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. 

Nightmares from Thomas Ligotti, Robert Aickman and Charles L. Grant

The nightmare continues!  Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we have been reading stories from To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare, a 1993 anthology edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg and Martin H. Greenberg.  To Sleep, Perchance to Dream... Nightmare contains thirty stories, and we have read 14 of them over the years in various venues; interested parties can see what we thought about them by clicking the links below:  

"The Black Stone" by Robert E. Howard     
"Ubbo-Sathla" by Clark Ashton Smith
"Scarlet Dream" by C. L. Moore
"The Dreams in the Witch-House" by H. P. Lovecraft 
"The Isle of the Sleeper" by Edmond Hamilton
"The Unspeakable Betrothal" by Robert Bloch  
"Perchance to Dream" by Charles Beaumont

"A Dread of Red Hands" by Bram Stoker

"The Watcher in the Green Room" by Hugh B. Cave

"The Lady in Gray" by Donald Wandrei

"Prescience" by Nelson S. Bond
"The Dreams of Albert Moreland" by Fritz Leiber

"Lover When You're Near Me" by Richard Matheson

"The Depths" by Ramsey Campbell

Today we'll read three more stories from the collection, those tales plucked by Messrs. D, W and G from the oeuvres of Thomas Ligotti, Robert Aickman and Charles L. Grant.

"Dream of a Mannikin" by Thomas Ligotti (1983?)

This story has appeared in several books, sometimes as "Dream of a Manikin" and sometimes as "Dream of a Mannikin" and sometimes as "Dream of a Mannikin, or The Third Person."  There is some confusion at isfdb over whether the story debuted in 1982 or 1983, but it looks to me like its first appearance was in the 1983 issue of the magazine Eldritch Tales.  In 1989 Jessica Amanda Salmonson included the story in her anthology Tales by Moonlight II, which appears to be a collection of stories that first appeared in small press magazines; "Dream of a Manikin" was reprinted in the Ligotti collections Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Nightmare Factory.

I guess we sort of expect Ligotti stories to be a little challenging, to be the sort of story you have to figure out, and this is true of "Dream of a Mannikin," but it is not terribly difficult.  The story takes the form of a long letter written by a psychiatrist to a fellow shrink, a woman with whom he is in love, and we learn more and more about his feelings for her and the nature of their relationship as the story progresses.  The last paragraph of the letter is in italics and is apparently the female therapist's notes on or response to the man's letter.

The main topic of the letter is the visit of a young woman, Amy Locher, to the letter writer.  Locher has had a terrible dream and is seeking treatment, and it turns out she was directed to the narrator by the woman he is in love with.  Ligotti puts multiple layers between the story and the reader as he has the letter writer describe Locher's dream, which mostly consists of a second, inner dream, the dream of the patient's dream version of herself.  In real life (ostensibly) Locher is a clerk or secretary at an industrial firm, but in her dream she works in a clothing store and dresses the mannikins (the spelling is perhaps significant--I'd spell the term for those figures in a store "mannequin.")  The retail worker version of the patient has a dream herself in which she is attacked by the mannequins she dresses and turned into a mannequin herself--this dream within a dream includes classic dream elements, like being unable to move and unable to scream when in danger.

The woman shrink has some totally wacky theories about "otherworlds" and powerful beings who toy with lesser beings that may be subordinate "splinter" aspects of themselves, theories that the narrator feels are more metaphysical than scientific, and the male shrink in his letter accuses her of manipulating Locher, of hypnotically inducing her dream, in order to acquire evidence of her bizarre theories and to lay a trap for him.  And an elaborate trap it is--it seems the narrator's secretary is an agent of the woman shrink.

In the second part of the letter the narrator describes his investigations that lead him closer to the nature of the trap the woman psychiatrist has laid for him, which he nevertheless falls into.  It seems the female shrink has somehow gained the ability, through contact with other worlds or dimensions, to take control of people and turn them into mannikins (also described as dolls--allusively, the lady shrink apparently had a doll named Amy as a child, and the word "darling" is spelled "dolling" multiple times throughout the story in multiple contexts) and she has done this to Amy Lochner and it looks like the male shrink is in the process of becoming her next victim.  Or maybe the female psychiatrist can imbue dolls--and/or people--with alien souls she snares from outer space--one of the themes of the story is ambiguity and confusion about identity and transformation of identity.  Or perhaps the female shrink is a space monster and all the other characters--Locher, secretary and male psychiatrist--are aspects of her soul which she plays with to help pass the aeons.

This is a well-crafted story; the depiction of dreams feels totally believable, the images are strong, and every sentence feels significant, offering some clue to the plot or adding to the atmosphere.  "Dream of a Mannikin" does require some patience and it will give your noggin a workout, though, so maybe it's not what everybody is going to think of as fun entertainment.  

"Never Visit Venice" by Robert Aickman (1968)

Robert Aickman is another writer whose work I expect to strain the brain case.  The title of "Never Visit Venice" made me wonder if I was in for allusions to Thomas Mann's famous "Death In Venice," which I have read a few times, and to Proust--Venice (Marcel's desire to go there and his eventual visit) is a recurring theme in Remembrance of Lost Time, and strange dreams, in which little Marcel has become an inanimate object or an abstract concept, are a prominent topic of the very first page of that monumental novel.  And then came the epigraph that opens "Never Visit Venice," some lines from Celine, whose Death on the Installment Plan and Castle to Castle we read back in early 2022. 

Fern is an Englishman, an office worker who is shy, unambitious,  and not very social; he doesn't make as much money as he could because he doesn't see the point, and he doesn't make friends or achieve any success with women largely because other people interest him but little.  He has a recurring dream about embracing a woman in a gondola in Venice, and eventually actually goes to Venice, where the dream comes true in a macabre and surreal fashion.  As the story ends it seems that Fern, alone in the gondola with the skeleton of the woman who beckoned him into the little craft, will drift out to sea to be drowned; one of the last things he sees is a political slogan painted on a wall, I guess a quote or paraphrase from Mussolini, asserting it is better to live like a lion for an hour than to live a lifetime as an ass.    

Though the sudden revelation in the end, when the woman Fern has just had sex with becomes or is revealed to be a skeleton, is like something out of Weird Tales or EC comics, most of the story resembles literary fiction.  The first part is page after page of Fern in England that focus on his ambiguous and diffident attitude toward life and career and money, and most of the remainder is page after page of Fern in Venice, finding everything disappointing and sensing that Venice's glory days are long past, a fact none of the living people in Venice are to acknowledge--only the ghost woman in the gondola will voice this sad truth.  The pervasive atmosphere of the story is of ambiguity and irony--early in the story we learn Fern is both proud and embarrassed that he is different than other people and doesn't really get along with them, and we are told early in the Venice part of the story that Fern's expectations of what he would find in Venice, based on what he has read and been told, are not realized, that in fact he finds the opposite of what he was told to expect.  And there are many other instances of irony and ambiguity.  One of the more striking examples is the camouflaged suggestion on the last page that Mussolini, whom we always see portrayed as a monster or a buffoon, had a better idea about how to live than does the inoffensive Fern, a strange notion that I guess the quote from Celine, the notorious Jew-hater and Nazi-sympathizer, that begins the story foreshadows.  

But it could be that Aickman is not endorsing Mussolini and Celine.  Perhaps Aickman's point is that people who put themselves out there, who embrace life with vigor, are often evil people, and that being forward and ambitious is dangerous and ultimately pointless (Mussolini and Celine are, of course, in the final equation, losers who get humiliated.)  Consider that Fern tries to realize his dream of love in Venice only to have sex with a skeleton who tells him one should "Never visit Venice" (i.e., do not pursue your dreams) and then get killed, and that early in the story Aickman puts forward the idea that travel is pointless, suggesting, as would a skeptic of "globalism," that easy travel and communication have served to homogenize the world, turn a world of diverse cultures into one big monoculture, so that travel and communication are unprofitable, every place being now the same.         

Though not a lot actually happens in the story, Aickman's style, as in good literary fiction, is smooth and engaging and carries you along so the story doesn't feel long at all, even though there is little or no narrative drive.  Thought-provoking and worthwhile.

"Never Visit Venice" first appeared in the Aickman collection Sub Rosa, and was also included in the collection The Wine-Dark Sea.

"The Last and Dreadful Hour" by Charles L. Grant (1986)

"The Last and Dreadful Hour" is one of Grant's stories about the town of Oxrun, and debuted in the collection The Orchard.  The Orchard has appeared in numerous editions, and looking over their covers I was amused to see that in one edition the Stephen King blurb reads "One of the premier horror writers of his or any generation," but on another cover the quote has been misleadingly edited into "The premier horror writer of his or any generation."  Was King aware of this inexcusable chicanery?  

Ligotti's "Dream of a Mannikin" is like 12 pages long, and Aickman's "Never Visit Venice" is some ten pages longer.  Grant's "The Last and Dreadful Hour" is ten pages longer still, clocking in at 33 pages, a fact that made me groan after I had read the first of those thirty-three, which is wholly devoted to a description of the weather, complete with poetic repetition--while Ligotti and Aickman's stories felt like literary fiction, Grant's from square one felt like the work of a guy trying to be literary but succeeding only in wasting everybody's time.

The second page of "The Last and Dreadful Hour" is given over to describing in mind-numbing detail the movie theatre in Oxrun.  The aforementioned weather--a ferocious storm--causes a power outage, and the theatre manager goes on the sound system--which, unlike the electric lights, is somehow still working--to apologize.  We are then introduced to a passel of boring characters with boring backstories, and forced to read bland and verbose retailings of their every move--

...she straightened, rubbed a hand over the back of her neck, and waved him out to the aisle.  He grinned and did as he was told, thanked her as she joined him, took her arm and pulled her down a pace while Seth and Davidson moved to carry the old man...

--as they discover an unconscious man in the darkened theater.  It is bad enough that Grant wastes our time detailing these boring people's every gesture, but his sin is compounded by the fact that his descriptions don't even work.  Toni the medical student is holding Ellery the depressed bookstore clerk's hand, and then she lets go of his hand, but then two lines later she is "pull[ing] him slowly up the aisle," as if she never let go of his hand.  So not only are all these descriptions tedious and useless, they are confusing, and then angering when you realize you are looking back up the page to reread boring sentences in hopes of figuring out if some dope is holding another dope's hand, even though whether or not these dopes are holding hands is meaningless.  It is possible these apparent mistakes are intentional, an effort to make the story "dream-like," but I am betting Grant and his editor just screwed up.

Some supernatural force locks all the doors and renders all the windows indestructible so the characters are all stuck in the candle-lit (and believe me, we hear like one thousand times about wax dripping off these damned candles) cinema, in which all the women flirt with Ellery and the local rich guy acts like a jerk.  People start disappearing, and while Ellery and a woman (not Toni, who has disappeared) are away from the group looking for one of them, she strips naked and tries to seduce Ellery, and then turns into a medusa and then into a skeleton.  Ellery faints, wakes up, finds everybody is gone.  A third woman reappears and flirts with Ellery before joining him on another search.  Another woman reappears to flirt with Ellery, and they search some more.  (This story moves in sterile circles--phrases, images, and actions all get repeated while the plot goes absolutely nowhere.)  The same sort of stuff keeps happening until the story finally ends with the awakening of the old man and the hint that this mind-bogglingly lame story that makes no sense and achieves nothing is all just the dream of that old man whom they found unconscious--or maybe it is the dream of sad Ellery himself.  (Toni's out-of-left-field mention of the orchard way back at the start of the story that implies the orchard is a locus of black magic or demonic possession or something is forgotten--maybe "The Last and Dreadful Hour" is more like a chapter of an episodic novel than a short story that can really stand on its own.)

This story is very bad.  The plot stinks, with no resolution or development and lots of loose ends.  The style is horrible, a mixture of the pretentious and the just plain dumb.  The characters' actions and dialogue make little sense, are just a series of non sequiturs; characters in genre fiction often act stupidly so that the plot will work, but this story is even worse because it doesn't even have a plot in which anything happens.

Grant has won a pile of awards but this story is garbage and I don't know why Dziemianowicz, Weinberg and Greenberg put it in their anthology; maybe they had run out of dream stories?  I will now take Stephen King blurbs even less seriously, and shun stories by Grant assiduously.

Incomprehensibly, "The Last and Dreadful Hour" would be included in the "Best of" Grant collection Scream Quietly.

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So today we have three stories that remind you that pursuing women is hazardous, two quite literary stories that are well-written followed by a piece of junk that makes you question the wisdom and honesty of Stephen King and the entire horror fiction establishment.  What a ride!

It's been like six weird and horror blog posts in a row here at MPorcius Fiction Log; when next we meet we'll do something a little different.

Masterful Dark stories: M W Wellman, C L Grant, F B Long & T F Monteleone

Let's surf on over to the internet archive, world's finest website, and check out Dennis Etchison's 1988 anthology Masters of Darkness II  (in its appearance in the 1991 omnibus edition The Complete Masters of Darkness.)  This is one of those anthologies that consists of stories selected by the authors themselves, stories with which they are particularly pleased.  Etchison invited contributions from a bunch of authors in whom we are interested, and let's today read four of them, stories by Manly Wade Wellman, Charles L. Grant, Frank Belknap Long and Thomas F. Monteleone.

In his intro to Masters of Darkness II, Etchison tells us that some of the stories in his anthology have been revised since their original publication, so I'll make clear here that for all these stories I am reading the versions that appear in this 1991 book.

"Up Under the Roof" by Manly Wade Wellman (1938)

We start with a story printed in Weird Tales prior to World War II.  "Up Under the Roof," after its debut, was reprinted in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Magazine in 1967 and then in multiple Wellman collections and horror anthologies.

A bookish young boy is growing up in an old house with a family who treats his shabbily, always criticizing him and not lifting a finger to aid him when a bully thrashes him within their sight.  His family are such jerks that he can't tell them about the scary sounds he hears in the attic above his bedroom every night.  One day he feels that his doom is approaching, that tonight the creature is going to descend and work its malignant will upon him, so before sunset he screws up his courage, arms himself, and explores the attic.

This is a very good story, full of vivid images, totally believable psychology, effective metaphors, heart-rending sadness and a cathartic ending.  The author's note (first published in 1973) that follows "Up Under the Roof" reveals that this is an autobiographical story, being closely based on Wellman's own experience.  

Recommended.

"A Garden of Blackred Roses" by Charles L. Grant (1980)

This one first saw print in the anthology Dark Forces, which was published in Dutch in multiple editions as Macaber Carnaval, and would later be included in Grant collections.

"A Garden of Blackred Roses" feels long and slow.  For one thing, it groans under the weight of long detailed descriptions of boring quotidian stuff, like snow and wind and the way a guy holds his cigarette or puts his gloves in his pockets.  I guess these passages are supposed to create a mood, but instead they made my eyes glaze over.  (Maybe that is a mood, but not a mood I am seeking when I read fiction.)  There are also extravagant and sometimes clumsy metaphors which, instead of increasing our understanding of what the author is trying to say, bring us out of the story as we wonder why the author would commit to paper something so goofy.  Grant also presents to us ungrammatical sentence fragments which I guess are supposed to mimic poetry.  And then there is the fact that "A Garden of Blackred Roses" is an homage to Nathaniel Hawthorne, and I am not familiar enough with Hawthorne to really grok all the references.  (Maybe Hawthorne junkies would love this thing.)

"A Garden of Blackred Roses" comes to us in the form of four vignettes about life on Hawthorne Street.  In the first three, people acquire flowers from the garden of a Mr. Dimmesdale, and then supernatural events occur to them--it seems the flowers can make wishes come true.  The fourth, shorter, chapter, portrays Dimmesdale, who has a letter written on his chest, tending to his blood-drinking flowers.

The star of Chapter 1 has a wife and four daughters and a cat he is crazy about.  He sneaks into the yard of the creepy Mr. Dimmesdale to steal some flowers from the man's rosebush.  His cat dies and he lays one of the flowers on kitty's grave; at night he thinks he can hear the cat--presumably the flower made his wish that his beloved cat was still alive come true.

In Chapter 2 we meet the owner of the only luncheonette on Hawthorne Street, a guy who is always irritating people with his cynical comments and unwelcome criticisms.  His wife has stolen some flowers from the Dimmesdale yard.  Some kids who hang out at the luncheonette have a tape recorder and are laughing at what appears to be a surreptitiously made recording of young lovers in a long-abandoned house down by the river.  The luncheonette owner and his wife, when they were young, themselves had sex in that abandoned house; after their tryst he hurt her feelings by critiquing her lovemaking.  Luncheonette guy goes to the abandoned house, I guess to investigate the nature of the recording or something, and gets killed by a ghost or something, I guess because he has with him some of the flowers his wife, who hates him, stole.  This chapter is the hardest to understand, and seems to drag in supernatural and mysterious elements that have nothing to do with the flowers; did the wife wish her husband would get killed?  Is the house on the river haunted?  Who were the kids recording?  

Chapter 3 features a sad highschooler who is in love with a girl who is uninterested in him.  This chapter has the most outrageous of the metaphors I was complaining about above.

...Ginny seemed so cold not even the equator could warm her.

Another girl in class is attracted to the boy, but he isn't interested in her.  Her role in the story seems to be to add additional sadness, and also to offer more examples of wishes coming true--she claims that her father stole a flower and wished for a car and got one, while her brother's wish for a glove came true.  

(Maybe things that seem to come out of nowhere, like the reference to the equator and the glove, are allusions to Hawthorne?) 

The boy's father is often away on business and it is hinted that his lonely mother is sexually attracted to him.  For example, when sonny boy groans that he doesn't want pea soup for dinner, Mom says "You know you love it" and smacks him playfully on the ass.  Then she pours him a glass of soda and the ginger ale foams up and drips down the side of the glass.  When she is particularly sad, she embraces her son and pulls his face to her breasts.  (Some of these hints are pretty broad.)  Actual incestuous intercourse is averted by the magic of the flowers--the boy's wish that his father not have to travel so much is granted (Dad gets transferred to the nearby home office) and the girl he has a crush on surrenders to his desires. 

Every page of this story radiates the feeling that Grant is trying very hard to be poetic and deep, but his strenuous efforts give birth to a story that is difficult to read because so much of it is tedious or oblique; as for the parts that aren't challenging to decipher, well, those are just lame.  Thumbs down!

"Cottage Tenant" by Frank Belknap Long (1975)

I have developed an affection for Frank Belknap Long over the years I have been toiling in the forge that produces this blog, but it cannot be denied that he has written a large quantity of clunkers, and here is another one.  The plot of  "Cottage Tenant" is acceptable, but the story is poorly written, and I don't just mean the typos and grammatical errors, for which the publisher deserves a large share of the blame.  Long's text lacks clarity, so there are times one has to puzzle out what Long's narration means to convey, and what the characters are trying to convey in their dialogue (which does not in the least resemble the speech of real people.)  Long's pacing and development of tone and atmosphere are also faulty, as he spends an inordinate amount of time describing absolutely extraneous phenomena.  The most egregious example comes up when a guy walking on the beach hears screams from a moored boat, and hurries over to investigate.  Instead of quickening the pace to inspire some excitement in the reader, or express the fear and urgency felt by the character, Long spends numerous sentences describing the guy's calculations regarding his method of approaching and climbing aboard the boat.  First, he decides that running across the beach will present an unacceptable risk of slipping and falling, and so instead he will employ "a swift stride."  Long informs us that the man has considered this issue before:

Crewson had always believed that it was a mistake to break into a run unless someone in need of help was in immediate critical danger.

Similarly, we are privy to the man's thought processes as he decides how far to wade into the water before he begins swimming, and then what stroke he will use, and finally, having clambered aboard the boat, whether he will crawl across the deck or stand up and walk across it.

Anyway, the plot:  Crewson has a wife and two kids.  He disagrees with his wife on what books their nine-year-old boy should read--the kid wants to read Greek mythology, but Crewson fears this fuels the kid's psychological problems, and it is strongly hinted the kid is somehow (Jung is mentioned) in touch with the ancient past, that he knows things about the Trojan War (for example) that are not recorded in literature.  Crewson takes a walk on the beach, discovers two of his neighbors are in distress on their moored boat; the man has been clawed by some animal which he describes as a beaked monster, and the woman is in a state of shock after grappling with the creature.  Crewson takes them to the hospital, and then back home is confronted by evidence that his son, somehow, by reading about the Trojan War, had summoned the monster who assaulted his neighbors.  The next day Crewson goes to see his son's psychiatrist, who, as a Jungian, takes all this talk of summoning monsters seriously, and advises Crewson to send his son to summer camp.  Crewson gets home just in time to find the monster clutching his two kids; he tells his son to empty his mind, and this causes the monster to vanish.  Then it is off to summer camp for the dangerous son.

Thumbs down, I'm afraid.  

Etchison specifically names "Cottage Tenant" as a story that was revised for its appearance in Masters of Darkness II.  It first was printed in an issue of Ted White's Fantastic that also includes a Barry N. Malzberg story I have never read; Gerald Page inexplicably selected "Cottage Tenant" for DAW's Year's Best Horror Stories: Series IV, and Centipede Press included it in the thousand-plus page $450.00 Long collection they published in 2010 and the 800-page $60.00 Long collection they put out in 2022.  

"Taking the Night Train" by Thomas F. Monteleone (1981)

In 1981 "Taking the Night Train" was published in the magazine Night Voyages and the hardcover Monteleone collection Dark Stars and Other Illuminations.  More recently, Eugene Johnson included it in his 2021 anthology Attack From the '80s.  In his afterword in Masters of Darkness II, Monteleone tells us it was the basis for his 1984 novel Night Train; back in 2020, Will Errickson of Paperbacks from Hell fame wrote a little about Night Train at his great blog Too Much Horror Fiction. 

Errickson wasn't crazy about Night Train, but I think this short story is quite good.  I suppose I am biased in its favor, because it covers a bunch of my favorite themes--New York City, alienation, and loneliness--but beyond that all the descriptions of people and people's emotions ring true, and the images are also vivid; critically, unlike Grant and Long in today's selections, Monteleone achieves his effects economically.

Ralphie is a short cripple in his early thirties who loves books and identifies with characters from Gogol, Dostoevsky, Hawthorne and Poe.  On work nights he emerges from his one-bedroom basement apartment near Houston Street to hobble on his mismatched legs to the subway to get to his job standing in front of a strip club drumming up business with a shouted spiel.  On the train one evening, he is not only confronted by homeless people and black muggers, as per usual, but spots what appears to be a secret abandoned station which the train rolls past, but slowly, almost as if the platform with its single light bulb is trying to stop the train but hasn't quite got the strength to do so.

There are a bunch of effective scenes that illustrate how the world has rejected Ralphie and how his ability to face people and his drive to make something of his life are ebbing.  At the same time, his obsession with the secret train stop grows, until he takes the radical step of lowering himself down onto the tracks and searching for the mysterious station.  He finds it, and a corridor that leads from it to a hellish allegorical landscape, where a tremendous monster representing loneliness cries out thunderously from where it is chained as a hideous skeletal bird picks at its entrails.  Ralphie frees the monster, which, presumably, goes on to terrorize the city in some fashion, and then Ralphie finds himself a tortured prisoner in the monster's place.

I can see how some people might find the allegorical ending a little over the top, but its echoes of Prometheus (who in some interpretations created mankind and in others gave mankind technology and civilization) are appropriate for a story that highlights horrible things about New York and about how people treat each other, and the realistic scenes illustrating city life in a period of high crime and how lonely life in the city can be are very good.  I also like the scenes in which Ralphie first sees the mysterious subway platform--I used to ride the New York City subway all the time, and one of the little thrills of such rides was the fleeting impressions of vague things in the dark beyond the windows.

Thumbs up!

**********

Wellman and Monteleone's offerings are commendable and easy to recommend, and the afterwards that accompany them in Masters of Darkness II are actually pretty interesting.  Unfortunately, Grant's story is pretentious and boring, and while Long's story has the makings of an acceptable horror piece, it is rendered ridiculous and ponderous by some bewildering authorial choices.  

I've got my eye on some more stories in Masters of Darkness II, so stay tuned.

Orbit 13: Lafferty, Bryant, Sallis, Grant, Etchison and Dozois

At the Dupont Circle location of Second Story Books, on the clearance carts, I recently spotted a volume entitled Speaking of Science Fiction, a collection of interviews of SF writers and editors conducted during the 1970s via the mail  mail by Paul Walker.  I was interested in the book, but I am incredibly cheap and so instead of buying it I found the scan of it at the internet archive and flipped through it while riding the subway (which in D.C. they call the Metro--oh la la!)

One Paul Walker's interviewees is Damon Knight, and one of the main topics of the interview is Knight's famous series of anthologies of original stories, Orbit.  (Knight also does his husbandly duty, gushing praise for his second wife Kate Wilhelm, talks up the Clarion workshop, and admits that his famous attack on A. E. van Vogt in In Search of Wonder was one-sided and he wishes he had "included something about vV's strong points.")  Orbit, Knight writes, "represents an attempt to bring about a renaissance in science fiction by demanding high standards and giving a lot in return--high rates, prompt reports, courteous treatment, etc."  He says that improving the quality of SF requires "redefining the field" and "letting go of rigid conceptions of what science fiction is;" he argues that "booms for quality" in the past have been the product of editors who have done just that, citing "Tremaine in the mid-thirties, Campbell from '37 to '42," and "Gold and Boucher in the early 50's."  With Orbit, Knight claims, he is not "editing to strict ideas of subject and content," but is "keeping the boundaries fluid" and publishing lots of work on the "fringe of science fiction" or even beyond it that surprise him.  At the same time, and perhaps most interestingly, he asserts that "Orbit has never had anything to do with the stylistic experimentation of the New Worlds/New Wave scene."  I am often struck by how nobody can agree on what the New Wave is or what it was all about. 

The listing of "Gene Wolf" on the cover of the paperback edition is a mistake;
Gary K. Wolf appears in the anthology, not Gene Wolfe.  The promise of 
editorial notes and personal commentary also seems to be a mistake--
at least there is no such additional matter in the scan at isfdb, just two pages of
jokey biographies at the end of the book; in his interview with Walker,
Knight discusses why he stopped composing intros and "blurbs" for Orbit.

Reading this interview has made me want to read some Orbit stories, so I again turn to the internet archive, this time to take a look at Orbit 13 (lucky!) from 1974.  Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we recognize all too well that life is short, and so we won't be reading all 240 pages of Orbit 13, just cherry-picking stories by writers we already have a particular interest in.  I guess this goes against Knight's whole open-minded, innovation-privileging, no-set-ideas, aim-to-push-the-boundaries mindset, but that's how it is.

"And Name My Name" by R. A. Lafferty 

We start off with a story the superiority of which was endorsed by another important SF editor; after its debut here in Orbit 13, "And Name My Name" was selected by Lester del Rey for inclusion in the 1975 edition of his Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year series.  The tale has since appeared in Lafferty collections.

"And Name my Name" posits a bizarre secret history of the world in which the Earth has been successively ruled by different classes or orders of animals: elephants, sharks, whales, crocodilians, etc.  In their time of primacy the ruling beasts have speech, art, even wear clothes, but when they are supplanted by the next rulers, lose these abilities and attributes and become dumb animals.  All except a small elite of seven or nine of their number, immortal representatives of their order at its height.  As the story (15 pages) begins, the seven elite apes, drawn from all across the world, are travelling to a conclave of all the sophisticated elites representing all the past rulers, because the times they are a-changing.  After we have been introduced to the ape delegation, we encounter the seven elite individuals who represent the current rulers of Earth, the human race.  At the big meeting in Mesopotamia a shining man appears; able to bend space and time he treats with each delegation separately but also simultaneously.  He assigns all the different species their roles in the new age, a process referred to as "telling them their names," and the members of the human delegation are pretty discomfited to learn they have no real name beyond "secondary ape" and to hear their culture of towering cities, nuclear reactors and space ships, dismissed out of hand by the shining man, judged less admirable than the hives of termites or the song of the mockingbird.  What will replace the human race that is about to be reduced to dumb animals as its civilization is swept away ,is left to the reader's imagination, but all the non-human characters seem sure it will be an improvement on humanity!

This is a good, fun story, and I think it fulfills Knight's ambitions for Orbit--it is innovative, throwing a new and crazy idea at you, and it is on the fringes of standard definitions of science fiction, seeing as it totally ignores all accepted science around biology and paleontology and all that and replaces it not with speculative science but what is a sort of religious view or just a fairy tale that casts the human race as inferior to the birds and the bees.  At the same time, the story is in direct dialogue with quintessential mainstream SF, as some of the human characters refer to Arthur C. Clarke stories by name. 

Good on Lafferty for producing a good story and good on Knight for publishing it.  Thumbs up!  

"Going West" by Edward Bryant

Looking at the records, it seems that 15 stories by Edward Bryant have been subjected to the sometimes pitiless, generally myopic and always erratic MPorcius microscope, plus the novel Bryant coauthored with bad boy Harlan Ellison, Phoenix Without Ashes, which you might call a piece of shrapnel or a submunition thrown off by one of Ellison's many explosive collisions with Hollywood.  While there are some clunkers among those fifteen, Bryant is a serious writer and his stories are generally thoughtful and ambitious (for one thing he seems to write a lot about various "marginalized communities," e. g., women, blacks, Hispanics, and homosexuals, which is sort of risky and interesting), and they are often effective, so we have reason to hope "Going West" will be a good story.   

"Going West" is indeed a good psychological horror/crime story, a character study and biography of a guy whose unhappy life drives him to trespass against the law and others; I guess you could call "Going West" an attack on our society, argue it suggests that American foreign policy and American racism created a monster out of the main character and that all the empty highways and congested interchanges in the story represent the loneliness and chaos of our individualistic culture of strivers and our complex capitalist economy.  (The title itself is a clue that the story is about America writ large, "going west" being a sort of quintessential theme of American history.) 

Lindsey was raised on the East coast by a single mother, his father having been killed in Cambodia.  Mom was cold and distant, and little Lindsey didn't make friends and was pretty maladjusted.  For example, he came to adore the school buses, to think of them as living animals, and was traumatized when activists angry about busing blew up one of the buses while it sat in a parking lot.

In college Lindsey's bicycle was repeatedly vandalized and eventually stolen.  After graduation, Mom got Lindsey a job at an accounting firm, owned by a Lindsay and his son.  The fourth man at Lindsay, Lindsay, Lindsey and Veach was an aggressive homosexual who kept irritating shy and sad Lindsey, flirting with him and advising him to see a shrink he knew who was a "pussycat."  

Lindsey started having some kind of breakdown, which the senior Lindsay recognized, so he gave Lindsey some time off, and Lindsey is now driving to Los Angeles with no fixed reason to do so in mind, other than to get away from home, where he assaulted the doctor recommended by Veach.  As he drives he becomes progressively more insane, and we readers are privy to what appear to be hallucinations as well as memories, each of which may or may not be false, of people and of conversations--we cannot be sure that anything Lindsey sees or hears or remembers is real.  There are also allusions to Lewis Carroll's Alice.  In the story's climax it seems Lindsey dies after driving off a highway overpass, victim of his hallucinations or a death trap in a through-the-looking-glass universe of murderous highways.  

As I have told you a hundred times I miss living in New York City and one of the things I miss is never  having to drive--I hate driving and all the attendant risks and responsibilities, worrying about the car's tires and oil and fuel and all that.  Because I am from New Jersey and my wife is from the Middle West and has family who have fled the Northern winters for the balmy South I find myself on many long road trips, driving hundreds and hundreds of miles up and down the East coast and back and forth between Washington D.C. and the rural Heartland.  So, I found Bryant's descriptions of the experience of driving for hours and hours and then trying to navigate a complicated series of junctions quite compelling.  The horror stuff in "Going West" is suitably sad and disgusting, and while the story is something of a puzzle, told out of chronological order and full of surreal sections, it is not hard to figure out.      

So, thumbs up for "Going West."  As a psychological horror story it is certainly on the fringes of, or even outside, conventional definitions of science fiction, though maybe the magical realist ending qualifies it as "SF."  According to isfdb, "Going West" has never been reprinted; too bad.   

*"Sending the Very Best," "The Soft Blue Rabbit Story," "Shark," "Pinup," "Road to Cinnabar," "Audition: Soon to Be a Major Production," "Strata," "Dancing Chickens," "Cowboys, Indians," "Nova Morning," "Beside Still Waters," "In the Silent World," "Dark Angel," "Jody After the War," and "Black Onyx"

"My Friend Zarathustra" by James Sallis

I've read eight or nine stories* by James Sallis over the course of this blog's tempestuous life and I have not liked many of them; in fact, I think I have denounced half of them as a waste of the reader's time.  I am just reading this one because it is a mere three pages long and because I wanted to say that seeing the name "Zarathustra" in print always makes me think of Roxy Music's "Mother of Pearl."

This is one of those stories by a writer that is about being a writer, how hard it is, how you hang around with other mentally unstable creative people who cry and vomit all the time and sometimes commit suicide.  It is vague.  Some of it is written in the first person, some in the third person; some is in past tense, some in present tense.  There are lots of images of stuff like the sunrise and neon signs.  The plot, such as it is, is about how the narrator's girlfriend left him for a friend.  The last paragraph seems to be evoking scenes of the torch-wielding villagers who come to the castle at the end of movies about Dr. Frankenstein, perhaps suggesting that writers, painters, musicians, etc., are like mad scientists who take risks, break the rules, and sacrifice others to bring about new life, new life that is sometimes twisted and destructive and arouses the enmity of the populace.  

Pretentious goop that goes nowhere and is eminently forgettable.  "My Friend Zarathustra" would reappear in Sallis's 1995 collection Limits of the Sensible World.

*"Field," "Tissue," "The First Few Kinds of Truth," "Delta Flight 481," "They Will Not Hush," "Faces and Hands," "Binaries" and "Only the Words are Different"

"Everybody a Winner, the Barker Cried" by Charles L. Grant

Charles L. Grant is the "quiet horror" guy.  If isfdb is to be believed, "Everybody a Winner, the Barker Cried" has never been reprinted, so if you are a Grant completist, it is time for you to hit up ebay and drop two or three sawbucks for a copy of Orbit 13.

There was a nuclear war recently, and almost everybody is dead.  A man and a woman meet at a seaside amusement park, both of these thin and haggard victims of radiation sickness who vomit all the time have independently come to the beach because they have happy memories of the place.  "Everybody a Winner, the Barker Cried" chronicles the first few hours they spend together, during which they fall in love.  As a college kid the man worked on the boardwalk, running a wheel of fortune, and says the line that serves as the story's title, and then remarks that the game is "fixed."  I suppose we are expected to see this as symbolism that our lives are similarly rigged by the existence of nuclear weapons.  The man is resourceful and has got generators running so the two can ride the decrepit ferris wheel.  (Feminists will groan at how the man saves the woman when she gets in trouble, picks her up when she falls, cooks the food, fixes broken machinery, and is a total gentleman who doesn't molest the woman, while the woman mostly cries and worries about her looks and obviously needs a boyfriend more than any fish ever needed a bicycle.)  Riding the ferris wheel offers these two ferris-wheel-lovers hallucinations of their happier days, and they decide to find a boat and sail to Coney Island to ride the much bigger ferris wheel there.  The end of the story is sort of ambiguous, with notes of hope as well as the pervasive idea that they are likely to die at any moment of their radiation sickness. 

Acceptable.  This is more mainstream science fiction than some of our other Orbit 13 reads, consisting of speculation of how people will react if there is a nuclear war, though the focus is on nostalgia and sadness and a human relationship than rebuilding civilization or something like that.    

"Black Sun" by Dennis Etchison

I've been impressed by many of the Etchison stories I have read, like "Daughters of the Golden West," "It Only Comes Out at Night." and "Wet Season"; at one point I even had the idea of reading the entire Etchison collection Red Dreams, though that ended up not happening (yet.)  So, I have hopes "Black Sun" will be good.

Well, the good news is that I am one step closer to reading all the stories in Red Dreams because "Black Sun" is included in that collection.  Maybe we'll really accomplish that goal some day.  The bad news is that this story is pretty opaque and boring.  As far as I can tell, the narrator is in a legal fight to avoid the draft, and his wife is pregnant, sick and suicidal.  There are lots of surreal scenes in which he deals with bureaucratic forms, his insane wife says crazy things, he looks at how skinny she has got, and wonders about the dots on her skin (it seems she is going to an acupuncturist instead of an obstetrician.)  Both these characters are getting pretty rundown, and in the end of the story it appears the narrator is so changed that people don't recognize him anymore.  He resolves to murder the acupuncturist and then take refuge in the wilderness, I guess an extreme reaction to losing his legal fight and/or the death of his wife.

An impressionistic mess; it takes some work to figure it out and what you end up with doesn't seem to justify the effort.  I didn't really see the connections among the story's themes of draft-dodging, acupuncture, pregnancy and darkness (Vietnam is in Asia and acupuncture is from Asia? burning your draft card is associated with hippies and lefties and so is acupuncture?)  The story is just a jumble of stuff and doesn't build to a climax or have any twists or turns, it is just a vague flat line from start to finish.  One problem with the story may be that Etchison is relying too much on readers' passionate connection to current events to give the story energy, expecting people in 1974 to get all worked up over the issue of the draft and so neglecting to include more universal themes; will readers in 2074 get the charge out of a story the main theme of which is the provision of puberty blockers to minors or AFVs to Ukraine that today's readers might get? 

I think I have to give "Black Sun" a marginal negative vote.  

"Flash Point" by Gardner Dozois

Looks like another horror story--"Flash Point" would go on to be included by Charles L. Grant in his 1983 anthology Fears and by Dennis Etchison in his 1986 anthology Masters of Darkness.  Were SF readers in 1975 disappointed by the high proportion of horror tales in Orbit 13?  Did Knight think that publishing horror stories in a science fiction anthology was somehow "innovative" or "redefining the field"?  Well, in Knight's defense, "Flash Point" does consist of speculation about the near future, so is more like traditional SF than Bryant's "Going West" or Etchison's "Black Sun."

You can also find "Flash Point" in Noreen Doyle's 2008 Otherworldly Maine, and it is a good choice for Doyle's anthology, as much of its text is devoted to creating a strong sense of place, offering lots of descriptions of the sights and sounds and the flora and fauna of its wooded setting and portraits of its small town people and the main character's relationships with them.  That main character is Jacobs, a guy who makes his living repairing appliances and doing handyman jobs; he is also a Vietnam veteran who was wounded in combat.  (Like "Going West" and "Black Sun," "Flash Point" reminds you that communism is nothing to worry about and that the world's problems stem from the sick society of the United States.  Maybe this is what Knight considered "innovative.")

Jacobs finds a deserted car on the road; Dozois's detailed description of the vehicle and its contents makes it clear to readers that we are dealing with a case of spontaneous combustion!  Jacobs does not recognize this, however, apparently never having had a copy of that Reader's Digest volume Mysteries of the Unexplained that creeped me out as a kid.  He contacts the cops (the sheriff is a violent brute and his subordinates are idiots) and then has lunch at the local diner where we meet the various town  eccentrics and, from the town doctor, get a strong dose of one of the story's themes: abnormal psychology and psychosomatic illness, how the mind can powerfully affect the functioning of the body. 

Dozois gives us a lot of verbiage about Jacobs's feelings, his changing state of mind after finding the abandoned car.  He becomes subject to powerful, violent rages, savors the idea of harming the anti-communist at the diner, a stray dog, the raucous wealthy tourists ("gypsies") who recklessly pass his pickup on the road and harass him.  Late in the story, with a reference to hologram TVs, Dozois makes clear something that has not been evident earlier, that this story is set in the near future; the "gypsies" are a reflection of how violent and cruel and even suicidal American society has become, their extended visits to rural Maine symbolizing how even remote areas are subject to the degradation of American society that started, or at least was most evident initially, in big cities.  The climax of the story is the presentation of stark evidence that the sick culture of America at large has subsumed even this little Maine community, a rash of the spontaneous combustion events and even the discovery of a Satanic coven that practices human sacrifice!

"Flash Point" is well-written, but some will perhaps find disappointing the fact that it is a longish (22 pages) mood piece; the main character does very little, acting merely as a witness, and the plot consists not of the characters taking a journey or overcoming obstacles but instead of the author progressively revealing to us readers the extent to which American society is sick and is turning ordinary people into killers and suicides.  I've already compared it to Grant and Etchison's stories, and a similarity we might see to "Going West" and "Black Sun" is how over-the-top, through-the-looking-glass and surreal the ending of "Flash Point" might seem to some--witches sacrificing babies and a multitude of people spontaneously combusting is pretty "out there" for a story so much of which is so realistic.  

As I have said, Dozois's writing is quite good--he delivers sharp clear images of the character's environment and his mental state, and the pacing is good; I was always interested, the pretty extensive descriptions never becoming boring.  So, thumbs up for "Flash Point."

**********

Living up to our stereotyped view of the 1970s, these are some pessimistic, apocalyptic stories.  And I suppose living up to Knight's objectives with the Orbit series, none of them is straightforward and none offers rational scientific explanations for the events they depict--all of them present characters who are hallucinating or who have experiences that are inexplicable except as religious phenomena or suspension-of-disbelief defying symbolism.  I like horror stories and as I always do, I have judged these stories today on how interesting, entertaining and well-crafted they are, not on how closely they adhere to some kind of platonic definition of "science fiction," but I think it is fair to wonder if Knight, in expanding the definition of "science fiction" so far, is perhaps rendering the term meaningless, or making its essential meaninglessness more obvious.  It is easy to suspect terms like "New Wave" and "science fiction" lack any concrete definition and are mostly useful as marketing categories or shibboleths used by people to declare allegiance to (or express contempt for) an identity group or cultural phenomena.       

More terror awaits us in the next episode of MPoricus Fiction Log.  Stay tuned!

1977 SF novellas about the arts by Richard Frede, Charles L. Grant and Barry N. Malzberg

I haven't read anything by Barry Malzberg lately, so when I was poking around the internet archive and came upon an anthology of three novellas Malzberg edited with Edward L. Ferman in 1977, Graven Images, I decided to read the piece Malzberg contributed, "Choral."  (Presumably this novella, like 47 pages in Graven Images, is the basis for the 1978 novel Chorale.)  Then I figured I'd just read the whole thing, you know, see what it was all about.    

Graven Images, Malzberg tells us in the introduction to the anthology, has as its theme the arts.  Malzberg claims that before 1950 or so science fiction was too focused on technology to discuss the arts, and suggests that, while there have been some good SF stories about the arts since then, this anthology is something new, a precedent.

"Oh, Lovlee Appearance of the Lass from the North Countree" by Richard Frede

Richard Frede has only four credits at isfdb, and no wikipedia page.  Apparently he wrote a novel about the medical profession that was made into a TV show starring that hero of kaiju movies Nick Adams and sexy sexy Suzy Parker.  In his intro to "Oh, Lovlee Appearance of the Lass from the North Countree" Malzberg lists Frede's novels (up to 1977, I guess) and says the man has published three mystery novels under a pen name.    

For like 30 or 35 pages of its 42 pages, "Oh, Lovlee Appearance of the Lass from the North Countree" is a competent conventional mainstream story.  An Air Force colonel on maneuvers flies his jet fighter over a storm front, and finds the colors of the clouds as they filter the light of the setting sun to be quite beautiful.  His wife is rich, so when she hears him talk about it she commissions a landscape painter to paint this image for him.

The painter, Clarence, is our main character.  He lives in Greenwich Village with his wife and four-year-old daughter.  He is bored of his wife and often fantasizes of having other women.  The Colonel wants him to fly with him over a storm front at sunset so he can get an idea of what to paint, and we follow Clarence as he spends long days at military bases receiving safety training and then just waiting for his flight with the Colonel.  There is so much detail about the training and the experience of flying in a jet fighter that the story feels like a journalistic account, which maybe it sort of is, as Frede (Malzberg tells us in the intro) flew with a U. S. A. F. officer doing research for a novel, The Pilots.  (The cover blurb of the paperback calls it "A scorching new heart-stopping drama.") 

Anyway, when Clarence is up in the F-106 seated behind the Colonel he accidentally activates his ejector seat.  He lands safely, and goes to a house.  Then the story takes a fantastical turn, as he meets an attractive woman who claims he is a knight who won her heart her years ago but, when she refused to give him her maidenhood, instead had sex with her sister.  After the knight left, the woman put her sister in an ice cave where she froze and still lies, perfectly preserved.  The woman forces Clarence into the cave, where he falls asleep.  When he wakes up he escapes the house and is rescued by an Air Force helicopter responding to the signal from his survival kit.  Clarence has a long beard, and it soon becomes evident, to the amazement of everybody, that Clarence was lost for seven years.  The Air Force looks for the house of the woman, which the chopper pilot saw, but the house has vanished.  Clarence learns his wife has had him declared legally dead, remarried, and moved to California.  The End.  

Acceptable.  The mysterious woman says things that may be allusions to some piece of literature I am not familiar with.  I was totally surprised when Clarence activated the ejector seat due to a boneheaded mistake, which is a plus--I always appreciate when a writer can surprise me without making me feel like I was blindsided, and Clarence's dumb mistake is totally logical.  Even the crazy medieval fairytale scenario he finds himself in is foreshadowed, so it doesn't feel too much like it came out of left field.  

I guess a noteworthy thing about the story is the respect shown to the Air Force personnel; there is nothing cynical or sarcastic about the story's treatment of the U.S. military.  Two nonwhite servicemembers are portrayed in a way that foregrounds the military's openness to diversity. 

This story hasn't been reprinted anywhere. 

"A Glow of Candles, A Unicorn's Eye" by Charles L. Grant  

Grant of course is famous for being the writer of "quiet horror," and this story was reprinted in a 2012 collection actually called Scream Quietly: The Best of Charles L. Grant.  It also won a Nebula Award, and was the title story of a 1981 collection.  So here, presumably, I have a chance to experience Grant running on all cylinders, as people who know about automobiles say.   

It is the future!  Humans live on the moon and Mars; Philadelphia and New York are just two ends of one colossal metropolis, Philayork.  Gordon Anderson, as a child, fell in love with the theatre and the cinema, and so became an actor.  But the entertainment industry is going through a period of decline and there isn't much work for actors.  As the story begins (after a vague and gushy speech written by Anderson which serves as a kind of prologue) we find Anderson performing in a sort of vignette about surviving a disaster--he is attacked by a robot tiger and nearly drowned in a special effects flood.  Anderson's improvisational antics are being recorded for "dream-tapes for children," a new means of teaching kids life lessons about being brave and having perseverance and so on that doesn't put the kids at any real risk, a sort of short cut to adulthood.  The point of these scenes is, I suppose, to show how directors and "the industry" treat actors like shit--the robot tiger draws blood and the artificial flood almost kills Anderson, and none of the crew seem to care.

Anderson hates directors, and seems to put a lot of blame on them for the poor state of the entertainment industry.  In fact, he lives in fear that the police will catch up to him and he'll be imprisoned for, just a week and a half ago, hunting down and assaulting three directors.  When he hears the news reports about the attacks he is surprised to learn all three of his victims have survived. 

Anderson has two friends, fellow actors, a fat guy Phillip and his attractive girlfriend Helena.  Anderson steals Helena from the fatso, and Anderson and his new inamorata try to figure out the big picture--why aren't people going to the theatre anymore?  One possibility is that plays are all improvised now; they don't have scripts.  In fact, when Helena tells Anderson she has some scripts by Shakespeare, Miller, and Chekov, she talks about them as if they are rare artifacts.  

Phillip figures out Anderson beat up those three producers and contacts the police; Anderson and Helena fight their way through a police cordon and drive out of the megalopolis to live as fugitives in the countryside.  They start a traveling theatre troupe and become popular.  When the police finally catch up to them they are, in a way that struck this reader as unconvincing, pardoned for their crimes, which include shooting a cop with his own weapon.  The ending of the story is supposed to be sad, as Anderson tells us Helena died at age eighty and says he'll always remember her because he has a toy unicorn she gave him which she found in an abandoned house while they were on the run--it is not sad because Anderson and Helena are not interesting or even likable characters, and a toy unicorn is laughably saccharine.    

"A Glow of Candles, A Unicorn's Eye" is cheap, sappy, and sort of tedious; Grant expended too much energy on failed efforts to make the individual sentences feel poetic or literary and too little effort on making us care about the characters and such lame symbols as a toy unicorn or even making clear exactly what was causing the decline in interest in the theatre and what Anderson and Helena, out in the country, did to get people excited about theatre again.

So why did this mediocrity win a Nebula?  Remember, Nebulas are awarded by professional writers; presumably Grant's trying-too-hard prose, his grandiose vision of the importance of writers and his self-pitying and self-aggrandizing depiction of the plight of the creative class struck a chord with the Nebula voters, flattering their self-importance and powerful sense that they don't get the respect they deserve.

"Choral" by Barry N. Malzberg

In the intro to his own novella, Malzberg admits that he enjoys playing the violin far more than he ever has enjoyed any aspect of his career as a writer, and discusses his admiration for Beethoven.  The Ninth, he tells us, is in his opinion the greatest piece of music ever written.

(As an aside, I want to note that some of the plot elements of "Choral" are uncannily similar to those of another 1977 story, which I read in 2016, Carter Scholz's "The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven and Other Lost Songs.")  

It is the 23rd century.  In the 22nd century time travel was invented, and a mentally unstable genius, the physicist Karl Kemper, came up with the theory that history was malleable, that the past had been curated by time travelers to create the present.  People of influence and power found this theory persuasive, and a government project--the Department of Reconstruction--was founded to make sure that formative events of the past proceeded as the history books said they did.  The Department trains and sends Travelers, disguised as important personages--for example, Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, and Adolf Hitler--back in time to play out the critical events that created the modern world and ensure they go off as expected, lest the rug be pulled out from under everybody living in the present.

Our protagonist Reuter is one of these Travelers, a relatively young man who has been on a few relatively minor missions as various politicians, but who is now in the middle of a big assignment: Beethoven.  Reuter must make sure Beethoven's monumentally influential works are created in the first place, and that they match the versions known to the 23rd century.  His masters transmit him from Department HQ in Buenos Aires to various critical moments in the life of ol' Ludwig van, points when his career might have gone off course or his work altered.  For example, we see Reuter at a rehearsal in 1808 when a conductor and some musicians object to the first four notes of the Fifth and implore Beethoven to change them--Reuter ferociously overrules their objections.  Between each trip, back in Buenos Aires, Reuter's handlers change his clothes to match the milieu of his next mission and his superiors debrief him.

Malzberg's body work is full of depictions of government agencies, like the space program in his famous SF work and public welfare agencies in his putatively erotic work like Everything Happened to Susan and Horizontal Woman, as institutions that are absolutely inefficient, incompetent and corrupt, and from the very start of "Choral" Mazlberg gives us clues that the Department of Reconstruction is very bad at its job and that its job is unnecessary or even inimical.  Reuter's interactions in the early nineteenth century are absurd, and he commits many blunders, and doesn't even seem up to the job (he doesn't care about music, for example.)  The Department is controversial and has detractors in government and amid the public.  And then there is the fact that the world you and I live in (the one with Thomas Alva Edison) is apparently not the world in which Reuter lives (in which there is an important figure by the name Thomas Alva Guinzaburg.)

Of course, the whole matter of whether these Travelers are "reconstructing" the past in order to preserve the present or are actually creating the past is hopelessly blurred--if the Department sends a man back in time with instructions to play Beethoven as a man with psychological issues, because the history books say he had such issues, isn't it possible, probable, or even certain that the reason that Beethoven is said to have psychological problems is because the man sent back to play him was told to exhibit those problems, or actually suffered from them himself?  This is the kind of time paradox we see often in SF, with people having sex in the past and becoming their own ancestors, for example.

Traveling is a psychologically trying task, and Beethoven, who has a simple personality, is an unsatisfying role for Reuter to play, and his superiors at the Department of Reconstruction in Buenos Aires suspect he is burning out.  Reuter begins to doubt the value, the necessity, of his work, and then Malzberg does something he rarely does--he holds out to us the possibility that the story has a happy ending!  After discussions with the mad physicist Kemper, who died over a century ago, about whether or not we have free will and whether or not life is meaningless, Reuter turns renegade, seizing control of the time travel system and transporting himself wherever he wants and, instead of following the script, doing whatever the hell he wants as Beethoven.  Instead of having an unhappy life Beethoven has a happy life, and all of history and the whole world are changed.  Of course, it is likely this campaign of rebellion is just Reuter's delusion--after all, how could he take over control of the time travel apparatus?    

A pretty good piece of Malzberg.  In particular, all the stuff about Karl Kemper, like how he put all the important stuff in the footnotes and committed suicide by inhaling seventeen thimbles, is fun.  Thumbs up for "Choral;" maybe someday I'll read Chorale.

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The critically acclaimed "A Glow of Candles, A Unicorn's Eye" appears elsewhere, so it is hard for me to recommend Graven Images to anybody but Malzberg fans (like myself) and Richard Frede fans, if such people actually exist.  (If you are a Richard Frede fan, write the poor guy a wikipedia page!)