"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.

Computer Eye by A. E. Van Vogt

I got a surprise when I started Computer Eye: it is a first person narrative written in the voice of the massive computer that serves as the surveillance and security force of the USA in the year 2090. Every home in “computerized America” includes a terminal through which the computer can watch the living room and front door (back doors are now illegal) and computer eyes are affixed to street corner lampposts, government buildings, and all vehicles.  Many of these eyes are equipped with ray guns which the computer can use to punish or execute rulebreakers. The computer is not only tasked with law enforcement; it does almost all the work society requires, from labor and manufacturing to the piloting of cars and aircraft, to even the composition of books and music -- having been programmed with all the literature, films and music ever created by mankind, the computer is able to produce art more popular than any a human could produce. There is very little work left for human beings.

The start of the computer era in 2059 coincided with a sharp increase in crime and immorality. The computer’s supporters claim this was a result of mass unemployment, and that in time humans will learn to cope with copious free time and then crime rates will drop. The computer’s critics, however, have a more radical theory: that the computer’s biomagnetic observation mechanism drains the energy from a person’s soul, literally draining the goodness out of people!

Among those who hold this theory are members of a protest group dedicated to developing people’s psychic abilities. This group, called the Computerworld Rebel Society, led by their most powerful psychic, Glay Tate, travels around the western states, giving shows demonstrating their mental powers and speaking out against what they see as the overweening power of the computer. Through flashbacks (the computer consulting its memory banks) we learn about the establishment of computerized America and the origins of the Computerworld Rebel Society.

The main plot of the novel follows the efforts of corrupt government officials to infiltrate and discredit or destroy the Computerworld Rebel Society. At first we witness this conflict through the cold uncaring eyes of the computer, but halfway through the book the computer accesses all that soul energy it has been stealing from people, and suddenly develops consciousness. It now has a wisecracking personality and selfish motives of its own that don't necessarily coincide with those of the human portion of the government.

My 1983 DAW paperback of Computer Eye (originally titled Computerworld) appeals to would-be book buyers as a sort of companion piece to George Orwell’s 1984. “Here is a novel to read after you have re-read 1984” we are told on the back cover, while on the front cover Computer Eye is described as “Ultra-Modern Science Fiction for the Post-1984 Era.”

Maybe this is good advertising, but comparisons between Orwell’s classic novel and Computer Eye are a little silly. I wouldn’t have even thought of comparing 1984 to Computer Eye if the cover blurbs had not invited me to do so; Orwell and Van Vogt are trying to do different things. While it does share with 1984 the topics of oppressive government and the abuse of high technology, Computer Eye is equally, or more, concerned with some of Van Vogt’s other favorite themes, like the next stage of human evolution and psychic powers, as well as all that mysticism about the human soul, which we are told consists of energy created before the Big Bang. Also, while 1984 is part of a long conversation about the role of the state, Computer Eye, by including a traditional thriller subplot about crooked politicians who will stop at nothing to achieve their personal ambitions to be President, dilutes any message it might have had about the relationship between the state and the individual by implying that the form of government is not the issue, but which particular person happens to be in charge. Finally, while 1984 ends with the triumph of the Big Brother state over the individual Winston Smith, Computer Eye ends with the corrupt politicians dead and the computer tamed, the obedient servant of the Christ-like Glay Tate.

This is a strange book, with a lot of things going on in it. It held my interest, but did not thrill me or affect me on an emotional level, so I can recommend it, but not enthusiastically. I admire Van Vogt’s ambition in trying to get into the “mind” of a computer, to reproduce the way a computer works by writing from the point of view of a computer, but this does bog the novel down a bit with lots of extraneous and tedious detail. Of course, Van Vogt’s prose is rarely smooth, and he doesn’t write compelling characters, which I knew going in. Van Vogt fans should definitely read Computer Eye, but people unfamiliar with our man Van should probably read Voyage of the Space Beagle, the stories collected in War Against the Rull or the Isher Weapon Shops stories first.

"Worms of the Earth" by Robert E. Howard

Yesterday I read a middling Howard story that was not published during Howard’s lifetime, but today I read a more famous Howard tale, printed in the November 1932 issue of Weird Tales. I read this story some years ago, and found it memorable, and the critics seem to consider this one of the best of Howard’s stories.

The major theme of Howard’s work, of course, is the superiority of the barbarian to the civilized man, and he hammers this point in the opening scene of “Worms of the Earth.” Our tale begins with the Roman governor of Britain making hypocritical statements about justice while watching with pleasure the crucifixion of a Pict. The Pict is being punished for killing a Roman merchant, but as we might expect in a Howard story, the merchant had it coming, having cheated and insulted the barbarian. The torture meted out to the Pict is an open challenge to the authority of the king of the Picts, Bran Mak Morn, who watches the crucifixion incognito, disguised as a Pictish diplomat.

Howard takes pains to distinguish the nobly barbaric Bran from the soft, sadistic and corrupt Romans. Bran hates fluted columns, he refuses to sleep on silks and cushions, he cares nothing for money, and Roman women prefer his primitive virility to the caresses of civilized Roman men. At the same time, Bran cannot deny that his people are outmatched by the wealth and power of Rome, and so when he vows revenge on the Roman governor he turns to unconventional warfare.

Unconventional warfare in the form of an army of troglodytes summoned from beneath the surface of the earth! In a dream a Pictish wise man warns Bran not to take this unspeakably sinful course, but the evil of the Romans has unleashed in Bran another evil. In the same way that the parsimony of his mercantile uncle led Dondal in “Swords of the Purple Kingdom” to betray his friends, the cruelty of the Roman governor and exploitation of the Roman merchant have led Bran to betray his elders and their wisdom. Contact with civilization has corrupted Bran’s soul.

Raising the army of prehistoric underworld denizens is no easy task, and Bran must seek the aid of a witch woman of the western moors, a hideous yellow-eyed and sharp-fanged creature, half human and half monster. In return for her guidance to “a Door to Hell,” Bran offers her money, and then the head of an enemy but, in a scene that amazed me when I first read it, the witch instead demands that Bran take her virginity! Grotesque and inhuman as she is, this is her one chance to experience physical affection, and with a king no less!

With the aid of the witch, and after crawling through a lot of slimy tunnels and swimming in a monster-haunted lake, Bran summons the army of reptilian troglodytes. These ophidian creeps are the degenerate descendants of the natives of Britain whom Bran’s own people, the Picts, drove underground centuries before. There is an interesting parallelism here: just as Bran’s people today are being oppressed and conquered by the Romans, in their own day the Picts destroyed the culture of those who had preceded them as masters of Britain. Before their defeat at the hands of the Picts the Worms of the Earth were men, now they are monsters: will defeat at the hands of the Romans similarly corrupt the Picts?

Through devious means Brak persuades the monsters to help him. The troglodytes undermine a Roman fort, causing it to collapse and kill the garrison, and drag to Bran the Roman governor, who has been driven insane by the horrors he has witnessed among these weird creatures. Bran realizes he was wrong to have summoned the subterranean monsters, and when he kills the Roman governor it is not out of revenge, but out of mercy.

This is a good story, and it is full of stuff for the Weird Tales aficionado to contemplate. Howard’s view of race and ethnicity, for example: there is a section about how Bran Mak Morn carries the pure blood of his people, and looks down on other Britons who are the product of racial mixing. There are also overt references and other similarities to the work of Howard’s friend, H.P. Lovecraft: the witch lives in “Dagon-moor” and directs Bran to “Dagon’s Barrow,” and one of Bran’s oaths is “Black gods of R’lyeh!” “Worms of the Earth” is also a good example of a Howard story that doesn’t rely on hand to hand combat to generate excitement; Howard is most famous for Conan, and rightly so, but he also wrote horror stories, and “Worms of the Earth” shows him in “eldritch horror” mode.

I read “Worms of the Earth” in the 2005 Del Rey collection Bran Mak Morn: The Last King, illustrated by Gary Gianni. Gianni’s drawings are not bad, but I think he did a still better job in the 1998 Del Rey edition of Howard’s Solomon Kane stories.

"Swords of the Purple Kingdom" by Robert E. Howard

I have read many stories by Robert E. Howard over the years, but today read "Swords of the Purple Kingdom" for the first time.  This story about Kull, exile from Atlantis and usurper king of Valusia, was written in the late 1920s and not published in Howard’s lifetime. I read it in the 2006 collection by Del Rey full of illustrations by Justin Sweet. I can’t say I like these illustrations; they are vague and difficult to “read,” and people’s faces seem expressionless and flat.

Kull, as king, has saved the decadent kingdom of Valusia from foreign invasion and through his wise policy improved the kingdom’s economy. Still, there are those among the Valusian aristocracy who resent the rule of a foreign barbarian, and of course foreign powers would be happy to see Kull off the throne so they could conquer Valusia themselves. Two Valusian nobles, one looking to put himself on the throne and another simply in need of money to pay off the debts he has incurred from high living, join forces with the commander of the army of a foreign state and through trickery capture Kull and imprison him in a ruin on the edge of town. By chance, Kull is rescued by a beautiful girl and her lover, another foreign adventurer. The story climaxes with Kull and the two lovers atop a crumbling staircase, fighting off dozens of soldiers.

The most interesting part of the story is the revelation of who the indebted conspirator is: it turns out to be Dondal, a young man friendly with Kull and his court, in fact the nephew of one of Kull’s most trusted advisers. Kull’s right hand man, Brule, yet another foreign adventurer (the people of Valusia are so decadent that most of the important military and political posts are held by foreigners) and one of Dondal’s drinking buddies, blames the whole conspiracy on Dondal’s uncle’s refusal to pay his nephew’s debts. “Want will make a rogue of any man,” Brule intones, moodily. A little social commentary from Howard, perhaps, sympathizing with spendthrifts and thieves and denouncing wealthy misers? Maybe the fact that Dondal’s uncle was described early in the story as looking like a merchant should have tipped me off to the fact that he was the “root cause” of the crisis; as Michael Moorcock in the foreword to Conan the Phenomenon points out, Howard and his heroes have no fondness for merchants and priests.

<UPDATE JAN. 26, 2014: Tarbandu at PorPor Books Blog has a great post about Conan the Phenomenon, and talks a little about Moorcock's class analysis of Howard's work.>

As a straightforward adventure story this is not bad, but it feels smaller and flatter than the best Howard stories. Kull is not a particularly interesting character, and this story didn’t achieve a very high level of fear or excitement or have any particularly memorable scenes. And since there are no wizards, monsters, or priests who worship alien gods, you wonder why this story is set in the forgotten past of Atlantean times at all. Howard could have used this same plot in a story set in Renaissance Italy or the medieval Near East, any milieu equipped with walled cities, foreign mercenaries, and backstabbing traitors. Still, a marginal positive review for this one.

Three selections from Moskowitz's Modern Masterpieces of SF: Bloch, Hamilton, and Kuttner

In 1965 Sam Moskowitz, SF historian and superfan, published Modern Masterpieces of Science Fiction, a book he intended to provide “superior examples of the actual fiction of the twenty-one most influential practitioners of modern science fiction,” and act as a companion piece to his book of biographies of SF writers, Seekers of Tomorrow. I checked out a library copy of the 1974 reprint edition. This anthology contains several stories I read in the past and enjoyed, including Heinlein’s “…We Also Walk Dogs,” Van Vogt’s “Enchanted Village” and Sturgeon’s “Microcosmic God,” but I got it with an eye to reading stories I had never read before by Robert Bloch, Edmond Hamilton and Henry Kuttner.

"The Strange Flight of Richard Clayton" by Robert Bloch (1939)

This is a gimmicky and unbelievable story, the trick ending of which is pretty obvious from the beginning. Scientist Clayton hires a team of experts and spends piles of money building a spaceship so he can travel to Mars. The ship has no windows, and Clayton crews the ship all by himself. The ship has no room for books or paper or even a pocket watch, just food and other vital supplies. The trip will take ten years.

On lift off the instrument panel shatters, so Clayton has no way to keep track of time or tell where he is. Luckily, the ship will land on Mars automatically; Clayton need only wait the ten years. With nothing to do Clayton starts going insane. The long lonely trip takes a toll on his body as well as his mind – looking into the mirror Clayton can barely recognize himself, he has become an old man! Finally the atomic engines shut off, and Clayton staggers to the door, opens it to find the ship has been stuck on the launching pad the entire time; the blasts from the atomic engines kept his team from rescuing him. How long has he been trapped in the ship? One week!

One wonders why Moskowitz thought this a “masterpiece.” Bloch is an important writer and so certainly worthy of inclusion in a book like this, but surely a better piece could have been found.

"Requiem" by Edmond Hamilton (1942)

This story takes place like 4000 years in the future. Humanity has spread throughout the galaxy, but Earth lies in ruins. A few thousand years ago Sol became a white dwarf, and the Earth was abandoned just before it froze over. Recently a rogue body passed through the solar system, drawing the inner planets toward the sun. The ice covering Earth has melted and historians, scientists, and TV journalists have commissioned a space ship from the government to take them to Earth to see the birthplace of mankind. They only have a few weeks to explore, however, before Earth follows Venus and Mercury in being swallowed up by the sun.

This is more like what I expected from a book of SF “masterpieces,” a thought- and emotion- provoking story that invites you to stretch your mind to encompass a strange scenario – human beings who know nothing of Earth setting foot on it for the first time, and soon after watching their ancestral planet annihilated. There is also a sort of elitist tone to the story: Hamilton severely denigrates the TV journalists, depicting them as crass and phony philistines. The historians and scientists fare better, but in the end it is only the gruff no-nonsense captain of the space ship, who would rather be on a serious mission than babysitting a bunch of “sentimentalists,” as he calls them, who truly feels and mourns for the doomed Earth.

"We Guard the Black Planet!" by Henry Kuttner (1942)

The narrator is a young man who has just completed training to be a space man. Tomorrow he lifts off from Newark Spaceport (yay New Jersey!) on his first trip into space, and his father, Nils Esterling, summons him to the ancestral family home on a fjord in Sweden to say good bye. Dad has a falcon he loves to watch fly and he talks romantically about the Viking past of his people. Then, he tells his son the story of the reason why he never returned to outer space after returning from his own first space trip, forty years ago....

A few years after beginning his space career, Esterling is shanghaied by ruthless, murderous space pirates. Esterling has a bracelet handed down through his family for generations, and the pirates have heard rumor of it, and know its significance. It is a map to a secret planet, hidden within a “negasphere” so that it is virtually invisible. Only two pirates, and Esterling, survive a space naval battle with the authorities, but the three of them make it to the black planet, which behind the black negasphere is a beautiful utopia of beautiful flying people (“Valkyries.”) Esterling, it turns out, is descended from such people, and in the radiation of this world grows wings himself and experiences the ecstasy of flight.

Kuttner, to make the Valkyrie planet seem even more like a paradise, describes life elsewhere beyond Earth as dreadful; space flights are dangerous, and the other inhabited planets are just places where spacemen get poisonously intoxicated on alien liquor and drugs, or fight in terrible wars. Space men lead short unhappy lives, Kuttner assures us. Kuttner’s story is also less gung ho about science than some of the stories I have been reading lately; not only are the Valkyries living in a post-science world, but one of the pirates is himself a scientist with “a string of degrees after his name.”

The space pirates, being pureblooded Earthmen, don’t grow wings, and the planet is no paradise for them. They contrive to escape, dragging Esterling and one of the natives with them. Esterling manages to overpower them, but away from the black planet his wings, and that of the beautiful Valkyrie, the narrator’s mother, wither and will never grow back, so they remain on Earth. The story ends with the narrator, half Valkyrie himself, receiving the bracelet so he has the opportunity to go to the black planet and grow wings, should he so wish.

This is a decent adventure story, incorporating Norse mythology.  It didn't affect me emotionally as much as Hamilton's "Requiem" or Gallun's "Old Faithful," but you can see Kuttner is making an effort.

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It is easy to recommend Moskowitz's Modern Masterpieces of Science Fiction; most of the stories included are good and/or important, and Moskowitz's introductory essay on what "modern" SF is and who deserves credit for making SF "modern" is interesting.  
 

Two 1930s stories by Raymond Z. Gallun

Some years ago I read Raymond Z. Gallun's The Planet Strappers, finding its unique view of space travel as well as its tone and attitude charming. Today I read two Gallun stories from anthologies I have on my shelf, Hartwell and Cramer's The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF (1994) and Asimov's Before the Golden Age: A Science Fiction Anthology of the 1930s (1974).

"Davy Jones' Ambassador"

Hartwell and Cramer take as their definition of hard SF "the part of sf that takes science as its central subject" (page 989) and the Gallun story they include in their 990 page anthology fits that description in more than one way. "Davy Jones' Ambassador," written in 1935, tells the story of Clifford Rodney, the one-man crew of a submarine exploring the deepest reaches of the Atlantic. Rodney and his sub are captured by the intelligent beings who live in the region of the ocean floor, and put into a tank to be studied by someone with authority who calls himself (itself?) "The Student."

The Student and his people are not the sexy mermaids and muscular mermen we so often encounter in stories set under the sea, but vaguely squid-like creatures with tentacles, suckers, beaks, and translucent skin through which their pulsing organs can be observed. These people have an advanced technology based on selective breeding: they have bred various types of sea creatures to act as robot soldiers and steam shovels, even electric generators and text message transmitters. Gallun really lays on the science in his description of how The Student has constructed the aquarium in which he keeps Rodney, and how it is supplied with fresh air.

The Student is fascinated by the surface world he has never seen, but learned about from examining sunken ships and items humans have thrown overboard. He can even read and write English, having learned it from books he has found. (This is necessary to the story, but seems a little unbelievable. I recall having a similar objection to how Tarzan learns to read.) He challenges Rodney to try to escape from the tank in which he is imprisoned, suggesting he thinks it will be an instructive experiment, a test of human ingenuity. Rodney studies his prison, cobbles together various items and engineers his escape (more science!)

It is quickly revealed that this was no mere test - The Student wanted Rodney to escape, and clandestinely aided him, because The Student wanted to hitch a ride to the surface. The Student's people are fearful and suspicious of surface civilization, and had forbidden the release of Rodney and any other intercourse with the upper world. Gallun's project in "Davy Jones' Ambassador" is not just to throw a lot of speculative biology and McGuyver engineering at us, but to glorify the scientist who risks death and the opprobrium of his people in the noble quest for knowledge.

Another element of Gallun's story worthy of note is the relationship between Rodney and The Student. These two risk-taking seekers of knowledge have much in common, but at the same time Gallun does not sugar coat their relationship, reminding us that, between people from such radically different cultures, "real sympathy" may be impossible. The Student specifically rejects friendship: "I am not your friend. What I did, I did for myself," he tells Rodney at the end of the story.

"Old Faithful"

"Old Faithful" also tells the story of an alien keen to learn more about humanity, this time a Martian. This story is quite similar to "Davy Jones' Ambassador," but superior in almost every way. It flings a lot of science at you, glorifies the risk-taking scientist, creates an interesting alien culture, and even tugs at the heart strings. Asimov, in his 1974 intro to "Old Faithful," written in 1934, credits Gallun with being a pioneer in writing sympathetic aliens, and the Martian, known as Number 774, is certainly a sympathetic figure, and this is a really good story.

Mars is an ancient world, its natural resources almost exhausted, and so for untold centuries the Martian people have been governed by authoritarian "Rulers" who judge people by how useful they are to society. When you reach a certain age, if your work is not judged useful, you are deemed a waste of food and water and sentenced to death. Number 774's life's work has been to study and attempt to communicate with Earth, and this work is not deemed useful by the Rulers.

So devoted to the pursuit of knowledge is Number 774, however, that he is the first Martian in thousands of years to try to escape his sentence of death. He and his gang of robots strive to build a space ship that will take Number 774 to Earth.

Gallun paints a compelling picture of Number 774, his society and his life.  Gallun succeeds in making the Martian quite alien but also easy to relate to - I really hoped Number 774 was going to escape Mars, come to Earth, satisfy his own curiosity and inaugurate a period of prosperity for both Earthmen and Martians. There is quite a bit of science and even math in the story, but it doesn't get in the way of the drama of a being driven to break thousands of years of tradition in the quest for knowledge, to see with his own eyes new worlds and new peoples.  Asimov made a very good selection here.

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So, two stories glorifying the adventurous scientist-engineer, one solid, and one very fine. Definitely worth the time of the classic SF fan.

Crazy Cock by Henry Miller

I looked over and organized my notes on Henry Miller yesterday because I had decided to finally, over a year after buying it, read Crazy Cock. I have been reluctant to read it because Moloch was so weak, and like Moloch, Crazy Cock was an early work of Miller’s, written before his breakthrough Tropic of Cancer and never published in Miller’s lifetime.

Written in the 1920s, Crazy Cock is based on Miller’s relationship with his second wife. As depicted in Crazy Cock, the marriage of Tony Bring (the Miller stand in) and his wife Hildred, a waitress at an establishment in bohemian Greenwich Village, has been a strange and difficult one from the start. Hildred, for example, endeavors to keep their marriage a secret from her friends, coworkers and family. Then a strange woman, Vanya, a depressed artist who makes eerie dolls, comes on the scene, and in a flash becomes Hildred’s inseparable best friend, and Tony’s formidable rival for his wife’s affections.

Written in the third person, unlike Miller’s later works, the novel lacks their immediacy and power. Crazy Cock is also burdened with too many “literary” descriptions of the sky and trees and so forth. (“White jockeys with spurs of malachite were scudding through the low-hanging clouds that hung like collars of fat about the slender ribs of the skyscrapers.”)

The triangular relationship of the three principles is interesting, of course, but Crazy Cock provides only a glimpse of the many themes and episodes that make The Rosy Crucifixion books, which cover the same period as Crazy Cock, touching, amusing and exciting: Miller’s many odd friends who tell him he is a genius and lend him money he likely won’t pay back, his love of good music, good food and good books, his love of the burlesque and of riding his bicycle, his frustrating efforts to become a writer, his agonizing desire to see Europe.

That glimpse of Miller’s mature work comes mostly in Part 5 (this 200 page book is split into six parts of several chapters each), the best section of Crazy Cock. There are loving references to Proust, the funny and sad story of a Christmas visit by the trio to Tony’s long-suffering parents’ home, and a stark snapshot of the complexity of the Tony-Hildred-Vanya relationship: Tony comes home drunk, and goes into a violent rage when he finds Vanya in his bed with his wife. He physically ejects Vanya from the bed, and in the melee punches Hildred to the floor, and minutes later, when the booze and anger have made him sick, it is Vanya who nurses him and mops up the mess he makes in the bathroom.

If Part 5 is a sort of prototype of the Miller I enjoy, Part 6 resembles the parts of Miller’s work I often find tedious: long surrealistic and symbolist passages and bizarre dreams that leave me yawning.

I wouldn’t recommend Crazy Cock to anyone who hasn’t read Miller’s later, more famous work, but devoted Miller fans will find it interesting, and Part 5 (about 55 pages) could stand on its own as a good short story or novella. Some will find Erica Jong’s 1991 foreword denouncing the United States amusing. Mary Dearborn’s introduction provides useful information on Miller’s life, and warns the reader about the anti-Semitism to be found in Crazy Cock. In fact, Crazy Cock has about one tenth as much anti-Semitism as Moloch.