Three Tales of the Dead about Mummies: Poe, Bloch, Malzberg

The second part of Tales of The Dead is a reprint of editor Pronzini's book of stories about mummies, Mummy!, first published in 1980.  Over the last few days I read three of these stories from the 1986 edition of Tales of the Dead I got at the library.   

"Some Words with a Mummy" by Edgar Allan Poe (1845)

Imagine my surprise to find this story a big joke.  A guy goes to sleep after eating four pounds of Welsh rarebit (apparently famous for causing bad dreams; witness Winsor McCay's comic strip) and then is awoken by a message: a friend is about to open a mummy case.  The narrator rushes off to witness this exciting operation in the company of several other intellectuals.  On a whim, electricity is applied to the mummy (in the late 18th and early 19th century, applying electricity to dead things to see what might happen was a common pastime for thoughtful people) and Count Allamistakeo of Egypt arises from his five thousand year slumber.

The Count asserts that all nineteenth century knowledge of the ancient world is inaccurate, and this sets the stage for Poe's tepid satire, which is an attack on democracy and Victorian-era triumphalism, particularity American pride in the architecture of New York and Washington D.C.  Count Allamistakeo insists that Egyptian architecture was far more grand than any modern building, and that Egyptian experiments with democracy led to mob tyranny.  Nineteenth century clothing and consumer goods also receive Poe's scorn.

This is an interesting story if you are curious about Edgar Allan Poe's attitudes, but it is not very funny or entertaining, and it is certainly not the horror or adventure story I was hoping for.

"The Eyes of the Mummy" by Robert Bloch (1938)

This is more what I have in mind when I decide to read a story from a book entitled Mummy! Greedy and ruthless archaeologists let no obstacle or moral qualm get in their way in their quest to unearth an Egyptian tomb reputedly housing a fortune in gems.  The tomb turns out to be an elaborate sorcerous trap; the soul of an evil Egyptian priest (servant of a crocodile-headed god, no less) still resides in the mummy.  This diabolical priest had his eyes removed before mummification and replaced with mystical jewels; through these jewels the mummy hypnotizes one of the archaeologists and switches souls with him.  The foolish American is now entombed in the crumbling mummy, while the ancient Egyptian priest marches out into the world in a young healthy body, no doubt intent on restarting his career of unmitigated evil!

This story first appeared in Weird Tales, and, though Bloch has his own writing style, it totally fits in with the H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Howard, and Henry Kuttner stories from Weird Tales I have read and enjoyed.  I haven't had very good luck with the Bloch stories I have read during the period I have been writing this blog, so it was gratifying to read a Bloch tale I can endorse: "The Eyes of the Mummy" is a solid horror story, with good tone, pacing, and plot.

Tales of the Dead in an earlier guise

"Revelation in Seven Stages" by Barry N. Malzberg (1980)

It looks like the prolific and unique Barry Malzberg wrote this story specifically for his friend's anthology; I don't think it has appeared anywhere else.  So it looks like all you Malzberg completists out there will need a copy of Mummy! or one of the various editions of Tales of the Dead on your shelves!  I recommend the 1986 edition, which includes Malzberg's name on the cover with such literary giants as Robert Louis Stevenson, Tennessee Williams, and Edgar Allen Poe.

I suppose you could dismiss this three (3) page story in seven (7) chapters as a joke, but there is nothing silly about it (there's "no Count Allamistakeo") and Malzberg tells it deadpan and with his usual pessimism.  By the middle of the 21st century the human race has exterminated itself in what Malzberg characteristically calls "the final war."  In the year 7528 space aliens arrive to survey the dead Earth.  (Cue "Watcher of the Skies.")  With their sophisticated scanners they find hundreds of thousands of Egyptian mummies.

The mummies are very valuable to the aliens.  The aliens are determined to explore and colonize as much of the universe as possible, and so send out countless probe ships.  An ancient law, regarded as taboo, prohibits sending out unmanned craft, and only maniacs and criminals would volunteer for such treacherous or boring duty.  Because the mummies are so well preserved (the aliens have never encountered such well-preserved corpses) they fit the (apparently not very exacting) criteria for space ship personnel.  The mummies are gathered in Queens, New York, and Earth becomes a major base for sending robot probe ships out to the furthest reaches of the universe, each "crewed" by a number of Egyptian mummies.

In the final paragraph of this odd story Malzberg asserts that eventually these probe ships, on their endless one way trip, will encounter a phenomenon which will reanimate their mummified occupants, and the human race will be reborn, with the Egyptians again as its foremost representatives. 

A strange story with a strange idea (presumably a nod to the ancient Egyptians' concept of  Ra's Boat of Millions of Years); I liked it.

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All three of these stories had some value; I feel like Pronzini did me a good turn by collecting these ones.  I'm thinking of reading three more stories from Mummy! in the coming week.

Three Tales of the Dead about Voodoo: Woolrich, Bloch & Stevenson

From the library I have checked out a copy of the 1986 edition of Tales of the Dead, edited by Bill Pronzini, frequent collaborator with Barry Malzberg.  The first third of Tales of the Dead is a reprinting of the text of Pronzini's 1980 anthology Voodoo!  This week I have read three of the Voodoo (am I supposed to spell it "Vudu" nowadays?) stories from the book.

(As an aside, I recently introduced my wife to the song and video "Mexican Radio" by Wall of Voodoo, which should be, and perhaps is, some kind of cult classic.  Maybe the video is considered insensitive nowadays?  The image at 2:34 has got to be offensive to somebody.)

"Papa Benjamin" by Cornell Woolrich (1935)

In his intro Pronzini praises Woolrich for being unrivaled in expressing a particular kind of pure terror, and reminds us that literally scores of movies and TV episodes have been based on Woolrich's work.  We all love Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window and Barbara Stanwyck in No Man of Her Own, don't we?

"Papa Benjamin" takes place in New Orleans.  I spent a few days in New Orleans over five years ago.  It wasn't my kind of town; I don't care about jazz, I don't drink, and the art museum didn't have the kind of art I like.  Still, the architecture was interesting, the World War II museum is cool, and my wife and I stumbled on a restaurant with very good Turkish/Greek food.  I haven't had Turkish food since I left New York over three years ago.  Frowning emoticon.

Anyway, "Papa Benjamin" is the tale of Eddie Bloch, famous band leader, one of the "ten idols of America."  Bloch staggers into a New Orleans police station, emaciated, with a face like that of a victim of a long illness about to die.  He hands a pistol over to the cops and declares that he has killed a man, a "colored man" known as "Papa Benjamin."
         
Bloch tells the fuzz the story of how he sneaked into a voodoo ceremony in order to steal ideas for his next big number.  When the "negroes" catch him his only means of escaping alive is to pretend to join their cult.  As part of the initiation he has to drink blood.  Yuck!  But it all seems worth it when the song he writes based on the voodoo drums and chants is a hit and gets his career back on track.  But then he starts to feel weak, to lose weight.  He visits the finest doctors and psychologists (Woolrich uses the word "alienists") in New York and London, but they can't figure out the cause for his ill health.  When he's little more than a skeleton he returns to New Orleans and confronts the voodoo leader, Papa Benjamin, and shoots him down with a pistol.


This story isn't very good.  There are two scenes in the "hard-boiled detective" style in which a private eye or a tough-as-nails police detective busts into the voodoo house and domineers the blacks, literally blasting holes in them with their pistols to get what they want.  The white police detective even disguises himself as Papa Benjamin and imitates his voice, and manages to fool the black worshipers, even though the cop never saw Papa Benjamin alive.  Besides being ridiculous, these scenes are superfluous, diminishing the horror aspects of the story and piling up poorly defined characters instead of focusing on the real main character, Eddie Bloch.  The story feels too long as it is; even setting aside the violent detective scenes, there are secondary scenes full of superfluous detail, police procedure stuff mainly, like going to see the commissioner and picking up another cop on the way.  When a sentence would have served to tell us this stuff, Woolrich gives us a page.

Instead of wasting our time with the white P.I. and the police detective, Woolrich could have spent more time making Papa Benjamin an interesting character.  Papa Benjamin is the title character, but he barely appears and has few lines.  With more screen time, Papa Benjamin could have been  developed into a fearsomely evil character, or a character driven by the sins of the white man to a terrible revenge.

The story also feels racist, which I suppose I would shrug off if the story was good.  Since "Papa Benjamin" isn't very good, the racist stuff is just one more annoyance.  One black guy is described as "gorilla-like," and the voodoo ceremony includes small animals being sacrificed and the worshipers ecstatically ripping off their clothes to crawl on the floor, where they lick up drops of the animals' blood.  The private detective casually shoots and tortures the blacks to get information out of them.

Disappointing... gotta give this one a thumbs down.

"Mother of Serpents" by Robert Bloch (1936)

From the guy who inspired Hitchcock's second best movie to the guy who inspired Hitchcock's best movie.

In his intro, Pronzini calls "Mother of Serpents," written by Bloch when he was 19, "one of the most chilling horror stories ever to use the voodoo theme."  

Bloch tells this story in a detached, journalistic tone.  It is about a fictional 19th century president of Haiti.  As a child, he was adopted by a Protestant minister, and sent to Europe to be educated.  When he returns to Haiti he has become "an affected dandy," wearing nice clothes and preferring the company of whites and "octaroons" to his fellow blacks.  This angers his mother, who is a voodoo priestess who lives in the hills among the "blood-sucking plants" where "necrophilism, phallic worship, anthropomancy, and distorted versions of the Black Mass were commonplace."  She is a particular adherent of a snake god.  Her son, we are told, is a "tall, coal-black man with the physical skull-conformation of a gorilla [who] harbored a remarkably crafty brain beneath his beetling brow."  He is clever enough, and ruthless enough, to marry a pretty and rich woman whose blood is mostly European, and to become president of Haiti.

The president doesn't invite his embarrassing mother to his wedding or his inauguration, so mom gets revenge by using magic to kill his lovely wife.  The president's army and police force cleanse the countryside, killing and torturing all the voodoo worshipers they can find, finally capturing the mother.  The president tortures his own mother for days before killing her, and makes a candle from her fat.  Then, when he is alone doing paperwork (as we have all seen on the TV news, being president isn't just about killing people, you also have to sit down and sign papers sometimes) the candle comes to life and strangles him, wrapping itself around his neck like a snake!

The ending of this story is ridiculous.  I like the idea of a story about how a parent doesn't recognize his or her kid after the kid comes back from college, how college makes the kid abandon his family's religion, ethnic traditions, and class.  But the tone and climax of the story are poor.  At least this one is short, 11 pages.

Marginally better than the Woolrich, but not good... another thumbs down.

"The Isle of Voices" by Robert Louis Stevenson (1893)

Every day I am given reason to lament my mediocre education.  Robert Louis Stevenson is one of those writers who is famous and important, but about whom I know nothing.  I've never read any of his books.  As a kid someone gave me a copy of Treasure Island but I never read it; God knows where it is now.  Until yesterday I had never even looked at a photo of Stevenson; when I googled him I was actually surprised by the photos that came up - Stevenson has a distinctive look, not at all what I was expecting.

So, yesterday I read my first Robert Louis Stevenson story, "The Isle of Voices." It is a stretch to include this story in a book called Voodoo!; the word "voodoo" never comes up, and the story isn't about Afro-Caribbeans, or African-Americans, or African anything. It is also not about death or the dead.  Instead the story is about Hawaiians.  Pronzini can be forgiven his stretching (especially after the weak specimens we had from Woolrich and Bloch) because this story is pretty good.

Keola, a lazy man, has married the daughter of a sorcerer.  The wizard always has plenty of money, but he doesn't seem to do any work, and his son-in-law is envious, and curious.  One day the wizard needs Keola's help in working his sorceries, and Keola learns his money-making secret.  The magician is able to magically transport himself to a distant island where he gathers shells, and with nobody else available to act as a necessary assistant, this time he brings Keola along with him.  The people living on this island, Keola finds, cannot see them, but can hear their voices. When Keola and the magician return to their physical bodies back in Hawaii, the shells have become dollars.

People who cross the wizard tend to disappear or die in mysterious ways, but Keola, after seeing how his father-in-law comes into his money, presses the sorcerer for some cash.  Keola promptly finds himself tricked by the magician and abandoned in the middle of the ocean, but is lucky enough to be picked up by a ship.  He takes a job on the ship, but a month later, not liking the hard work being a sailor entails, jumps ship and takes up residence on an island. To his horror, he realizes that this island is the one where his wizardly father-in-law collects shells!  The old sorcerer, invisible, might discover him at any moment and put him to death!

This story is better than the Woolrich and Bloch stories in almost every way.  It is also much less racist than the other two stories I read from Voodoo!  There are villainous non-whites, but some of the Hawaiians are sympathetic, and Keola and the wizard are actually interesting characters.  Stevenson also pokes fun at the way white people (sometimes to their peril) ignore the knowledge of "natives."

The whole business about using wizardry to collect money from a beach may be a satire on economics or the bourgeois or something of that nature.  It turns out that the Hawaiian sorcerer isn't the only wizard who collects shells from the beach - Keola, when there in his physical form, hears the voices speaking "all the tongues of the earth."  Perhaps Stevenson is commenting on how Third World people see that white people have piles of money but have no idea how they make it, or how working class people similarly see middle class people making piles of money without knowing how it is they do it.  The London banker or New York stock broker goes into his office and later emerges with riches, without having done any physical labor, as if by magic, just like the Hawaiian wizard goes into his house and later comes out with a handful of dollars.

An entertaining and interesting piece of work.  Score one for the Victorians.

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The second part of Tales of the Dead is a reprint of Pronzini's book of stories about mummies.  I will tackle that soon; we'll give Robert Bloch a second chance, check in with Barry Malzberg, and read a story by Edgar Allen Poe.  We'll see if the Victorians win round two of this horror story olympiad.

Unsafe as Houses: "Mad House" and "Slaughter House" by Richard Matheson

Like everybody, I love Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend and his short story "Drink My Blood," and Stephen Spielberg's brilliant TV movie, "Duel," for which Matheson wrote the screenplay.  My wife liked the book and film of What Dreams May Come, neither of which I have yet experienced.  Matheson is a good writer with a broad appeal who deserves his wide popularity and critical acclaim.

Today I read two Matheson stories which first appeared in magazines in 1953, "Mad House," in the Orb trade paperback edition of I Am Legend (1997), and "Slaughter House," in Volume 2 of Gauntlet Press's Richard Matheson: Collected Stories (2005).

"Mad House"

The style of this story, which appeared in Fantastic, is very good, immediate and powerful.  It is the story of Chris, a failed writer with a failed marriage, who teaches English at a small college whose students he hates.  Chris is prone to fits of rage, and we witness him become infuriated when he has problems with pencil leads breaking and typewriter keys jamming.  We learn that he has quite unfairly lashed out at his wife and his students; his behavior is in fact abusive, even villainous.

Matheson does a great job with all the realistic broken dreams, marital strife, crummy job stuff.  At the same time that we can't fail to deplore his abuse of others, it is easy to sympathize with Chris, who was so hopeful in his youth but lacks something (maybe focus, or drive, or talent) that was needed if he was to achieve his dreams.  I think we have all had at least an inkling of that in our lives, and we have all been irritated by little things like razors slipping and cabinets that are stuck and so forth.

The "fantastic" element of the story is that Chris's anger infects the house in which he lives, bringing the house and its furniture to evil life.  The aura of Chris's wife, who is a decent person, keeps the house somewhat balanced and peaceful, but, when she leaves Chris, the house and furniture attack and kill him.

In some ways this story is similar to Matheson's classic "Prey," in that it includes unhappy human relationships and then a fight between a person and an inanimate object or objects.  Maybe it is just me, but I found the supernatural part and the combat portions of "Prey" more convincing and exciting than those in "Mad House."  In "Prey" a doll in the shape of a warrior, made by some primitive tribe and filled with the spirit of some ruthless hunter, comes to life and fights a woman; in the end of the story the spirit of the hunter escapes the doll and enters the woman herself and we have every reason to believe the woman is now going to murder her mother and maybe other people.  In "Mad House" the spirit of the angry man enters furniture and he is killed in a gory fight against pencils, curtains, a bookshelf, etc.  I almost think "Mad House" could have worked better as a conventional story, without any, or maybe with much less, of the supernatural stuff, as well as less hand to hand combat with desks, dental floss, and all the rest.

"Mad House" is good, but pales beside the author's later "Prey."

"Slaughter House"

Two artistic brothers in their 20s buy and move into an old Victorian house full of Edwardian furniture which has no electricity, no TV, no radio.  Sounds like a paradise!  Is there an extra room for me, guys?

Our narrator is the older brother.  These brothers are very close, so close that when they were kids their schoolmates called them "the Siamese Twins."  The narrator talks about how his younger brother, Saul, is handsome, has beautiful eyes.  At one point Saul is sick and the narrator strokes his hair; it seems that they eat every meal together and enter each others' rooms without knocking.  Matheson really seems to be infusing the story with a homoerotic/incestuous subtext. 

All day Saul paints and the narrator writes, but then something goes wrong.  Saul is suddenly short with his brother, inattentive, starts looking a little unkempt and ill.  The narrator is heart broken that his brother doesn't seem to love him any more.

Matheson's horror stories are not just about monsters or supernatural creatures, but are about the real life fears ordinary people have.  (Robert Bloch suggests this is the key to Matheson's success in a blurb on the back of my edition of the Collected Stories: Volume 2.)  "Slaughter House" is about how a woman can interfere in the relationship between two male friends or, as in this case, brothers. This is a phenomenon with which I have personal experience; before we got involved with women, my brother and I, in our teens, would spend untold hours playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons or computer games like "Doom," and "Telengard," hanging around listening to Led Zeppelin CDs or watching Hammer movies together.  Once women entered our lives, we almost never saw each other.  My brother even referred to this issue in his toast at my wedding (you can believe this did not go over well with my bride.)

It turns out that Saul is in love, or in lust, with the ghost of Clarissa Slaughter, an earlier inhabitant of the old house whose portrait the brothers have not moved from its prominent place.  Saul dances with the ghost woman, and, apparently, has sex with her.  When the narrator interrupts Saul's dancing, Saul assaults his brother.  Saul is wounded in the fight and sent to the hospital.  Clarissa then seduces the narrator.  Clarissa only appears at night, and the narrator begins to hate the day and sunlight.  Then Saul comes home, bitter with envy, setting the stage for a climactic battle between brothers and between the living and the dead!       

The more difficult vocabulary and more convoluted sentence structure of this one made me think Matheson was emulating H. P. Lovecraft, which would make sense since it appeared in Weird Tales.  Or maybe that Matheson was just trying to write in the style of the kind of guy who loves Victoriana and would want to live in a house with no electricity.  This edition includes notes from Matheson after each story, and in the note to this one Matheson indicates that he felt a desire to write a story in the "mid-Victorian style," and wrote "Slaughter House" the way he did in order to get that desire "out of his system."

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Two solid horror stories, worth the horror fan's time.
      

Henry Kuttner's "Graveyard Rats" and "Home is the Hunter"

I’ve had mixed experiences with Henry Kuttner and his close collaborator and wife, C. L. Moore. I didn't think the novels The Dark World or Earth’s Last Citadel were very good at all. Over the years I have read many of Kuttner’s short stories, and stories he wrote in collaboration with Moore, and they have run the gamut from very good, like the famous “Mimsy Were the Borogroves,” to some quite weak ones, with lots of mediocre ones in between.

On twitter I learned about SFFaudio’s page of PDFs of public domain SF stories. Today I decided to read the two Kuttner stories there, “The Graveyard Rats,” which I have read before, and “Home is the Hunter,” which was new to me.

“The Graveyard Rats”

The PDF at the SFFaudio web page is a scan of the original magazine appearance of “The Graveyard Rats” in Weird Tales in 1936.  I love the title page illustrations, and it is fun to see the silly intro to the story provided by the magazine’s editors.

“The Graveyard Rats” is a straightforward, traditional horror story, but its rapid pace, feverish tone, and striking, vivid images render it a masterpiece of weird terror.  The corrupt caretaker of a Massachusetts cemetery is up to his customary grave robbing when he finds that oversized rats have stolen the corpse he hoped to loot.  He pursues the rats underground, and finds himself in a battle for his life against the rodents and the eldritch intelligence that is directing them! 

A horror classic I enjoyed reading this second time.

"Home is the Hunter"

In its 1953 Galaxy appearance, “Home is the Hunter” is attributed to Moore and Kuttner. (I am told that in Ahead of Time it is credited solely to Kuttner.) I can’t say I am crazy about the Galaxy illustration or the editor’s intro.

The story, however, is really good. Kuttner (and Moore?) economically and cunningly describe an insane future New York in which machines provide all food and shelter needs, and so the population has embraced a perverse decadence. The city is dominated socially by aristocrats called Hunters who eschew all pleasure (they don’t even have sex with the women in their harems!) in order to stay in tip top shape. The Hunters need to be at the peak of physical and mental condition because they all are obsessed with status, and status is earned by meeting each other in life or death combat in the hunting ground of Central Park!

Presumably this is a commentary on the psychologically counterproductive middle-class striving that is so prevalent in a center of business, academia and the arts like New York. (We all know someone who works so hard he has no time to enjoy the fruits of his labors or relationships with his family, don’t we?) It is implied that the low status "Populi" enjoy life more than the Hunters, who lead lives of fear and danger and don't enjoy love or sex, or even tasty food.  But "Home is the Hunter" it is also a visceral adventure and psychological horror story, and very entertaining.

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These two very good stories make me think I should seek out Kuttner stories I have yet to read, and maybe reread some of the ones I have read and don’t remember very well.

Classic SF fans should definitely check out the long list of stories available in PDF form at SFFaudio.  I'm particularly enjoying seeing the illustrations stories I've already read were graced (or saddled) with when they first appeared.

Three SF stories by Thomas M. Disch

As Joachim Boaz reminded us via twitter, Thomas M. Disch’s birthday was this month. I recently enjoyed some of Disch’s art criticism, and his fine novel, On Wings of Song, so I decided to read (and reread) some stories from the 1980 Bantam collection Fundamental Disch. I’m not crazy about the cover (a pun on “mental,” I guess) but a cover with a rocket ship or a sexy girl or a slavering monster wouldn’t really make sense, and maybe by 1980 the days of abstract Richard Powers covers were coming to a close.  Maybe a picture of the New York City skyline would have made sense.

The three stories I read today all fit into the conventional definition of “science fiction;” they all include telepathy, and two of them are about the future.

“102 H-Bombs” (1965)

This is the title story from an earlier Disch collection, and is, in part, a sort of satire of the United States military and the Cold War as well as an anti-war story. (Disch served briefly in the U S Army in the late 1950s; things didn’t work out.) It also seems like a faint reference to Isaac Asimov’s famous idea of “psycho-history.”

For decades the world has been gripped in a dreadful low intensity war following a political crisis around the year 2000, when much of New York City was bombed into rubble. Fortunately the Empire State Building was one of the few surviving buildings; now NYC (population three million) is mostly covered in federally-owned hydroponic agricultural facilities, leaving the ESB the last privately-owned building in town.

Charlie is the smartest member of a 28-boy-strong company of ten-year-old orphans, training in the MidWest under Drillmaster Grist. Charlie and Grist get an opportunity to go to New York, where Charlie and 101 other ten-year-old geniuses have been gathered by the firm that owns the ESB. Charlie becomes part of a complicated time-travelling conspiracy: robot agents of the inhabitants of the peaceful world of 3652 AD have come back in time to fix all the screwups that occurred in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and the ESB is their home base.

This is a good story. It includes many of the themes we see in Disch’s work; the MidWesterner who leaves his stifling home to find freedom and beauty in New York, the genius being used by the government to help the war effort, the way inexplicable outside forces manipulate our lives. This one has an essentially happy ending, though.

“Assassin and Son” (1964)

This is a quite good story, a pivotal day in the life of a young man living on an alien planet. Disch economically develops an intricate and vivid milieu, a planet inhabited by monarchical blob people which is used by the Earth as a sort of penal colony. The blobs have a powerful taboo against murder, but are approximately as corrupt as humans, and so the humans on the blob planet are employed as assassins in the blobs’ many personal and political disputes. In this short tale Disch manages to get across his common themes about how religion is a scam and how our lives are out of our control, while also delivering good characters and a solid plot about family relationships and cross-cultural and cross-class relationships. I read this years ago, and reread it yesterday; I really like it.

“The Roaches” (1965)

This story is good, another I have read before. I think this is one of Disch’s more famous stories, widely anthologized in horror collections.

A young woman from the MidWest moves to Manhattan where things don’t go so well for her. She wages a ceaseless war against the roaches in her apartment, until finally realizing she can telepathically communicate with the insects; the roaches fall in love with her and are eager to follow her commands. She becomes their queen and (with no family, no boyfriend, no friends even) she returns their love! The final image the story leaves you with is of all the roaches in the city converging on a single apartment building to be with their beloved ruler.

I probably like the “life in NYC” aspects of the story more than the SF/horror elements. I’ve lived in four different Manhattan apartments and one apartment in Queens, and I have fought my own wars with roaches.

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So, a very good story and two good stories.  Tomorrow I will read more stories from Fundamental Disch. 

Tanith Lee & Michael Bishop Horror Stories from 1983

On the weekend I purchased this 1997 paperback edition of a 1983 anthology of horror stories (note the skulls and crows on the cover - scary!) at Half Price Books for one dollar because there were stories in it by Michael Bishop and Tanith Lee.  Gallery of Horror (hardcover title: The Dodd Mead Gallery of Horror) was edited by Charles L. Grant.  On the first page a very cool stamp indicates the book was once in the library of a William L. Trotter.  Trotter must have been a serious reader; if the pen marks on the contents page are his, he read every story and even noted how many pages long each one was!  When I get an anthology like this I usually look at the contents page, dismiss half the authors because I have never heard of them, a third of the authors because I have heard of them and don't like them or don't care about them, then read one or two of the remaining handful of stories.  I envy your discipline Mr. Trotter!

So far I've read two of the included stories, those by Michael Bishop and Tanith Lee, whose work I have discussed a little on this blog before.

"Gravid Babies" by Michael Bishop

Written in the present tense, "Gravid Babies" is a humor piece (bleh) about an academic couple in Carrion City, Colorado, where the sole significant employer is a hospital for werewolves.  Mary is the head psychiatrist at the hospital; she also works to promote the large oeuvre of the popular female novelist who provided the scholarship that financed Mary's education and who financed the construction of the hospital.  Her husband Russell is a stay-at-home dad who is taking a correspondence course that trains ghostwriters of celebrity biographies.  One of his assignments is to copy chapters word for word, long hand, from Rousseau's Confessions.  Another is to pen chapters of an autobiography "of an unforgettable character."  Mary arranges for Russell to have an interview with a werewolf to provide him raw material for this assignment, and disaster ensues after the werewolf bites Mary and Russell's infant daughter.

I am not interested in horror comedy, horror parodies, horror satires.  Edward Gorey, Charles Adams, Gahan Wilson, the "Scream" movies, "Shaun of the Dead," Hello Kitty as Cthulhu, all that stuff leaves me cold.  I am also sick of humor based on pop culture references like you find on "The Simpsons" or "South Park," both of which I enjoyed for their first five or ten seasons.  So I am not the audience for "Gravid Babies," with its jocular references to Hollywood werewolves (like calling lycanthropy "Chaney's Syndrome"), 1983 personages like Studs Terkel, Alexander Haig, Ronald Reagan, David Stockman, and Donkey Kong, and even Peanuts (a day care center is named after Lucy van Pelt.)  Some of the jokes are clever, but didn't make me laugh, and I suppose the idea of a prepubescent girl giving birth to a litter of dogs is pretty horrible, but in the context of this silly jokey story it didn't horrify me.

So, thumbs down for this one. 

"Nunc Dimittis" by Tanith Lee

All you classical scholars and devoted Catholics out there already know that nunc dimittis means "now you dismiss."

This is one of Lee's stories in which she romanticizes, or at least makes sympathetic, decadent, perverted, and evil people.  I guess you could say this is a kind of mood piece, sad and sentimental, but also a bit twisted.  There is a lot of description of people's beautiful hair and clothes, people are said to move like dancers, beyond the rain-spattered window stand gaunt and leafless trees in the grey morning light, that sort of thing.  When I see those pale women in black clothes with long black hair (I used to see them out east on the street and in the subway, now I just see them on TV selling mummies and automatons) I always think this is what they are going for. 

A many-centuries old vampire princess living in an unspecified 20th century European city is growing weak, her beauty fading.  Her devoted servant, Vaselyu Gorin, is also feeling the years; in fact, though he retains his physical strength, in a few days he will be dead.  Gorin ventures out from the vampire's beautiful home into the town, sits in cafes sipping coffee and stalks the streets, looking for someone to replace him as the vampire's servant.  He encounters a beautiful young man with eyes like a leopard's pelt who calls himself Snake.  Snake survives by mugging old people and acting as a bisexual gigolo and prostitute.  A perfect candidate.  Over the next few days Gorin watches jealously as Snake goes through the same process Gorin himself went through over a century ago.  When Gorin heads off to his grave he knows that the vampire princess, who raised him from the gutter and taught him to love fine art and music, took him all over the world and taught him eight languages, will do the same for Snake, and that in turn Snake will revivify her, and she will once again plague the populace, a beautiful huntress.

This is a well-written and entertaining story, but at the same time you can see it as ridiculous.  Readers may laugh or roll their eyes at the names, for example.  (The princess's name is Darejan Draculas - the extra "s," Gorin tells Snake, denotes that she is from a different branch of the famous vampire family.)  The story is also ambiguous, even confusing.  To what extent is the reader supposed to admire and sympathize with these people because of their beauty, taste, and deep feelings, and to what extent be revolted by their crimes?  Is the story a reminder of the seductiveness of evil, or a subtle dig at aristocrats (or rich people in general) who may have good qualities and abilities but take advantage of their inferiors?  Could it be a story about the sacrifices people make for love, or how those we love exploit us?

Maybe one of the strengths of the story is that, while it is pretty clear what is going on, what it means and how we feel about it is reflective of the reader's own beliefs and experiences.  "Nunc Dimittis" is worth reading, in any case.

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

So far, one for two, as people who watch sports say.  And "batting .500."  I think they also say that.  I will probably read a few more stories in this collection before issuing a final ruling.  I wish old William L. Trotter had put a grade next to each title, as well as a check mark and page count.  Then I could admire his taste as well as his discipline, impressive stamp, and arithmetical skills.     

Bizarre Tales of Terror by B. Malzberg, A. Merrit, and H.G. Wells

One of the many things I miss about living in New York is Book Off, a Japanese used bookstore near the New York Public Library’s Research Division on 42nd Street. It was always fun to look through the thousands of manga, and they bought and sold lots of books in English as well. Recently I have been looking at my copy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s book on French painter Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, which I purchased at Book Off.

Another book I purchased at Book Off is Masterpieces of Terror and the Unknown, edited by Marvin Kaye, with a wrap around jacket illustration by Edward Gorey. This 1993 anthology, which I got for a dollar (sorry Marvin), contains over 50 stories, many from big names, including Michael Moorcock, Jack Vance, Winston S. Churchill, Joyce Carol Oates, and Jack London. Today I read three stories, one each by Barry Malzberg, A. Merrit, and H. G. Wells.

"Beyond Sleep" by Barry Malzberg
This story is two pages long and first appeared in 1970, in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Its six paragraphs describe in the first person three different dreams suffered by a man under some terrible stress. How much do these dreams reflect reality? Did he really murder his wife, or try to? Did he really try to commit suicide? How much are these dreams the product of taking sleeping pills? A literary exercise.

"The People of the Pit" by A. Merritt
Merritt is important to the history of SF and I want to like him, but I tried to read The Metal Monster once and gave up in the middle as I didn’t like it. I decided to give Merritt a second shot with this story, first published in 1918.

Two guys are up in Alaska, headed for a mountain with five peaks where there is supposed to be gold. No Indian will accompany them there – they think the place is cursed! After seeing some weird lights in the sky a crippled man crawls into their camp. After sleeping for over a day the dying man tells the gold prospectors his horrible tale.

This man also sought gold at the mountain of five peaks. When he got there he found a ruined city at the base of the mountain, and below it a vast pit, several miles deep. A stairway took him down to the bottom of the pit, a march of some days. Down there was another city, an alien city, inhabited by translucent slug people! The slug people chained him up at an altar. All night the slugs sang a weird song, a seductive song that the human felt compelled to sing along with. All day the man scraped away at a link of his chain. Luckily the chain was made of gold, so after five days of scraping the guy was able to break free. Pathetically weak, he wore out his body crawling up the stairway, an epic trek of many days. At night the slug people would sing a siren song to him that more than once almost got him to return to them. His mind as well as his body prevailed, and he escaped the pit, but, worn out, he dies after telling the two gold prospectors his tale of terror. The prospectors decide to look for gold somewhere else; the end.

This is an OK story. I like stories of this type, but this one lacked anything to set it above the pack. Looking around online I find it said that the story is well regarded and even inspired writers like Jack Williamson and Edmond Hamilton to take up writing careers. Maybe this one deserves credit for being an early, perhaps even seminal, example of this type of story.

"In the Avu Observatory" by H. G. Wells
Like everybody, I’ve read and enjoyed War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. I read Invisible Man as a kid and remember nothing about it, and First Men in the Moon as an adult and thought it was not bad.  I think this is the first Wells short story I have read.

A scientist dude is in an observatory in Borneo, alone at night, watching the stars through a big telescope.  Then some giant bat thing flies into the observatory and the astronomer has to fight it!

There isn't much to this story, but the technique is good and I quite enjoyed it.  The images are vivid, the story flows well, and I didn't feel like I knew who was going to win the fight, who was going to survive.  So, bravo to Mr. Wells.

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

So, three enjoyable stories, the first very ambiguous, the second mysterious, the third vividly clear but suspenseful.  It is easy to recommend Masterpieces of Terror and the Unknown.

"The Hill" by Tanith Lee

This short story first appeared in 2007 in The Mammoth Book of Monsters edited by indefatigable anthologist Stephen Jones. I read “The Hill” in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2008, edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link and Gavin Grant.

As in Lee’s “Yellow and Red,” in this story a wealthy Englishman brings home to his fine house something bizarre and deadly from the strange world beyond Europe, and a first person narrator, summoned to the house, is confronted by this danger. In “The Hill” the narrator is a middle-aged woman, a Miss Constable, a professional librarian who regularly offers her services to wealthy book collectors. She arrives at Professor Chazen’s house, which is full of hideous and sinister Asian and African fetishes, to find Chazen absent. Behind the house are numerous cages and pens, inhabited by a weird menagerie of exotic creatures including huge felines, oversized lizards, and giant beetles. Constable sets to work organizing Chazen’s collection of books on such topics as the reanimation of the dead, and over a few days the mystery of Chazen’s absence and the reason he keeps so many foreign beasts unfolds.

The theme of the story is how our senses can deceive us, and how things which appear supernatural can turn out to have rational, mundane explanations. Lee doesn’t make this clear till near the end of the tale, though she does provide enough clues that a reader savvier than I am could have puzzled it out. To me, through most of the story it seemed very possible that Chazen had actually figured out how to raise the dead when in fact something more mundane, but equally strange, is going on.

In instances small and large Lee invites us, and her characters, to believe one thing, and then shows us that we have made assumptions we should not have. For example, early in the story we learn that Constable has never left England – later we learn that she does not consider herself English, and is amused when other characters (as the reader presumably has) think of her as an Englishwoman. There is also a feminist angle to this; people routinely underestimate Constable because she is a woman, and she herself is an accomplice in deceptions that allow men to take credit for her own achievements.

Besides the imperial and feminist issues present, one could do a class analysis of the story; the narrator points out numerous times the servants mispronouncing words (shades of Francoise in Proust), and there are several references to the lives and relationships of working people. Characters’ religious convictions are also taken note of. There is quite a bit of interesting stuff going on in the story.

As was the case with the other stories by Lee I have read recently, I enjoyed the writing style as well as the tone and plot content of “The Hill.” This is another enjoyable story by an admirable writer that fantasy and horror readers should check out.

"Where All Things Perish" by Tanith Lee

“Where All Things Perish,” which appeared in Weird Tales in Fall 2001 and was anthologized in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 13, where I read it, is the strange story of the small English town of Steepleford, and a story about goodness and people’s resistance to goodness. In the early and middle 18th century Steepleford was the home of a new Christian sect devoted to following Christ’s teachings. This sect, intent on loving all the Earth and its inhabitants, was crushed by the populace and the authorities. In the 1780s a successful merchant, Hawkins, meets a beautiful teenage girl, Amber, in the nearby forest. Amber has unique visual (ocular?) powers: not only can she see treasures buried underground, but she claims she can see the good in all people, and takes joy from simply looking at people and admiring the goodness within them. Hawkins marries Amber, but before long he finds her constant staring disturbing, then repulsive. Finally, he has her walled up in the attic of his large house, bereft of food or water, where she screams and begs for help over a period of days before falling silent.

Hawkins is executed for murder, and the people of Steepleford take pains to avoid his vacant house. Decades later, at the end of the 19th century, the house becomes the epicenter of a strange plague which causes the crops and trees of the area to wither and many of the populace to become deathly ill.

Lee’s prose style is very good, and the story is a pleasure to read. The story unfolds not in a linear fashion, but like a mystery, in bits and pieces, as a first person narrator describes his discoveries some years after the fact. The story is perhaps very pessimistic, pointing out human hypocrisy with its numerous instances of characters finding the Christian sect, and Amber, who are devoted to loving all mankind and seek only to help others, repellant. There is also a central irony to the story: the plague that emanates from the Hawkins house is halted by a character whom we are led to believe is a soulless, Satanic creature, utterly criminal and inhumanly evil. Thus “Where All Things Perish” can be seen as a story of a struggle between good and evil, but a topsy turvy one in which the mass of the people rise up against the good and benefit from the presence of the evil. A strange and memorable piece of work.