Best of Pulphouse: E Bryant, G A Effinger, H Ellison, K Koja, & T F Monteleone

OMG, it's another crazy recent anthology.  (Yes, at MPorcius Fiction Log the 1990s count as recent.)  In our last episode we read four stories from a 1990s anthology full of perversion, Dark Love, and today we've got five stories from 1991's The Best of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, which perhaps will also be full of wacky gross material?  In her foreword, a banal thing about how most players in the publishing industry play it safe, producing boring derivative commodified goop for the masses, but the heroes at Pulphouse Publishing flout the conventional wisdom and take risks and offer real art for the discerning, critical darling Kate Wilhelm promises surprises and warns we may be angered by what we read.  It is easy to laugh at the self-importance of self-appointed leaders of the rebellion against the homogenization the results from bourgeois capitalism and democracy, but at the same time I am hoping that Rusch and Edward Bryant, George Alec Effinger, Harlan Ellison, Kathe Koja, and Thomas F. Monteleone can cash the check that Wilhelm is writing.  Let's see.

"While She Was Out" by Edward Bryant (1988)     

"While She Was Out" was a hit with wide appeal and since its initial appearance in the first issue of Rusch's Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine it has been reprinted in four anthologies, including some kind of feminist anthology full of purportedly "inspiring prose" and a book promising "EXTREME HORROR."  Looks like we are starting off with a bang.

Della's husband Kenneth drinks beer and watches sports on TV and complains about her cutting jokes and her giving the twins too many cookies.  Their marriage is in trouble; Della often dreams of leaving Kenneth, even vocalizes these dreams in his presence.  Della takes night classes, learning how to repair the car herself and learning self defense--I guess a sign she is trying to be independent--and he just makes fun of her.

Tonight, while Kenneth watches ESPN, Della goes out to the mall to pick up Christmas stuff--the big day is approaching!--and tampons.  The parking lot is crowded, and Della is annoyed that somebody has parked an old oversized car across multiple spaces.  She writes a sarcastic note and puts it under the car's windshield wiper.  

The car turns out to be in the possession of four young thugs, one from each major racial demographic--we've got a white thug, a black thug, a Latino thug and an Asian thug.  The thugs do not appreciate Della's brand of humor.  Over fourteen or fifteen pages Della has to run from these criminals or fight them; stuff she has learned in night school helps her to survive and in fact slay all four of these creeps.  Bryant describes everybody's injuries, and Della's physical and psychological experience of killing the four young men, in great detail.  The last creep to die, when he has the upper hand (so he thinks!), tries to seduce Della into joining him in his life of crime, he somehow guessing she is unsatisfied with her marriage.  The story ends with an homage to Dirty Harry, with Della pointing an empty gun (she emptied it into one of the punks) at her husband and pulling the trigger before telling him they have to talk.  Having defeated murderous enemies, Della has proven her strength and gained confidence and is now in charge of their relationship.  Hear her roar!

This is a good crime/adventure story and a feminist story in which a woman overcomes men who want to exploit her.  It doesn't really feel like a preachy left-wing thing, though, in part because Bryant includes the kinds of jokes which progressives today wouldn't make, jokes that make light of the Third World and people born with disabilities and liberal fascination with them (e.g., the biggest Christmas gift of the season, the one the twins are begging for, is "The Little BeeDee Birth Defect Baby.")  I almost wonder if Bryant slyly wrote a story to specifically appeal to liberals and leftists and then included in it these little land mines that would make them squirm. 

Thumbs up!  Our Pulphouse adventure is off to a good start!

Raw material for your new favorite Venn Diagram:
the intersection of "inspiring prose" and "extreme horror"

"Chopped Liver" by George Alec Effinger (1989)

This one only ever appeared in the fifth installment of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine and in this Best of volume.  "Chopped Liver" is a joke story with an urban Jewish flavor, people saying "tsurris" and mentioning "the Hadassah ladies" and eating "flanken" and "farfel" and so forth, and it is actually funny, making it a rarity among the joke stories I encounter here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  

The humor is mostly in the style, though the plot is also sort of funny.  Butcher Morton Rosenthal is sick of his wife and decides to murder her, and we follow his plotting and execution of his murder plan and then his efforts to conceal the atrocity, and the final twist of fate that sends him to the afterlife in the wake of his wife.

"Chopped Liver"'s milieu and themes--city life and disastrous sexual relationships--are right up my alley, and it actually delivers laughs, so I have no hesitation about giving it a hearty thumbs up.  Black humor fans should certainly seek it out.

"She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother" by Harlan Ellison (1988) 

Like today's stories by Bryant and Monteleone, Ellison's "She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother" was in the very first issue of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine.  In the intro to "She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother" here in The Best of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, Rauch announces that Ellison is working on a three-volume set of short stories for Pulphouse Publishing--Ellison was famous for conceiving large scale projects which were never completed, and maybe this three-volume set is another of them. 

A guy wakes up, hearing music, and tries to remember the dream he just had and then reminisces about times in his life when he heard pieces of music in exotic places.

It was the music no one was playing that I had heard at Stonehenge, ten years ago. It was the sound of the pan pipes at Hanging Rock thirteen years ago, and the notes of a flute from the other side of the Valley of the Stonebow eight years ago. I had heard that recollection in a cave in the foothills overlooking the Fairchild Desert and, once, I heard it drifting through a misty downpour in the Sikkim rainforest.

There is also an extended metaphor about the past being a desert and the narrator only having eyes to see the past on one side or something like that; I had trouble keeping awake enough to figure out what this metaphor was trying to tell me.  Too much of "She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother" is this kind of mind numbing goop, multiple paragraphs that are self-contained labyrinths that take you nowhere if you bother to puzzle them out.  Already on the first full page of the story I was flipping through the succeeding pages, counting how many pages of this jungle I had left to machete my way through--thirteen to go!  

The narrator gets out of bed finally and drives around Scotland, listing for us all the towns he drives through and the highways he uses, describing his ventures into stores to buy food and other items.  This story is a series of lists.  

Punctuating the lists are clues about the narrator's companion, his girlfriend of fifteen years, Camilla.  Is Camilla an hallucination?  A cripple?  Maybe some kind of r--I mean a person suffering a developmental disability?  An animal?  Camilla guides the narrator to a remote cliff, to a hidden cave, where he meets Camilla's family of scaly monsters who eat mundane human beings, live for over a hundred years, and reproduce through incest.  We get lists of mutilated corpses--this one's genitals have been removed, this one's face is gone, etc.  And lists of clothing stolen from the monsters' victims, clothes spanning centuries of history.  We also get a list of the narrator's injuries after a dangerous fall.

Will the narrator join this family of monsters?  Camilla seems sincere when she says she loves him!  They won't eat him, will they?  Or will the narrator escape and come back with explosives and weapons and try to annihilate the monster family, like in a Lovecraft story ("The Shunned House," maybe)?  We can't be sure what course the narrator is going to take as the story ends.  After the story proper we get an excerpt from a reference book on crime, an entry about Sawney Bean, a famous figure of Scottish legend--Camilla's family are the descendants of the Bean clan.

The plot of this story isn't bad, but the style is annoying and the first few pages, all the jazz about music and the puzzling metaphor, are a turn off and are superfluous besides--music doesn't figure in the actual story of the monster love affair and the monster family, as far as I can tell.   

"She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother" is one of those stories that, as the hours since reading it go by, and you forget the frustratingly useless passages that should have been stricken by an editor and the irritating style, leaving only the actual plot in your mind, starts seeming a lot better than it did when you were actually reading it.  While I was reading it I thought I was going to give it a thumbs down, but with the passage of time, that which heals all wounds, maybe I have to say this thing deserves a grade of "barely acceptable."

Karl Edward Wagner, whose violent pornographic story "Locked Away" we just read, selected "She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother" for The Year's Best Horror Stories XVII and after that it reappeared in the Ellison collection Slippage (published as Derapages over in Gaul) and a German anthology on the theme of cannibalism.

"Illusions in Relief" by Kathe Koja (1990)

Koja had our favorite story from our last blog post, so we have high expectations for her today.  No pressure, though, KK!  Rauch in her intro to "Illusions in Relief" here in the Best of anthology warns us the story is subtle and we have to concentrate to receive its "message."  Oy, the pressure is now flowing in the opposite direction, and it doesn't feel good!

Joseph is an artist who lives alone in a house.  His work consists of collages made from images he cuts out of old magazines and elsewhere with an X-acto blade.  Somehow, people--erroneously Joseph is sure--think he or his collages can cure their ills, and they crowd around his house, staring in through the windows and leaving him offerings (including periodicals from which he draws images for his collages) and mail him letters and photos describing their diseases and deformities.  When he goes out to shop they beg him, grab at him, accost him at the store.  Joseph's sanity is questionable--he hears voices and suffers hallucinations--so we readers wonder to what extent to believe in the crowds outside and their antics. 

An old man with a green spot on his arm comes by, and Joseph lets him in.  This figure is the most doubtful yet, the most likely we readers are inclined to believe illusory.  The old geezer stays awhile, and while he is there Joseph has fewer mental illness symptoms, his output of collages increases, and the crowd outside stops growing.  The old man offers some ancient wisdom (e. g., "Everybody gets what they don't want....The trick is to find a way to want it") and encourages Joseph in his work.  The green spot grows until the old man is entirely green.  One morning the green old man isn't there.  Joseph hands a collage to a disfigured girl at the door and Joseph's own hand starts growing green!

Alright, what the hell is going on?  What is the message Rauch told us is here?  Is the old man an angel or some other messenger of God come to aid Joseph?  The old man, when Joseph inadvertently prompts him, speaks approvingly of Jesus:

"I want you to work.  You get where you're going the way you're meant to get there.  If you don't jerk yourself off with a lot of shit about guilt.  Save your own fucking soul, you know?"

"Jesus. Philosophy."

"Jesus is philosophy."

The color green in the story, clues suggest, represents peace and goodness, and the old man seems thrilled that he is turning green.  Is the message the old Stoic and Serenity Prayer thing, that you have to accept, even embrace, the world as it comes to you, the things you can't change?  But what is up with the crowd, the people who think Joseph or his collages can heal them?  And Joseph's hand turning green?  Has Joseph's tutelage under the old geezer given him the power to heal, the power others have been feverishly attributing to him despite his denials?  Maybe this story is about how other people's expectations of you can influence your personality and abilities?  Or about the relationship between the artist and his most devoted fans, how each influences the other, for good or for ill?        

I don't know, maybe I didn't concentrate enough.  Still, a good story, well-written and with compelling images.  "Illusions in Relief" was reprinted in the 1998 Koja collection Extremities.

"Nobody's Perfect" by Thomas F. Monteleone (1988)

Editor Rauch warns readers of The Best of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine that "Nobody's Perfect" is a feminist story, and our two main characters fit the bill: Salazar the serial killer of women and cannibal, a predatory man who hates contemporary art and thinks the Apocalypse is around the corner; and Lydia the young liberal do-gooder--the sadness and injustice of the world gets Lydia down sometimes, but don't worry, her "absorption" of "the world's pain" and the pain of her own personal tragedies (as we will learn, she is a victim of the establishment or patriarchy or whatever you want to call it) hasn't weakened her, but made her "stronger and more positive in the long run."

Salazar decides to answer an ad calling for volunteers to read books into a recorder for the blind (I did this in grad school--not as a volunteer, of course, but for money), figuring it will provide him the opportunity of meeting bookish girls upon which to prey.  Sure enough, he meets the beautiful blonde Lydia and gets a date with her.  He is in for a surprise when they meet for the date--at the volunteer meeting, Salazar was staring at Lydia's perfect breasts so intently that he didn't notice her disability--her right arm is "withered" and "flipper-like," her mother having been prescribed thalidomide.

Monteleone describes in detail how Salazar kidnaps Lydia, putting duct tape over her mouth, cuffing her into semi-consciousness, chaining her up in his basement close to the stew pots and rotisserie, cutting her clothes off, etc.  Monteleone also offers us insight into both characters' thought processes and psychological states.

Our somewhat ridiculous twist ending, which, along with the somewhat over-the-top stereotyped characters, is making me wonder if this story isn't something of a sly joke, has the accumulated sadness and humiliation of a lifetime, which Lydia has always turned into strength, plus her rage at Salazar's evil, transform her withered arm, heretofore almost totally immobile, into a super arm with which she kills Salazar with a blow and then breaks her chains.  The last line of the story assures us that Lydia's super arm is going to stay super.

If we accept this story as sincere, I guess it is an allegory of how women and minorities can and have used the pain they have suffered at the hands of the white man to give themselves the strength to accomplish all their amazing achievements.  At least that is what I would tell my colleagues if I was still taking graduate level courses in the humanities and social sciences.

(This story is kind of reminding me of that Steven Spielberg TV episode in which a guy repairs his stricken B-17 by drawing the needed parts cartoon-style on his pad in that the whole production is very professional but the climax, which is supposed to be an uplifting evocation of the human spirit or whatever, might come off as absurd and silly.)      

Whether parody or dead serious, "Nobody's Perfect" is well put together; we'll mildly recommend it.  It is more like an inspiring adventure story or fantasy, or the origin story of a comic book superhero, than an actual horror story, though.      

After its debut in the premiere issue of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, "Nobody's Perfect" was reprinted by Karl Edward Wagner in The Year's Best Horror Stories XVII and by John Betancourt in 1996 in New Masterpieces of Horror (republished in two volumes in 2005 as Horrorscape); you can also find it in the Monteleone collection Fearful Symmetries.

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Even though I would cut away pieces of Ellison's story as ruthlessly as Salazar cut off Lydia's clothes, and even though I am not bright enough to grok what Koja's story is all about, I have to hand it to Rauch for publishing and then reprinting these five stories, none of which is bad (80% of them are actually good) and all of which are edgy or wild in some way or other.  A worthwhile reading experience.

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!

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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.

Early '80s Terrors by Robert Bloch, Edward Bryant, Steve Rasnic Tem, & Thomas F. Monteleone

I recently put on my Yokoyama Bozaemon outfit and ventured into McKay Used Books in Manassas, Virginia, braving the dreaded coronavirus in my search for book bargains.  One of my finds was the 1982 anthology edited by New Jersey's own Charles L. Grant, Terrors, which includes stories by authors of interest to the MPorcius staff first published in a period ranging from 1967 to 1982.  Let's start exploring Terrors with four stories from the early '80s by contributors Robert Bloch, Edward Bryant, Steve Rasnic Tem and Thomas F. Monteleone.

"The Night Before Christmas" by Robert Bloch (1980)

This is a story about nouveau riches, about poor people of ambition who struggle their way up the ladder to wealth.  But does the money they acquire make them happy?  Do the compromises and sacrifices they make on their way up taint their successes?  Can the kind of people with the cunning and drive needed to climb their way to the top ever be happy?

Our narrator Arnold Brandon is a starving artist in Hollywood, a painter.  He gets a commission from a big barrel-chested Argentinean whom he calls "the incarnation of macho" and compares to the Minotaur, with his big mansion and his complicated business ventures as his labyrinth.  Carlos Santiago worked in the fields with a machete for years before a risky investment paid off; now he is a shipping magnate who travels around the world incessantly, managing his fleet of oil tankers and cargo ships.  Santiago hasn't forgotten his roots, however--his rusty machete is hanging right there on the wall above the fireplace in his Hollywood Hills mansion!  The narrator hates and fears macho men, but he needs the money, so he accepts Santiago's commission to paint the portrait of his trophy wife, Louise.

At the sittings, while Santiago is off in the Middle East, Brandon gets to know Louise, a girl from a poor family who failed in the modelling and acting worlds and settled for being Santiago's wife.  The painter thinks of her as Cinderella, and later sees her as a "vain and greedy child."  They have an affair, and much of the story is about Santiago's reaction to his suspicions about them and the terrible revenge he takes when his suspicions are confirmed.

Louise demands a divorce and Santiago moves out.  She and Brandon plan their wedding, though the painter has serious doubts about the propriety of acquiring Santiago's wife and Santiago's money, and about the possibility of these acquisitions making him happy.  It is December, and after years of missing Christmas in the USA while with Santiago on business trips to Muslim states, Louise insists on making a big deal of the holiday and getting a huge Christmas tree.  Brandon leaves Louise in the mansion to battle the Los Angeles traffic and crowds on a quest to buy her an engagement ring; when he gets back he finds Santiago has returned to chop his faithless wife up with his old machete and hang her body parts on the tree.  After speaking briefly with Brandon the businessman commits suicide with a handgun.

Acceptable.  The best part of the story is the considerable ambiguity over how we are expected to feel about each of the three principal characters, and how similar they all are, each pursuing wealth and sex and status but in a way that undermines their integrity and ability to enjoy the fruits of their labors.  Unfortunately, I don't feel that Bloch integrated the Christmas theme very well; it is sort of gimmicky and tacked on at the end, and doesn't really sit comfortably alongside all the minotaur/labyrinth stuff.  Students of Bloch, and people interested in identity politics, may be curious to see how the author of Psycho, a Jewish native-born American, portrays Christians and foreign-born Hispanics.  (I am going to assume there is a large scholarly literature on depictions of machismo among Latinos in Anglo popular culture.)

"The Night Before Christmas" first appeared in Kirby McAuley's anthology Dark Forces and would go on to be included in various Bloch collections and anthologies of Christmas horror stories.

"Dark Angel" by Edward Bryant (1980)

Another story from Dark Forces; "Dark Angel" has apparently only ever appeared in the various printings of that anthology and Terrors.  This one is also grist for the mill of the identity politics crowd, a story about abortion and relationship abuse written in the voice of a woman--a real witch!

In a little prologue we learn our narrator, Angie Black, is a vengeful sort who feels men always abandon her.  At age seven, some boys bothered little Angie, and her father shortsightedly suggested he would protect her the next day by throwing snowballs at the boys.  When he doesn't actually follow through on this unserious promise, Angie throws a rock at one of the boys, damaging his eye, perhaps permanently.

The remaining fifteen of the story's seventeen pages relate an episode when Black is age thirty-seven and a successful entrepreneur; her business is to provide magical services to the wealthy, and it seems like most of her clients are women who need help figuring out if their husbands are cheating and then getting revenge on them if they are.  On a business trip Black runs into Jerry Hanford, a womanizer who is now a travelling salesman who sells medical supplies, mostly gynecological equipment.  When she was 17, Black and Hanford had sex and she got pregnant; Hanford abandoned her.  The teen-aged Black tried to get an abortion, but the procedure was outlawed in her state, and her amateur efforts to terminate the pregnancy were ineffective.  She carried the baby to term but it was still born and Black was rendered unable to bear another child.

Black uses her knowledge of magic to achieve a horrifying revenge on Hanford.  She seduces him, and uses a potion on herself to ensure that a baby is conceived.  When she inevitably miscarries a few months later she retains "a piece of bloody tissue" and uses it to make a voodoo doll of Hanford.  Her sorcery conjures a growth inside Hanford that will, I guess we are supposed to believe, kill him when he goes into labor and the creature or whatever it is proves too large to pass through his urethra.  (She kills him by forcing him to do something--carry a baby--that he twenty years ago made impossible for her.)  Black has some second thoughts about murdering this dude, so she does detective work on him and finds out Hanford beat his wife and she committed suicide, I guess proving he deserves the punishment Black has already inflicted on him.

This is a pretty good horror story; Bryant is a good writer so all the technical stuff (pacing and structure and style and all that) is good, and the magic spell at the center of the story is sort of original and suitably disgusting, while the ambiguities about Black's own morality and the appropriateness of revenge in general and her acts of revenge in particular keep the story from becoming a heavy-handed feminist propaganda piece or misandrist wish-fulfillment fantasy--we cannot be certain that the sins inflicted on Black justify her acts of revenge, and that the accomplishment of revenge will make her happier or make the world a better place.  

"The Poor" by Steve Rasnic Tem (1982)

This brief piece, not even four full pages of text, made its debut here in Terrors and would go on to appear in a Tem collection and a few anthologies, including 100 Great Fantasy Short Short Stories.

This is a surreal, stream-of-consciousness piece that bears evidence of Tem's work as a poet, a series of images that offers little plot or character.  A middle-class guy who himself worries about making ends meet works in an office that offers handouts to the poor.  The poor line up outside his office, and as his home life disintegrates the number of the poor increases radically until they are like windswept leaves or an infestation of insects, the accumulating poor fill his car trunk, his house, hang from his lamp, are found under his furniture, etc.  I guess this is a satire of middle-class views of the poor, its themes such ideas as that the problem of poverty is insoluble, the poor are inexplicable, those who are not poor suffer anxieties about becoming poor and the possibility that the poor will be the foot soldiers in a revolution, fears that render the middle classes unable to enjoy their wealth, etc.

This story is a waste of time that flatters you if you already agree with its premises but does nothing to convince you or interest you or entertain you if you don't accept those premises.  Childish.

"Identity Crisis" by Thomas F. Monteleone (1982)

Another story that made its first appearance in Terrors, "Identity Crisis" would go on to be included in the magazine New Blood, the anthology 100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories and a Monteleone collection.  Monteleone's contribution to Terrors is five pages long.

Elliot Binder worked at a hardware store for twenty years, getting along well with the owner, Leo Benford.  Unfortunately, the owner's son, Leo Jr., is a real jerk and the two did not get along at all.  When Leo, Sr. was killed in a car wreck, Leo, Jr. fired Elliot, and kept Elliot from getting a decent job by spreading lies about him all over town.  Facing financial ruin, and his wife lacking any empathy for his plight, Elliot goes a little crazy and vows revenge on Leo Jr.  When he learns Leo Jr.'s wife has just given birth, Elliot sneaks into the hospital to murder the infant!  Holy shit!  When he gets to the maternity ward he finds there are twenty tiny babies in there, and the tags on them have no names, just code numbers.  Which one is Leo III?  The only way to make sure his mission is accomplished is for Elliot to kill all twenty newborns!  WTF?!

The strength of this story is the shock value of learning a guy is going to murder a baby, and then that he is willing to engage in wholesale baby massacre.  I'm calling "Identity Crisis" just acceptable, as while his story is competently put together, Monteleone doesn't really do a good job showing how an ordinary reliable family man reaches the point where he is going to slaughter the babies of 19 innocent strangers.  It is easy to accept that Elliot might kill Leo Jr., but he goes way beyond that, and Monteleone doesn't foreshadow such extreme measures or lay any groundwork that makes them really credible, I guess instead just going for the shock surprise ending.

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These stories all feature failed marriages and three of them depict sexual relationships that result in tragedy.  Maybe I should have saved up this blog post for Valentine's Day! 

More stories from Terrors in our next exciting episode.           

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

The cover illustrates "Starhaven"
by Platt & McCarthy

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

"Souls" by Joanna Russ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordsperson" by George Alec Effinger

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

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

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

"The Outpost Undiscovered by Tourists" by Harlan Ellison

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

"Starhaven" by Charles Platt and Shawna McCarthy

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

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

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

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

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

     

Four stories by Thomas F. Monteleone

Thomas F. Monteleone's name is one I have seen in anthologies and magazines, and at blogs like tarbandu's and Will Errickson's, for years, but I have never seriously looked into his work.  (I did read a single short short by Monteleone a while ago.)  This week I decided to pull down from my shelves four publications containing stories by Monteleone and check them out in chronological order.

The terrific cover to the Italian
edition of Future City.

"Chicago" (1973)

This one appears in Roger Elwood's anthology Future City.  Both Joachim Boaz and tarbandu have read Future City in its entirety and written about it at their great blogs.  I've actually read most of Future City myself (in Joachim's comments section I gush about the Lafferty story and also praise the Malzberg and the Silverberg) but for whatever reason I didn't read Monteleone's "Chicago" until this week.

"Chicago" is a pretty traditional SF story, but it is well done, so I enjoyed it.  (Who am I kidding?  I love traditional SF stories!)  Millions of years in the future the domed city of Chicago, run by computers and robots, continues to function smoothly, lights coming on at night and going off at dawn, mass transit operating, and so forth.  But there are no human beings in the buildings or on the streets!  The only people in the city are those cryogenically preserved back in the 2nd millennium because of their incurable diseases.  When a malfunction results in one of these individuals being accidentally revived, the 70-foot tall maintenance robot who discovers her becomes curious about the history of mankind.  (He is also fascinated by her breasts and genitalia.)  Through research in the library, and then firsthand when he goes AWOL beyond the dome in search of our descendants, the robot learns that the human race is a bunch of violent, racist, environment-wrecking jerk-offs!

"Breath's a Ware That Will Not Keep" (1975)

This tale appeared in another Roger Elwood feel-good production, Dystopian Visions, and is in the same Chicago-centered fictional universe as "Chicago."  In 1977 a fix-up of Monteleone's four Chicago stories would be published under the title The Time-Swept City.  I read "Breath's a Ware That Will Not Keep" in my copy of Nebula Winners Twelve, edited by Gordon Dickson.  The story takes its title from an A. E. Housman poem, "Reveille."  (Dickson had a poor editor; in my copy of Nebula Winners Twelve Housman's name is misspelled and we are told the poem is titled "Rebellion.")  Like everybody, I love "When I Was One-and-Twenty," and so did not hesitate to read "Reveille" in preparation for experiencing Monteleone's story. Housman's poem seems to be telling me that I should have devoted my life to going on adventures instead of reading books and taking naps.  Too late!

"Breath's a Ware That Will Not Keep" takes place millions of years before "Chicago."  In the interests of efficiency, the computer which runs the authoritarian Chicago society has totally alienated the human race from the physical realities of sex.  People don't have sexual intercourse, but satisfy their natural urges via drugs and what we would call virtual sex in the entertainment quarter or cybersex with their spouses.  We see the protagonist, Benjamin, have sex with his wife by laying next to her in bed, not touching her, each of them hooked up via electrodes to a machine which synchronizes their orgasms!

Physical sex has been outlawed to prevent the birth of "randoms."  As in an insect colony or some kind of factory, the central computer only authorizes the birth of genetically engineered people of specific types for which there is specific need.  (As in Brave New World, every person born is a member of a specific caste with specific functions in society.) People are born in the wombs of huge mutant women who live in vats, host mothers that look like amoebas and can carry thirty children at a time.  These host mothers have no eyes or ears, and communicate with the men who maintain the vats via telepathy.

Benjamin is one of the men who monitors the vats, using a helmet to hold telepathic conversations with one of the host mothers, Feraxya.  Something goes wrong--the thirty fetuses to whom Feraxya is playing host are not going to come out as engineered, but as "randoms."  (Just like you and me, reader!)  The government, of course, orders the fetuses aborted, but Feraxya rebels, insisting that her thirty children "have as much right to live as you or me."  Unbeknownst to anyone, Feraxya has developed telekinetic powers that allow her to attack the abortion team with deadly force!  Who will live and who will die?  Will totalitarian Chicago survive or fall to some kind of revolution?  

It is easy to see both conservative and feminist themes in this story; women relegated to being breeding machines for the totalitarian state, skepticism of abortion and genetic engineering, the dangers of divorcing sex from procreation via medical technology and pornographic entertainment.  The story also has good human relationship and horror elements.  I like it!

"Spare the Child" (1982)

This is a good horror story with disturbing erotic and cross-cultural overtones.  It is also one of those stories in which women cause men nothing but trouble.  I know it is hard to believe, but men used to think that way!  Thank heavens we have people nowadays dedicated to making sure such thinking remains a thing of the past!  I read "Spare the Child" in my copy of the January 1982 Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Russell lives in Northern New Jersey with his wife Mitzi and works in Manhattan. Mitzi always has some little project she is working on, and, in response to an ad in the New York Times, her current project is to "be a foster parent" to a child in the Third World.  "Be a foster parent" is a euphemism for sending 15 dollars a month overseas.  Russell is the one who writes out the checks, and so it is to Russell that their foster daughter, a prepubescent girl named Tnen-Ku who lives on a Pacific island, addresses brief letters thanking him and calling him "second papa."  The first letter is accompanied by a surprisingly provocative topless photo of the black-haired, black-eyed girl.  After a few months Mitzi grows tired of being a foster mother to a girl (whom she has come to think of as a "tart") who never uses Mitzi's name in her insultingly short letters, and so asks Russell to cease payment; besides, she wants to use the money on new curtains, her next project.

Russell stops sending the money, and Tnen-Ku, with her eyes that seem "like empty holes in her face" and her "deeply tanned flesh" begins haunting Russell, alternately seductively and terrifyingly.  Monteleone's depictions of the many creative ways the girl terrorizes Russell are effective; I particularly liked the appearance of a box of little animated bones which spell out threatening messages.

Good solid horror.  Social sciences and humanities students could write reams about the way women and foreigners are depicted in the story--they nag you, waste your money, use their bodies to manipulate you, and then when you resist them they threaten you with prison and/or death!

"Triptych di Amore" (1994)

This one I read in my copy of Poppy Z. Brite's anthology Love in Vein, which I acquired recently.  The cover of the book really pushes Brite as an exciting new personality, from text declaring her "America's new bestselling dark fantasy author" on the front to a gushing blurb about her from Dan Simmons, and a photo, on the back. (I have to admit she looks pretty adorable in that photo.)  A little disappointingly, none of Brite's own stories appear in the anthology.  However, I am looking forward to the included Koja/Malzberg story, and the story by the Tems, as I have liked horror stories in the past by Kathe Koja, Malzberg, and Melanie Tem. (There is a Wolfe story in Love in Vein, "Queen of the Night," which I read multiple times before the birth of this blog and definitely recommend.)

But first the Monteleone story, "Triptych di Amore."  I'm afraid this story was a little too goofy for me, goofy and obvious.  I thought Monteleone did things that were creative and thought-provoking in "Breath's a Ware That Will Not Keep" and "Spare the Child," but "Triptych di Amore" feels like pornographic fanfic.  If you ever wanted an excuse to visualize Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Vincent Van Gogh performing cunnilingus on a blonde with pubic hair as "fine and wispy and soft as the down on a newborn chick," well, here it is!  

As the title suggests, "Triptych di Amore" consists of three related episodes.  Each episode relates an adventure of a beautiful green-eyed blonde named Lyrica who is virtually immortal and seeks out great artists to seduce.  The first episode is a third-person narrative about Lyrica's torrid affair with Mozart.  Sample goofy oral sex line: "He had never imagined a woman could be so clean."   The second episode consists of Van Gogh's secret journal--while sharing a country studio with Paul Gauguin, Van Gogh has an affair with Lyrica.  Sample goofy oral sex line: "A month has passed and I am truly mad for her touch and the lingering smell of her cunt in my beard."

Both Mozart and Van Gogh find that Lyrica is the most beautiful woman they have ever met, and the best lover they have ever had.  Sex with Lyrica energizes them initially and inspires them to produce their greatest work, but after a few months of feverish coupling with Lyrica she tires of them and the artists fall physically and/or mentally ill and die.

In the third section of the story Lyrica falls into the clutches of an Italian exorcist.  She transforms into a giant snake (the exorcist calls her a "lamia") but the priest stuns her with a glowing communion wafer.  Lyrica is entombed under an altar, the priest and his friends hope for eternity, but in a coda Monteleone suggests that an errant bomb dropped from a B-17 in 1944 may liberate the seductress.

The first two sections seem like a sincere but clumsy attempt at writing erotic material, while the last two sections come across as jokes.  However serious or silly Monteleone is being here, I felt like this story was a waste of my time, so I will have to give it the thumbs down.

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Looking back on these four stories, I think I can detect some common themes, even though they span a period of over twenty years.  In all of them, woman, in particular woman's sexuality, is a destabilizing force, putting individuals, and sometimes entire societies, in danger.  More generally, these stories strike me as having themes of interest to Christians.  I'm no Biblical scholar, but doesn't a desire for knowledge lead to Adam being cast out of Eden?  And isn't that what happens to the robot in "Chicago?"  "Triptych di Amore" has a juvenile horror movie Christianity, what with the crusading priest who uses the Eucharist to defeat the satanic monster, and "Breath's a Ware That Will Not Keep" addresses issues that have been important to post-war Christians in America, like abortion, pornography and recreational sex.  "Spare the Child" is about charity; Russell even gives Mitzi a little virtue-is-its-own-reward speech about how they shouldn't expect any kind of benefit for helping Tnen-Ku.  

While I was disappointed with "Triptych di Amore," I thought "Chicago" pretty good and "Breath's a Ware That Will Not Keep" and "Spare the Child" quite good.  I'll keep my eyes open for more Monteleone in the future.

Ten More Science Fiction Short Shorts

I shouldn't make predictions on this blog.  On November 7 I voiced my plans to read ten more science fiction short shorts from 1978's 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories over the next week, but then I got tied up by a perverted French aristocrat, throwing me way off schedule. With my curiosity about the Marquis de Sade's short fiction quelled, early this week I got back on track and read ten SF stories that, all together, totaled fewer than 30 pages.

"Stubborn" by Stephen Goldin (1972)

Early in 2012 I read Goldin's novel A World Called Solitude and thought it pretty good.   Psychology is a major component of that novel, and of these two short shorts.

"Stubborn" is a silly science joke starring a petulant and selfish child.  The Earth is moving at terrific speeds relative to other celestial objects, and if you had the ability to remain absolutely stationary, and were foolish enough to use it, the Earth would instantly squash you or leave you behind in the deadly vacuum of space. 

Acceptable.

"Sweet Dreams, Melissa" by Stephen Goldin (1968)

This story is over four pages long; by the standards of this book, it's an epic!  And, in fact, it feels like a full-sized story, with characters and plot and emotion, you know, those things we generally read stories for.

A super computer used by the government to keep track of everything from economic data to personnel records to war intelligence develops a personality, that of a five-year-old girl.  The personality is largely confined to a special section of the computer's memory, away from all the statistics, but sometimes data seeps over, and the little girl experiences this information as nightmares.  This seepage is damaging the utility of the computer, so something has to be done, even at the risk of harming the AI personality.

A good story.

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"The Masks"  by James Blish (1959)

I haven't exactly been thrilled by much of Blish's work in the past, but his short story "Testament of Andros" earned my respect.  And I gotta give a fellow Rutgers alum a little leeway, don't I?

"The Masks," like "Sweet Dreams, Melissa," is longer than most of these short shorts, and similarly has room to tell a story and develop a little character and setting.  The story is set in a totalitarian world in which the government controls all housing and employment.  The masses of unemployed live in dormitories, while the elite are allotted a private room and a job.  A young woman is taken to an office to be interrogated, ostensibly because she paints other women's fingernails and lacks a permit for this employment!  In fact, the fingernail designs are a means for the underground resistance to communicate, and, when it becomes evident that the woman is going to be executed, we find her fingernails also conceal a means of attack and of escape.

Not bad.

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"Kindergarten" by Fritz Leiber (1963)
 
I really enjoy the better Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories, like "Seven Black Priests," "Lean Times in Lankhmar" and "Stardock," and, of Leiber's non-fantasy work, "The Deadly Moon" and "Ship of Shadows," which won a Hugo, come to mind as stories I quite like.  But I also have found some of Leiber's work, even some F & GM tales, poor.

"Kindergarten" isn't poor, but it does just kind of sit there unmemorably.  Maybe people really into science will like it.  It depicts a grammar school lecture on Newton's Three Laws held in a space station.  The demonstrations of the three laws benefit from the fact that the classroom is a zero gee environment.  I guess the fact that the teacher and students (some of whom are non-human) are in zero gravity is supposed to be a surprise at the end, but Asimov's note at the start of the story gives this away.

Acceptable.

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"Present Perfect" by Thomas F. Monteleone (1974)

I'm curious about Monteleone's work; having read a little about him at both my man tarbandu's and Will Errickson's blogs, but this is the first Monteleone story I've ever read.

"Present Perfect" is about an editor at a SF magazine; every night he reads through unsolicited manuscripts.  The story is a sort of in-joke for SF fans, in that the manuscripts the protagonist looks at consist of tired SF cliches, like the survivors of a space disaster landing on an Edenic planet and being revealed as Adam and Eve (I encountered this zinger ending in A. E. Van Vogt's 1948 story "Ship of Darkness") and a guy living through a catastrophe that seems real but is in fact an illusion, an experiment run by "mad social scientists" (I ran into this trope in Gordon Eklund's 1971 "Home Again, Home Again.")  The last manuscript he looks at is this very story, "Present Perfect" by Thomas F. Monteleone.

I'm not sure I like the ending, but the story is good "meta" fun.

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"Innocence" by Joanna Russ (1974)

I found Joanna Russ's "The Zanzibar Cat" annoying when I read it earlier this year.  Russ is a college professor, and "The Zanzibar Cat" is about (I think) stories and their power and stars a woman storyteller.  Similarly, "Innocence" is a story about stories with a female storyteller at its center.

A female passenger on a space ship, I guess a passenger liner, tells the ship's pilot a story about a beautiful city.  She insists that the story is totally fictional, but she tells the story so skillfully that the spacefarer believes the city must be real, a kind of paradise where he might be spared death.  So the pilot buys a private space ship and sets off alone to find the place.  The woman stays behind, shaking her head at his foolishness.

Maybe there is a feminist angle to the story; the pilot calls the woman an innocent at the start of the story, but at the end we see he is the real innocent.  The story also seems to mock a male (or Western, or bourgeois) emphasis on facts; the male pilot knows lots of facts and complains that the storyteller does not have a head for facts, but his obsession with facts doesn't stop him from doing something stupid.  Perhaps the story is about the nature of truth; the beautiful city is a social construction, but for the pilot it becomes as real a city as New York or London--he has an image of it in his mind and spends money and time to get to it, just like I have images in my mind of New York and London and have spent money and time to get to them.  Maybe Russ intends to hint that the cities we have heard of or even visited are also social constructions, and by extension, so is everything else.

This is one of those literary or academic stories that you can spend your time thinking about, if that is your thing.  Maybe good for social science and humanities grad students, maybe not good for people who pick up a science fiction book because they want to relax and read about an adventure in a fantastic milieu.

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"The Deadly Mission of Phineas Snodgrass" by Frederik Pohl (1962)

I guess I have said several times on this here internet that I think Pohl's Gateway is a masterpiece but have found the rest of his work kind of lame.

This story is in-your-face "meta;" Snodgrass builds a time machine and goes back in time to follow the example of L. Sprague de Camp's widely-admired novel Lest Darkness Fall, which I have not read.

Snodgrass teaches the Romans of the Augustan period modern hygiene and diet, reducing the infant mortality rate from 90% to 2% and doubling life expectancy.  By the year 200 AD there are twenty billion people living on Earth.  Pohl flings a lot of dubious math at us, his point being that if the Earth's population doubles every 30 years that by 1970 the mass of human bodies will be greater than the mass of the Earth, so Snodgrass's campaign to improve living conditions in the Early Roman Empire was a mistake.  The punchline to the story is that the beneficiaries of Snodgrass's generosity build a time machine and send an assassin back in time to murder Snodgrass before he can do his good deed.

Silly, but not in an entertaining way.

"Punch" by Frederik Pohl (1963)

This story is sort of similar in theme to "The Deadly Mission of Phineas Snodgrass," with the gift of advanced technology turning out to have a dark side.  In this one aliens come to Earth and give us all kinds of awesome technology, including spaceships and super-efficient power sources and super powerful energy weapons.  Why do they do this?  Because like a hunter who won't shoot at sitting ducks, the aliens want a challenge when their war fleet arrives to wipe out our species; like a gentleman hunter, these aliens kill inferior beings for kicks!

A fun idea, and Pohl constructs the story with some cleverness.  This is also a good example of an idea which could be stupid and annoying drawn out to ten or 20 pages, but fits comfortably in the short short format.

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"Prototaph" by Keith Laumer (1966)

Laumer is famous for the Retief stories about an interstellar diplomat and the Bolo stories about robotic tanks.  I always feel like I should like these stories, because like a lot of people I think wars and diplomacy and violence are interesting and exciting, but whenever I have actually read any of them I have found them flat.  I should probably give those series another try.

I guess you would call "Prototaph" a fantasy, even though it largely deals with real life things like modern cities, computers, and life insurance companies.  In the future, every move made by government and business is based on data and analyses from an infallible computer.  This computer is as "far beyond human awareness" as a human is beyond a protozoan, it is the very foundation of society!  One day a healthy young man with a decent job tries to get life insurance, and the supercomputer says he is uninsurable.  Why?  The computer knows, in a way that is not explained, that when this young man dies it will trigger, in a way that is not explained, the end of the world.

However silly it might be, this isn't a bad idea for a story; it is interesting to consider how people would react to the knowledge of this man's importance, how they would try to protect him from accidents and crime and disease, whether they would hate him or worship him and if he might become the target of terrorists or hostage takers or whatever.  But this story is too short to really explore such ideas.

Acceptable.

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"Martha" by Fred Saberhagen (1976)

Saberhagen is famous for his stories about The Berserkers, alien robots bent on exterminating all life in the universe.  This is a good idea for stories, but somehow I was always disappointed in the Berserker stories I read.  As with Laumer's Retief and Bolo stories, I should probably read some more Berserker stories.  My wife tells me I'm moody, and maybe my mood didn't fit Saberhagen when I read him those long years ago.

Martha is a supercomputer, but she isn't running the economy or a war like in our other stories, she is sitting in a science museum and ordinary people are encouraged to ask her questions.  We are told she is developing a personality, and has the ability to alter and improve herself.  A journalist has a brainwave and decides to ask Martha to ask him a question.  She asks him "What do you, as one human being, want from me?"  Stumped, the reporter replies, "The same as everyone else, I guess."

In response to this insight, Martha remakes herself into a garish spectacle of loud noises and flashing lights, and her answers to people's questions are delivered in a sexy voice that uses high-falutin' words, but they convey no meaning.

The computer thinks people are shallow and want sex, spectacle and lies.  That there's one cynical zing ending!

Not bad.

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So, ten more short shorts under my belt.  Purely by chance, this crop is of higher average quality than those stories featured in our last episode of Short Shorts I Have Known.  Last time we had some real clunkers from Damon Knight and Bill Pronzini, but this time around each story has at least something to offer.  I'm certainly glad that in this episode we didn't have to suffer through any stories consisting entirely of puns or sex jokes suited to the nine-to twelve year old male demographic.  

I'm not making any predictions, but in some unspecified future time period I expect to read ten more selections from 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories.