The Male Response by Brian Aldiss

isfdb lists Brian Aldiss's 1961 novel The Male Response as "non-genre," but it made its first appearance as part of the Galaxy Science Fiction Novel Series (during the period the series was published by Beacon) and that first edition was explicitly marketed as SF; look at the man-sized chemistry set our dude on the cover is working with!  You need two hands to lift those flasks, beakers and retorts!  The cover of a 1963 British hardcover edition shows (behind an image of a human figure of a sort that likely wouldn't get published on the cover of a novel today) some kind of electronic apparatus.  So maybe there is some speculative science in this book, which otherwise appears to be some kind of farce or satire about the different attitudes about sex of British people and Africans.  Let's see what this curious artifact is all about; I am reading the scan of one of those Beacon paperbacks that is available at the world's greatest website, the internet archive.

The Central African republic of Goya is, according to its boosters, "most progressive;" The Times even called it "the black Scandinavia"!  So we shouldn't be surprised when Prince Jimpo Deal Lampor, son of the President and King of Goya, comes a-calling to the offices of London computer manufacturer Unilateral to order a computer--he specifies that the people of Goya want one painted red.  Soon four Unilateral employees are wimging their way down to Goya in a plane with the prince and the forty-odd crates that contain the computer's components; when the plane crashes just miles from the capital of Goya, Umbalathorp, the pilot and two of the engineers are killed, while the prince is injured; fortunately Soames Noyes, "liaison manager," and one last engineer, Ted Timpleton, escape unharmed.

When Noyes gets to the palace in Umbalathorp, a city largely consisting of huts and shanties and served by an unfinished railroad line, the man who is both King and President of Goya puts the lie to his son's talk of Goya being an African simulacrum of progressive Scandinavia--Noyes, Timpleton, and the computer, which it will take some five days for Timpleton to get running, will be domiciled in the palace to protect them from Goya's citizenry, many of whom hate and fear modern science and technology.  His Majesty Mr. President, who has two wives (one is Mrs. President, the other the Queen) doesn't seem too crazy about the modern world himself: "Enlightenment is like a tearing down of old familiar rooms when we are left to squat in a desert of disbelief.  What has education to offer but the truth of man's smallness and beastliness?" he tells Noyes.  At the funeral of the three Britons killed in the plane crash the King says that airplanes have done nothing to improve human life, but have served to "denationalize" people, to separate them from their roots to the Earth and to their cultures.  The King's sentiments are echoes by his son, the Prince, who laments that his education in England has alienated him from his "Goyese" countrymen.  While King and Prince have mixed feelings about the computer they have brought to Goya, another powerful figure in Umbalathorp, the city's chief witch doctor, is definitively against it, calling the computer a "Christian devil box." This joker tells Noyes that "The many spirits of Umbalathorp all speak out against your coming," and predicts that Noyes will never leave Africa alive!

All this stuff about how science and technology lead to deracination and alienation is interesting enough, but anybody who chose to read this book based on its cover was doing so because he thought it would be full of sex.  And while there are not actual sex scenes in the novel, sex is a major theme of The Male Response.  Everybody Noyes meets in Goya offers a girl to him--the King sends a woman to service Noyes in his bedroom, the Prince takes Soames to a brothel, a Portuguese businessman is a procurer on the side and spins fables about the terminal diseases with which the whores of other pimps and madams are riddled, a Chinese businessman wants to trade the services of his beautiful daughter for Noyes's help with some industrial espionage.  Queen Louise hopes to set Noyes up with her daughter, Princess Cherry.  Alistair Picket, an Englishman who arrived as a missionary twenty-seven years ago and, upon seeing the squalid state of Umbalathorp, immediately lost his faith and abandoned his calling, tries to set Noyes up with his daughter Grace.  In private Grace begs Noyes to have sex with her--she has been resorting to lesbian sex with black girls, and aches to experience "normal" sex with a fellow English person.  (It later becomes clear that her father has taken to having sex with "black boys.")

In one of the best scenes of the book Aldiss combines his two themes; the girl at the brothel (a woman who may have Arab blood and whose teeth are filed to points) who services Noyes doesn't use her own flesh to bring the Englishman to orgasm, but a vibrator.  A sign outside the brothel advertises this as an "American Massage," and the Prince tells Noyes the new service is extremely popular--technology and commerce have literally come between man and woman and rendered mechanical that most intimate of human activities.

All these themes are laid out and most of the The Male Response's many characters are introduced in the first of 183-page novel's three parts.  In Part II the plot really gets going, as a second Portuguese businessman accosts Noyes, accusing Timpleton of conspiring with the aforementioned Chinese man and the first Portuguese to steal five crates of computer spare parts.  We get some complicated intrigue full of backstabbing, double-crossing, and disguises as Noyes tries to steal the spare parts back but ends up captured by the police and thrown in jail.  Various characters ostensibly come to his aid but who can he trust--the King, the Prince, the witch doctor, and Timpleton all have different, conflicting interests and attitudes about Noyes and about the computer and may or may be legitimately trying to help him or manipulating the situation to pursue their own schemes. 

The Male Response is meant to be humorous; the silly contents page makes that immediately clear.  Aldiss fills the novel with low key jokes and while very few of them actually make you laugh, they are for the most part clever enough.  Aldiss mines many jokes from the efforts of non-British people to speak English, and a few jokes from Timpleton's attempts to speak French.  (The King has no English and so Noyes communicates with him en francais.)  Memorable examples: the first Portuguese businessman says "Gentlemen, we are bounders to meet again," and the Chinese entrepreneur has nicknamed his wife "Rosie" but pronounces it "Lousy."  

Anyway, in Part III the humor becomes more broad, and the plot, which in the first two parts is more or less believable and serious, becomes more and more farcical.  As Part III begins Noyes has been sprung from the clink and he and Timpleton activate the computer, which stands seven feet high, three feet deep and forty-five feet long.  The witch doctor, seeing the computer as a threat to his position and profession, proposes a contest between Western science and African witchcraft--which can more accurately predict whether the Prince will recover from the grievous injuries he sustained in the fracas that concluded Noyes's extralegal effort to recover the stolen spare parts?  The computer predicts that the Prince will recover, but the witch doctor, ominously for us readers, who have reason to believe he masterminded the attack in which said Prince Jimpo Deal Lampor was wounded, predicts that he will not live to see tomorrow's sunset.  When the next day it is the witch doctor's prediction that comes true, civil unrest erupts, as many people sympathetic to the royal family assume the witch doctor, through magic or mundane skullduggery, murdered the Prince.  Timpleton is killed in the fighting, but otherwise things go well for the royal faction: the witch doctor is exiled to the countryside to grow chickens, and through good luck and quick thinking Noyes not only survives, but ends up a candidate for President with the full backing of the King, who is eager to shed one of his titles and thinks having a white president will be a public relations and diplomatic coup.

Noyes wins election handily and then learns about a Goyese tradition that has previously gone unmentioned: before inauguration a newly elected President must publicly deflower a virgin in order to prove his manhood.  (The city mob will lynch him should he fail.)  Noyes will be allowed to choose which "virgin" (she need not in fact be sexually innocent) and said virgin will then become his wife and bearer of the title "Mrs. President."  Many men put forward their own daughters for consideration--including, through an intermediary, the exiled witch doctor.  Aldiss quickly wraps up the novel by portraying Noyes becoming seduced by a love of power and in his hubris making foolish decisions that allow the witch doctor to exact a fatal revenge on him.   

isfdb may consider The Male Response non-genre, but it is structured much like a SF story and addresses issues with which SF is often concerned.  We have the mission of people from a world familiar to readers, in this case London, to an exotic and somewhat dangerous world, here a bonkers fictional Central African state, and the author uses this plot as an opportunity to talk about the effects of science and technology on human society--Aldiss in this book suggests science makes our lives worse, and portrays the triumph of a primitive cleric over men of business and technology from the metropole.

(In his intro to Another World, Gardner Dozois, following Kurt Vonnegut, suggests that SF authors are among the few people to address the issue of "what machines do to us" and in his essay 1980 essay "John W. Campbell: June 8, 1910 to July 11, 1971," published in The Engines of the Night, Barry Malzberg describes a debate with Campbell in which our pal Barry argued that SF should be about how technology was "consuming" and "victimizing" people, contra Campbell, who thought that SF should be about solving problems and overcoming obstacles.)  

So, can I recommend The Male Response?  Well, it is certainly not the "rollicking novel of bawdy adventure" promised by the cover of the 1976 Panther paperback edition.  The pace is deliberate rather than fast, and, despite all the little jokes, it is just not fun--Aldiss's novel is sad, depressing.  The characters are all venal, or corrupt, or cynical, or defeated.  Innocent people suffer or get killed for no purpose.  The sexual relationships in the novel are neither life-affirming the way sex based on love might be, or titillating as nasty or naughty sex might be--sex in this novel is sordid or pathetic, from Grace's begging to the Chinese girl's emotionless offering of her body to further her father's unethical business schemes to the whores who service their clients with vibrators.  Aldiss's philosophical asides are also downers.  "The perfectionist dreams of, and the humanist dreads, the day when all things may be reduced to equations."  "All men think alike; no two act alike."  "It is a distressing trait in human nature that we tend to underestimate the good in others when circumstances are against them...."  "Human relationships are sticky as spider webs.  We run into them cheerfully enough, then they stretch a mile rather than break and let us go free.  If we poor flies were not also spiders at heart, the matter might go easier."  In one joke passage that sticks out like a sore thumb and strengthens my case that The Male Response has much in common with a SF novel, the Prince tosses a small coin into a bush and Aldiss tells us that two thousand years later, long after a world war has obliterated our civilization, the coin will be discovered by archaeologists of the succeeding dominant civilization, that of Eskimos.

Potential readers might also consider the fact that many 2021 readers will find this novel full of sexism, racism, and homophobia, though Aldiss is pretty scathing about English people, pointing out English arrogance and xenophobia, among other not necessarily admirable traits, while the Prince is probably the most admirable and the King the most wise of the characters in The Male Response.

So, The Male Response isn't a fun sex novel or a thrilling adventure novel, but I still think I can give it a mild recommendation.  I was never bored or irritated, and I was always curious about what was coming next, and often surprised.  Aldiss is an important, knowledgeable and skilled writer, so anything he writes has an inherent interest, and of course the book provides a window onto the culture of the time and place in which it was written.  If you are interested in Aldiss, or sex and race and computers in early 1960s SF, I think it is worth your time.

Adventures in Otherness by C Smith, R A Lafferty, G Wolfe and B W Aldiss

There are a lot of SF anthologies at the internet archive; let's take a look at one of them, 1977's Another World: Adventures in Otherness, edited by Gardner Dozois.  Dozois provides an introduction to the book in which he brags about how awesome New England is, relates how when he was young (Dozois was born in 1947) the entire community discouraged him from reading SF, and offers the opinion that SF is one of the few vibrant living things in our "weary and sterile" world of "dead art, dead minds [and] dead institutions...."  (Damn!)  SF authors, Dozois tells us, quoting Kurt Vonnegut, are among the few people who actually think through the implications of big events and big ideas, how cities and wars and technology actually affect people.  Dozois also writes little intros to each of the stories.  Today we'll read four of the included stories, those by authors in whom I have a particular interest.  

(Note: Another World: Adventures in Otherness includes Damon Knight's 1957 story "Man in a Jar," which I read and opined about back in 2019.)

"On the Gem Planet" by Cordwainer Smith (1963)

Wealthy planet Mizzer was ruled by Kuraf, a decadent libertine famous galaxy-wide for his library of nasty books, until he was deposed and exiled by reformers.  Soon Mizzer fell into the hands of the most radical of these reformers, the tyrannical Colonel Wedder, a utopian whose rule is far more oppressive than was that of Kuraf.  The Instrumentality of Mankind that loosely governs the human space empire refuses to directly interfere in affairs on Mizzer, but has provided Kuraf's nephew and heir apparent to the throne of Mizzer, Casher O'Neill, the wherewithal to travel from planet to planet, seeking aid in his quest to overthrow Wedder and make Mizzer a happy place again.  "On the Gem Planet" describes O'Neill's visit to planet Pontoppidan.

Pontoppidan is an inhospitable world where you can't grow food or breathe the air; the 60,000 inhabitants live in domed cities and trade with other planets for most of what they need.  Because Pontoppidan is "a fragment from a giant planet which imploded" with a "geology based on ultra-heavy chemistry" it is covered in gems of all sorts and sizes, which provides the Pontoppidanians an all natural-natural product which is always in demand.

Casher O'Neill negotiates with the ruler of Pontoppidan and his beautiful niece, the heir apparent, angling to get some money or weapons to support his liberation of Mizzer from Colonel Wedder.  The ruler of the gem planet agrees to supply something useful in return for an unusual bit of service--a horse, an exotic Earth creature never before seen by the people of Pontoppidan, has been found on their barren planet, and the dictator wants O'Neill's advice on what to do with it.  (As luck would have it, Mizzer has plenty of horses, and O'Neill is familiar with them.) 

Through his relationship with the horse and with various underpeople (Smith's Instrumentality stories are full of these "underpeople," the product of genetic engineering whose DNA is largely that of dogs, cats, snakes, wolves, etc. and who serve as a sort of working class and servant class under the full-blooded humans), and the pretty heir to the throne of Pontoppidan, O'Neill not only acquires a valuable gem that can serve as the core of a puissant energy weapon, but is exposed to enlightening dialogues about the meaning of life, the path to happiness, and the meaning of civilization.  We also witness strong hints that there is some kind of proscribed Christian underground in the space empire, an underground of which O'Neill is a member.  

Pretty good; Smith's style renders "On The Gem Planet" a smooth and pleasant read and all the SF ideas and philosophical ideas of the story are engaging.  Smith published four Casher O'Neill stories in SF magazines in the mid-1960s and this is the first; maybe a near future project of mine will be to seek out the other three.  After making its debut in Fred Pohl's Galaxy, "On the Gem Planet" has appeared in numerous Smith collections as well as a few anthologies, like The Seventh Galaxy Reader and an anthology of SF about equines.      

"Among the Hairy Earthmen" by R. A. Lafferty (1966)

Another piece from an issue of Galaxy edited by Frederik Pohl.  "Among the Hairy Earthmen" was reprinted in a number of anthologies, including Nebula Award Stories 2 and Brian Aldiss's Evil Earths, and collected in 1984's Ringing Changes. 

This is a gimmicky sort of story that supposes that the explosions of intrigue, war, and cultural and technological development of the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries, things like the career of Lucrezia Borgia, the fall of Constantinople, the Divine Comedy, and the invention of the printing press, were the work of mischievous alien children who came to Earth on vacation and were able to inhabit or imitate human bodies.  Much of the story is just lists of figures and events, sometimes vaguely referred to as if to present a puzzle to the reader.  The end of the story features some social commentary and social satire as a character called the Pilgrim, who may be a representative of the human race--or maybe just the West or Christendom--or may even be the God of Abraham, upbraids the alien brats for all the death and destruction of those wars and of the way the Renaissance and Reformation have sundered the unity of Christian civilization.  The aliens retort that mankind was always violent, and that the diversity they have introduced is of greater value than the Pilgrim's vaunted unity.

There isn't a hell of a lot to this story, really, besides its core idea and its-against-the-grain theme (that maybe the Renaissance and Reformation were not so great); it is odd and different, and thus worth reading, but not particularly entertaining.

A German edition of Nebula Award Stories 2 and a Dutch edition of Evil Earths 

"Straw" by Gene Wolfe (1975)

I read "Straw" years ago in my copy of Storeys from the Old Hotel, but that was before this blog staggered forth from its tenebrous place of birth to haunt unheeded the series of tubes that is the interweb.  Dozois in his intro here tells us it is set in an "alternate Dark-Age Europe which never was."  Jim Baen, introducing the story where it first appeared, in as issue of Galaxy during his editorship, suggests it might be set in an alternate world, or maybe on a post-apocalyptic Earth or on a lost space colony which has degraded politically and technologically, standard SF settings.  My copy of Storeys from the Old Hotel isn't accessible to me right now, but in his afterword to the story in The Best of Gene Wolfe, Wolfe says "I decided to put the hot-air balloon in the Dark Ages, and I threw in a few other things too."  The text of the story itself includes no clues that I could find as to where or when it might take place.  

"Straw" demonstrates why Gene Wolfe is widely recognized as some kind of genius; as in so much of his fiction, "Straw" is written in an easy, smooth, pleasant style, but again and again the reader is confronted with mysteries and surprises.  Wolfe doesn't straightforwardly explain all the odd circumstances of this world, which the narrator and characters take for granted the way we take computers and the internal combustion engine and penicillin for granted--we readers learn about them from the characters' natural speech as the story moves along.  Our narrator, Jerr, a soldier, describes the day on which he first killed a man, when he was the youngest member of a small company of mercenaries armed with armed such weapons as the "pincer-mace" and pikes whose heads can be shot by some sort of spring or maybe electric mechanism who travel over the countryside via a hot-air balloon whose fire is fed by straw.

(I feel like there are a lot of weird maces in Wolfe's fiction; Baldanders fights with a high tech mace in The Book of the New Sun, and the narrator of The Wizard Knight fights with a mace that looks much like a sword.)

Times are tough for the mercs, and they are hungry, and their talk suggests that they are quite willing to turn bandit, attack some people, and then turn cannibal!  When they have run out of straw they land at a villa, and meet the baron who lives there, the baron hires them because there is some kind of war or unrest nearby and the villa could be attacked very soon.  There the story ends--we never find out who Jerr ended up killing, how the relationship between the mercenary company and the baron's household worked out, if there was a siege or battle at the villa, etc.  

"Straw" is a great piece of writerly technique.  The "problem" with it is that it feels like a chapter out of an awesome picaresque adventure novel or one of a series of brilliant short stories about Jerr and his comrades, in each of which Jerr learns some lesson or has some major life experience or the company faces some formidable challenge or something.  But "Straw" is all we have of this potential epic or saga.

Besides reappearing in several Wolfe collections, "Straw" has been included in a number of anthologies, including anthologies of military SF.        

"Old Hundredth" by Brian Aldiss (1960)

Science fiction is full of brute animals who have, thanks to human design or human calamities, evolved into bipedally walking, talking, tool-using people.  We just read one of Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of Mankind stories, in which such uplifted or enhanced animal people are a major element, and who could forget Edmond Hamilton's 1946 cover story for Weird Tales, "Day of Judgment," in which nuclear war exterminated humanity but gave dogs and cats human intelligence and posture, or A. E. van Vogt's 1971 The Battle of Forever, set thousands of years in the future, when most of the Earth's inhabitants are intelligent bipedal hyenas, hippos, cheetahs, et al, the product of genetic engineering.  Well, "Old Hundredth" is another such tale.   

It is the far future, long after the Moon drifted out of Earth orbit to circle the Sun, long after man dragged Venus into Earth orbit, even long after the final members of the human race essentially ceased to exist by abandoning their physical bodies to "merge with the texture of space itself," employing science to achieve immaterial immortality!  Today the Earth's population consists largely of the products of man's genetic engineering, including intelligent mole people and giant ground sloth people who are practically immortal.  The protagonist of "Old Hundredth" is one of those elephant-sized megatheriums; she has devoted her centuries-long life to the study of music columns.  These columns of energy stud the surface of the Earth, and when an intelligent enough creature approaches one, it produces music composed by its creator, who died in the production of it, making use of the same technology by which humans "merged" with the universe.  The giant sloth has travelled the world on the back of a baluchitherium, examining all the music columns she can get to.  She is in telepathic contact with a mentor, a dolphin who has lived even longer than she, who helps guide her musical studies and offers her advice and can transmit images to her brain and so on.

Over like nine pages Aldiss gives us all this background and sets a sad sort of mood--the sloth's main purpose is to compose her own death song and become a music column herself, she feels sad that the humankind who created her and all her comrades is no more, etc.  Her mentor hints that humans were a bunch of jerks who deserve no credit for anything; their disagreement foreshadows the melodramatic climax and sentimental denouement that come in the story's last five or so pages.  You see, human personalities, when they "projected themselves into the pattern" of the universe, were stored in glowing columns of energy much like the music columns; each of these energy columns houses many human personalities.  Most of the genetically engineered animals who inherited the Earth are meek, and docile and unambitious, but the bears aspire to be like humans.  They stick their heads in the energy columns to gain human energy and they scavenge the world's ruins, seeking old human technological devices to study and refurbish as part of their efforts to rebuild a human-like civilization.  When the sloth lady returns to her home, an old ruin, she finds within a bear with a knife intent on carrying away the ancient video screens and whatnot that litter it.  The human-hating mentor dolphin opposes the project of the bears and tries to take over the sloth's body so she will crush the bear with her superior size and weight, but the sloth is a pacifist who resists her mentor's control and lets the bear get away.

Enraged, the dolphin severs all ties with its ward, ending an intimate, formative relationship that has lasted hundreds of years.  The sloth then elects to die and becomes a music column that produces a piece of music associated with the 100th Psalm.

This story is OK.  I have to admit that, compared to Wolfe's earthy and alive, brisk, economical and direct "Straw," which sounds like an authentic natural voice and manages to be both emotionally familiar and culturally alien, and which leaves you wishing it was much longer, "Old Hundredth" feels long, tedious, pretentious, manipulative, tendentious and self-consciously literary; when you finish it you are glad it is over and kind of wish it had been shorter.  But it is not bad.

"Old Hundredth" made its debut in New Worlds in the period when John Carnell was editor.  It has appeared in a giant stack of Aldiss collections, as well as many anthologies with "best" in their titles.     

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Four stories by critically-acclaimed members of the SF community that are well worth reading, but the Cordwainer Smith and Gene Wolfe stories stand head and shoulders above the Lafferty and Aldiss contributions, I think largely because they are grounded in real human emotion and not gimmicks and high-level philosophizing--Jerr and Casher O'Neill are real people whose emotions and experiences we can instinctively understand, while the alien brats and an intelligent immortal sloth music historian are just artificial constructions propped up to illustrate some abstract or esoteric theme. 

1947 Weird Tales by C H Thompson, R Bradbury, A Derleth, R Bloch & M W Wellman

I love the cover of the November 1946 issue of Weird Tales, the work of Boris Dolgov.  I love the colors, for one thing.  And of course I love the long-limbed female figure, the contemplative fishman, and the fun sea mountain with its arches and spires, and the sea dragon is just perfect.  Very fine!

Behind its terrific cover this issue also offers stories by many writers we are interested in here at MPorcius Fiction Log, so let's embrace the weird and check them out!

"Spawn of the Green Abyss" by C. Hall Thompson 

The gorge cover painting of this issue of Weird Tales illustrates C. Hall Thompson's "Spawn of the Green Abyss."  In March of 2020 I read Thompson's story "The Will of Claude Ashur" and quite liked it.  So I approach this one with some hope.

"Spawn of the Green Abyss" is the sealed testimonial, to be opened after his death, of a brain surgeon who has just been convicted of the murder of his wife and is scheduled to be executed!  He tells us that he welcomes his imminent death because he sees extinction as a release from a life burdened with knowledge no man should ever have to bear!  (Whereas classic science fiction romanticizes the quest for knowledge and suggests that knowledge of the universe makes your life better, in a Lovecraftian tale a guy who learns something new about the universe typically gets killed or driven insane.)

In his memoir of 24 or so pages the narrator relates the hellish adventure he experienced in the tiny seaside town of Kalesmouth in New Jersey, greatest state in the Union.  Our boy went there for a nice long rest, needing to relieve the stress built up sawing open people's skulls and digging around in their grooves and ridges.  In Kalesmouth he became fascinated by a big old house on the tip of the peninsula, a decrepit and sinister pile he was told was home to reclusive old Lazarus Heath, retired sailor, and his beautiful daughter Cassandra, whom he brought back from overseas after being shipwrecked on some Atlantic island for over a year.  One night, dark and graceful Cassandra with her black eyes and black hair came to the brain surgeon's bungalow to ask for his help--her father was quite ill.  Doc tended to Mr. Heath for two weeks, up until his death, at the same time falling in love with the mysterious Cassandra.  The Heath case was an odd one; not only would this old codger be taciturn for long stretches and then deliriously babbling about some submarine goddess, but he had scaly skin, like a fish's, and weird openings in his neck, like gills!  When nobody was looking he would sneak away to a cove behind the house where there were some queer old pillars, and it was there that, on the very day our narrator proposed to Cassandra, Lazarus Heath was found dead, though the narrator's autoposy showed no sign of what killed him.

Cassandra and our hero married and moved to New York City, but it wasn't long before Cassandra convinced her husband they should move back to the huge and fish-smelly Heath House.  There, as the months went by, Cassandra grew distant from her husband, spending as much time as possible alone, glaring at him with hate-filled eyes when she thought he was trying to get into her father's locked library, the key to which hung from a necklace she always wore.  It was as if the hideous old house, and the sea that nearly surrounded it, was stealing Cassandra from him.  Cassie even began developing scales and gills like her father!

The stormy night the surgeon learned Cassandra was pregnant, and she collapsed after telling him it was not his child, the brain surgeon took the key and got into the library, to read Lazarus Heath's diary and learn the horrible truth of Cassandra's origin and the threat to all mankind that lurks beneath the waves!  From the library window our sawbones watched climb up from the cove the creature which had fathered the thing growing in Cassandra's womb, a slimy blob monster like an unholy fusion of reptile and amoeba!  Only by killing Cassandra, who in a lucid moment begs for death, can the surgeon sever the connection to our surface world of this prince of a diabolical race long exiled to the briny deep and send it back from whence it came.

"Spawn of the Green Abyss" is a very good Lovecraftian story.  Thompson is a skilled writer: the tale is thick with atmosphere thanks to Thompson's powerful descriptions of the settings and characters, and he ably uses such elements as Greek mythology (the sirens from The Odyssey are, we learn in Heath's forbidden library, based on the evil beings who in ancient times were banished to the abyss--in the story they use their seductive songs to win the aid of such people as Lazarus and Cassandra Heath in their campaign to conquer the surface world) and our anxieties about sex to add dimensions of interest and drama to the story.  I can definitely recommend this one to all you fans of Yog-Sothery out there.

"Spawn of the Green Abyss" was reprinted in Kurt Singer's 1968 anthology Tales of the Uncanny, the cover of which incorporates one of those troll dolls designed by Thomas Dam that are now (I hear) the basis for major motion pictures.  Robert M. Price selected it for 1992's Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos, and S. T. Joshi included the story in his huge (over 600 pages) 2014 anthology A Mountain Walked.    

"Let's Play 'Poison'" by Ray Bradbury 

This is a good but not particularly remarkable story of only three pages or so.  A teacher quits teaching after a mob of his students murders one of their classmates.  He conceives a somewhat irrational hatred of children.  When, after seven years of retirement, he is dragged back into the teaching profession for a brief stint as a substitute, his hostile attitude and rage at their childish games quickly inspires among his students a powerful antipathy towards him.  The kids' campaign of harassment, by chance or by design, climaxes in the teacher's death, which Bradbury marks with a clever little gimmick.  

A solid piece of work, "Let's Play 'Poison'" has been reprinted many times in Bradbury collections and in a few anthologies.  This is my opportunity to point out to those who don't already know that the surreal image on the 1972 Japanese edition of Bradbury's 1947 collection Dark Carnival features a woman's bare ass.  Lewd!  

"A Collector of Stones" by August Derleth

I have passed a just but merciless verdict on several weak or actually bad Derleth stories at this blog, but am happy to report that this five-page story is inoffensive, even mildly enjoyable. 

"A Collector of Stones" is a light-hearted humor story.  A fat rich guy who has a big estate in the country is driven by a mania to collect.  His eccentric passion is to collect stones, nothing fancy, just mundane paving stones and the like.  He has built entire houses on his estate out of the stones he collects, and hundreds of feet of meandering walks.  

One day he finds four stones in a remote wood, stones that will be perfect for the walk he is currently laying.  He doesn't realize that he has stumbled on a decayed family cemetery, these are gravestones, the names on them being almost effaced.  The story's gimmick is that after he has laid them in his stone path the ghosts whose graves he has unwittingly robbed try to bring the stones back to where they belong.

Better than average among the Derleth stories I have read; I didn't actually laugh at any of the jokes, but I didn't find them irritatingly bad, either.  "A Collector of Stones" has been reprinted in a few Derleth collections, including 1948's Not Long for this World and That is Not Dead, a 2009 collection with an intro by David Drake you can read at Drake's website here that describes Drake's meeting with Derleth and Derleth's influence on Drake's career.        

"Lizzie Borden Took an Axe..." by Robert Bloch

The eighth page of this issue of Weird Tales, nestled between a full-page ad for a truss ("Quick help for Rupture!") and a full-page ad for the Rosicrucians ("Are You in Tune with the Infinite?") is a full page ad for a radio show, Stay Tuned for Terror.  Stay Tuned for Terror was a 15-minute program which presented dramatizations of stories by Robert Bloch.  "Lizzie Borden Took an Axe..." was one such story and you can listen to the radio version of it at the internet archive here, and read an article about Stay Tuned for Terror by Karl Schadow in The Old Radio Times here.  

"Lizzie Borden Took an Axe..." is an acceptable though pedestrian story.  Our narrator is in love with a woman, Anita, who lives in a big decrepit house with her eccentric uncle, a dude who is reputed to be a wizard who puts hexes on people's farms.  The uncle keeps Anita under tight control, forbidding her marriage to the narrator.  Anita also claims that in her dreams an incubus in the form of a black mist comes to harass her.

One day Anita telephones our hero in a panic, and he rushes over to the creepy old house to find the uncle dead, his head demolished by a blow from an axe.  Anita's description of her discovery of the body reminds the narrator of the story of Lizzie Borden, and Bloch uses up a page and a half of the six-page story relating the celebrated Borden murder case.  Anita and the narrator separate when looking for clues, and when he sees Anita again she has a black mist about her face and the axe in her hands, and is apparently stalking him!  Our narrator overpowers Anita, the mist vanishes and she faints, and then our hero has to consider if maybe the incubus is real and has been possessing Anita, forcing her to kill, or if stress is making her crazy to murder people and him crazy enough to see the black mist.  If the incubus is real, presumably it was an incubus that fifty or whatever years ago drove Lizzie Borden to massacre her parents!

The narrator falls asleep, and when he wakes up Anita has been slain with the axe, presumably by him.  Was he also possessed by the incubus?  Or is he just a nut?  

A routine piece of work.  Is there really any reason to cobble together the Lizzie Borden story with satanism and wizardry?  Feels arbitrary.  "Lizzie Borden Took an Axe..." has appeared in a bunch of Bloch collections, like The Skull of the Marquis de Sade, and anthologists like Peter Haining and Martin H. Greenberg have also reprinted it.

"Frogfather" by Manly Wade Wellman 

Ranson Cuff is a fat guy everybody hates.  The richest man in this stretch of swamp country, Cuff made his money catering to Northerners who come down here to hunt and fish at his camps, and now is a money lender who holds the mortgages to many of the locals' homes and boats.  The narrator tells the tale of Cuff's last day, when he was a teenager, working for Cuff, practically his slave, to help his aunt pay off her debt to the man.  

Cuff loves frog's legs, and on that memorable night he, the narrator, and an Indian who speaks better English than either Cuff or our hero but ended up in Cuff's employ, set out on a boat to hunt frogs with which to stuff Cuff's pie hole.  Cuff directs his paddlers to a spot the Indian warns him to avoid, because it is there that resides Khongabassi, the father of all frogs who has lived since the beginning of time.  Cuff thinks this is ridiculous nonsense, and fires the Indian on the spot.  Of course, around the bend in the river, the boat is overturned by a frog at least nine feet long which carries Cuff down to its glowing lair but permits the narrator to escape.  The Indian finds the narrator and together they must contrive a story of how Cuff vanished that won't bring more ignorant white men to the lair of the Frogfather.

The plot elements of this switcheroo story (a guy who hunts little frogs is hunted by a big frog!) are of course old and obvious, but Wellman gives the setting and the characters personalities, and he treats the material with seriousness and sincerity, and so I enjoyed it.  "Frogfather" presents a strong contrast to Bloch's "Lizzie Borden Took an Axe..."; Bloch gives his characters no personality at all and he doesn't bring old ideas like haunted houses and demons and wizards to life by employing them skillfully and sincerely--instead he draws attention to how well worn they are and begs the reader's forgiveness for using them by having his narrator say recursive "meta" stuff like, "There are no legend-haunted houses looming on lonely hillsides.  Yet Anita lived in one....There are no gaunt, fanatical old men who brood over black books...yet Anita's uncle, Gideon Godfrey, was such a man."  A lazy strategy that reminds you you are reading a story instead of helping you get caught up in the story.

"Frogfather" has been reprinted in two Wellman collections and the anthology 100 Creepy Little Creatures AKA 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories.  As I have said before, Wellman is somebody whose work I should try to become more familiar with.           

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A pretty good crop of stories.  After my wishy washy response to the stories I read in Avon Fantasy Reader a couple of blogposts ago, it is nice to read some short stories I can get excited about.  Dorothy McIlwraith, who edited Weird Tales from 1940 to the magazine's demise in 1954, put together some decent art and fiction for this issue. 

More short stories in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log. 

The Scarf by Robert Bloch

"But there's one thing I'm curious about, Dan. With all your perception of the feminine mind, why do you hate women?"

I didn't have any answers ready for that one.

He leaned closer. "You don't happen to be a homosexual, do you?"

In our last episode I was looking at the covers of Avon paperbacks advertised in Donald A. Wollheim's Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13, and I made note of the 1949 Avon edition of Robert Bloch's 1947 novel The Scarf--the Avon people, always appealing to readers' most prurient interests, had retitled the novel The Scarf of Passion.  I've already read quite a few Bloch pieces during the period of this blog's existence, and decided to give this novel a stab.  The internet archive has a scan of the 1966 Fawcett Gold Medal printing, which isfdb tells us is a revised edition, and that is the one I read on the screen of my aging laptop.

The Scarf is the first person narrative of Daniel Morley, novelist, misogynist, and serial killer!  The main narrative consists of Daniel Morley's account of his continent-spanning career as a writer, and is interspersed with italicized passages from his "black notebook."  Bloch, the author of Psycho, is well-known for grounding much of his fiction on psychological bases, and some of the black notebook entries describe the events in Morley's youth that apparently warped his mind and turned him into a murderer of women--for example, being scolded and humiliated by his mother for wetting his bed or "playing doctor" with another nine-year-old.  Morley comes right out and tells you that according to psychological theory events that happen to you as a child determine what your life and personality are like, asserting that he had no free will and was driven by the actions of others to kill lots of people; it is unclear to what extent Bloch himself believes this sort of stuff.  A source of some tension in the novel is the fact that Bloch puts into the mouth of an intelligent but insane killer criticisms and unflattering depictions of psychology, women, and the entertainment and publishing industries, and we readers are unsure to what extent Bloch shares these criticisms and is satirizing psychoanalysts, dames, and people who work in radio, publishing and the movie biz, and to what extent he is lampooning the skeptics, sexists, and critics who hold such views. 

The most important formative event in young Morley's life was his relationship with one of his teachers when he was 18, the 38-year-old Miss Frazer.  As he tells it in the passage from the black notebook that begins the novel, the lonely spinster fell in love with the clever and handsome Daniel and offered him special individual lessons, teaching him to scan poetry and encouraging him in his writing; ultimately  she tried to seduce him right before graduation, getting him tipsy and offering him a gift--a maroon scarf.  In what the kids call a "cringeworthy" moment, Frazer asked Daniel to kiss her, and when he complied she turned it into a French kiss  Teach, totally off her rocker, declared they should commit suicide together in repentance for having soiled their pure love.  Frazer died, and Daniel barely escaped with his life; traumatized, he fled his home town, abandoned any idea of attending college, and bummed around the country for years.      

Some of the black notebook passages are Morley's accounts of his annoying surrealistic dreams--the worst parts of the 160-page novel--and others are Morley's musings about the nature of murder and famous killers of the past, like Jack the Ripper and the likely mythical Spring-Heeled Jack.   

The main plot: Like ten years after fleeing home, Morley is in Minneapolis and uses the maroon scarf to strangle Rena, a silly gullible married woman with whom he was having an affair while her husband was in prison.  With the money he steals from Rena he hopes to get his writing career really going--he has written a story based on Rena's sad life.  He flees the scene of the crime to Chicago.  In Chi-town, while working as a cabbie, he meets and seduces Hazel, a model.  Hazel has friends in radio and publishing, and she gets him a job at a radio station writing ads and jingles, and even helps hook him up with a publisher in New York.  Morley pens a novel based on Hazel's life, and then murders her late at night on the El--he tries to strangle her with the maroon scarf, but in her efforts to escape she falls off the platform to her death.

Our narrator hurries to New York, where he gets all mixed up with people in and around the publishing business.  The significant members of this cast of characters are 1) a nymphomaniac, Constance Ruppert, 2) Constance's former husband, psychoanalyst Jeff Ruppert, and 3) Patricia Collins, novelist, editor and agent at the firm publishing Morley's book, as well as Jeff's fiancé.  Jeff, master head shrinker, can sense from reading Morley's book that our narrator is an expert on women's psychology, and also that he hates women.  Jeffy boy also warns Morley to avoid Constance, whom he says is dangerously insane.  Morley tries, but fails, to give Constance a wide berth--Constance has fallen in love with him, and he can't just give her the brush off because she has figured out what happened to Hazel back in the Windy City, and blackmails Morley into agreeing to marry her!  While out shopping for a house, Morley puts the kibosh on their nuptials by killing Constance with the scarf and burning down the house, with her in it, to destroy the evidence.  Clever Jeff spots some holes in Morley's alibi, but Morley's smart thinking throws the analyst off the trail...or so he thinks!

Complicating all this business in the Big Apple is the fact that Morley has fallen in love with Patricia Collins.  It looks like Pat (as everybody calls her) will be out of Morley's life for good when she gets transferred to California to manage the publishing house's office there; Jeff goes with her to open a practice with his father, who conveniently already lives out on the Left Coast.  But then a few months later Morley moves to Tinseltown himself after a big movie producer who saw an early draft of Morley's new novel (this one based on Constance's life) bought the rights to make a movie out of it.  This Hollywood big shot hires Morley to be part of the team punching up the script that is based (increasingly loosely) on his half-finished novel.

In Hollyweird, Morley's psyche begins to crack.  Working alongside a stable of more experienced screenwriters turns out to be stressful, especially since Morley doesn't have a woman in his life right now to base his writing on.  He pursues Pat when Jeff is busy setting up his new practice, and she gives him mixed signals--is she just trying to be his friend, or is she having trouble choosing between him and Jeff?  Morley becomes obsessed with the maroon scarf, wearing it everywhere, even when alone at home banging away at the typewriter.  He keeps seeing some guy following him, but is this guy real, or just a guilt- and fear-generated hallucination?  A creepy photographer who collects photos of mangled murder victims and voraciously reads mystery novels tries to make friends with Morley, thinking they share an interest in grue and gore, and Morley wonders if this guy can read on his face that he is a killer.

In the end Morley's lust to kill overcomes him, and he tries, and fails, to murder some waitress he picked up while drunk; a few days later the waitress finds her way to that ever-suspicious shrink Jeff and Jeff lays a trap into which Morley falls.  Then comes the surprise ending--Morley's black notebook is full of delusions and fantasies.  It wasn't Miss Frazer who tried to force herself on him and then murder him in a suicide pact, he tried to force himself on her and then kill both of them, but failed to kill either of them.  More surprising than the fact that Miss Frazer is still alive is the fact that she is such a softie that after hearing of Morley's publishing success she wrote a letter to his publisher to congratulate him, even though he tried to rape and kill her!  

I don't care for these endings that pull the rug out from under you, telling you in the last chapter that the stuff you've been thinking was the very foundation of the whole book is in fact a trick and a lie.  Especially when the real explanation--Miss Frazer was just a nice lady--is more boring than the grim scenario the book had been fostering, that Miss Frazer was a murderous mental case with sexual issues who turned another person into a murderous mental case with sexual issues!  What kind of horror story undermines its single most disturbing scene in its final pages?  What a let down!  Bloch's deflating ending also feels cheap, because I don't think there were any clues suggesting the black notebook might not be legit.

A particular problem with the ending revelation of The Scarf is how it further muddles whatever opinion about psychology Bloch may have been trying to put across and whatever explanation he might be presenting for why Morley started killing women.  These issues are the heart of the novel, and if what Bloch is trying to say is not clear, the book falls flat.  Now, if Miss Frazer didn't drive Morley crazy, does that mean psychology is bunk, that it is not childhood events that made Morley a killer, but that Morley was just evil from birth?  Or was it Morley's mother who turned him into a woman-hating woman killer?  If his mother is to blame, why did Bloch spend so many pages on the relatively minor figure of Frazer instead of on the pivotal character, Mom?  That is not good storytelling!  And if Morley lied in his black notebook about Frazer, maybe he lied about his mother, too.  Do we really have any idea why Morley became a misogynist serial killer?

(The fact that Jeff turns out to be some kind of mastermind detective as well as an expert analyst who even gives a little speech at the end of the novel explaining that Morley's writing is a means of achieving catharsis and the scarf was a symbol of death, suggests Bloch highly respects psychoanalysis, so I guess that sort of answers that question, but not in a satisfying way.)  

A competent psychological crime story for most of its length, OK but no big deal.  The pace is deliberate--there are no real action scenes or suspense scenes--but it never drags, either.  There is little gore and there are no sex scenes, so if you are looking for those kinds of thrills, look elsewhere--the covers of the paperback editions are much sexier than the contents.  As I have suggested, The Scarf contains many of the elements we have come to expect from Bloch: quite a lot of psychology blah blah blah, some social satire and goofing on industries with which Bloch was familiar--radio, movies, publishing--those references to famous real-life mysterious criminals, and even a few puns.  

Do I have anything interesting to say about this pretty conventional book?  Well, let us consider the possibility that Bloch means to portray Morley as a man who is a repressed homosexual.  The Scarf is full of snide remarks about "queers," and Jeff directly asks Morley if he is a homosexual, something Morley denies, so the topic is right out there in the open.  Morley is a man who is an expert on how women think; now I guess people don't say this kind of stuff anymore, but it used to be normal for people to suggest that gay men are "inverts"--male in body but woman in mind.  (Proust uses the term "invert," and early in The Scarf, when he is working as a cabbie, Morley carries a copy of Proust around with him to appear more intellectual.)  Maybe Morley is an expert on women's psychology because, in a sense, he is a woman.  

Then we have the fact that Morley hates women, and is not sexually attracted to women.  That gay men hate women is a recognized stereotype that, perhaps, Bloch is employing here.  And there is evidence that Morley has little or no sexual interest in women: Constance admits that Morley "can't bear to touch" her unless he is "crazy mad, or crazy drunk," going so far as to tell him, "I want you, and I'm going to have you, and you'll get drunk if it's the only way, every single night for me...." and that waitress is all over Morley, but he is disgusted by her, his only desire is to slay her.

Now, you will object that Morley falls in love with Miss Frazer and with Pat Collins and wants to marry and have sex with both of them.  Well, Frazer is old, and maybe Morley sees her as some kind of mother substitute?  Isn't there some stereotype about gay men and their mothers?  My theory is on firmer ground with Pat Collins, who not only has the ambiguous name but is repeatedly described in ways that are stereotypically masculine--she manages an office and wears suits, for example.  On the same page on which Morley talks about what an effective business woman Pat is he also informs us that Pat has "blunt, babyish thumbs;" a weird thing to include, I thought when I read it.  Maybe Pat is a man substitute!

The other potentially interesting thing about The Scarf is the fact that Bloch revised it.  What differences might there be between the two versions?  There is a sneering reference to Bob Dylan in the 1966 edition I read that must not have been in the 1947 edition, but there must have been more changes.  Is one edition more sexy, more sexist, more gory, more homophobic?  Or did Bloch just try to improve the style?  

(Apparently S. T. Joshi, the premier scholar of weird fiction, has written an essay about Bloch in which he deals with The Scarf--maybe I should track that down.) 

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Not a bad novel, but I can't say you should seek out The Scarf unless you are some kind of Robert Bloch completist.

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I'm still reading manga about the challenging emotional lives of Japanese schoolgirls, and today I can recommend one that is less perverse, less depressing and less subversive than the ones I have been recommending in past blog posts.  High Score Girl (AKA Hi Score Girl) is about a love triangle among teenagers in the early '90s who are obsessed with video games, especially the Street Fighter games.  The jokes are funny, the relationships are touching, and maybe you will be inspired to fire up MAME on your old laptop and relive your youthful days playing fighting games at the local arcade.   

Stories by F B Long, R Cummings, A Derleth and C Simak & C Jacobi handpicked by Donald A Wollheim

At the time of writing, the wikipedia page on Frank Belknap Long includes an image of the sexalicious cover of the 13th issue of Donald A. Wollheim's Avon Fantasy Reader, a periodical that reprinted old stories and ran for 18 issues from 1947 to 1952.  Those blonde bombshells are hard to resist, and seeing as the MPorcius Fiction Log staff has been investigating the writing of Long anyway, we have the perfect excuse to give in to their charms.  With the help of everybody's favorite website, the internet archive, let's flip through this 1950 magazine and read stories Wollheim thought worth reprinting by people whose names we recognize.

(Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 also reprints Donald Wandrei's 1932 "Raiders of the Universes," which we talked about back in 2017.)  

"The Body-Masters" AKA "The Love Slave and the Scientists" by Frank Belknap Long (1935) 

"The Love Slave and the Scientists" first appeared under its less salacious original title, "The Body-Masters," in Weird Tales, alongside stories by Robert E. Howard (one I've written about), Edmond Hamilton and August Derleth.  Wollheim here in Avon Fantasy Reader suggests it is a serious science fiction story, asking the question of how science might help solve the problems of loneliness and stale marriages, and how people might react to a scientific resolution to their sexual relationship problems.  Sounds good--I've got my fingers crossed! 

Long sets his tale in the 57th century, a time when high divorce rates are a major cause of concern for the authorities.  The "Dictator of Emotional Arts" diagnoses the problem: men want variety in sex partners, but when a man cheats on his wife, she gets jealous.  So a means is found to allow men to experience novelty in their sexual relations that will not arouse their wives' jealousy--sex robots!  No sensible woman would be jealous over a machine, the men of the world reason.

The plot of the story follows a surgeon, V67, who embraces the idea of the "Mechanical Companions," and spends his free time with one, relieving tension and introducing variety into his love life.  As we follow him from the "garden" where the Mechanical Companions are to be enjoyed to work and then  home, we learn a little about life in the 57th century, like the mass transit system of the future and the way the government uses eugenic breeding and surgery on the glands of excitable people to keep the population docile.  Back home V67 gets a surprise and we get our predictable twist ending--V67's wife is being visited by one of the newest line of sex robots, Mechanical Companions built in the form of men with the purpose of improving the lives of women who are bored with or ignored by their husbands!  V67's liberal attitude about Mechanical Companions goes right out the window and he destroys the masculine robot in a fit of rage!

The "points" of the story seem to be that both men and women are responsible for relationship problems and that no government, no matter how invasive and tyrannical, can do much to change human nature.  As my father learned that time he suggested to my mother that they watch a Gloria Estefan concert on TV, and I learned when I suggested to my wife that we watch a Sophia Loren movie, women really will get jealous over a machine, and men are probably no better.  I can't argue with Long's themes, but I can't say that they are surprising or exciting, either, and I also can't say his prose style, pacing or atmosphere are anything better than serviceable. 

We'll judge this story, which isn't doesn't quite wear out its welcome, to be merely acceptable filler.  For some reason Leo Margolies chose "The Body-Masters" for his 1964 anthology of stories from Weird Tales, which was also printed in a (truncated) German edition.

"The Curious Case of Norton Hoorne" by Ray Cummings (1921)

In August of 2018 I read three novels and eleven stories by Ray Cummings--damn, I was productive in those days!  Let's get another Cummings piece under our belts, one Wollheim suggests is one of the "unusual off-trail stories" that (according to Wollheim) characterized Cummings's early work.  (Click the "Ray Cummings" link above to learn how Frederick Pohl characterized Cummings's late work.)     

Norton Hoorne was one of the world's great concert pianists.  In this story our narrator, music lover Dr. William Manning (a medical doctor, not an Ed.D. or whatever) and one of Hoorne's best friends, tells us the heretofore secret truth about Hoorne's death!

The year is 1900!  Manning and another of Hoorne's closest friends, Dr. Johns (also a medical doctor and not a doctor of education or something), are called to Hoorne's beautiful Manhattan flat on Riverside Drive by his distraught housekeeper to find their buddy in a cataleptic state!  The musician doesn't seem to be breathing, and he has no pulse, but there is no positive sign he is dead, either.  Johns has an inkling of what is going on.  You see, just a week ago, Hoorne told Johns that he (Hoorne) had developed a new kind of music that could facilitate the departure of his soul from his body so he could travel in the astral plane!

The two sawbones do some detective work and experiment by playing the piano--by tickling just the right ivories Manning can bring Hoorne's soul closer to his body so he can, haltingly, talk to them--and solve the mystery.  Hoorne was in love with one of his pupils, the beautiful blonde daughter of a rich financier, but said moneybags wanted his little girl to marry some English baron, rendering the dreams of these piano-playing lovebirds null and void.  Just this morning, the docs discover via their sleuthing, that Hoorne's sweetheart was found dead by her family--the docs suspect she is not really most sincerely dead, but just travelling the astral plane hoping to be reunited with Hoorne!  Hoorne tried to join her on the other side, but something went awry and his soul is still anchored to his body.  With Manning's help at the keys, Hoorne completely severs his ties to this mortal realm and joins his beloved in some other universe.

Acceptable filler, I suppose.  "The Curious Case of Norton Hoorne" made its debut in Argosy and was only ever reprinted in the Avon Fantasy Reader.  

"The Thing That Walked on the Wind" by August Derleth (1933)

This one debuted in Strange Tales alongside stories by Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard and has reappeared in several Derleth collections and some odd theme anthologies, like one that collects SF stories by non-Canadians set in the Great White North, another about the Wendigo, and one full of stories about Ithaqua.  (You'll remember I read a story by Brian Lumley about Ithaqua, "Born of the Winds.")  I guess Derleth invented Ithaqua, but based it on Algernon Blackwood's story "The Wendigo."

Wollheim comes right out in his intro to the story in Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 and admits "The Thing That Walked on the Wind" is a pastiche of H. P. Lovecraft and Blackwood, and Derleth lazily mentions these big names in his story, waving his inspirations in our faces.  Derleth's tale, like so many Lovecraftian stories, consists of documents like official statements, testimonials and/or newspaper clippings.  This time out the primary frame is the statement of a Mountie, division chief John Dalhousie; most of Dalhousie's statement is a reproduction of a report from Constable Robert Norris; Norris in turn includes some brief newspaper stories in his report.  Norris, Dalhousie tells us, disappeared soon after submitting that report, and his body was found in a snow bank seven or eight months later.

In February of 1930 the entire population of the little town of Stillwater mysteriously vanished.  Exactly one year later, Constable Norris was near Stillwater and saw something moving in the sky--three bodies then fell to the earth near him, one that of a dead woman, the other two men who still barely clung to life.  The men turned out to be guys who were visiting Stillwater on that day everybody vanished.

By interrogating one of these guys, Allison Wentworth, when he briefly wakes up before dying, as well as the local doctor (of medicine) called upon to examine these three airborne Canadians, Norris learned that the people of Stillwater worshipped an air elemental, Ithaqua, going so far as to dedicate human sacrifices to this monster.  Wentworth and his friend had the bad luck to arrive in Stillwater the night of the big sacrifice; when they tried to rescue the sacrificial victim, a young woman, the monster was so angry it carried away all the inhabitants of Stillwater as well as the two would-be-heroes!  Wentworth and his friend were held captive by Ithaqua up in the stratosphere for an entire year, and accompanied the monster on its journeys around the world, visiting Ithaqua-worshipers in many occult (like R'lyeh or the Plateau of Leng) and mundane (like London or Lebanon) locations.  The year long world tour over, Wentworth and his pal were gently left on the Earth's surface, doomed to die in the warmth because Ithaqua had changed their body chemistry to be more suitable to the cold of the upper air.  (Don't ask why they didn't die in London or R'lyeh--Ithaqua works in mysterious ways!)  Wentworth informed Norris that since he too had glimpsed the air elemental, Ithaqua would no doubt kill him as well.    

After Norris's report, Dalhousie presents the evidence that Norris was also taken around the world by Ithaqua for some months before being left to die in Canada.

The core plot of this story is standard and obvious, but classic stuff that a good writer struck by inspiration and willing to put in some labor can turn into a fun and/or striking piece of fiction.  Derleth unfortunately buries that workable core under layer after layer of dry frame story and does nothing to add emotion or excitement to the traditional framework he is working with--he doesn't tweak or subvert or embroider the standard-issue plot at all, and his style and tone are bland.  None of the characters have personality or motivation, there are no memorable images, Derleth doesn't create any atmosphere or paint a picture of the setting, etc.

"The Thing That Walked on the Wind" is a formulaic, by-the-numbers Lovecraftian story to which the author adds nothing new or special.  Barely acceptable filler. 

"The Street That Wasn't There" AKA "The Lost Street" by Clifford Simak and Carl Jacobi (1941)

The famous coronavirus, the mass looting and rioting, and the increase in violent crime in cities we have witnessed in the last year or so have had me thinking about Clifford D. Simak's foreword to Roger Elwood's 1973 Future City.  (You can read Future City at the indispensable internet archive.)  Simak suggested that the city had outlived its usefulness--it was full of crime, commuting to it was an expensive hassle, and you could do all your work from home via electronic communication anyway--so maybe the city was doomed to extinction as people fled urban life for the suburbs and rural areas.  I have to wonder if Simak's prediction might not be coming true.

But I digress.  Wollheim says that "The Street That Wasn't There," which first appeared in the short-lived magazine Comet under the title "The Lost Street," is a "fascinating mental game" and a "really off-trail story" that is based on the tension between the foundational philosophical concepts of materialism and idealism.  Our man Wollheim is a real salesman!

It is the horrible future world of 1960!  The Old World of Europe, Asia and Africa are wracked by war and plague, and these blights are beginning to afflict South America.  But American Johnathan Chambers knows almost nothing about the world crisis--he's been a recluse who refuses to read newspapers or listen to the radio for like twenty years.  Two decades ago he published a book on metaphysics that was so revolutionary his colleagues and the public hounded him out of the university!  This victim of cancel culture lives alone and talks to nobody; every night he takes a 45-minute walk on the same route at the same time, and all his neighbors have learned to not bother addressing him, even the store clerk who sells him a cigar every night at the exact same time.

But tonight Chambers gets home and looks at his watch to find he has come home 15 minutes early!  How did this happen?  Chambers lives by the clock; for years and years his walks have always begun at precisely 7:00 PM and ended precisely at 7:45!  Also, somehow, he forgot to buy his cigar!  

The next day Chambers figures out the psyche-breaking and world-shattering truth.  That career-ending book he wrote twenty years ago posited that the world is the way it is because our minds force order upon matter--that bunch of molecules over there takes the form of a tree because we all expect it to be a tree, that bunch of molecules over there is an automobile because we expect to see an automobile there, etc.  Pushing this already dumb idea all the way out to la-la land, Chambers suggested that aliens from another dimension who had superior brain power could impose upon our universe their own vision of what our world should be like, and this way take over our dimension.  So the next night when Chambers goes out on his walk and realizes that the block with the cigar store has simply vanished he realizes that his speculation of an alien invasion has come to pass!  The world war and global plague that have yet to reach the United States must have killed off so many people that there are no longer enough human brains to enforce their will on this universe's matter, giving those evil aliens an opportunity to start crafting our matter into a world more suited to them!  (Or maybe twenty years of not talking to another human being has just driven Chambers insane?)

Chambers rushes home as the world around him changes.  There is no hope, smh, soon his house will vanish like all the other houses, and he will vanish like all the other Earth people.  Chambers knows that matter is never destroyed, only changed, so the molecules that are now him will soon be something else and he wonders if in his new form he will have consciousness or be a mere inert object.  

Better written and better structured than the rest of the stories I have talked about today, but still not exactly good; I guess I can give "The Lost Street" a grade of "OK."  "The Lost Street" has appeared in numerous Simak collections as well as a 1940s anthology edited by August Derleth and a 1970s one edited by Terry Carr.

   

**********

I'm feeling wishy washy today; I'm not comfortable definitively praising any of these stories or consigning them to the junk heap.  I have lost my passion...why should I need to keep it since what is kept must be adulterated?

Let's look for some fun in the back of the magazine!

In the back pages of Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 are some pages of ads, one of them listing dozens of Avon paperback books.  Some of these books are serious literature, what we might even call classics, like D. H. Lawrence's The First Lady Chatterley and A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad (we all love "When I Was One and Twenty," don't we?), and many are respectable mainstream fiction, like the works of W. Somerset Maughan or Howard Fast, or respectable genre literature, like the novels of Raymond Chandler or Cornell Woolrich ("William Irish" is one of Woolrich's pen names; I read I Married a Dead Man before I started this blog and I guess I liked it OK, though I remember very little of it; I actually remember the Barbara Stanwyck film of the novel more vividly.)  As you might say of Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 itself, the cover art of many of these publications seems to indicate that Avon saw as its target market those in search of salacious material.  Below I have reproduced some interesting specimens of such art.

As I write this, you can see several pages from the Naughty 90's Joke Book at an ebay auction 
here (scroll down) and judge how many belly laughs it might have provided 

       

Four luscious women and one sinister man sounds like a good recipe;
maybe I'll read the edition of Bloch's The Scarf available at the internet archive soon 

So many questions...

ICYMI: Joachim Boaz's Favorite Reads of 2020

Joachim Boaz's latest blog post is a run down of the ten SF novels and ten SF short stories he most enjoyed reading this year, and it is a good mix: fiction from a range of postwar decades written by some authors most well known for writing adventure capers, some best known for innovative new wave visions, and maybe a few authors who aren't so terribly well known.  You should check it out--you are almost bound to learn something new.

Three of Joachim's favorite pieces are things I myself have written about and recommend: Tanith Lee's 1979 novel Electric Forest, which I read in 2015, 1954's "Death of a Spaceman" by Walter M. Miller Jr., which like Joachim I also read this year, and Edmond Hamilton's 1952 "What's It Like Out There?" which I reread in 2017 when I was blogging about The Best of Edmond Hamilton, a volume edited by Hamilton's wife, Leigh Brackett (who also makes an appearance on Joachim's list!)