Richard Matheson: "Being," "The Test," and "Clothes Make the Man"

Back in October, the internet archive was down (it was a tough time, people!) so I went to Wonder Book to buy a cheap copy of the A. E. van Vogt fix-up novel The War Against the Rull because I wanted to compare its text to that of an anthology version of one of the component stories, "The Gryb" AKA "Repetition."  While there, I also bought a copy of Avram Davidson's The Masters of the Maze.  It turned out that the store was having some kind of "buy 2 paperbacks and get a 3rd free" sale, so I grabbed a decaying copy of Richard Matheson's The Shores of Space, Bantam A1571.  (I didn't have time to hunt through the shelves for something with a good cover.)  In honor of my cheapness and of the man who wrote Vincent Price's best movie and Steven Spielberg's best movie, let's read three stories from this freebie.

But first!  Links to the two stories in The Shores of Space which I've already blogged about: "The Last Day," and "Pattern for Survival." 

"Being" (1954)

"Being" debuted in an issue of If with an awesome meteor shower cover; Matheson's story is graced with some pretty chilling Virgil Finlay illustrations.

"Being" is an effective horror story that exploits the tension between city and country folk, depicts two marriages, convincingly portrays people under terrible stress, and includes two very common science fiction elements; I quite enjoyed it.

It is August, and married couple Les and Marian, Los Angelenos, are driving cross country to New York to visit Marian's family.  Matheson does a good job describing their discomfort and frustration as they drive through the deserts of the South West--the intolerable heat, the need to get off the highway due to construction and follow poorly maintained dirt roads, the ever present risk of the car overheating.  There ain't no air-conditioned Toyota Corolla or GPS in 1954!  On some remote road the couple get kidnapped and held captive in a makeshift zoo owned by a gas station owner!

"Being" is more than hicksploitation.  Merv, widower, war veteran, and gas station owner, is a prisoner himself--a telepathic blob monster from outer space is making him capture people so it can eat them, one man every two days!  (We encounter many blob monsters and telepathic aliens here at MPorcius Fiction Log.)  This is the first time Merv has ever captured a woman, and he is shaken to his core--he's already fed eight men to the blob monster but feeding it a woman feels like an even deeper level of degradation!  And Marian looks like his beloved wife Elsie!  

Matheson's descriptions of the psychology of our four characters as they struggle to survive in extraordinary circumstances, always trying to outwit or outfight each other, are compelling.  Merv and Les in particular are forced to balance the need to survive with their ideas of justice and duty.  All the characters act believably and it is easy to sympathize with any or all of them.

A quite good science fiction horror tale.  "Being" has been reprinted in a bunch of anthologies and Matheson collections, including another I own, Collected Stories Volume 2, where Matheson in an afterword talks about the genesis of the story and his efforts to turn it into a screenplay.

"The Test" (1954)

"The Test" first saw print in an issue of F&SF alongside Chad Oliver's "Transformer," a story I panned when I read it a few years ago, and an Edmond Hamilton story I have yet to read.  There is always new territory to explore!

It is the year 2003.  A law has been passed--old people, I guess 65 and older, have to take a comprehensive physical, mental, and psychological test every five years and those who fail are euthanized!  Our characters are a married couple with two kids and the husband's father, age 80.  The story dwells on ambiguity and ambivalence--the justification for the law is overpopulation and the way it strains resources, but of course there is reason to believe it was passed because many people are sick of having their elderly parents around.  The emotions of the married couple in the story are torn--the old man is a burden, a hassle, but at the same time his son still loves him.

This is only barely a SF story--for the most part it is a mainstream literary story about the relationships between adult children and their parents in our prosperous individualistic age in which family ties are weaker and people live longer, in which people want more and more freedom and (paradoxically) give the government more and more power in hopes of securing that freedom--generally at the expense of the freedom of others.  Matheson handles the material ably, and employs an economical style--every phrase and image is powerful, the story is just the right length and moves at just the right speed.  Thumbs up!      

This is another widely reprinted story.  "The Test" appears under the heading "Overpopulation" in Isaac Asimov Presents the Best Science Fiction Firsts, and in his afterword to the story in Collected Stories Volume 2, Matheson talks about F&SF editor Anthony Boucher's reaction to the story and tells us there was some interest in Italy in adapting the story for the screen, but Matheson doesn't know if anything came of it.

           

"Clothes Make the Man" (1951)

"Clothes Make the Man" debuted in the final issue of Damon Knight's short-lived magazine Worlds Beyond.  This is a silly filler story.

An ad exec guy is a real clotheshorse.  He has all his clothes custom tailored, even his undies.  He never takes off his hat, even inside, and however hot it is, he won't take off his jacket.  On a picnic his wife, brother, and sister-in-law take off their shoes and socks to wade in a stream, but he refuses.  

Anyway, it becomes apparent that the man can't function without his clothes.  If someone swipes his hat as a joke this wizard who is always coming up with spellbinding ad campaigns becomes an imbecile.  If he doesn't have shoes on he can barely walk.  The climax to the story is that the clothes come to life and start walking around without him, even doing work at the office and dating women; bereft of his clothes, the ad exec is a useless wreck, unable to even talk, in the hospital in steep decline. 

We also get a twist ending.  "Clothes Make the Man" is a first-person narrative; the narrator is at a party and the story of the clotheshorse is being told to him by the clotheshorse's heart-broken brother.  The narrator is very dismissive towards this poor bastard.  The twist ending is that the narrator is the suit of clothes, out on a date with the clotheshorse's wife.

The plot does not make any sense, but the story moves at a quick pace and all the individual sentences and paragraphs are OK--we'll call "Clothes Make the Man" barely acceptable.

I don't think this one has been anthologized in English, but "Clothes Make the Man" has been included in European anthologies, as well as a stack of Matheson collections in many languages.

**********

Matheson has a high reputation and "Being" and "The Test" demonstrate why--Matheson's characters feel very real, making his SF ideas all the more engaging.  As for "Clothes Make the Man," well, they can't all be winners, and we have read much worse.

More short stories in our next exciting episode, but from over twenty years later.

Avram Davidson, '58: "Paramount Ulj," "Great is Diana," and "The Bounty Hunter"

Let's read some 1958 stories by Avram Davidson, starting with "Paramount Ulj," which debuted in the same issue of Galaxy as a Fred Pohl story and a Robert Bloch story we read recently, and then checking out two other stories that debuted in SF magazines.

"Paramount Ulj" 

I didn't care for Frederik "Gateway" Pohl's "The Wizards of Pung's Corners," nor for Robert "Psycho" Bloch's "Block that Metaphor," but maybe this issue of H. L. Gold's Galaxy offers a good Davidson story as a kind of consolation prize or silver lining?

The Pohl was largely a joke story, with weak obvious jokes littered throughout it and a central theme that was broad satire of the modern market economy and modern warfare.  The Bloch was a longish story that served as the set up for a gruesome and childish bit of wordplay.  "Paramount Ulj," like the Bloch, ends on a tired little macabre pun, but the story as a whole is a little more subtle and sophisticated, but not much.  We'll call this merely acceptable.

(Is Galaxy a humor magazine?  I asked this question when reading a Davidson story in Galaxy in the autumn, and today I ask it again.)  

Alien diplomats arrive in current day (1950s) New York.  Much of their speech is intelligible by the natives, but they throw around a few terms that are untranslatable, and unfortunately these words are the important ones.  It seems the aliens have amazing, inscrutable and insuperable powers--they can communicate and even teleport across the galaxy, and wipe out the life of an entire planet with ease.  They are travelling around the galaxy, looking for societies that exhibit "ovlirb-tav"--those who fall short are annihilated.  If Earth's people do not demonstrate this mysterious characteristic, we will be exterminated.  Earth's diplomats are desperate to show we have this quality, and sort of assume it means peace or justice or something like that, and squirm when the aliens look at newspapers and see stories about murder in America, riots in India, civil war in Thailand.  The aliens are suddenly called back home--their father, leader of their space empire, has died.  Our twist ending comes back on these aliens' home world.  These star-hopping beings represent a civilization whose culture revolves around assassination and cannibalism, and they will probably wipe us out because we don't eat dead humans but instead make it our general practice to bury or cremate them.  The pun in the last line, as the diplomats eat their father's corpse, is that the old man had excellent taste.

One of the interesting things about "Paramount Ulj" is that, of the three Earth diplomats, one is Thai and one is Indian, and Davidson offers little jokes about and caricatures of those cultures which are not exactly flattering.  Thus, the story perhaps illustrates the liberties which American writers dealt with non-Western cultures in their work, and provides insight into what an intelligent well-read American thought the noteworthy aspects of India and Thailand in the 1950s.  Along with Davidson's references in the story to the Soviet Union and its satellites sort of provide a view of what was going on in the world and in the minds of Americans in the middle 1950s.

Much better than Pohl's revolting pile of junk, and somewhat better than Bloch's overly long gag story, but no better than passable.  This is not a good issue of Galaxy, folks.

"Paramount Ulj" would be reprinted in the collection Strange Seas and Shores.

"Great is Diana"

I can't come across a reference to Diana without thinking of one of my favorite sculptures, Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Diana of the Tower, versions of which you can see in New York, Philadelphia, New Hampshire, and Washington--when I am in our nation's capital I often take time to look at the version in the National Gallery of Art, which I think is my absolute favorite, though I haven't seen the New York one in a long time.  Saint-Gaudens' elegant and heroic masterpiece depicts Diana in her hunter guise--Davidson's story is about one of Diana's other aspects.

In its debut appearance in F&SF, "Great is Diana" is preceded by a rather long introduction by editor Anthony Boucher the subject of which is another of my favorite subjects--women's breasts!  Well, actually, the intro is a discussion of terms and euphemisms for mammaries.  

Davidson starts the story with a bunch of wealthy guys talking over after-dinner drinks about how women nowadays don't breastfeed and maybe this is why kids act crazy in the 1950s--they were weaned on dextrose, maltose and corn syrup!  (Woah, these guys can maybe get jobs at HHS!)  This is the frame; the core story is told by one of these jokers.

The main narrative is about an 18th(or early 19th?)-century Englishman who travels across Europe to Turkey, sampling all the food and drink available and banging lots of women.  In his letters he describes all his adventures.  In a wild part of Turkey, near Ephesus, he meets an attractive woman who was, apparently, once rich but has now fallen on hard times.  He tries to have sex with her but when he reaches into her clothes he feels not two breasts but many.  This is of course a reference to the famous Diana of Ephesus, a sculpture which depicts Diana as a fertility goddess who has a multitude of mammaries (though some think they look like eggs or even testicles.)  Thinking this a test from God or a temptation from the Devil, the Englishman runs from the woman, and becomes a committed Christian and a devoted husband and father.  Having touched a fertility goddess, he and his wife have many children.

I'll note that evolution, heredity and selective breeding are also pervasive themes of this story.

"Great is Diana" is well-written, Davidson ably employing multiple styles and throwing around many cultural, historical, and literary references.  I can mildly recommend it.

"Great is Diana" was collected in Or All the Seas with Oysters and The Other Nineteenth Century and also selected by David G. Hartwell for Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment.

"The Bounty Hunter"

Of today's three 1958 Davidson stories, this is perhaps the most critically successful--Brian Aldiss, Dennis Pepper, and Hans Stefan Santesson all included it in anthologies after it debuted in Santesson's Fantastic Universe.

"The Bounty Hunter" is also probably the most entertaining  story we are reading today; less erudite than "Great is Diana," it is a pretty smooth read, a decent twist ending story that is well-written and economically draws portraits of characters and of a society--the twist is important, but there is quite a bit more to it than that.  

A legislator and his son, a college student, come to visit a remote cabin in the woods inhabited by a trapper.  These three people are the descendants of space colonists--their ancestors took over this planet generations ago after travelling across the galaxy.  Those hardy ancestors tamed this wild world, fought for independence, then fought civil wars amongst themselves; their descendants today live in an orderly society in which everything is carefully planned and structured.  Is the current regime of strict disciple and conformity a sign this society is exhausted, has lost the drive and spirit of their brave, war-like, industrious forebearers? 

Some small percentage of people resist this discipline, and the trapper is one of them.  He lives out in the wilderness, trapping native wildlife--"big varmints"--and sometimes hunting them with some kind of firearm.  He eats real meat instead of synthetics.  He even drinks booze, which everybody knows is unhealthy!  The government pays him a bounty for each big varmint he catches--the varmints are dangerous, and their population needs to be kept down.  With modern techniques the native creatures could easily be exterminated, but the government doesn't pursue such a policy, perhaps because these trappers, who are often featured in fictional 3D TV shows, are people's last connection to their adventurous past.

The twist ending of "The Bounty Hunter" is that this planet is Earth, and the big varmints are the last human beings--the legislator, college student and trapper are inhuman, but quite humanoid, aliens.  We readers have, of course, been assuming they were the descendants of Earthborn people on some alien world.

I like it.

**********

A solid batch of stories.  I should probably read Davidson more often.  I say this kind of thing about writers all the time, of course, and fail to follow up on it--I'm afraid there is far more material I want to read than I will ever get to, even if I manage to cut all the dextrose, maltose, corn syrup, seed oils, alcohol and carbohydrates from my diet.

More short stories from the 1950s in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.  Until then, keep an eye out for traps, my fellow varmints!

Robert Bloch, 1958: "Block that Metaphor," "Egghead," and "The Deadliest Art"

In our last episode we read a story by Frederik Pohl (the less said about it, the better) in an issue of Galaxy.  That issue of Galaxy also includes stories by Avram Davidson and Robert Bloch that piqued my interest, so today let's read that Bloch story, "Block that Metaphor," and two other stories by the man who brought you Norman Bates that appeared in 1958 magazines.  Next time we'll read three 1958 stories by Davidson.

"Block that Metaphor"

This story has two foundational ideas, one solid science fiction idea, and one childish joke idea.  It is the space faring future and the human race has recently made contact with another of many intelligent alien races.  These aliens have abandoned their physical forms and installed their brains in robotic bodies, so they don't have to eat or rest or take a dump and they have super 360-degree vision and super hearing and super memory, etc.--that's the solid SF idea.  The childish joke idea is that these aliens (whom humans call "Mechs") are extremely "literal"--they have no concept of metaphor, simile, or hyperbole.  There is a lot of tension between humans and the Mechs because, when humans first met them, the Mechs heard a guy say offhandedly that "I ought to have my head examined" and the literal-minded Mechs took the man's head apart, accidentally killing him.  Other similar mistakes have occurred, inspiring the animosity of ordinary Earth people towards the Mechs, whom the Earth government and big business want to be friends with.

The plot of "Block that Metaphor" concerns diplomat Lane Borden, who is hosting the first Mech to arrive on Earth at the Embassy while outside an angry anti-Mech mob demonstrates.  Around the Mech, Borden, and all the other staff at the Embassy, wear a device to "scramble" their "subvocalizations" because if the alien's super duper electronic hearing picks up any figurative or metaphorical comments the Mech may act upon them and cause trouble.  There is a ball at which Borden's fiancé plays the piano.  The mob gets past the gates and throws a rock through the window of the ball room.  Borden goes outside and pacifies the crowd.  The alien is grateful--it believes the human mob might have killed it if Borden hadn't worked his diplomatic magic on the crowd.  The Mech wants to give Borden a gift to show its gratitude.  Borden's scrambler has been malfunctioning, and our gruesome twist ending is the result of the Mech picking up one of frustrated musician Borden's subvocalizations while watching his fiancé tickle the ivories--"I wish I had those fingers...."     

"Block that Metaphor" is well paced and smoothly written and all that, so I want to like it, but the fact is that the story's entire raison d'etre is to provide the opportunity to deliver a dumb joke, the kind of joke a little kid might compose, and that makes it impossible to give it a passing grade--thumbs down for "Block that Metaphor."

"Block that Metaphor" can be found in the oft-reprinted Bloch collection Atoms and Evil, as well as a Dutch collection which takes as its title story Bloch's "Comfort Me, My Robot."  What is the Dutch equivalent of "ooh la la"?

"Egghead"

Here's another story that shows up in Atoms and Evil.  "Egghead" debuted in Fantastic Universe, alongside stories by Grand Master Robert Silverberg; Evelyn E. Smith, whose "Softly While You're Sleeping" we liked; and Michael Shaara, who is probably more famous for his American Civil War and baseball fiction than his SF--we read his sentimental robot story "Orphans of the Void" a while ago and I gave it a thumbs down.  Enough with the sentimental robots already.

"Egghead" is about conformity, one of the big topics when people talk about the 1950s.  The story is set in the near future of the 1970s, when everybody wears the same clothes and has the same hair cut and eats the same thing for breakfast (cruller and coffee.)  Bloch also manages to fit in other de rigueur 1950s topics--how there is too much TV, too much advertising, too much consumerism, and too much automobile, I mean, too many automobiles.

Our protagonist and narrator, a college student, lets his hair grow long, wears a suit that is some years out of date, and orders eggs and cocoa for breakfast.  He even is willing to sit in the booth at the drug store (remember kids, in the 1950s many a drug store was like a diner or coffee shop) which doesn't have a TV, and to sell his car.  His girlfriend dumps him, not wanting to be seen with such a nonconformist guy.

News that our narrator is a nonconformist gets around fast and it looks like our guy will get thrown out of college--in this world college exists to enforce conformity among the middle class and train the professional elite to enforce conformity on and inspire consumerism among the proletariat through advertising and other psychological techniques.  Our guy is contacted by the local underground of individualists, college students led by a disgraced professor who seek to hide their nonconformity and work their way into the highest ranks of society to later lead a nonviolent individualist revolution.  The professor gives a long history lesson about how America went from being an individualistic country to a conformist one and points out that while the establishment calls the nonconformists "commies" and "pinkos" those words are now just terms of abuse, divorced from their literal meanings, and the nonconformists aren't really communists at all.   

The twist ending is that the narrator is a double agent, working for the elite.  He collects info on the individualists and turns them in to the authorities.

A pedestrian twist ending story that airs the complaints about mid-century America we have heard a million times already.  Barely acceptable.

"The Deadliest Art" 

Here's a story that first saw print in Bestseller Mystery Magazine.  It would reappear in several Bloch collections, among them the second volume of The Complete Stories of Robert Bloch (whch is where I'm reading it) and the German collection Horror Cocktail.

"The Deadliest Art" is a little trio of short-shorts.  The first is about how a British guy in India discovers his wife is cheating on him and tosses a snake at the man who cuckolded him--when the second guy survives the bite he convinces the wronged man that the Indian who sold him the serpent cheated him, selling him a harmless snake, and that the guy's wife is a liar.  The twist ending is that the guy who got bit has an artificial leg--the snake really is deadly and the wife's lover proceeds to trick the cuckold into getting killed by his own snake.

The second is about a Chicago musician, a drummer, who is a heroin addict.  Bloch writes this with a lot of musician slang.  The drummer's drug dealer owns a pawn shop, which is convenient because the drummer can pawn stuff and get his drugs all in the same place--one-stop shopping.  The time comes when the junkie drummer has pawned his drums and can't work to get the money to buy them back.  He tries to steal the drums back, and in the struggle with the pawn broker the drums get busted up.  The druggie drummer then murders the pawn broker and uses medical instruments in the shop to skin the pawn shop owner and use the skin to fix his drums.

The third and final story involves two guys who own a barbecue joint.  They annually hold a cook out in honor of the local police.  When one of the men kills the other he cooks the corpse up and feeds it to the cops; the story ends with one of Bloch's lame puns.

Barely acceptable.

**********

Not Bloch's best work--forgettable, disposable little trifles.  Hopefully the Avram Davidson 1958 stories we will be reading next time will be a little more ambitious and successful.

Merril-approved 1958 stories: Pabel, Pohl, and Presslie

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are taking a tour of the speculative fiction of 1958 with herald of the New Wave Judith Merril acting as our guide.  This tour has been on hiatus for a few months, but today we are back aboard the Judith Justine Grossman bus and through the windshield we can see some "P" stories up ahead.

As you probably know if you regularly read my scribblings here, Judith Merril in her SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume reprinted a bunch of 1958 stories and in the back of the book provided an alphabetical "Honorable Mentions" list of stories that for whatever reason didn't quite make the cut, but which she thought good, and we have been selecting stories from this list to read.  We've already dealt with a stack of Merril-approved 1958 stories from authors whose names start with the letters "A" through "O"--see the links below:

Poul Anderson and Alan Arkin
Pauline Ashwell, Don Berry and Robert Bloch
John Brunner, Algis Budrys and Arthur C. Clarke
"Helen Clarkson" (Helen McCoy), Mark Clifton, Mildred Clingerman and Theodore R. Cogswell
John Bernard Daley, Avram Davidson and Chan Davis
Gordon R. Dickson 
Charles Einstein, George P. Elliot, and Harlan Ellison
Charles G. Finney, Charles L. Fontenay, Donald Franson, and Charles E Fritch
Randall Garret and James E. Gunn 
Harry Harrison, Frank Herbert and Philip High
Shirley Jackson, Daniel Keyes and John Kippax
Damon Knight and C. M. Kornbluth
Fritz Leiber, Jack Lewis and Victoria Lincoln
Katherine MacLean, "T. H. Mathieu" (Les Cole) and Dean MacLaughlin 
A. E. Nourse
"Finn O'Donnevan" (Robert Sheckley) and Chad Oliver

Whew, gotta whole lotta links.

Today we've got a story by woman of mystery Avis Pabel, one by Grand Master Frederik Pohl, and two by Londoner Robert Presslie.

"Basic Agreement" by Avis Pabel

Avis Pabel only has one credit at isfdb, and a quick look around the interwebs suggests she led an exciting life.  She married an escaped German POW living incognito as a Chicago bookseller, got involved in Objectivism and published articles in an Objectivist magazine under the name Avis Brick, and eventually vanished from sight altogether.  Wild.  Let's try to figure out what John W. Campbell, Jr. and Merril saw in Pabel/Brick's sole SF story, "Basic Agreement," which appeared in Campbell's Astounding and, it seems, never again.

This is a brief trifling story but well-told, a story about family life that rings true.  A little girl keeps seeing a monster in the corner of her bedroom--when she screams, her stressed-out parents get angry at her, insisting she is just having a nightmare.  We learn that the little girl had an older sister, Jill, who died protecting her, and to whom the parents keep comparing her, unfavorably--Jill never had nightmares, Jill was good at math, Jill was popular, etc.  So she has to get used to the creepy sight of the monster just standing in the corner of her room every night.  Then one night, after our little heroine has had a particularly bad day, the monster speaks, and we realize it is a sad little alien girl, a little dolly in one of its tentacles, and it wants to make friends with the protagonist, and maybe it can help her with her math!

Thumbs up!    

"The Wizards of Pung's Corners" by Frederik Pohl

All three of the illustrations to "The Wizards of Pung's Corners" in Galaxy, where it debuted, include a TV set, and I groaned thinking this story of 25 pages by Fred Pohl, alumnus of the Young Communist League, was going to be an attack on television, advertising, and, by extension, our entire market-oriented society.  Twenty-five pages?  Suddenly, firing up my C-64 emulator and playing some more Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (which I hear is in the news again, like 40 years after I first played it) was looking pretty attractive.  When I had satisfied my need to scribble--and ruefully erase--notes on graph paper, I felt a little better about seeing what Fred had to say about the boob tube.

These good feelings didn't survive the first page of the story.  "The Wizards of Pung's Corners" is written in the annoying colloquial style of a tall tale told by some rural yarn spinner around the fire...

You never saw a bag like that! It looked like a kind of electronic tool kit, I swear.

...and takes the form of a popular history written in the far future which describes events in the near future, full of references to memoirs and history books.  The content of "The Wizards of Pung's Corners" constitutes an even more absurd and broad satire than I had feared, with Pohl focusing on telling tired jokes and detailing his social and economic theories and putting no effort into plot or character.

Bad!

Alright, here's the plot summary for all you gluttons for punishment.

Pung's Corners is a New England town in the middle of a desert--it had the good fortune to survive the atomic war that wiped out most of America's northeast.  Pung's Corners has a history of sitting out America's wars, its inhabitants having avoided service in the War of Independence and in the Civil War, and the current inhabitants are not unhappy about being cut off from the rest of the United States by the radioactive wastes--in fact, there is a local law prohibiting TV antennas so they won't get info from the outside world and their anti-aircraft missiles have shot down multiple approaching aircraft.  As the story begins, an old man we are told is wicked on the first page of the story, Coglan, drives into town in a car sheathed in lead.  He takes a room in the hotel; the bellboy watches Coglan through the keyhole as the old man communicates with his colleagues via his two-way TV phone (that is what is in the bag referenced in the quote above.)  

The United States government is under the control of an advertising agency and Coglan is their agent, come to Pung's Corners to reintroduce the isolated town to advertising.  The automated underground factories that survived the atomic war need more markets for their products and Pung's Corners is to be one of those markets.  The people of Pung's Corners have hard wired TV service which runs the same old movies again and again.  Coglan somehow patches into this signal, adding subliminal advertising for mass-produced consumer goods.  He has drugs put in the local water supply to make the townspeople more suggestible.  He uses a subsonic hypnotic device to trick the local banker into giving him money.  He hires the town slut to be his assistant.  These characters disappear from the narrative in the middle of the story to be replaced by other, perhaps even more ridiculous, caricatures.

Living in Pung's Corners is a retired advertising man who can tell what Coglan is up to.  He rallies the people of the town to physically overpower feeble old Coglan and thus foil his scheme.  So the federal government sends the United States Army to attack Pung's Corners.  Pohl gives us a long and tedious  absurdist military campaign in which the war correspondents that accompany the expeditionary force outnumber the riflemen, who don't know how to use their rifles because of planned obsolesce--the subterranean factories put out a new rifle every season and so the privates never have time to adequately train on each new model.  The people of Pung's Corners accept the surrender of the attack force, and then advance on the capital and take over the United States and put an end to advertising.

This story is just a vehicle for Pohl to inflict his lame leftist economic and social theories on readers.  Ordinary people, in Pohl's view, are easy prey for the manipulations of business people, who are all monopolists who overproduce products no sane person would want and use advertising, which is irresistible, to trick people into buying those useless items.  Government is needed to step in to protect the ignorant masses from advertising.  Pohl goes to the trouble of giving "The Wizards of Pung's Corners" a style--the hokey tall tale style I mentioned before--but plot and character have no place.  The plot offers no suspense, as it is made clear in the beginning that the people of Pung's Corners are going to take over the world and we are expected to cheer them on in doing so, and much of the text is unconnected to the plot, taken up by exposition as Pohl lays out his various theories in the form of historical digressions.  The characters are all broad stereotypes or archetypes--the evil old man, the vapid slut, the blundering, glory-seeking, military man, and these characters don't do much of anything--they get introduced, they are the butt of feeble jokes, then the plot resolves itself without them making any decisions.

I repeat: bad.  Merril may have been doing her fellow bolshie a favor by recommending it, but she was doing us readers a disservice!  "The Wizards of Pung's Corners" has reappeared in several Pohl collections, as well as a 1964 Penguin paperback marketed as being for "connoisseurs" and a 1974 Prentice-Hall textbook designed for use in the government schools.  Good grief.

"Another Word for Man" by Robert Presslie

A year ago I read a story by Presslie on Merril's recommendation, "The Creep," and I hated it.  In 2018 I read his story "The Day Before Never" and found it boring.  Yet, somehow, today I have committed to reading two more stories by Presslie.  Now who's the glutton for punishment?

The first blow in this Presslie one-two punch is "Another Word for Man," which debuted in John Carnell's New Worlds and would go on to be included in the second anthology in the Out of this World series edited by Amabel Williams-Ellis and Mably Owen as well as Michael Moorcock's Best of New Worlds.  It seems the SF community, at least over in the green and pleasant land, embraced this story.  Well, let's hope it provides me an opportunity to revise my opinion of Presslie.   

"Another Word for Man" is, thankfully, a competent if pedestrian story in which an alien performs a Christ-like act of sacrifice for a human who doubted it, leading that human to rethink his religious dogmatism.  Presslie, according to the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, worked as a "pharmacy manager" and this story's science speculation centers on medicine and biology.

A lobster fisherman from a remote Canadian village pulls up an alien in one of his pots.  This thing, looking like a slug the size of a basketball, has telepathy, as so many aliens in these old stories do.  Its body is flexible and changeable--it can grow gills with which to breathe underwater, if need be, extend tubes with which to breathe air and make sounds, etc.  The lobsterman brings the alien to the little community's de facto leader, the priest.  This man of god decides to keep the alien a secret from the outside world.  Because the alien professes to be a doctor, the priest remands it to the custody of the two physicians at the local doctor's office.  We later learn that the priest and the alien had an argument over religion and the priest holds a grudge.

The alien is an eager beaver and learns all about human physiology from the doctors--soon it is better at diagnosing patients than they are!  The alien laments that human surgery involves cutting people open--among his people, who can change shape with ease, no such cutting is necessary.  When the priest is found to have a massive cancerous growth in his chest that has extended tendrils all through his body (he has been ignoring his chest pain for three years), the alien projects hundreds of cilia into the cleric's body and withdraws all the cancer cells into itself, killing itself but curing the priest, who realizes the alien is one of God's children and the phrase typically translated as "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" should be rendered "Greater love hath no creature of Mine...."

There is a mountain of SF stories out there that show up how crummy humans are by contrasting us with goody goody space aliens, and we can add "Another Word for Man" to the pile, but while there is a passage in which one of the doctors groans that governments spend more on weapons research than cancer research, Presslie in his story here does more showing than telling--he doesn't indulge in tendentious speeches or anything--and the writing is reasonably good.  Acceptable.

"Dial 'O' for Operator" by Robert Presslie

Here we have a good horror story; the horror elements work, and so do the human elements, as the two main characters act in a way that is believable and compelling, and at least one of them actually grows as a person as a result of his ordeal.

A telephone operator answers a call--a prostitute is at the docks, in a phone booth, and claims she is pursued by a blob monster!  All we know of her plight we learn from her dialogue--we are in the same boat as the operator.  Presslie does a good job conveying the tension and fear of both the woman and the operator as he and the police try to help her.  The telephone company employee is initially presented to us as a dull man, but he comes to life as he strives to save this woman.  The police go to the phone booth, but there is no woman, no monster.  A clue convinces the operator that the woman must be calling from the future!  He comes up with a plan to save her, but whether it succeeds or not, whether she escapes or is devoured by the blob, he will never know.

Thumbs up for "Dial 'O' for Operator"--Merril steered us right this time!  The story debuted in John Carnell's Science Fantasy; Carnell reprinted it in an anthology of horror stories by science fiction writers, and it has also reappeared in anthologies on the theme of time.

**********

So we've got three misanthropic stories today in which human beings are shown to be either evil or powerless victims who can only get out of jams through deus ex machina interventions, not their own  initiative.  Pohl's treatment of this theme is tendentious and tedious, lacking an engaging plot or compelling characters and instead filling up two dozen pages with absurd jokes and lame theories.  Presslie's story about a self-sacrificing alien is OK, as, unlike Pohl, his speculative science is somewhat interesting and he makes an effort to construct multiple engaging characters with believable personalities.  Pabel's story might not have the science or can-do hero we expect to see in Astounding, but it nails the human emotion components and is an effective little weird tale I can recommend.  But today's top story is the fourth, Presslie's horror piece about a blob monster and inadvertent communication across time.  This story has a more hopeful theme, depicting ordinary--even fallen--human beings who have a fighting chance when faced with novel and deadly challenges and who grow in response to their terrible adventure; most importantly, it delivers horror thrills and isn't preachy.

We hit a jarring pothole with the Pohl, but otherwise this hasn't been a bad leg in our guided tour through 1958, and I am especially pleased to see a better side of Presslie's work.  Stay tuned for more 1958 SF here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  

Lester del Rey: "Whom the Gods Love," "Though Dreamers Die," and "Fool's Errand"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading Early del Rey, a thick hardcover collection published in 1975, when I was four years old, that includes stories first published from 1938 to 1951 along with del Rey's memoirs of his career and his relationships with other SF figures.  We are making our way through this volume at a leisurely pace; in fact, I think it has been like four months since our last installment in this series of posts.  Let's blame it on a road trip to the Middle West and the always taxing holiday season and just welcome the fact that we are back on track today with our fifth blog post about Early del Rey, during which we will tackle three stories from the period 1943-1951.

Oh yeah, links to the first four episodes in this series:

"The Faithful," "Anything" and "Habit"

"The Smallest God," "The Stars Look Down," "Doubled in Brass," and "Reincarnate"
"Carillon of Skulls," "Done Without Eagles," and "My Name is Legion"
"Though Poppies Grow," "Lunar Landing," and "Fifth Freedom"

"Whom the Gods Love" (1943)

This is a sort of power and revenge fantasy.  Some kind of alien consciousness or immaterial being wakes up with amnesia in the body of a dead American pilot on a Pacific island, next to a crashed two-seater warplane in which lies another dead American.  The alien animates the body it occupies, and uses its ability to create matter out of ambient cosmic energy and manipulate it telekinetically to partially heal the body and to repair the aircraft.  Inspired by a bird flying by, the alien ignores the plane's damaged propeller and internal combustion engine and gives the plane's wings the ability to flap before climbing in and taking off.  When its occupied body gets hungry it makes food pop into existence, guided by memories of food found in the American airman's brain.  Similarly prompted by the airman's memories, it recognizes Allied aircraft as friendly and Japanese aircraft as hostile--the alien also can read minds, so knows the Japanese wish him ill.  (I told you this was a power fantasy--this alien can do anything.)  The alien gives the aircraft's guns, which are out of ammo, the ability to shoot energy bolts it can unerringly aim with its mind and wipes out an entire Japanese naval task force. 

Eventually the alien decides to finish repairing the body it is occupying, removing a bullet from the brain.  When the bullet is removed the airman comes back to life and the alien consciousness is forced out.  Without the alien's telekinesis to keep the motorless plane aloft, it goes down, but the resurrected American flyer bails out safely into American-held territory.

"Whom the Gods Love" is a merely acceptable action story that lacks suspense or characterization, but offers some entertainment through the astounding events it depicts and the way it portrays a high intelligence grappling with a totally novel milieu.  The story has not been reprinted outside the various editions of Early del Rey.

In the text following "Whom the Gods Love," del Rey talks a little about the rage felt by Americans towards the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, saying "Given the right provocation, we are all racist bigots, I fear," and admitting he shared some of that animosity, but also mentioning that he made one of the heroes in "Nerves" a Japanese as a way of combatting such racism.  Then he talks about his own experiences doing war work, manufacturing parts of DC-3s, bragging about how his employers were amazed by how good he was with tools.

"Though Dreamers Die" (1944)

After telling us how he excelled as a sheet metal worker and how he enjoys such work as much as he does writing, del Rey talks a little about his relationship with Robert Moore Williams.  Williams, as del Rey tells it, wrote some very good stories for Astounding, including "Robots' Return," which we read back in 2018, but then decided to churn out "routine stories" for Amazing instead of expending the effort required to meet Astounding and Unknown editor John W. Campbell, Jr's exacting standards.  (We've read good stories by Williams, like the aforementioned robot story and "The Counterfeiter" and "Death Sentence," but also a bunch of things of his that are mediocre or bad, like "Jongor of Lost Land," "The Return of Jongor," "Red Death of Mars" and "Zanthar at Trip's End.")  Del Rey was so impressed by "Robots' Return" that he got permission from Williams to write a prequel to it; entitled "Though Dreamers Die," Campbell printed in Astounding and it has reappeared in several robot-themed anthologies since then.

"Though Dreamers Die" is sentimental and to my mind somewhat silly, but then I don't anthropomorphize robots the way many people do.

Just when humanity was about to conquer the galaxy, when the first star ship was just weeks from completion, a Plague with a capital "P" struck Earth, killing almost everybody.  A small group of people were put into suspended animation on the star ship, which was operated by five of the latest, most advanced robots.

Our hero is one of the guys in suspended animation.  He is awoken by the robots after ninety years--they have found an Earth-like planet!  Unfortunately all the other people in suspended animation have died of the Plague--our protagonist, a man, is the last member of the human race!  There is a lot of melodramatic talk about how mankind's dreams have gone unfulfilled and how it is a cosmic joke that they found a planet suitable for colonization only after colonization was impossible.  But then the protagonist realizes that the robots can fulfill mankind's dream by reproducing themselves and building cities all across the galaxy.  The dream is independent of those who initially dreamed it!

This story is quite long for what it accomplishes, with lots of descriptions of the new planet--in particular a natural harbor that would be an ideal location for a beautiful city--and of the star ship as well as lots of flashbacks and exposition in which del Rey describes characters now dead.  But the real problem with the story is the whole premise--it makes no sense for robots to colonize the galaxy and build cities if no humans are left alive.  Why would human beings explore and colonize the galaxy?  To make their lives better, to satisfy the human desire to overcome obstacles and win renown.  Do machines have lives?  Do machines have desires?  Of course they don't.  What would the city built by robots be like?  Human cities are full of places to sleep, to conduct business and maintain order, to pursue pleasure, full of infrastructure to distribute food and water.  Robots don't need to sleep, they don't trade or commit crimes, they don't experience pleasure and they don't need food or water.  The romanticization of robots is one of the commonplaces of science fiction that I don't get.

We'll call it acceptable.

"Fool's Errand" (1951)

Between "Though Dreamers Die" and "Fool's Errand," del Rey talks about moving to New York and about writing the story "Kindness."   

"Fool's Errand" is a gimmicky joke story--the gimmick is actually much like that in the 1980s horror novel we just read, Late at Night by William Schoell, in which a person writes a book about an adventure she was in and then contrives to transport the book back in time so some of the other participants in the adventure have access to it before and during the adventure it describes, so they come to believe the book is prophetic.  (Oh, yeah, spoiler alert.)

In "Fool's Errand," people in 1989 discover an early manuscript of Nostradamus, one which lists all his prophecies but in less ambiguous verbiage.  All of these predictions prove accurate.  In the 23rd century, people want to make sure this manuscript is really Nostradamus' and not some kind of forgery, so they build a time machine and send a guy back to 14th-century Paris to try to find Nostradamus and confirm the pedigree of the manuscript.  The scientists estimate that the time traveler has only a week to accomplish his mission before he is brought back home automatically.  The time traveler is accidentally sent back in time too early, the time of Nostradamus' college days in Montpelier.  He rushes down to the university town, and by the time he gets there ten dats have already passed--he could disappear back to the future any moment!  He does manage to get to Nostradamus just in time.  The twist ending of the story is that N has not taken up the career of prophet yet--he only embarks on such a project because he acquires the copy of the manuscript the time traveler brought back with him to have authenticated when the time traveler is jerked back to the 23rd century before he can take the manuscript back.

Barely acceptable.  In the Forties, Campbell rejected "Fool's Errand," which del Rey admits is too obvious, but a few years later Robert A. W. Lowndes bought it for Science Fiction Quarterly.  In 1953 it was reprinted in an Australian magazine, and in 2009 in the del Rey collection War & Space.

**********

None of these stories is actually bad, but they aren't great either, relying on gimmicks and the exploitation of attitudes I just don't have--I don't care about Nostradamus, I don't romanticize robots, and I'm not particularly fired up about the Japanese imperialism, as horrible as it was, of 85 years ago.  These stories are not "timeless" and have a specific rather than a broad appeal.  They are competent, though, which we can't take for granted here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and read in conjunction with del Rey's memoirs, the stories are valuable for the student of SF as they offer insight into the world of the time and the workings of the professional SF community, so I'm still finding Early del Rey a quite worthwhile read.

Late at Night by William Schoell

In this state, the necromancer could do whatever it chose.  It could manipulate the island's forces to its own ends.  It could tap into the vast psychic buildup which was even now surrounding all of them.  

It could kill.

William Schoell has his own entry in Grady Hendrix and Will Errikson's Paperbacks from Hell, so I feel that Schoell's 1986 novel Late at Night qualifies as one of the famed Ps from H.  As followers of my account at the social media platform formerly known as Twitter--the world's most dangerous app!--may recall, I recently purchased for one single solitary dollar a copy of Late at Night at an antiques mall in Hagerstown, Maryland, a 1986 copy complete with embossed drops of blood on its cover and an ad for other "blood-chillers from Leisure Books" on its final page.  Our friends Grady and Will* describe Schoell's six novels for Leisure Books as "C-grade," which doesn't sound good, but Late at Night appears to be popular--it has been reprinted multiple times in our present 21st century (to which "C-grade" might also be applicable) and copies of the 1986 printing as well as the recent editions are not cheap on ebay.  Well, let's crack open my little blood-encrusted bargain and see what Late at Night is all about.

*UPDATE FEB 3, 2025: Will Errickson in the comments clarifies--it must have been Grady Hendrix who made this assessment, as Errickson himself has not read any Schoell.

Late at Night has an introduction that details the geography and history of Lammerty Island, which lies off the coast of Maine; this intro, somewhat jocular in tone ("Lammerty Island had it all!...many people would like to go to Lammerty Island....God help them when they get there!") is mostly a catalog of pirates, Indians, colonists, gangsters and feuding families killing each other in the good ol' days and residents in more recent days committing suicide.  Today the island is deserted, but students of the occult believe its history of bloodshed has left it awash in psychic energy and worthy of exploration. 

After the Introduction we've got a Prologue.  In a Boston restaurant a guy dumps his girlfriend because she is weird; he can't get over how much time she spends on her hobby--the occult--and her belief she has arcane powers.  Back in her apartment she decides to distract herself from her sadness by casting the most dangerous spell she has ever attempted!  As far as we readers can tell, she summons a dimly seen figure and an object which she seizes before it disappears.  The text is intentionally opaque--we don't learn the woman's name nor the specific purpose of the spell, and both the figure and the object are described in only the vaguest of terms.

Then come our 55 numbered chapters, followed by an Epilogue.  (My copy of Late at Night has like 360 pages of text, but the print is big so it is not terribly long.)  The book as a whole is divided into six Parts, "Arrival," "Reverberations," "Morning," "Afternoon," "Night" and "Late at Night."

Part One: Arrival

Young Lynn Overman has inherited Lammerty Island and all the property on it.  Schoell's clumsily written novel is full of contradictions--in the Introduction we are told people want to visit the island because of or in spite of its reputation as a center of psychic energy, but then in the very first chapter Lynn is told that nobody wants to buy it so it is valueless.  Not for the last time readers have to say "whatever" and just read on.  

Lynn is dating her wealthy lawyer, middle-aged John Evergreen and the two of them decide to spend a weekend on the island checking it out, and they bring with then a dozen of their colleagues and friends, so we end up with a cast of fourteen suspects/victims.  We've got the lawyer's domestic staff:  Eric the chauffer, Hans the handyman, Mrs. Plushing the cook, and two slim attractive servant girls.  And we've got the middle-class goofballs and their hangers-on: Lynn's aunt Gloria, a fat middle-aged gossip columnist and her young boyfriend, failed actor Jerry; John's cousin magazine writer Ernie; Lynn's best friend, the shy and overweight Betty, and her college friends, Andrea the psychic and Cynthia the soap opera star; and Lynn's former boyfriend, Anton the Rumanian concert pianist.  We have to hear about everybody's looks and personality; I guess trying to be funny, Schoell gives the characters silly personalities and reminds us again and again how fat the fat women are (one has "fingers thick as sausages" and "chunky arms and legs" and we witness another squeezing into tight clothes in front of a mirror) and how ugly the pianist is.  The characters all make lame obvious jokes.  More significantly, Schoell gives us reason to suspect that any of several of the educated young women could be the woman from the Prologue.

There is a lot of fat in Parts One and Two, before the real bloodshed begins.  Schoell describes the rooms and furniture of the guest house in which they are staying, and who is assigned what room by John the lawyer and where each is in geographical relation to the others.  None of this figures in the plot.  Schoell does little to make the island or guest house seem scary besides having the characters think cliched things like "This place gives me the creeps" until the seventh chapter when one of the pretty young servant girls hallucinates blood in a bathroom and has a kind of mental breakdown and runs around the house naked.  For some reason Schoell puts distance between this event and the reader--instead of witnessing it from the point of view of the servant girl herself or someone watching the girl, we hear about the episode in dialogue, that of Mrs. P the cook as she tells the other characters about it.  After dinner and drinks, quotidian events which Schoell describes in boring detail (who is sitting where, why the main course is late, blah blah blah) Ernie the writer and Andrea the psychic go outside to look for the remains of a shipwreck reputed to be nearby.

Part Two: Reverberations

More unnecessary descriptions of people's faces, more people experiencing creeping feelings, more clues as to which of the young female characters might be the girl who got dumped in the Prologue.  On their nighttime beach walk, Andrea tells Ernie about how the servant's hallucination of blood was probably the result of psychic echoes of a suicide attempt in the 19th century in the very same bathroom.  This idea, that the island is haunted, is soon abandoned by Schoell in favor of the idea that an evil wizard is the cause of all gruesome supernatural events. 

Back at the guest house, Ernie finds a horror paperback on a bookshelf--the novel is entitled Late at Night and is about a writer who goes to a haunted island with 13 other people--the people in this book within a book look like and do the same things as the people in Schoell's actual book.  Oh, brother.  The second servant girl hears voices and cannot sleep--she pees herself in terror (several characters urinate on themselves in this book) and then sees the ghost of a mutilated naked young woman.

Most importantly, Schoell indicates that one member of the party of 14 believes himself or herself to be an evil wizard--this individual feels he or she has transcended sex and become something like a god and Schoell refers to this individual with the pronoun "it" and the title "the necromancer."  (Like in that Van Der Graaf Generator song, "necromancer" is used as just a synonym for a generic magician here--this character's sorcery is not specifically concerned with or limited to communicating with or animating the dead.)

Part Three: Morning

Ernie can't find that paperback--did he dream it?  Most of the 14 decide to explore a decaying 19th- century mansion on the other side of a woods--Schoell puts some effort into making this place seem scary, describing how the facade looks like a face, how it smells, how hot air seems to move in and out of the house, like it is a breathing beast.  Gloria the middle-aged gossip columnist has remained at the guest house and Cynthia the actress leads the gossip columnist's young lover Jerry up to a remote room on the mansion's fourth floor and seduces him; their sexual congress is interrupted by the ugly pianist, Anton.  The two servant girls explore an underground passage that leads to the mansion's cellar and the necromancer uses its powers to direct thousands of vermin to attack them.  A legion of spiders devour one of the girls, reducing her to a skeleton (I don't think spiders actually eat that way, but whatever) while the other girl is skeletonized by white worms.  Schoell informs us that the spiders will then devour the worms, and then the rats will eat all the spiders, and then bats will eat all the rats.  Do bats in Maine eat rats?  When the rest of the party can't find the servant girls, Ernie, remembering how in the now-missing book the girls died in the basement, enters the basement to look for them--he finds the skeletons, and Schoell makes clear that the spiders and worms not only ate the girl's flesh, but their clothes.  (Ernie sees some rats, so I guess the bats didn't get them all.)

Part Four: Afternoon

Ernie doesn't tell the others about the skeletons, so search parties are formed and head out to look for the missing girls.  Anton the pianist tells Gloria about Jerry's tryst with Cynthia, leading to a scene--the gossip columnist slaps the actress in the face.  One example of Schoell's clumsy writing is the omniscient narrator's report that "The strike was so hard and so well-executed that it nearly took the younger woman's head off;" Cynthia doesn't act like she was nearly decapitated--on the next page we are told that the actress has "already chosen to ignore the whole thing" and is at the bar mixing herself a drink.  What is the point of the absurd exaggeration?  Is it a joke?  A similar example comes when the necromancer goes to a shed to transform in private (into what, is left unsaid) and Eric the chauffer catches it in the act--the nonbinary wizard assaults and kills Eric with an axe:

Suddenly his hand wasn't there any more.  Just a bleeding stump, discharging gallons of his precious bodily fluids.

Gallons?

Gloria runs out of the guest house alone and Jerry, whom we are told really really loves her even though he cheats on her all the time, goes after her but can't find her.  Gloria decides to climb to the top of the lighthouse, and a demon summoned by the necromancer follows her up there and pushes her out a window, down to her death.  Meanwhile, Cynthia has caught up to Jerry and they look for Gloria at the wrecked ship--they are eaten by red-eyed zombies.  While all this is happening Ernie is searching for the book and Angela the psychic is beginning to sense the presence of the necromancer, coming to realize the danger the party is in.

Part Five: Night     

The middle-aged lawyer John goes out into the dark alone to look for the servant girls; he gets lost and ends up at the ruins of an earlier, "original" mansion that burned down in the 18th century.  Mrs. Plushing the cook is bedridden with delirium and fever and Betty the fat girl is having a nervous breakdown.  Andrea endures a psychic attack from the necromancer, and senses that the necromancer has the power to create anything out of thin air and has used that power to kill the servant girls, Gloria, Jerry, and Cynthia.  Andrea also senses where the book is, so Ernie, Andrea and Anton bust into Lynn's room and recover the book from where it is hidden under the bed.  While the four are squabbling over the significance of the book and we readers are wondering if Lynn is the necromancer, the lights go out because the necromancer is "draining away the electrical energy" and in the dark the necromancer seizes the book out of the writer's hands.  When the lights come back on the four people in the bedroom try to figure out which of them, or who among the other members of the party, must have snatched the book and is probably the necromancer.

John the lawyer is dragged down into the gaping hole that was the original mansion's basement by a vine and his blood is sucked out by carnivorous plants which then tear his dead body to pieces.  This death scene is the most effective in the book; it is the least ridiculous, most importantly, and also the most moving because Schoell makes an effort to portray John responding to his imminent death in a way that reflects his personality.  The demise of the cook is perhaps the most absurd and overwritten death in the novel.  Mrs. Plushing's face swells up to double size while invisible blades cut through her limbs at the joints, and through her neck, dividing her body into individual parts.  These parts take on independent lives of their own, the limbs crawling around and the head rolling around, and attack Hans the handyman, scratching and biting.  There is a long scene of Hans fighting the animated body parts until they--and his injuries--disappear.  It was all an illusion!  Groan!  But then the invisible blades start cutting the handyman into parts, so he commits suicide.  The death of Hans brings to the fore the way how Schoell leaves ambiguous to what extent his silly monsters and outlandish psychic attacks are physical manifestations conjured by the necromancer and to what extent they are illusions that scare people to death or drive them to suicide. 

Having neglected Betty the fat girl, Schoell suddenly gives her some background and personality and we get a scene in which Anton the pianist, drunk, humiliates her--he has been flirting with her and built up her hopes to the point that she expects to marry him, but now he insults Betty to her face and even unzips his fly and waves his genitals at her.  Ernie punches the pianist's lights out. 

With fewer than 100 pages to go we learn that Lynn is the woman from the Prologue; she has mostly been offscreen, which weakens the potential impact of this revelation.  The spell Lynn cast in her Boston apartment was intended to give her a vision of one year into the future--she wanted to see if she would get another boyfriend!  ("I know that's silly, pre-feminist thinking," she admits while confessing to Andrea, Ernie and Anton.  Even the minds of psychic sorceresses are vulnerable to the ubiquitous oppressive influence of the patriarchy!)  In the future she found that book, Late at Night, on her night table, and she had brought it back with her to the present.  The identity of the shadowy figure remains a mystery.

Part Six: Late at Night

Andrea uses her powers to, again, determine the location of the book--it is at the 19th-century mansion.  Ernie ventures into the dark alone (why are all the characters in this book doing that?) to retrieve it; as he makes his way across the island, he wonders which of the survivors is the necromancer--Lynn, an admitted psychic?  Anton, who is always treating people like shit?  Andrea, another psychic and the woman he has decided he wants to spend the rest of his life with?  Anton appears and a tree falls on him, crushing his hands; this is supposed to be a big deal because he is a pianist, who creates his art and makes his money with his talented fingers, but the fact that Schoell never has Anton express or demonstrate a love for music or preoccupation with his career undermines this.  And seconds later another tree falls on him, crushing his head, besides.

Ernie gets his hands on the book, but seconds later the necromancer shows up and chops his head off with an axe--and the necromancer is revealed to be Betty the fat girl!  She is on a campaign of revenge against the world for being mean to her!  Andrea senses Ernie's death and goes to the mansion for the final showdown.  Betty takes on a demon form, all fangs and talons, but somehow Andrea outfights her with a pair of scissors, some matches, and lighter fluid.  Seeing the necromancer, in reptilian alien form, who killed two men by hacking them with an axe, and slew nine other people by summoning monsters or projecting mind-bending illusions, bested by a girl who doesn't even have a gun or a knife, was pretty deflating and anticlimactic.  As she lays dying, Betty the necromancer causes the mansion to explode in hopes of killing the psychic as well as herself.

The Epilogue takes place some 18 months later in Lynn's Boston apartment.  It is the second anniversary of her trip forward in time to collect the book. Andrea, whom Lynn and the authorities have believed was killed in the explosion, shows up at her door. Angela has the book with her--she wrote it and got it published. Lynn's time travel spell, cast two years ago, was meant to send her forward in time one year, but in fact sent her forward two years, to today! She'll be showing up any minute now! After leaving the copy of Late at Night on the night table for past Lynn to collect in a few minutes, Andrea murders current Lynn with scissors to avenge Ernie--after all, it was Lynn's meddling with sorcery that ultimately got him and the others killed.

"C-grade" is too kind!  Late at Night is bad in almost every conceivable way.  None of the characters is likable or interesting, in particular the most important character, the necromancer, whose motives are a cipher and whose magic or psychic powers amount to the ability to do just any damn thing the author thinks of, meaning there is no consistent theme to the supernatural elements of the story.  Schoell also sloppily conflates psychic powers and magic--sometimes the psykers are just using their natural born powers to manipulate matter, other times they are casting spells they learned through much study--as if they are the same thing.  The book-that-is-coming-true gimmick is lame, and the book plays multiple roles in the story, none of them very well--the characters are all running around trying to find or hide or steal the book, for example, as if it is a powerful weapon or shield, but nobody ever uses the book to protect themselves or harm their enemies; people talk about how mystical or powerful or whatever the book is, but it is not like the necromancer needs any more power--she is already powerful enough to do whatever she feels like, including blowing up buildings and killing anybody she wants with trivial effort (except when the plot requires her not killing someone--then that person can just kill her with a pair of scissors.  And what is up with the scissors?  Schoell should have made the scissors significant, like a gift from Ernie or something Andrea or Ernie used in a hobby or at work, cutting out newspaper stories or typescripts or something.)  The mysteries of the identity of the woman in the Prologue and of the necromancer, and the big reveals, are not compelling, in part because Lynn and Betty get little screen time compared to Ernie, Angela and Anton.   And the gore scenes and sex scenes are more silly than scary, disturbing, or titillating. 

So the way the story is put together is not good.  And neither is the actual writing!  The writing is lacking in style and full of cliches; the later parts of the novel move at a decent pace, but the first two Parts are larded with extraneous detail about stuff that is boring.  Throughout the book we find sentences that seem to contradict earlier ones--for example, the handyman decides to take "the boat" off the island for help, as if he has seen one, and on the next page he is merely hoping that there is such a boat.  Many sentences feature distractingly bad word choices that should have been fixed by somebody at Leisure Books; here are a few I noted:  

They gathered outside the entrance to the house, and shook off the dust and smell of the mansion like dogs expelling water.

The comma is unnecessary, shaking off a smell makes no sense, a dog shaking off water moves its torso while a person removing dust moves his limbs, and "expel" is the wrong word.  Argh.  

The weeds were really high in the rear of the house, long green stalks the size of a small man's body.

Obviously this should be something like "the height of a short man" or just "four or five feet high."

He opened the door.  Two rats came hurling up a staircase behind it.

Maybe this is a typo for "hurtling"?  Not that "hurtling" is very good; "darting" is better for something small--we usually see "hurtling" for something large like a locomotive or a truck.

Pretty faces were, quite literally, a dime a dozen. 

Abuse of "literally" is not new.

Thumbs down!

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It's back to science fiction short stories from before I was born for our next episode.  Stay tuned, space cadets!