solomon Kane and one by Edmond Hamilton about the Interstellar Patrol.

When you are reading from a book called Mummy! you probably expect all the stories to include mummies, but again you would be mistaken.  As Pronzini warns us in his intro, there are no mummies in "The Vengeance of Nitocris."  Instead this is a story set in ancient Egypt, about a pharaoh who neglects his duties to the gods, and is torn apart by an angry mob lead by rabble-rousing priests.  The impious pharaoh's sister, Nitocris, is a striking beauty with "thick black brows," "luminous black eyes," "rich red lips" and "slender fingers."  Hubba hubba, we can understand why the priests put her on the throne after murdering her brother, can't we?  

Nitocris has built a tremendous temple of great beauty, and invites all the priests to a banquet there in its subterranean dining room.  While the priests are living it up with booze and slave girls, Nitocris sneaks off and pulls a lever and the Nile rushes into the banquet hall, drowning all of the priests (and the slave girls!  Cold!)  Nitocris then commits suicide in a room full of fire.

This is more like an anecdote than an actual short story; Williams lets us know ahead of time what is going to happen, and all you classical scholars will know anyway, as Williams lifted the story from Herodotus.  So there isn't much suspense.  I myself hadn't heard the story before, and was disappointed when the priests were drowned; when Nitocris pulled the lever, "a moment of supreme ecstasy," I thought a pack of ravenous lions was going to burst into the banquet hall and tear everybody to pieces.

This story is just OK, though I feel like I learned something about American and Greek literature I should have known already, so I will recommend it.     

"The Other Room" by Charles L. Grant (1980)

I've never read anything by Grant before, though I have a book he edited, Gallery of Horror.  It seems that "The Other Room" only ever appeared in Pronzini's Mummy! and the omnibuses like Tales of the Dead in which Mummy! rose again.

It seems that Grant is a fellow New Jerseyean, and in fact was born in a town with which I am familiar, Hackettstown, where they make M&Ms.  

"The Other Room," Pronzini tells us in his intro, takes place in the New England town of Oxrun Station, the setting of several stories by Grant.  Like everybody, I love New England: the trees, hills, ocean, antiquing, old houses, etc.  After we bought our doughty Toyota Corolla my wife and I spent many weekends driving around New England.  One week we stayed in a spider-infested cabin in the Maine woods, next to a clear pond full of adorable turtles.  The power went out and for light to read by I had to hand crank a LED lamp.

Sometimes my life back in New York feels like a dream.

Anyway, in "The Other Room," two academics discover a secret chamber in an old Connecticut house.  The room contains sarcophagi, and an inscription that describes a simple spell.  When one of the academics completes the spell there is fire and smoke and everyone flees the house, and we are left to wonder what manner of doom is about to befall the world, now that a door to some ancient evil has been opened.

Grant spends a lot of time setting the scene and helping us get to know the characters, which include the wife and teenage daughter of the owner of the house.  This is fine, but I felt like there wasn't much pay off; what they actually find in the secret crypt and what happens next is left a mystery.  This story kind of feels like the first chapter of an adventure story about an army of monsters trying to conquer the Earth through a gate, and how a band of plucky ordinary people, or a special branch of the FBI, or an armored division of the US Army, has to stop the monsters before midnight or an eclipse or something.  Or the first half of a short story about a family or a pair of friends who outfight a monster in a house using the rifles from the gun cabinet, the rusty crossed swords that have hung over the fireplace for 20 years, and their knowledge of the Bible or The Necronomicon.  (My spell check wants to read a story in which people defeat a monster with their knowledge of microeconomics.)

Grant seems like an able writer - I want to read something else by him now - but I feel like there could have been more here.  My man Tarbandu, who has read lots of horror stories and doesn't seem to be a fan of Grant's, suggests at his venerable PorPor Books Blog that the lack of a "payoff" is characteristic of Grant's work.  Will Errickson, whose Too Much Horror Fiction blog is always interesting and full of great images, appears to like Grant more than does Tarbandu, and provides a more sympathetic view of the style of horror Grant wrote and promoted.    

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One poor story, and two OK stories; not so hot.  Still, I will rustle up and read more stories by Wollheim and Grant before giving up on them.  And I'm not done with Tales of the Dead; its third section, Ghoul!, lurks in my future.