Jondelle by E. C. Tubb

"He is not your son.  You owe his family no allegiance.  No one, as yet, has paid you to find him.  Why are you willing to risk your life?"

"I gave my word." 

First edition, cover by Kelly Freas depicting
title character Jondelle and the Melevganians
burning down his foster parents' farm and
murdering their employees 

If you've read my blog post on the ninth Dumarest book, Mayenne, you'll already know that I own an omnibus put out by DAW in 1981 that includes both Mayenne and the next Dumarest caper, Jondelle.  You'll also know that I thought the blue-eyed blonde with the elaborate necklace on the cover of Jondelle was a pretty girl--in fact it is a six-year-old boy.  Embarrassing!

The tenth Dumarest book, first published by DAW in 1973, finds our hero Earl Dumarest on the planet Ourelle in the labyrinthine city of Sargone.  He gets lost while looking for the museum (Dumarest and I are like two peas in a pod, always eager to go to the museum to see the antiquities) and rescues a guy, Elray, and his adopted six-year-old son, Jondelle, from three armor-clad creeps.  A veteran of the gladiatorial arena who always has his long knife with him, Dumarest makes short work of these jokers, but he does get shot by a laser pistol in the process.

Dumarest is nursed back to health by the boy's mother, Makgar, a doctor, at her farm house in the country.  Dumarest is irresistible to women, and his manliness is doubly attractive to Makgar because her husband, Elray, is one of those pacifists who eschews violence.  When the next batch of armored freakos attacks the farm Elray refuses to shoot at them, so Dumarest and Makgar (in her nightgown!) have to battle them without his help.  Elray, Makgar, and many of the farmhands get killed, Jondelle gets kidnapped, and we readers get an object lesson in the right and responsibility of a man to defend himself and those who depend on him, courtesy of Edwin Charles Tubb: "Elray could have climbed to an upper room, picked off the invaders as they stood before the fires, shot them down as they tried to climb the stairs. Had he acted, the boy would be safe and the woman unharmed."  (For an opposing point of view, see Davis Grubb's "The Baby-Sitter.")

Advertising copy on the first page of my copy of
the Mayenne/Jondelle omnibus 

There being no government or police in the countryside, Dumarest turns to the interstellar Church and to a merchant for aid in finding Jondelle and uncovering the mystery of why someone is so interested in kidnapping the boy, and who that someone might be.  Dumarest hires a bunch of down-and-outers and leads them to Melevgan, the region of Ourelle from whence hail the armor-wearing sadists who were hired to seize Jondelle.  The Melevganians are insane, their genetic material damaged by the radiation characteristic of their region.  Genetic degeneration is one of the themes of the novel; Jondelle features several races which suffer genetic defects due to inbreeding.  One of these races serves as a sort of peasantry and proletariat on Ourelle; inbreeding has made them very passive and subservient.

The dangers of passivity is another of Jondelle's themes--Elray's inaction dooms himself and his wife and endangers his adopted son, while another minor character, when faced by a giant scorpion, similarly fails to use a rifle in his possession and dies as a result: "...Altrane would have survived, if he'd had the courage to act."  While looking for clues in Melevgan, Dumarest talks to a slave in a mine, and tells the slave that if he doesn't want to die in the mine, he will have to take action, rising up against the psycho Melevganian mine owners. ("'You're a man!' he snapped.  'Get yourself out.'") It is also noteworthy that the clerics of the Church hypnotize those who come to them for charity, implanting in their brains, Clockwork Orange-style, an aversion to violence which will prevent them from fighting, even in defense.  When Dumarest gathers the men he needs for his expedition to Melevgan, he makes sure to hire only those who have not accepted charity from the Church--men who cannot defend themselves are dead weight, a burden to their fellows.

The survivors of the dangerous expedition to Melevgan, following the info learned in the mine, journey to another part of Ourelle to rescue Jondelle from his kidnapper. Chillingly (or nauseatingly), Jondelle is captive in a sort of brothel!  To our relief, it turns out the brothel owner is just holding Jondelle for ransom.  In the last few pages of the book (you've read our spoiler policy, right?) Dumarest hands Jondelle over to his blonde and blue-eyed grandparents.  Jondelle is the product of "a hundred generations" of inbreeding for specific traits; Makgar was not his genetic mother, but a surrogate mother who fled across the galaxy with the baby because, as grandma puts it, "'she couldn't bear to part with him...the normal reaction of any woman toward the child of her body.'"  The grandparents have been searching for little Jondelle for six years.  In gratitude to Dumarest, they give him a clue to Earth's whereabouts.  Finally, some progress!

With its insane and sadistic criminals, crime-ridden cities, innocent in jeopardy, and self-defense and vigilante themes, I'm getting a sort of Dirty Harry/Death Wish/Taxi Driver vibe from Jondelle.  Maybe I just have the 1970s on the brain.  The weird races and cultures, bodypaint, air cars and detective stuff reminded me of Jack Vance, the Demon Princes series in particular.  (These are not complaints; I like those movies and I really like Jack Vance.)

Most importantly, this is a great fast-paced adventure novel, full of action, human drama, and weird SF settings, devices and people. E. C. Tubb is a master of this kind of writing, and this volume of the series is a great example of his ability.  Thumbs up for Jondelle and on to Zenya, Dumarest #11!! 

More late '70s horror: Davis Grubb, John Tibbetts, Eddy C. Bertin & George Hay

Let's read four horror stories by people I have never heard of!  I liked the first four stories in Karl Edward Wagner's The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII; let's hope ol' Karl has picked four more winners for us!

"The Baby-Sitter" by Davis Grubb (1978)

Wagner in his introduction tells us Grubb is "in the front ranks of writers of Southern regionalism." This story, however, is set in my home state of New Jersey (or as Meg of the year 3485 would put it, "Joysy.")  Is there any chance this story is going to celebrate the high culture, productive industry, and world-class agriculture that make the Garden State a wonderful place to grow up, attend university, and build a family?  (No, there is not.)

"The Baby-Sitter" reads like a PSA from a gun-control advocacy group, and is an attack on American (perhaps all modern) society.  There is no particular reason to set the story in New Jersey--Paramus is just a stand in for "AnyTown, USA."  The story is not set in New York or the South so that readers do not mistake it for a denunciation of rednecks or a meditation on urban crime or whatever; Grubb wants to make sure we get that his gripe is with all 50 of the states and every human being, from city slicker to country boy.

A Vietnam vet, Jim, owns an M-16.  (I don't know anything about gun laws; could private residents of New Jersey legally own an M-16 in 1978?  It is not 100% clear if the weapon in the story is capable of full automatic fire.)  He and his wife Jan are going out for the evening, and hire teenage Marion, who is reading Future Shock, to baby-sit their twin five-year-old boys, Joe and Jim Junior, and six-month-old girl, Sally.  While Mom and Dad are away the boys get a hold of the rifle, wrestle over it, and accidentally shoot up the house, shattering Mom's Ming vase and other valuables.  When Marion runs upstairs to see if the baby was hit, the boys take turns shooting at her until she is dead.

A main theme of "The Baby-Sitter" is collective guilt.  Grubb asserts that all of society is to blame for the evil or foolish acts of individuals:

Marion watched their faces watching hers then and she felt her own face flood and she knew suddenly how every guilt in the world is shared.  Because it did not matter who had pulled the trigger....  When Joe pulled it so had Jim Junior.  So had Jan and Jim.  And so, inexorably and most terribly of all, had Marion.    

I'm not impressed with the story's anti-individualistic "society made me do it" politics. Does the story have artistic merit I can admire anyway?  Not really.  There is no suspense, as it is clear from the beginning that the gun is going to be the "villain" of the piece.  On the first page we get this passage:

"Jim has a gun," she [Jan] said cryptically.  "Or did I mention that?"

And for a reason she could not understand then, Marion shivered.  Was it the chill of the November night?  Or some sense of some thing, some unfathomable, unknown thing to come in the night which lay before her.

The story dispenses with moral agency, so there is no drama: how can there be any drama when everyone is to blame for whatever goes wrong and the focus of the story is a quotidian inanimate object?  The story is also too long--there is page after page of the five-year-old boys arguing over and wrestling for the rifle while the baby-sitter watches them impotently.  The characters are symbols rather than real people, so who cares who gets blasted?

People who hate guns and/or modern society may like this one for its politics, but I'm giving it a thumbs down.  It first appeared in Grubb's collection The Siege of 318: Thirteen Mystical Stories.    

"The Well at the Half Cat" by John Tibbetts (1979)

Frank Vincy is a sensitive 29-year-old Englishman who has recently been released from the mental hospital following a painful divorce.  Vincy has decided to get out of the rat race and fix up and run an inn, the Half Cat, out in the countryside at a village which has maintained its Olde World character.

Vincy's first guests are a gruff intimidating working-class man and his beautiful wife; oddly enough, they have no luggage.  The wife flirts with Vincy, and he is immediately obsessed (remember, he's sensitive!)  We readers, but not Vincy, learn that decades ago the Half Cat closed after its owner had an affair with a beautiful woman, which resulted in her being murdered by her husband, who was in turn killed in a fight with the innkeeper.  The innkeeper threw the corpses down the well, and then died himself, either falling or jumping into the well.  Vincy's first guests are the ghosts of the unfaithful wife and her violent husband, and they reenact the deadly drama that ended their lives, this time with Vincy playing the innkeeper role.

This story is long, with lots of descriptions of sights and smells and sounds and of such humdrum activity as the repair work on the inn.  It didn't engage my emotions; I'll rate this one "OK."

"The Well at the Half Cat" first appeared in Eldritch Tales No. 5.  John Tibbetts only has two fiction credits at isfdb, and four art credits.  But don't worry about his career; Renaissance man Tibbetts is a critic who has published extensively on film, music and literature (sample titles from Wikipedia: “Young Berlioz Revealed,” “The Case of the Forgotten Detectives: The Unknown Crime Fiction of G.K. Chesterton,” and “Beyond the Camera: The Untold Story Behind the Making of Hoop Dreams”and is also a professional pianist.

"My Beautiful Darkling" by Eddy C. Bertin (1979)

Belgian Bertin publishes in six languages, and originally wrote "My Beautiful Darkling" (the title of which comes from Baudelaire) in Dutch; it is the title story of the collection Mijn Mooie Duisterlinge.  Wagner informs us that Bertin himself translated the story into English for inclusion in The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII.

The bulk of the story is the transcript of an arrestee's interview with the police. The suspect relates how some time in the past his head was injured in a motor accident, and this gave him the power to sense other people's emotions.  He can't quite read minds, but he can, as he puts it, "taste thought," and, in context, make an educated guess at what people are thinking.

The arrestee likes to attend fairs and amusement parks, to taste the emotions of the crowds of people.  One evening at such a fair his mind touches that of a physically attractive and mentally strange, even inhuman, woman, Cathy, whom, he detects, has the same power he has! They have sex in the shadows, and it is perfect, exhausting, sex because they can feel each other's emotions and need not speak a word to each other.  He and Cathy meet regularly every few nights at different fairs, never speaking but enjoying a wonderful, if exhausting, mental and physical union each time.  But then one evening he can't find her, and is arrested while desperately accosting people at a fair, seeking Cathy (and, it is hinted, masturbating.)

After the transcript comes five pages of conventional third-person omniscient narration starring the arrestee's shrink.  The doctor gets the guy out of jail, explaining that he is a harmless victim of schizophrenia, that his mental abilities are a product of his imagination and Cathy but "an alternative shard of his own personality," a simulacrum of a woman named Catherine who rejected him shortly before his drunken auto accident.  His patient is going through a crisis, beginning to fear Cathy is going to abandon him--a sign sanity is returning with the realization that Cathy is not real.

But then, when the doctor is walking through the fairgrounds to his car, an attractive woman beckons to him from the shadows, physically and telepathically!. He follows the creature his patient calls "Cathy" into the darkness; she is, apparently, some kind of psychic vampire who steals a person's life force, and is dumping the patient to take up with the younger and more vigorous doctor.

This story is not bad.  Moderate recommendation.

"A Serious Call" by George Hay (1979)    

This six-page story is just a trifle, though well-written.  All you intellectual types may enjoy the copious name dropping that goes on: Lytton Strachey, Karl Popper, Carl Jung, and H. M. Tomlinson are among those who are casually mentioned.

The narrator relates why he, while attending a college in an industrial section of northern London, abandoned his thesis on the ghost stories of M. R. James, which sought to debunk James's belief in evil.  A Rev. Paul Tremblett came to give a guest lecture on good and evil--the lecture coincided with the most ferocious thunderstorm the narrator has ever experienced.  The Reverend explained that Satan is real, and very clever, adept at doing his evil work while at the same time convincing people he is merely a myth.  At the end of the lecture the Reverend stepped outside and was immediately killed by a bolt of lightning.

"A Serious Call" first appeared in the first edition of Ghosts & Scholars, a periodical devoted to M. R. James, a famous and important British medievalist and writer of ghost stories whose work I have never read. (Every day I lament my poor education, but I only have myself to blame...and maybe the Atari 2600, the Commodore 64, Gary Gygax, id software, etc....)  So I have no idea if Hay has managed to capture the spirit or style of James's work, which I believe was his intention.

The style is good and I appreciate all the name-dropping and the London details, so marginal to moderate recommendation for this one.  I should try to find out which of M. R. James's stories are considered his "best" or "most representative;" it appears they are easily accessible at gutenberg.org.

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

Not up to the standard set in the first batch, alas, but, taken as a group, not too bad. Four more stories, hand picked by Wagner from divers sources, await us in our next episode.