Late 20th-century Horror Stories by Thomas Ligotti, Kathe Koja & Dennis Etchison

I'm no Dinosaur Dracula, but, getting into the spirit of the season, I checked out 2010's Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror, an anthology full of illustrations of snakes, edited by Ellen Datlow.  Early this week I read three widely-admired and widely-anthologized horror stories from its pages.  Maybe these "modern" horror stories will provide a contrast to the Victorian and Edwardian horror stories I have been reading?

"The Greater Festival of Masks" by Thomas Ligotti (1985)

Written in the present tense and full of rich descriptions, but with its plot and point not all that easily discerned, "The Greater Festival of Masks" has the qualities of a dream or nightmare.  I had to read it twice to feel that I had much of an idea of what was really going on.  It first appeared in the collection Songs of a Dead Dreamer.

Noss lives in a sort of neverland, an odd city with no connection to our own real world, in which a festival is taking place.  A prime component of the festival is the wearing of masks, and Noss walks through town, to a shop which sells masks.  He has been delaying participating in the festivities, but has resolved to now acquire masks for himself.

We come to realize Noss is not a native of the town but an immigrant, and along with him we learn the truth of the festival at the mask shop.  The people of this town, during the rare mask festivals, put on two masks, one after the other.  The first erases their features, leaving their faces egg smooth, and the second mask creates for them a new face--Ligotti compares the slow process of a new face forming to being like that of a garden growing.  After some initial reluctance, Noss joins in this practice.

Any fiction in which masks feature prominently is going to make you think about identity and about the difference between what we show of ourselves to the world and the true character of our souls.  ("Every day you've got to wake up/disappear behind your makeup.")  On the second page of the story we get a description of how deceptive and fake are the facades of many of the city's buildings, incorporating false doors which do not open, stairways which lead nowhere, and balconies that cannot be accessed, decorative features which mimic practical ones, but lack any utility themselves.  This is a city characterized by false faces.  Perhaps ironically, during the festival of masks people in the city are more open and aboveboard: "He also observes numerous indications of the festival season.....For instance, not a few doors have been kept ajar, even throughout the night, and dim lights are left burning in empty rooms."

This city is also one characterized by change; it is implied that buildings come and go, and change places, like the plants of a curated garden.  (The garden is a metaphor Ligotti uses more than once in the story.)  And I think the story is primarily about change, the way change can be scary, the way that moving to a new city can change you, and also social change--everybody in the city, after all, changes at the same time, not each citizen individually and of his own volition.  The device of the masks seems to suggest that changes in the character of individuals come from without, not within, and Ligotti hints that social change comes from the periphery, not from society's recognized rulers ("...the delirium of this rare celebration does not radiate out from the center of things, but seeps inward from remote margins.")  He also suggests that after a major change the past is buried, forgotten ("of the old time nothing will be said, because nothing will be known.")

This reminded me of the adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire, and of recent changes in the conventional wisdom about homosexuality in the United States--such changes seem to bubble up from the the culture and the people, instead of being lead by politicians, who follow trends in an effort to appeal to the masses and seem to be lying half the time about how they really feel.  As Ligotti suggests, once the change has taken place everybody acts like the new fashion is the obvious norm, and claims to be shocked and disgusted by the way people thought and behaved in the past.

Well-written, full of good images and phrases, and thought-provoking--"The Greater Festival of Masks" is a quite good story.    

"Teratisms" by Kathe Koja (1991)

This story is sort of opaque, or at least difficult (editor Datlow appropriately uses the word "oblique" to describe Koja's style.)  As with the Ligotti story, I had to read this one twice to satisfy myself that I knew what the hell was going on plotwise.  The tone and feeling of the story is no mystery, however; Koja generates an atmosphere of disgust and despair, of helplessness in the face of challenges and guilt, partly by including realistic little details about the depressing lives of her degenerate lower class characters, partly with all the bizarre descriptions of blood.

Mitch and his sister, who changes her name periodically and is currently going by the name of Randle, are young adults.  Their mother, before dying, made them promise to look after their illiterate kid brother Alex, and so the three stick together even though Mitch and Randle openly detest and are sickened by Alex and by each other.  This soul-crushingly antagonistic family can't settle down anyplace, but instead moves across the country in a beat up old car because, unless I am totally misinterpreting Koja's clues, Alex is a cannibal, perhaps even a vampire or ghoul, who kills and eats children when he gets a chance.

("Teratisms" first was published in the anthology Whispers of Blood, which has the subtitle "18 Stories of Vampirism," but in the story Koja never uses the word "vampire" and Alex seems to walk around in the sunlight all the time.  The story works without any supernatural content, as far as I can see.)

Koja is a little cagey when describing the cannibal stuff, but open with other examples of this trio's insanity and abnormality.  Alex obsessively recites the list of towns they have been to, and obsessively plays with little scraps of paper.  Randle is always coming on to her older brother, exposing her breasts to him and so forth, and I thought Koja was hinting that the three of them form a love triangle or maybe sometimes have group sex:

They [Randle and Alex] were almost to the counter, holding hands. When Randle saw him [Mitch] enter, she looked away; he saw her fingers squeeze Alex's, twice and slow. What was it like for her? Middleman.   

In the final lines of the story (remember our spoiler policy here at MPorcius Fiction Log) Mitch, exhausted by this horrible life, intentionally runs over Alex as Randle sits beside him in the passenger seat, and then drives the car into some trees in hopes of exterminating his entire insane and predacious family.

"Teratisms" is a skilled performance, and is twisted, disgusting and disturbing.  Read at your own risk!

"The Dog Park" by Dennis Etchison (1993)

I read Etchison's story "The Dead Line" in the summer and thought it was pretty good. Dinosaur Dracula praised, and then illustrated, Etchison's novelization of Halloween III just recently.  (Illustration is the sincerest form of flattery.)  So I thought "The Dog Park" worth a look.  

"The Dog Park" is about Hollywood people.  I guess it is about the way Hollywood chews up and spits out so many ambitious people without the talent or luck to achieve their dreams ("success walks hand in hand with failure," you know), and maybe about how the people in Hollywood who have already made it feel contempt for and even prey upon those who have yet to make it.

The story takes place in a dog park alongside an overgrown canyon.  People come to the dog park to network, giving their business cards to the other dog walkers and discussing scripts and that sort of jazz.  In the canyon, apparently, live coyotes and mountain lions who, it seems, kill any dogs who stray into the canyon.  On the other side of the canyon are the houses of rich people.

The plot follows a novelist who has produced only one novel and is leaving Los Angeles soon, defeated.  His dog vanished into the canyon a few weeks ago.  In the dog park one last time, in hopes of finding his lost dog, he meets a young woman who works for the Fox Network on a TV show about police dogs; she aspires to write a movie-of-the-week about Elvis Presley and his relationship with dogs.  Her dog is also stupid enough to end up in canyon.  As the story ends the rich people above the canyon are having a party, and seem to be applauding the wild beasts in the canyon as they devour the TV writer woman's canine.  Etchison directly compares the canyon to the Roman arena.

Maybe this story would do something for me if I had lived in Hollywood or ever owned a dog.  As it is, I am just sort of shrugging it off as OK.  Despite my lukewarm reaction it won a British Fantasy Award in 1994, and is apparently the favorite horror story of Richard Matheson's son!  "The Dog Park" first appeared in Dark Voices 5: The Pan Book of Horror.

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Datlow seems to have put together a collection of solid stories of importance to the horror fiction community; maybe I'll read more tales from Darkness later this week.

Pessimistic Science Fiction Stories from 1949-50 by John D. MacDonald and Damon Knight

There is this idea that science fiction as a genre is optimistic, or was optimistic before some particular date.  For example, we often hear Barry Malzberg described as an outlier or rebel because his work is so pessimistic, and hear that the SF "establishment" was upset when Malzberg won the first Campbell award.  So it is fun to discover old stories, stories from before events like the Kennedy assassination or the Vietnam War, which we are sometimes told "signalled the loss of America's innocence" or whatever, which are pessimistic.  Here are three voyages aboard the S. S. Pessimismo with blast off dates in 1949 or 1950, which I read in Isaac Asimov Presents The Golden Years of Science Fiction Sixth Series, published in 1988, an omnibus edition of Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories, Volumes 11 and 12, which appeared in 1984.

"Flaw" by John D. MacDonald (1949)

We've experienced some of famous detective novelist MacDonald's pessimistic science fiction before, in the novel Wine of the Dreamers and in some 1948 short stories.  "Flaw" first unleashed its negative vibes in Startling Stories.

You've probably heard of the phenomenon of "red shift," and how the fact that light from other stars is red shifted is strong evidence that the universe is expanding. (But have you heard the great Peter Hammill's song "Red Shift," in which he uses the fact that the universe is expanding as a kind of metaphor of the expanding psychological distance between people in the modern age?)  In "Flaw" MacDonald suggests an alternate, and quite wacky, theory to explain the red shift phenomenon.

"Flaw" is the brief memoir of Carol Adlar, a woman in the "future" of ten years after MacDonald wrote this story.  An atomic rocket motor has been developed, and Carol, who is a clerk at a space agency rocket station, and her colleagues were initially eager to explore the universe!  Our narrator's fiance Johnny was one of the first handful of astronauts to fly in an atomic rocket ship, but a disaster occurred, killing him and all hope that man can travel beyond the solar system, something our narrator figured out long before the eggheads did!

You see, over a month before Johnny's rocket was expected to return, a colossal meteor crashed near the space base.  Our narrator watched the excavations of the crater with binoculars, and something she saw proved her premonitions of her fiance's death to have been accurate--from the crater was hoisted a jeweled ring, a ring the size of a house!  Carol recognizes the ring as one she gave Johnny!  She realizes that the red shift phenomenon is caused by the fact that our solar system is shrinking, that the rocket ceased shrinking when it got far enough from the Sun!  ""If Johnny had landed safely, I would be able to walk about on the palm of his hand....It is a good thing that he died."

This story is drenched in pessimism.  Carol describes her own physical ("My fingernails are cracked and broken...") and psychological ("I rather imagine I am quite mad") deterioration since Johnny's death and the death of the human race's dreams of visiting the stars, and hopes she will die soon.  She repeatedly refers to how mankind has trashed the Earth, and points out that the ring she gave Johnny was that of her father, who was killed in the Pacific theater during World War II.  "We have made a mess of this planet, and it is something that we cannot leave behind us."

However silly the story's gimmick is, MacDonald is a good writer and there is a measure of human feeling to the tale, so I'd judge it moderately enjoyable.

"Spectator Sport" by John D. MacDonald (1950)

In the introduction to this story Martin H. Greenberg claims that MacDonald "still has great affection for sf and the people who write and read it."  Somehow I seem to recall MacDonald singing a different tune in the afterword to my edition of Wine of the Dreamers, but since my copy of Wine of the Dreamers is in storage I will just have to take Greenberg's word for it.

This cautionary tale about advances in entertainment technology first threatened the livelihood of Hollywood TV producers and electronics manufacturers in Thrilling Wonder Stories.

"Spectator Sport" is about a time traveller from 1950 who projects himself 400 years into the future.  He is astonished to find that there has been very little societal progress or change--there are no new buildings, and in fact things look unmaintained, decrepit.  A park bench the scientist recognizes from the 20th century is in place but decayed, as if nobody ever visits the park and the government never services it.

What has happened?  Everybody in the world is so addicted to what we would now call "virtual reality" (MacDonald references Huxley and "the feelies" by name) that few people have sex (population has diminished significantly) or even leave the house unnecessarily, and other forms of entertainment, like books and periodicals, are extinct.

There are two forms of virtual reality, "temps" and "perms."  Temps are like TV sets that have a knob you touch; through the knob is transmitted the emotional content of the show.  Wealthy people opt for more immersive (and expensive) perm treatment--they have their eyes removed and a feeding tube implanted, wires connected to their nerve endings and brain stem, and then live out the rest of their lives in fantasy worlds devised by the 24th century equivalent of TV executives and producers.

With its omniscient narrator, flat characters, and a central gimmick that doesn't feel fresh anymore (though MacDonald did use it five years before it appeared in Kuttner and Moore's "Two-Handed Engine"), I didn't enjoy "Spectator Sport" as much as "Flaw."  I'm more interested in drama and literary virtues than heavy-handed polemics, and "Spectator Sport" seems to rely for its impact on the reader's supposed anti-television prejudice and on its gore scene, in which we observe a person's body being mutilated in preparation for receiving "perm" service.  This story is merely OK.

"Not With a Bang" by Damon Knight (1950)

In his intro Asimov suggests the title of this story may refer not only to T. S. Eliot, but also to the sex act.  Asimov does not worry about spoiling the audience of his anthologies!  This condemnation of our species and civilization first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

"Not With a Bang" is an exercise in misanthropy.  Nuclear and biological warfare has destroyed civilization.  Only two people survive, one man and one woman. The man is desperate to have sex with the woman, willing to employ any means, but he is too weak to rape her, because he suffers from a wasting disease.  The woman is addle-brained from the shock of something she saw during the brief war, and, as a devoted Christian, refuses to have sex outside of marriage.  The man is so angry at her that he often feels like murdering her, but he needs her to give him life-saving shots when his disease causes him paralysis attacks.

Finally, he convinces the shell-shocked woman to agree to marry him.  He imagines not only the pleasure of having sex with her, but with a daughter they may have(!) Before the wedding he goes to a public restroom, and, as the door closes behind him, he has an attack of paralysis.  He will die of thirst standing there, and with him the human race, a race of murderers and rapists.

Knight is famous for the pun in his 1950 story "To Serve Man," and in the last paragraph of this story he gives us some misanthropic word play, declaring that the word on the door of the lavatory, "MEN," is a warning!

The audacity of the story, the way Knight goes to the limit, makes it fun, regardless of how seriously you might take his attitude.  Moderately enjoyable.

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I hope you've enjoyed these trips to classic SF's dark side.  Don't do anything rash!          

More American Fantastic Tales by Women: Spofford, Jewett, Gilman and Wynne

In my last blogpost I wrote about stories written by major female American authors that are included in The Library of America's American Fantastic Tales Volume I, edited by Peter Straub. For this post I read stories from the book by women whom I don't think are quite as famous as Chopin, Wharton and Cather: Harriet Prescott Spofford, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Madeline Yale Wynne.  I decided to read these four stories largely because of their evocative titles.  Could this be a good strategy for sniffing out good fiction?  Let's see.

"The Moonstone Mass" by Harriet Prescott Spofford (1868)

One of the ideas I had when I decided to blog about stories from this anthology, an idea I haven't follow through on, was to assess if and how the stories were peculiarly American.  Could these stories have been written by someone from another English-speaking country?  Did the distinctive culture or attitudes of the people of the United States shine through each story?  If we look at the stories this way I think it may be significant that many of them have something to do with business and money; perhaps this makes sense, if we think of the society of the United States as a peculiarly individualistic, democratic and bourgeois one, a place where everybody thinks of himself as middle-class and people are often defined by their work and their income.

Harriet Prescott Spofford's story fits into this mold.  Our narrator has a "certain weakness" in common with his ancestors, "the fear of dying in poverty."  And so he goes on a dangerous adventure: sailing into the Arctic in hopes of discovering, or disproving the existence of, the Northwest Passage.  His uncle, a man very interested in this topic, promises to pay him a pile of money for participating in the voyage.

"The Moonstone Mass" reminded me of Poe's 1841 story "Into the Maelstrom," which I admit I read like ten years ago and do not remember well.  Spofford's narrator's voyage is a disaster, with our hero the only survivor.  Alone he rides a chunk of ice along some current, witnessing odd meteorological, electrical and magnetic phenomena.  Spofford's speculations as to what is going on in the unexplored areas around the North Pole reminded me of 20th century science fiction writers' speculations about conditions on the moon or Mars, but also reminded me of the Romantic Movement: our hero doesn't do anything, he just lies on a moving ice floe and is alternately awed and horrified by what he sees (like "a lance of piercing light" that shoots up into the heavens) and feels (like a magnetic force that holds him in place on his ice floe.)  Finally he sees the "Mass" of the title, a huge hunk of moonstone, which he realizes is very valuable.  The current carries him past this treasure, and the memory of it haunts the rest of his days.

The plot of this story is good, but the passages about the natural wonders are too long and boring; the long sentences made my eyes glaze over.  Spofford doesn't develop any human relationships between the narrator and anybody on the doomed ship, and the north where much of the story takes pace is desolate of all life.  I have to give "The Moonstone Mass" a marginal thumbs down, and admit I thought the "Mass" of the title was going to be a ritual attended by witches or Satanists.

The most memorable thing about the story may be that Spofford employs some words we don't hear very much in the 21st century, like "pelf," "niggard" and "diablerie."  If things are a little boring at the office tomorrow, sprinkle your vocal contributions to a meeting or your section of a report with these fine words--there's a good chance you will generate an excitement your colleagues will appreciate.

 "In Dark New England Days" by Sarah Orne Jewett (1890)

The two unmarried Knowles sisters, who are both over sixty years old, have just lost their father, a former sea captain, to a stroke.  Now they can finally open his sea chest, the chest into which he has been putting all the profits of their farm as well as his voyages.  The chest is full of gold coins!  Good news!  But that night a burglar sneaks in and steals the treasure! Bad news!  Why don't you old bags own a dog!?

The sisters accuse Enoch Holt, a business associate of the dead sea captain's, of the theft.  Holt and Captain Knowles had been on bad terms for years after the old sailor had accused Holt of cheating him out of his fair share of the profits of a business partnership.  There is no evidence Holt is the burglar, and so he is acquitted.  Enraged, in front of half the town one of the sisters curses Holt and his descendents.

"You stole it, you thief!  You know it in your heart!" 

"I swear by my right hand I never touched it."

"Curse your right hand then!" cried Hannah Knowles...."Curse your right hand and all your folks' that follow you!"

The rest of the story flashes forward some decades, and consists mostly of dialogue between gossipy women, in which it is related that Enoch Holt and his descendents all broke or lost their right hands in accidents and wars, while the Knowles sisters lived as wretched recluses, perhaps accompanied by the ghost of their father, Captain Knowles.  I think you can say the story has a subtle feminist spin: Captain Knowles, instead of allowing his daughters to "grow up" and pursue their own lives, dominated them psychologically in such a way that they remained children into their sixties, so that they could not lead happy lives nor contribute to the community.

This story is OK, no big deal.  It feels a little long.  Worse, it is afflicted by one of my pet peeves: the dialogue of many of the characters, for long stretches, is written phonetically, with lots of apostrophes, to indicate their accent and/or dialect:

"Why on airth don't ye git somebody to git some o' your own wood an' season it well so 't won't warp, same 's mine done, an' build ye a new one?"

I realize this is a device employed by the author to build character and a sense of time and place, but I find it obstructive and annoying.

"The Yellow Wall Paper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)

After the labored and archaic Spofford and Jewett stories this one was like a breath of fresh air!  In its clarity and directness, use of an unreliable narrator, and feminist ramifications, it feels very modern, and I mean that in a good way.

Our narrator is an educated woman, married to a physician.  Her brother is also a physician.  These doctors think she is mentally ill in some way and requires rest, and so forbid her from working, even from simply writing--the husband actually has a schedule for her to follow, covering every hour of the day!  The narrator repeatedly admits that he does this out of love for her, but to the reader it is obvious she is treated like a child or a prisoner!

The couple has rented a big old estate for three months.  The husband decides they shall use a top floor as a bedroom, a room once used as a sort of nursery and as a gymnasium when the estate was a school.  There are bars on the windows, and a hideous yellow wall paper on the walls of this room.

The narrator, who spends most of her time in the bedroom, becomes obsessed with the wall paper, and her interpretation of its design evolves over time.  Eventually she comes to think that the wall paper depicts a woman, or women, creeping about, trapped behind bars, and she endeavours to aid the prisoner in her escape.  At the end of the story she identifies with the liberated wall paper woman, thinking she herself has escaped from the wall paper.  Her husband faints when he sees her creeping around the room and hears her bizarre repetitive speech.

The story is open to several interpretations.  Perhaps the woman is a nut, maybe suffering from postpartum depression (she gave birth shortly before they moved into the rented estate but never sees her child) and the wall paper has a negative effect on her mind.  Maybe the woman is normal, and the estate is haunted--there is some physical evidence that the yellow wall paper has driven other people insane, and the couple was able to get the estate cheap, as if the place has a bad reputation.  Maybe a ghost woman has even escaped the wall paper and invaded the narrator's mind! Obviously many elements of the story--women as prisoners, a woman kept from doing productive or interesting work, a woman treated as a child, a woman separated from her own baby--can be interpreted as symbolism of the way women are treated by men and by society.

A very good psychological story, thought-provoking, clear when it should be (lots of sharp images of the sinister room and estate) and mysterious when it should be (is the woman crazy? is there a ghost? should we trust this woman's descriptions?)  Thumbs up!

"The Little Room" by Madeline Yale Wynne (1895)

I like fictional descriptions of rooms, Proust's description of the seaside hotel room in In Search of Lost Time, for example, or the rooms in Ballard's "Billenium."  I have lived a more or less sedentary life, and spent lots of time in rooms, and having moved every two or three years since leaving New Jersey for New York in the '90s, I've lived and worked in many different rooms.  I've spent a lot of time tracing with my eyes the grain of woods, cracks in plaster, and wallpaper patterns, and thinking about the relationships between bookshelves and doors and windows and moldings and pictures.  Like a city street, where the buildings are all put up by different people but live in a relationship with each other, a room is a collective work of art--somebody designed and built the room, placing windows and doors, but generally somebody else decides where the furniture goes, what kind of pictures and curtains to hang.  A room builds up a character, a personality, in the minds of the people who spend time in it, because of how it looks and because of the good or evil things that have happened in it.

I was totally into the descriptions of the room in Gilman's "The Yellow Wall Paper," and started Wynne's "The Little Room" with hopes of a similar experience.  And I was not disappointed!  This is a great little uncanny story which includes a vivid description of a room, a room with great emotional resonance.

In Vermont live two wealthy old ladies, sisters, in a large house.  Sometimes relatives come for brief visits, or to stay for a season.  On the north side of the house, between the front and back rooms, is a door.  Some visitors to the old house vividly recall a little room being behind the door, while others remember a china closet being there. Both schools of opinion can describe the room and its furniture or the closet and the china in great detail, and people who saw a room think the closet viewers must be putting on an elaborate hoax or suffering some delusion, and vice versa.  Most shockingly, some individuals who saw a room as children are distressed to find the room gone when they visit as adults.

Two young people who recently visited the house separately, one who saw a room and one who saw a closet, set off together to solve the mystery once and for all, only to find the house has just burned down.

I love the plot, and the style; Wynne writes economically, something I strongly appreciate, and really paints an image in the reader's mind of the little room which may or may not be there.  She also does a good job conveying the reactions of the characters to this weird phenomenon.  Thumbs up!

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I can strongly recommend "The Yellow Wall Paper" and "The Little Room" to readers of horror and weird fiction, and to those interested in women writers of speculative fiction.  American Fantastic Tales is shaping up to be a quite good anthology.

American Fantastic Tales by Major Women Authors: Chopin, Wharton & Cather

While it is true I have been effusive in my praise of Tanith Lee and Thomas M. Disch on this website, I don't think anybody would mistake MPorcius Fiction Log as the go-to place for celebrating diversity in SF and promoting the publication of more SF by members of marginalized populations.  But maybe today is the day I will get a little absolution from the powers that zhe for my harsh criticism of The Tomorrow People and The Killer Thing.  Because today is the day I read three "tales of the fantastic" by women, women who are iconic members of the American literary canon: Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather.

It is fair to see this post as a companion piece to my late September post about stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Henry James, because I have also drawn these three stories from The Library of America's American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps.  As was the case with Henry James, I know just about zero about Chopin, Wharton and Cather, not having been required to read them in school and not having sought them out since I bid farewell to the classroom. This will be my first experience of these big name American authors.  I know we're all crossing our fingers hoping I love these things!

"Ma'ame Pelagie" by Kate Chopin (1893)

Fifty-year-old Ma'ame Pelagie and her sister Pauline, thirty-five, live in a cabin on their Louisiana plantation, saving their pennies in hopes of rebuilding the mansion they lived in as children, which has been a ruin since it was wrecked by Union soldiers during the Civil War, some three decades ago.  Maybe in twenty or thirty years they will have amassed enough funds to rebuild the place.

A niece, whom they call "La Petite," comes to stay with the childless unmarried sisters.  La Petite quickly becomes the light of Pauline's life: "...she seems like a saviour; like one who had come and taken me by the hand and was leading me somewhere--somewhere I want to go."  La Petite, who has lived in big cities, tires of life in the little cabin far from her piano and any excitement, and declares she will leave.  Pauline tells Ma'ame Pelagie that "if La Petite goes away I shall die."

In her youth her father impressed upon Ma'ame Pelagie that she must look after her little sister.  So Ma'ame Pelagie abandons her dream of rebuilding the mansion, and instead uses the accumulated money to build a smaller but still fine house.  The house becomes a meeting place for local society, and La Petite and her father are happy to move in permanently.

This is a reasonably good mainstream story about self-sacrifice, moving forward in life, and women's relationships, but what is "fantastic" about it?  I guess the scene in which the title character looks into the ruin and "sees" the big party she attended right before the war.  Or how the ruin seems to brood "like a huge monster."

"Afterward" by Edith Wharton (1910)

The Boynes, engineer Ned and wife Mary, left New York City for Ned’s work and have “endured for nearly fourteen years the soul-deadening ugliness of a Middle Western town.” Ay carumba, this is a horror story!  Thank heavens they finally struck it rich and moved to a country estate in Dorsetshire, England.

Life is good for the Boynes at their English estate, with the garden and the library and the servants and walks in the countryside and all that, but then supernatural disaster strikes! A mysterious man appears, and Ned leaves with him, leaving no word with Mary or the servants as to who the man is, where they are going, and when he will return.  In the event, Ned does not return!  Weeks later, with the arrival in England of an acquaintance of Ned’s, all the clues fall into place and Mary learns the terrible truth.  In the course of striking it rich back in what we now call flyover country, Ned screwed over some business associate (in a way Wharton does not specify) and this joker lost all his money and committed suicide.  It was the ghost of this suicide who came to take away Ned, presumably to some final, fatal, punishment.

One assumes this story is an attack on business or capitalism or the free market or whatever you want to call it.  Wharton portrays businesspeople as unscrupulous and business as a lawless realm beyond concepts of honor and dishonor or good and evil. Mary asks the American visitor, “you accuse my husband of doing something dishonourable?”  His reply is “I don’t say it wasn’t straight, and yet I don’t say it was straight.  It was business.”  Wharton includes his line twice in the story, to make sure we get the message.  Another clue that this story is about economics as much or more than it is about ghosts is that Ned was spending his retirement in England writing a book with the working title of Economic Basis of Culture.

“Afterward” is alright, I suppose, but it is no big deal.  It kind of just sits there.  It feels a little long for what it tries to accomplish, and doesn’t generate much feeling; Wharton doesn’t give the reader much reason to like or dislike Mary or Ned or the suicide, or to care what happens to any of them. And of course its politics are hardly interesting or novel; every day we hear broad emotional denunciations of businesspeople and the business world from those who think society would be better off if there was more power in the hands of aristocrats, commissars, or government bureaucrats.

"Consequences" by Willa Cather (1915)

Eastman, an industrious and successful lawyer (sometimes he argues before the Supreme Court in Washington!), and Cavenaugh, a playboy (sometimes he parties til dawn with showgirls!) are bachelors living in the same building in midtown Manhattan.  Oh yes, this is one of those stories which makes me wax nostalgic about "the good old days" when I stalked the streets of New York City, lounging in parks, on street corners, in museums, and at esplanades, stuffing my face with the world's finest pizzas and bagels, watching the girls, the trains, and the ships going by.

Eastman and Cavenaugh exchange stories about suicides they have known. Cavenaugh eventually unburdens himself about his own dark secret: an old man haunts him, appearing at random intervals when he is alone.  This mysterious figure, who wears worn out evening clothes, knows everything about Cavenaugh and his life and puts a bad color on everything:

"...he knows me like a book; everything I've ever done or thought.  But when he recalls them, he throws a bad light on them, somehow.  Things that weren't much off color, look rotten.  He doesn't leave one a shred of self-respect...."     

Is this phantom a cautionary vision of the future Cavenaugh, who regrets his wasted life?  Is it the ghost of Cavenaugh's athletic and ambitious brother Brian, who died young, of who Brian might have become?  Is it a materialization of Cavenaugh's conscience?  

Eastman advises Cavenaugh to quit his idle ways and become a businessman or an engineer or something.  He even helps the playboy get in touch with a ranch in Montana where he can ride horses and shoot guns and do real physical work, far from the decadence of New York.  But it is too late--after a final visit from the old man, Cavenaugh shoots himself.

Even accounting for my New York prejudice, this is easily the best of the three stories I'm talking about today.  Cather's style is more modern: it is clear, smooth, and alive. Eastman and Cavenaugh seem like real people, Cather discusses issues of universal interest, like "how should you live your life?" and "why do people take their own lives?" and exhibits the kind of cynical wisdom I am a sucker for:

"It reminds me of what Dr. Johnson said, that the most discouraging thing about life is the number of fads and hobbies and fake religions it takes to put people through a few years of it."  

"People never really change; they just go on being themselves."   

Perhaps most importantly, for stories in a collection of "fantastic tales," the supernatural element of "Consequences" actually works: it is prominent, interesting, and genuinely creepy.

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I'm sure there are legions of college professors and mountains of books that could explain to me why Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather are the queen bee's knees.  But instead of consulting them I went right to the source material and came up with my own almost totally uneducated assessment.  My brief reconnaissance into the distaff side of the American literary canon has left me with a good impression of Willa Cather and the feeling Edith Wharton is not for me.

In our next episode, more American Fantastic Tales, this time by women whom I don't think are as famous as Chopin, Wharton and Cather--at least I've never heard of them.

Post-War American Tales of the Fantastic: Beaumont, Ligotti & Wolfe

The college library that is within walking distance of the dilapidated and spider-infested house the wife and I rent has a copy of Volume II of The Library of America's American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub and published in 2009.  Volume I, which I read three stories from last week, covers the period before 1940; this one presents work from 1940 to 2007.  A few days ago I borrowed the volume, and early this week read three of the stories therein.

"Black Country" by Charles Beaumont (1954)

Beaumont is one of those writers I have often thought I should read, but whom I have not gotten around to.  So here is my chance.

"Black Country" first appeared in Playboy. The story is about jazz.  It's my understanding that Playboy, at least in its early incarnations, was marketed as the magazine for the sophisticated man, and one of the things the Platonic ideal of the sophisticated man of the '50s and '60s cared about and knew about was jazz, and Playboy covered jazz within its pages quite extensively.  (Personally, I know nothing about jazz.)  The cover of the issue in which Beaumont's story appeared is actually adorned not with some hot chick, as has been the norm for decades, but a cartoon depiction of jazz musicians.

"Black Country" is a first person narrative by a member of an African-American jazz band whose talented and charismatic leader, Spoof Collins, plays the trumpet.  The group has a dedicated white fan, Sonny, who takes over for the saxophonist when he is killed in some kind of fracas.  The band later decides to take on a female singer, Rose-Ann.  Rose-Ann falls in love with Spoof, but Spoof loves his trumpet more than anything, and when she gets a little too cloying, Spoof hits her.  Sonny rushes to her aid, staring down Spoof; Sonny is in love with Rose-Ann, and they become an item. Spoof dies soon after (committing suicide because he has cancer) and Sonny becomes leader of the band, shifting from saxophone to trumpet.  The story's climax is when Sonny digs up Spoof's horn from the grave and Spoof's spirit plays through Sonny; the two men, of two different races, who butted heads earlier, are reconciled in their quest to achieve the ultimate, purest jazz.  

This story is just OK.  Maybe I would enjoy it more if I was a jazz aficionado--the numerous scenes describing musical performances ("Spoof lifted his horn and climbed up two-and-a-half and let out his trademark...Jimmy kanoodling the great headwork that only Jimmy knows how to do...Henry did that counterpoint business that you're not supposed to be able to do unless you have two right arms and four extra fingers...." etc.) left me cold.  Maybe others will find the story's racial and sexual politics interesting; presumably Beaumont is arguing for racial harmony here, but some readers might find the way a white man takes over the black band, or even the way Beaumont speaks in the voices of black men, condescending or offensive.

"The Last Feast of Harlequin" by Thomas Ligotti (1990)

A year ago (gadzooks, has it really been that long?) I announced to the world my deep and abiding love for Thomas Ligotti's story "Vastarien."  Can I experience such a love again?  I started this story, which first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, with hopes that I could.

Ligotti dedicated "The Last Feast of Harlequin" to "the memory of H. P. Lovecraft," and in the introduction to American Fantastic Tales' second volume Straub calls the story "a loving and exacting tribute" to Lovecraft.  Straub's description is perfectly apt; this is a finely crafted Lovecraftian story, carefully emulating the plot structure and themes and tone of Lovecraft's own works.

The story is a memoir or testament, written by an academic anthropologist, describing his investigation of an odd festival in a Midwestern town, a town founded by New Englanders in the nineteenth century.  Like the characters in various Lovecraft stories, our narrator travels around town meeting creepy characters, delves into old newspapers and other old documents for clues, and then learns a horrifying truth before escaping with his life, but not without dreadful psychological scars and the knowledge that something catastrophically terrible awaits him in his future.  In the climactic scene we even get the subterranean ritual of human sacrifice led by an evil wizard or priest which we expect to find in a Weird Tales-style story.

Maybe because I was exposed to so much Marxism in college, and maybe because in my twenties and thirties I spent so much time reading books in which social class is important (like Proust and various 18th-century things like Casanova and Boswell), I am always finding these SF stories to be worthy of some kind of class analysis. "The Last Feast of Harlequin" is perhaps a more appropriate subject of a class-based analysis than most.  The town at the center of the story is split into "desirable sections" of "normal residents" and a darker, uglier, poorer side, "the south end," which the narrator calls a "slum" or "ghetto" and which is home to "lethargic," "gaunt" and "nauseatingly passive" people.  The slum dwellers keep to themselves, and are, in fact, monsters of some type.  Every winter they have a dark, creepy, sinister celebration, and the loud and brightly lit festival in the "normal" part of town is (our narrator theorizes) devised to drown out or distract from the evil celebration of the monstrous freaks.  The narrator, as a professional scientist and college professor, is of course solidly middle-class, but, by putting on a disguise of old shoes, blue jeans and a coat whose pockets he tears and to which he applies stains, he has little trouble infiltrating the dark side of town.

The surprise at the end of the story, which is not really a surprise to careful readers because Ligotti foreshadows it quite clearly, is that the anthropologist is, previously unknown to himself, one of the freaks.  "He is one of us....He has always been one of us" says the wizard/priest, who turns out to be the narrator's mentor back from his days at his New England university.  This kind of class anxiety strikes a chord with me because of similarities to my own life.  My parents are working class, and my mother expresses hostility to white collar workers and complains when she sees me in my J. Crew outfits ("Why don't you wear jeans and sneakers?  Does Joe College think he is better than the rest of us?")  Does my own college degree, my intellectual hobbies and time spent working in universities and offices make me middle-class, or does my blood and the time I've spent working in machine shops, warehouses, and the stock rooms of stores make me working-class?

"The Last Feast of Harlequin" is like a smoothly running clock, each of its glittering gears rotating in harmony with every other.  Every paragraph serves a purpose and serves that purpose well.  I can enthusiastically recommend this story to Lovecraft fans, who may enjoy picking out all the little Lovecraftian elements and themes.   Because it is so good, I would also strongly recommend the story to people curious about Lovecraft's influence on later "weird" writers.  

I didn't like "The Last Feast of Harlequin" as much as "Vastarien," however.  It is so like a finely polished, exquisitely constructed exemplar of a Lovecraft story (dare I use the phrase "Platonic ideal" twice in one blog post?) that it is a little lacking in the surprise and novelty department.  Ligotti here has put together a masterpiece of an homage; it feels like the best possible version of something we've seen before, rather than something original or new.  I thought "Vastarien," while definitely Lovecraftian in feel, had something new to say and was more challenging, more mysterious, making for a more powerful reading experience.

"The Little Stranger" by Gene Wolfe (2004)

I'm one of those people who thinks of Gene Wolfe as his favorite writer and who thinks Wolfe is a strong candidate for "best" or "greatest" or "ultimate" SF writer of all time, so for me reading a Wolfe story that is new to me is always a significant event in my intellectual life.

This is actually the second time I've read "The Little Stranger;" when I checked out the book I thought it was new to me, having forgotten the title, but by the second page I realized I had read it before.  Perhaps I read it in Jonathan Strahan and Karen Haber's Fantasy: The Best of 2004; I used to get those anthologies at the New York Public Library all the time.  I'm sure I didn't read it in its first place of publication, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  

The story begins on a heartbreaking note: the tale is a series of letters written by a terribly lonely old woman, Ivy, to a dead cousin.  "Please forgive me for troubling you with another letter....You are the only family I have, and as you are dead you probably do not mind."  The story quickly becomes light-hearted, however.  The conceit of the story is that everybody thinks Ivy is a witch, and various coincidences, like a black cat joining her household and two little kids named Hank and Greta coming to visit her "gingerbread house," reinforce this idea and provide an opportunity for Wolfe to make jokes (of Hank and Greta our narrator says, "[they] are such sweet little strangers.  I could just eat them up!")  It is strongly suggested that Ivy's house is haunted or somehow alive, and also lonely, and manipulates events to relieve its own loneliness as well as Ivy's.  There are also hints that Ivy is hundreds of years old.

While I have suggested the story is light-hearted, at the same time we are constantly reminded that the world is full of evil.  Ivy often worries about thieves and burglars, and is very concerned that business people will cheat her.  There are gypsies in the story (our narrator doesn't use that word, but I think all the clues point to them being gypsies) and they have a contentious relationship with the authorities: one of the female gypsies opens a fortune telling business and is investigated by the police bunco squad, while the others flee into the woods at the very sight of the police. Readers may recall that I had the same attitude about Wolfe's 1990 novel Pandora by Holly Hollander; that it was outwardly fun, but full of reminders of war, crime, and broken families.

As usual with Wolfe, an economical and dense story worth rereading, with an odd, novel premise.

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I'm not the audience for the Beaumont story, but these three stories are all worthwhile reads.  While I, an inveterate cheapo, have borrowed the two volumes of American Fantastic Tales from libraries, I hope other people who care about genre literature have been purchasing them.  We certainly want to encourage The Library of America and other organizations to continue producing books like this, books full of stories about ghosts, witches, and evil cults but composed of fine paper and fine bindings, with attractive and easy-to-read typefaces and no typographical errors.  (Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick have volumes of The Library of America dedicated to them--if I eat my broccoli maybe I'll live to see similarly handsome volumes of Gene Wolfe's work.)

1949 Stories from Kuttner & Moore and Edmond Hamilton

I recently found myself with time to kill before an appointment in Urbandale, Iowa, so I looked into the public library there.  On the science fiction shelves I saw a hardcover 1988 printing of one of the volumes of the Isaac Asimov Presents the Golden Years of Science Fiction series edited by Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg, the volume covering 1949 and 1950.  I noticed on the contents page some stories I had yet to read by authors I am interested in, so the book found its way back to headquarters where it joined the pile of library books.  This weekend I read three stories that first appeared in science fiction magazines in 1949: two credited to "Lewis Padgett," one of the pen names used by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore; and a story by Edmond Hamilton.

"Private Eye" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

The editors suggest that this story, which first appeared in Astounding, was probably written by Kuttner.  It seems to be universally loved; not only was it the cover story at Astounding, but it has been widely anthologized in such books as The Mirror of Infinity: A Critics' Anthology of Science Fiction and Astounding Stories: The 60th Anniversary Collection (Vol. 3).  On the negative side I now can't get that Hall and Oates song out of my head.

It is easy to see why this story would be popular with critics and editors.  There are hundreds or thousands of stories speculating about space travel, robots, time travel, nuclear power, and so forth, and "Private Eye" speculates about something that in 1949 maybe hadn't been done to death already, extensive government surveillance, but in the context of an individualistic market society with a limited government, more like early 20th-century America than the kind of totalitarian society we see in 1984 and so many other books.  According to the story, light waves and sound waves leave a semi-permanent impression on materials, impressions that can be translated into audio and video by a device employed by law enforcement.  Thus anything that has happened within sight of a wall or floor in the last fifty years has essentially been recorded for viewing by the government, making getting away with a major crime a difficult proposition!

The plot of the story follows Sam Clay, murderer.  Clay's girlfriend has been stolen by a more successful man, and Clay crafts and pursues an elaborate scheme over the course of 18 months, manipulating people and contriving situations so he can stab his rival to death in full view of the watching government and jury and get off on a plea of self-defense. As Golden Age SF fans probably already know, Kuttner was fascinated by psychology and studied the field in college, and "Private Eye" is full of psychological theories spouted by government scientists and descriptions of Clay's state of mind, a mind warped by childhood experiences, driven by a lust for revenge and oppressed by the knowledge that his every move is being recorded as if by cameras for viewing by law enforcement.  Over the course of the story we observe Clay's psychology, and to a certain extent that of other characters, evolve.

This is a good story, well paced and structured, achieving genuine tension and presenting interesting characters and situations.  Even the little throwaway details about life in the future (like a restaurant where a computer analyzes your face and lights your table to your best advantage like a Hollywood director) are good.  Maybe some 21st-century readers will be put off by the 1940s-era psychology theories and the less than flattering portrayal of women in the story, but to me that stuff just adds a layer of historical interest.        

"Prisoner in the Skull" by Kuttner and Moore

Each of the stories in Isaac Asimov Presents the Golden Years of Science Fiction has two introductions, one by each of the editors.  In his intro to "Prisoner in the Skull" Greenberg thanks important SF writer, critic and historian, and Kuttner and Moore superfan, Barry Malzberg for pointing out this story to the editors.  Asimov takes the opportunity to sneer at "woman's romance" and "the typical Western," and suggest SF is superior to these genres.

A recurring element in Kuttner and Moore's work is artifacts or individuals from the future appearing and befuddling people.  We see this in some of Kuttner and Moore's most acclaimed work, like "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" and "Vintage Season," and we see it in "Prisoner in the Skull."  "Prisoner in the Skull," which also appeared in Astounding, feels like a companion piece to "Private Eye," in that it is about the evolving psychologies of an unsympathetic main character and the less than admirable woman with whom he is obsessed.

John Fowler is a successful commercial artist.  He is courting a beautiful model, Veronica, a shallow and greedy woman.  One day a mysterious man, a man lacking will and individuality, a man with a "blank" face who is almost unable to talk, appears at Fowler's door.  Fowler takes this "blank man," whom he dubs "Norman," into his home, and discovers that he is easy to dominate, and has terrific mechanical and engineering ability.  At Fowler's direction, Norman improves various household items (like a light switch) and invents radical new consumer products, like a window upon which one can project images via telepathy.  (This story also includes the device I admired in "Private Eye," a system of artificial indoor lighting that can be calibrated to flatter individuals.) By marketing these inventions, over the course of a few years Fowler becomes rich.

Having a virtual slave to dominate, and vast wealth, corrupts Fowler. Kuttner and Moore describe the excuses and other psychological devices used by Fowler to justify his exploitation of Norman.  When Veronica marries a stock broker, Fowler bends his wealth and Norman's amazing abilities to the task of concocting and executing a complicated conspiracy to break up the model and the broker, and get Veronica back under his control. As in "Private Eye," the female lead is not so easily outmaneuvered.  In the end it is revealed that Norman created himself by inventing a device that altered Fowler's brain; Norman thus turns Fowler into a proto-Norman and sends him (himself) back in time to meet his earlier self.

This is a good story, though I don't think it is as well put together as "Private Eye," and the time loop ending is not, to me, as satisfying as "Private Eye"'s resolution.  For one thing, I often find time loops and that sort of thing unsatisfying (my brain bridles at such explanations as "he became a genius inventor when his later self, a genius inventor, went back in time to make him a genius inventor.")  For another, the end of "Private Eye" is a conclusive one, with the immoral male and female leads suffering final, punishing fates.  In "Prisoner in the Skull" I felt like the stories of Fowler and Veronica weren't quite over, and I wasn't sure if they had been punished for their sins. What happens to Norman after he liberates himself from Fowler by sending Fowler (his earlier self) back in time?  Is he still obsessed with Veronica?  Is he still rich?  Is he still a genius inventor?

Leftist readers may appreciate what appears to be a Marxist subtext to the story. Fowler, I guess representing the capitalist, exploits Norman to become wealthy, but wealth corrupts him and Norman rises up against him, and it turns out Fowler was hurting himself by exploiting Norman.  An offhand comment about economics early in the story (it is suggested that in the future there is no shortage of raw materials, so businesses create artificial scarcities in order to make customers more willing to make purchases) is perhaps a clue that Kuttner and Moore want readers to view the story as some kind of allegory about economics.

"Alien Earth" by Edmond Hamilton

I've read quite a few stories by Hamilton during this blog's life.  The last time we encountered Hamilton was when I was praising his story "The Legion of Lazarus," which I read in a crumbling old magazine I found in an antique store.  As he does in the collection Before the Golden Age, in this volume of Isaac Asimov Presents the Golden Years of Science Fiction Asimov expresses his admiration for Hamilton.  For his part Greenberg calls "Alien Earth" "a wonderful, moody story that is science fiction at its finest."  

Hugh Farris is an American in the teak business, travelling here and there through the jungles of French Indo-China searching for teak trees. (Apparently American wood isn't good enough for some people!  Do Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump know about this?  It may be time for a tariff on these foreign woods!)  In the forest Farris discovers a weird native cult of people who inject themselves with some green goop that slows them down so that they "live a hundred times slower."  Hamilton gives us numerous descriptions of how they breathe slower, walk slower, blink slower, etc.

You don't care what these goofy natives are up to?  Why doesn't Farris just leave them to their goofy drugs and religion and get back to collecting that teak which is putting perfectly good American oak and pine out of work?  A woman, of course!  In the jungle Farris meets Lys Berreau, a French blonde (ooh la la) whose brother Andre has gone native and is using the green drug so that he can spend weeks at a time living at a speed one hundredth of the speed most of us are living at.  The French girl begs Farris's help, and can we blame him for not refusing?

Under ordinary fictional circumstances, I'd expect an evil priest and/or evil god to be at fault, and for Farris to have to read a spell from an old book and/or hit some people with a sword to resolve the plot.  This is what I would expect in a Weird Tales-style story.  But "Alien Earth" is endorsed by Isaac Asimov, and we all know from Before the Golden Age that Asimov has contempt for the Weird Tales crowd.  The Asimov seal of approval means this story must be about science!  Farris carries the almost motionless Andre into a house and keeps him there for weeks until the green goop injection wears off.   When the Frenchie is back at normal speed he explains that he is a botanist and wanted to live at one percent speed because it helped him get in tune with the life of plants!

Farris and the mademoiselle try to get Andre to give up on his obsession with what he calls "a botanist's heaven" and get back to France, but he refuses to budge.  In fact, he drugs their food so Farris and Lys are tricked into entering the world of plants themselves!  Perfidious Gaul!        

So, what is so awesome about the world of plants?  As far as I can tell plants can't have sex or read books or go to art museums or listen to old Blondie albums, the kinds of things that make life as a human being barely tolerable.  Why is the botanist so keen to live out his life in that vegetative world?

Farris and Lys venture into the rain forest to find out!  Living at one hundredth normal speed, they experience the sun crossing the sky in like seven or eight minutes, while the growth of grass and the budding of leaves on trees moves at an apparent speed much like that of the stalking of animals.  Hamilton compares the engulfing of trees by vines and fungus as being much like the attacks of wolves on quadruped herbivores.

More significant is the revelation that plants have thoughts and emotions just like animals, and project these telepathically.  Moving at one hundredth normal speed our heroes can pick up these transmissions!  It turns out that the French botanist worships the oldest trees of the forest, whom he believes have great wisdom to impart!  So, even though this is a sciencey story, Hamilton manages to shoehorn in an evil priest and god.  When Andre orders the plants to kill Farris and his own sister(!), we even get something like a traditional Robert Howard hero-interrupting-virgin-sacrifice scene.  Farris even has a big bolo knife, a good stand in for a sword, that he and Lys use to chop away at the vines, which move like snakes when you are living at one hundredth speed!  

This story is pretty ridiculous.  It is hard to accept the idea that plants have thoughts, much less "wisdom."  The idea of thinking, breathing, and moving at one hundredth speed is also a little suspect.  Farris and Lys run at this speed, which would seem to be impossible--wouldn't you just lose balance and collapse when your second foot left the surface?  What about insects and germs--if you are in the middle of a damn jungle and you can't swat bugs and your white blood cells are moving at one hundredth normal speed, aren't you going to be devoured?

I'll grade "Alien Earth" acceptable, but Greenberg is really exaggerating when he suggests it represents "science fiction at its finest"--the sciency stuff is mediocre, and the story is not redeemed by being a good adventure with memorable images (like Hamilton's better work such as "The Legion of Lazarus") or by having traditional literary values like a good style or characters or the ability to evoke emotion in the reader.  I suspect Asimov and Greenberg thought Hamilton deserved to be included in their series, which he does, being a major writer of the Golden Age, and hit upon this one because it is sciency and not Weird Talesy, and because Hamilton published no other stories in 1949.  I do have to say it is a little odd that Asimov felt comfortable presenting a story in which the scientist is the villain and the violent businessman-adventurer is the hero.

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The Kuttner and Moore stories are solid; classic SF fans should definitely check them out.  I guess the Hamilton story is interesting if you are interested in Hamilton's long and productive career, or are trying to read every SF story about botany!

I'll probably read some more stories from this volume before it ends up back on the library shelves--stay tuned.

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (trans. Mayer & Brogan)

"My friend," I exclaimed, "Man is human, and the small amount of intelligence one may possess counts little or nothing against the rage of passion and the limits of human nature pressing upon him."

Copy I read this week

Close followers of this blog will know I recently read Mikhail Lermentov's "Princess Mary," an early 19th-century novella which I viewed as a piece of Russian Romanticism.  This inspired me to borrow, from the local university library, one of the foundational texts of the Romantic movement, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.  I read Werther in the 1990s, when I was working at a New Jersey bookstore for minimum wage, in a paperback Penguin edition that I believe I still own, but which is packed away in storage.  The hardcover edition I read this week was put out in 1993 by The Modern Library, and presents a translation by Elizabeth Mayer and Louis Brogan that first saw light of day in 1971, the year of my birth.  It includes on its back cover a quote from Thomas Mann that includes an anecdote indicating that Napoleon Bonaparte was a tremendous fan of Werther.  Well, we won't hold against poor Goethe the fact that one of history's premier monsters was practically president of his fan club.

Think back, if you can, to the year 1771!  The place, Germany!  The Sorrows of Young Werther is, primarily, presented in the form of letters written by our title character, a sensitive soul who likes to draw, write, read Homer and look at mountains, and who apparently has enough money that he never has to do any work, has a servant, and is always throwing money to the poor.  The letters in Book One (73 pages in this edition) are to Wilhelm, a friend of Werther's.  Werther is spending the summer in some little country town to run some trifling legal errand for his mother (some aunt is trying to keep Mom from getting her share of an inheritance or something) and, it seems, to get away from some love triangle mess back home.  "Poor Leonora!  And yet I was blameless.  Was it my fault that, while the capricious charms of her sister provided me with a pleasant entertainment, her poor heart built up a passion for me?"  This whole book, from page one, is about people being carried away by their caprices and passions and causing themselves and others considerable suffering.

Out in this little town Werther meets and falls in love with a pretty girl, Charlotte, whom he calls "Lotte."  Lotte is more than a pretty face--she likes the writers Werther likes and she is the picture of virtue, dutifully and lovingly raising her little brothers and sisters after their mother's death.  But Lotte is not on the market!  The girl of Werther's dreams is engaged to Albert, an honest, decent, level-headed and productive citizen!  In the intro to this edition modern English poet W. H. Auden declares that Albert is a "square!"  Werner spends all his time either hanging out with these two paragons or weeping his eyes out alone because Lotte will never be his.

A ringing endorsement from the Corsican Ogre

In Book Two of the novel (just 17 pages) it is autumn and winter, and Werner has left the country to take some kind of diplomatic or civil service job at court, working with an "envoy," a "Count," and a "Minister," drafting documents.  In letters to Wilhelm and Lotte he complains that the people at court are obsessed with status and the rat race, and ruin every day with their bad attitudes.  Due to an embarrassing faux pas at a party, in the spring Werther quits his job and moves back to Lotte and Albert's environs. In Werther's absence Lotte and Albert have married.

The last section of the novel, entitled "Postscript" and running 70 pages, is a conglomeration of documents written by Werther and narration by a nameless editor who has investigated Werther's last days.  Werther hangs around Lotte, putting strain on her marriage to Albert, and he gets upset when some guys want to chop down some trees he likes and when a guy with whom Werther identifies, a component of one of the novel's ubiquitous love triangles, commits murder.  Werther finally goes off the deep end and commits suicide with some pistols he borrows from Albert.  (A friend in need....)  This suicide is no surprise to the reader; not only has it been foreshadowed again and again, with Werther discussing suicide with Albert and writing to Wilhelm about committing suicide and even play acting suicide with Albert's pistols back on page 57, but after the "editor" baldly tells us on page 135 that Werther has decided to kill himself, we have to wade through 30 more pages before the deed is done.

I didn't enjoy The Sorrows of Young Werther as much as I had expected to.  With the exception of a mind-numbingly tedious seven-page extract from James MacPherson's famous fraud The Works of Ossian (MacPherson wrote poems in English that he based very loosely on Gaelic sources and then claimed they were translations of centuries-old manuscripts he had discovered) the book is an easy read, but it is repetitive, extravagant, obvious, and fails to pull the heartstrings.  There is no surprise, little ambiguity or depth, and surprisingly little insight into 18th-century life or thought.  And who can care one way or the other about these goofy characters?    

Among the elements I thought reflected "Romanticism" in"Princess Mary" was how the narrator waxed poetic about Nature, expressing his love of the trees and the dew and the sunlight and all that, and how all the characters acted irrationally, tossing reason and logic out the window and taking catastrophic risks because they are driven by passions for love, revenge, or honor.  We see some of these same elements in Werther.  There's lots of talk about how lovely mountains and valleys and sunsets and the rest are, and when he is mentally stable Werther blabs on and on about how much he loves Nature, but somehow the book fails to inspire any of these feelings in the reader.

The edition I read in
the '90s resembles this 

More interesting to me was the recurring theme of how intelligence, education, knowledge and reason can be a detriment rather than a virtue, can make people less happy rather than more happy.  Werther argues the charm of the classical poets comes from their ignorance: "You see, dear friend, how limited and how happy were the glorious Ancients!  how naive their emotions and their poetry!"  Werther later claims that true emotion, love in its purest form, is felt by "those people whom we call uneducated and coarse."  Werther and Wilhelm have been diminished, not elevated, by their educations: "We educated people--miseducated into nothingness!" When Werther meets a mental patient who has been released into the custody of his family, the maniac asserts that he was happier when he was totally insane and chained up in an institution than he is now, free and partially cured.

At the same time that Werther's rhetoric denounces the intellect, suggesting that education and reason corrupt, or deaden, or sadden us, the actions of the characters, especially Werther himself, demonstrate that people do not act logically, are not guided by reason, but are instead driven by whims and irrational passions.  It is hard to believe that Goethe is celebrating this emotionalism, even if the character of Werther is, because their passions drive the characters to destructive actions: among other disasters, we hear the story of a girl who committed suicide because of a love triangle, and the story of a man who committed a bloody murder because of a love triangle.  Werther, in a debate with Albert and in response to the aforementioned murder case, claims that suicides and murderers should not be judged guilty or punished for their sins because the passions that drove them are like a disease, and we don't blame a guy for catching the flu!  This surprisingly modern attitude towards mental health and crime (think of how nowadays we aren't supposed to look down on drunks and compulsive gamblers and junkies as irresponsible jerks with no values and no common sense, but instead to empathize with and support them as victims of a disease) is probably the thing in Werther that made the biggest impression on me this time around.

In my real life I have often been moved by the beauty and sublimity of mountains, oceans, sunsets, lightning bolts, birds and so on, and all too often I have acted stupidly over a woman or because I was angry about something.  I should be a receptive audience for what Goethe is selling here.  And yet I was not emotionally affected by Goethe's novel.  Is Goethe to blame because the book is too extravagant, too repetitive, too poorly structured?  Or could the translation be (in part?) to blame?

Don't be fooled by the cover of this kindle edition! 

The only German I know is stuff I've picked up via pop culture that does not paint a flattering portrait of the German people, phrases like "Schnell! Schnell!," "Achtung, Spitfire!," "Judenfrei," and "schadenfreude."  So I am in no position to criticize Mayer and Brogan's translation.  But I still have some questions.  When Werther causes confusion during a dance by making some missteps, he uses the phrase "everything was at sixes and sevens," which I always think of as a British idiom.  Do Germans say this as well? Or is Werther making a clever joke related to the fact that the dance he screwed up was an anglaise? Or are Mayer and Brogan just translating some German cliche they fear their American audience won't get into an English cliche they are confident English readers will know?  (I had similar questions when Werther used a variant of the phrase "It's all Greek to me.")  I would have appreciated a footnote or endnote here, but this edition has no notes.

Several times I felt that notes would have been appropriate.  Sure, I am familiar with The Vicar of Wakefield, but presumably some readers of this edition of Werther were not.  And even though this is my second reading of Werther I had no idea what or who the Klopstock that Lotte and Werther are so excited over was, or what Emilia Galotti was all about, until I googled them.

Obviously, I don't regret reading a major novel by a major writer, but I won't be recommending The Sorrows of Young Werther to people with the enthusiasm with which I recommend other canonical novels, like Don Quixote, Moby Dick, or In Search of Lost Time.