Fredric Brown: "Granny's Birthday," "Nightmare in Yellow" and "Little Apple Hard to Peel"

I recently purchased a copy of the big Fredric Brown anthology put out in 2012 by Bruin Crimeworks, Miss Darkness, and from the "Tinglers" section late last month I read four stories first printed in the 1940s.  There are four more stories under the "Tinglers" heading, one of which we read in July 2022 when we read a bunch of critically-acclaimed noir stories, "Don't Look Behind You."  Let's read the other three today, one from the World War II era, two from the early Sixties. 

"Granny's Birthday" (1960)

A mere two pages of text, this is a successful horror trifle; you might call it a portrait of the concept of familial amoralism.  

A guy is at the birthday party of an 80-year-old woman, the matriarch of the successful Halperin family; he is the only person in attendance who is not a member of the family.  He likes all the people and is having a good time, but then a dispute erupts between two Halperins and a reckless impulsive act leads to a sudden tragic death.  The matriarch whips into action, demonstrating her dedication to her family and her dictatorial authority over its members.  To ensure the Halperins are protected from any sort of police prosecution, she instructs her people to murder the protagonist, thus eliminating all non-Halperin witnesses and providing a scapegoat who is in no possession to argue his innocence.  

After its debut in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, "Granny's Birthday" has been reprinted many times in Brown collections in English as well as in translation.

"Nightmare in Yellow" (1961)

"Nightmare in Yellow" was first printed in the men's magazine Dude.  This is another two page story that has been reprinted in many Brown collections; in addition, Helen Hoke in 1969 and Steve Bowles in 1981 saw fit to include it in anthologies of scary stories.

"Nightmare in Yellow" is an adequate twist ending story that shares a theme with "Granny's Birthday": the person who has won the love and affection of others who unexpectedly turns out to be horribly evil.

The protagonist is an embezzler who has reason to believe his thefts will soon be discovered.  His fortieth birthday is today, and, being something of a comedian, he has conceived the plan of starting a new life on this day by skipping town; he will kill his wife at the same time, to the very minute, at which he was born forty years ago, to cover his tracks and because he hates her.  His plan goes awry because his wife loves him and he has plenty of friends, and they have set up a secret surprise party--the surprise is sprunt just moments after he has committed the monstrous dead of slaying his wife, her inert body still warm in his arms.

"Little Apple Hard to Peel" (1942)

The narrator of "Little Apple Hard to Peel" is the sheriff of a small town in the Midwest.  When he was ten or eleven, a new kid his age, John Appel, arrived in town.  Anybody who got crosswise of John Appel suffered terrible, painful, even crippling, mishaps; one kid, Les Willis, suffered particularly grievously.  None of these dreadful misadventures could ever be traced to Appel, or to anybody else, but the sheriff and Willis had little doubt as to who was responsible.

Upon achieving adulthood, Appel left town; word eventually reached the sheriff that Appel was rumored to be a crime boss in Chicago, though nothing could be pinned on him legally--as far as the government could prove, he was a legitimate businessman.  One day Appel returns to town to take up residence in his childhood home, which has sat abandoned since his parents died.  Heartbreaking tragedy is the result when Les Willis and John Appel again cross paths. 

The ending of "Little Apple Hard to Peel" is a little bit on the extravagant side, but on the whole this is a powerful tale of cruelty, grief and revenge.  I like this one.  "Little Apple Hard to Peel" first appeared in Detective Tales, and later would be reprinted in 1985's Carnival of Crime and the 1997 French collection Attention, chien gentil!  

**********

These are all good realistic horror stories about human evil and the fact that we are never safe, that enemies, suspected or unsuspected, can suddenly appear to torture us or strike us down at any moment; Brown's characters and their behavior are very believable and the stories are all quite disturbing.  Thumbs up for all three--these are stories which justify Brown's high reputation.  

Merril-approved 1956 stories: Harlan Ellison and Charles L. Fontenay

It is normal to hear people praise Judith Merril as a great anthologist.  For example, I was leafing through a scan of the July 1955 Astounding while reading Eric Frank Russell stories recently and came upon P. Schuyler Miller's review of Merril's Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time, in which Miller praises Merril's "diligence" and declares her compilation of 19 stories about psychic powers "the best anthology of 1954."  So if one was going to choose a guide through the jungles of 1956's SF, Merril would be a logical choice, and this is a choice we at MPorcius Fiction Log made back in March.  Since then we have been picking stories out of the list of honorable mentions, organized alphabetically by author's last name, at the end of Merril's 1957 anthology SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume, and have already read many selections by writers whose names start with letters A through D.  Today we read the E and F stories, of which there is only one each.

"The Crackpots" by Harlan Ellison 

"Crackpots" is one of those stories that doesn't waste your time with nuance, subtlety, ambiguity, or believable characters and situations.  "The Crackpots," instead, is a fairy tale farce/satire that depicts over-the-top events and is populated by cardboard characters, all the easier to hit you mercilessly over the head with its banal, self-aggrandizing fan-service ideology.  I am reading "The Crackpots" in the scan of the 1979 omnibus anthology The Fantasies of Harlan Ellison that is available at the internet archive because the scan of the 1956 issue of If in which it first appeared lacks the pages containing "The Crackpots," which I am assuming is testimony to the fear instilled in the masses of mankind by Harlan Ellison's crack legal team.  This 38-page 1979 printing of the "The Crackpots" is preceded by an introduction over two pages in length in which Ellison name drops Nancy Weber, reminds us he doesn't like Richard Nixon, brags about his idiosyncratic furniture, and tells us that "The Crackpots" is about the fact that "Madness is in the eye of the beholder."  Thanks for the Cliff's Notes, Harlan--nothing makes hacking through 38 pages of anemic jokes more enjoyable than being told the point of it all ahead of time.

The Kyben are the dominant power in the galaxy, a hierarchical civilization of obedient and disciplined rules-followers.  Kyben who are not disciplined conformists are confined to planet Kyba, the planet of eccentric and insane Kyben.  All that occurs in the Kyben space empire is recorded by the men of the vast and ubiquitous surveillance apparatus known as The Watcher Corps; Watchers carry around with them "dicto-boxes," watch everything and make a record of everything by speaking into the dicto-boxes.  Our protagonist is Themus, a recent graduate of the Watcher Academy; great things are expected of him, as he graduated second in his class of 1200.  Themus has been assigned to Kyba, and we are there as he records the behavior of the local maniacs.  Ellison provides many descriptions of the crazy costumes people wear and the wacky things they do, including things that are unusual but certainly possible, like having sex with strangers, and things that go beyond unusual and seem essentially impossible, like surviving falls from high buildings and using psychic powers to divine the contents of another's pockets.  I guess these images and episodes are supposed to be funny, but instead they feel like a waste of time; even worse are the repetitive speech patterns and nonsense phrases that characterize the dialogue of some of the madmen and madwomen, which are are annoying to read.

As we sort of expect in SF stories about authoritarian societies, Themus gets mixed up with the secret underground when a pretty girl introduces herself to him.  She uses her feminine wiles to get him to surrender his dicto-box, which she wrecks, apparently dooming him to a court martial and consignment to the capital-M Mines--with such a black fate looming over him otherwise, he has little choice but to join up with these mad people.  The mad crew won't admit him into their mad ranks until he has done five mad acts, right now and right here in their HQ, and we have to endure Harlan's descriptions of all five; Harlan tries to make one interesting by having it involve disrobing the attractive woman who got him into this mess, which would certainly have made a cinematic adaptation of "The Crackpots" more interesting, but does but little for us readers.  

Having succeeded in performing five mad acts, to Themus is revealed the amazing truth of Kyben civilization.  The madmen of Kyba are not really mad--they are in fact secretly in control of the entire Kyben space empire!  From Kyba they manipulate the ordinary conformist masses of Kyben; their apparent madness is merely creativity and innovation that appears mad to the dull close-minded conformists.  The stuff they do that seems impossible is a reflection of the superpowers they have developed because they are free thinkers who do not permit society's rules to stifle them.  Themus was assigned to Kyba because he seemed smart, and is inducted into the ranks of the madmen and, presumably, lives happily ever after with the hot girl.

"The Crackpots" is an expression of Ellison's contempt for ordinary people with ordinary jobs who follow conventional norms, a wish fulfillment fantasy in which the superiority of people like Ellison, the creative people who break all the rules of the squares, cannot be questioned, a world in which people like Ellison are in charge.  (The way the hot girl just comes out of nowhere and declares her desire for Themus without him having to do anything to attract her is another aspect of wish fulfillment that scratches an itch that nags many of the young men who read SF magazines.)  "The Crackpots" is also a story that celebrates the manipulation of the masses by the cognitive elite.  Science fiction is full of this sort of elitist fantasy and pandering to alienated nerds--the Slan, the X-men, the Dragonriders, the Jedi, the Foundation, on and on--but when we are fortunate it is a little more subtle and is embedded in an entertaining adventure narrative instead of a series of lame jokes and farcical anecdotes.  Today we have not been fortunate.

Thumbs down!  Presumably Merril liked this one because she sees herself as a creative person oh-so-superior to the ordinary American with his stuffy bourgeois morality.  "The Crackpots" hasn't been anthologized as far as I can tell, but was reprinted in the various editions of Paingod and Other Delusions.  

On the left above we see Jack Gaughan's cover to the first edition of Paingod and Other Delusions.
Below we see the covers of European publications which include translations of Ellison stories
and bear covers shamelessly ripping off Gaughan's work for Pyramid.

"The Silk and the Song" by Charles L. Fontenay

I don't think I've ever read anything by Fontenay before.  "The Silk and the Song" first appeared in F&SF, and editor Anthony Boucher selected it for a F&SF "Best of" anthology; it has also seen print in multiple anthologies with Isaac Asimov's name on them, a text book, and Fontenay collections.  People seem to like it, so maybe it is good--I hope so, because the last story has me feeling a little down about the whole SF community.  

Faith restored!  "The Silk and the Song," unlike Ellison's clunker, presents a believable alien world, inspires real human feeling, and has a competently executed adventure plot--and no dumb jokes!  Plus, lefties can easily read it as advocacy of diversity and tolerance and maybe even an animal rights piece.  Thumbs up!

The Hussirs are a short people with tails and only four fingers on a hand who have a sort of medieval civilization--there are lords in the countryside who have a tense relationship with the merchants in the towns, and everybody fights with spears and archery.  These lords and merchants own slaves of another race like twice as tall as they, using them as we would use horses, as steeds and to pull plows and so forth.  This slave race is homo sapiens, the descendants of a Terran space crew who landed on the planet like a thousand years ago and were captured after a futile fight against overwhelming numbers.

Our protagonist is a young slave who, through a concatenation of events, finds himself free, a member of a community of escaped humans and their descendants who live in the hills.  Following clues left by their ancient ancestors, our hero and an attractive girl figure out how to escape the planet on the towering thousand-year-old space ship that sits at the center of a Hussir town.

A well-written classic-style SF story with paradigm-shift and sense-of-wonder elements in which all the little details and character relationships ring true.  A relief!    

**********

Well, that was a roller coaster ride.  Two stories about superior young men who discover the truth about their authoritarian societies and fight their way to freedom, one an irritating farce full of non-sequitur comedy scenes and oozing with self-important elitism and the other an entertaining adventure story with convincing characters and images.  

This has been the eighth post in our Merril-approved 1956 stories series.  Below find links to the first seven installments, and stay tuned to see how many additional 1956 SF stories will inspire agonized groans or sighs of relief here in the headquarters of MPorcius Fiction Log. 

Abernathy and Aldiss
Anderson, Allen and Banks
Barrow, Beaumont and Blish
Bradbury, Bretnor, Budrys and Butler  

Carter, Clarke and Clifton 
Clingerman, Cogswell and Cohen
de Camp, deFord, Dickson and Doyle      

Eric Frank Russell: "Somewhere A Voice," "U-Turn," "Seat of Oblivion," and "Tieline"

When I read John D. MacDonald's "Appointment for Tomorrow" in a 1949 issue of Super Science Stories recently, a commenter pointed out its similarities to Eric Frank Russell's "U-Turn," which first appeared in a 1950 issue of Astounding.  I looked up "U-Turn" at isfdb and saw it was reprinted in a 1966 collection with Frank Kelly Freas cover and interior illustrations, Somewhere A Voice.  The collection presents seven stories by Russell, three of which, "Displaced Person,"  "Dear Devil" and "I Am Nothing," we have already read, and four we have not.  Let's experience that quartet today as SF fans first experienced them, in scans of the magazines that hosted their original appearances.  Should you be curious to see Freas's illos (crashed rocket, caped creep, tentacled monster, child with automatic weapon, etc.) there's a link to a scan of the 1966 Dell paperback (F-398) at the isfdb page for Somewhere A Voice.  Also, nota bene, there is reason to believe Russell revised the stories for book publication--a look at the first paragraph of "Somewhere A Voice" indicates at least some changes were made to that story--so my comments below may not apply to the stories as they appear in the numerous editions of the collection.  

"Somewhere A Voice" (1953)

"Somewhere A Voice" made its first appearance in Other Worlds; this issue boasts not only a front cover that appeals to lovers of both birds and felines, but a fun back cover by Hannes Bok and a pointless autobiographical sketch by Russell in which he talks about how he doesn't like to write autobiographical sketches.  In 1957 "Somewhere A Voice" was reprinted in the British magazine Nebula.  In addition to the numerous different editions of the collection of which it is the title story, the story can be found in a big 1992 Russian anthology.

You'll be thrilled to learn that "Somewhere A Voice" is a story that celebrates diversity and debunks prejudice and bigotry, teaching us that, among other things, not every Chinese man is an opium addict and not every Jewish person carries diamonds around with him.  Keep a copy of this one in your back pocket to whip out when you hear someone bemoaning how old science fiction is white supremacy projected upon the stars.  

The Star Queen was hit by a meteor and wrecked, and almost everybody among her hundred-plus crew and passengers was killed.  A handful of people (and one dog) made it to the lifeboat in time and as the story begins they disembark onto a planet bathed in dangerous solar radiation whose toxic atmosphere gives life to endless jungles within which writhe carnivorous plants and skulk ambush-laying monsters.  One survivor is big and strong space sailor Bill Mallet, deputy engineer; another is First Officer Alex Symes; a third is Max Kessler, head of the third watch.  Mallet is dismayed to see that they are the only white crewmen to have survived the disaster--the remainder of the survivors consists of two elderly obese Russians, a Jewish passenger, an Asian who was a cook's assistant or something, and an unskilled "Negro" mechanic.  How are they going to survive the march to the nearest settlement--a trek of 2,000 miles!--with these losers slowing them down?  

For like thirty pages the party hacks its way through the jungle, regularly fighting the voracious native life.  One by one the human survivors of the shipwreck get killed, but before he is broken, torn or poisoned to death, each of the minorities has an opportunity to demonstrate courage, strength of character and unexpected capabilities, and before Bill Mallet himself expires he learns that people are all the same and tolerance is the most important virtue.  In the end Mallet, the last to die, also gets religion--delirious, he hears a voice reciting Matthew 11:28 in his head.  This is a surprise not only because science fiction stories are generally dismissive or even hostile to religion, but because it isn't foreshadowed at all, but seems to come out of nowhere.

Mallet keels over just as a rescue helicopter spots him and the dog--the dog is the only survivor of the Star Queen disaster.  The role of the dog is one aspect of "Somewhere A Voice" that sticks out, Russell suggesting this canine is an equal member of the party, that tolerance shouldn't be limited to human beings, but should be extended to our four-legged friends as well.  (I guess this is a data point in support of the cliché stereotype that English people love animals.)

"Somewhere A Voice" feels long.  Did we really need to see five different representatives of marginalized communities--two fat old foreigners, an African, a Chinese and a Jew--perform prodigies of self-sacrifice?  It gets a little monotonous; maybe one or two such characters would have driven the point home.  Individual scenes are also pretty long--Russell describes in great detail Mallet's provision of first aid to a number of his stricken companions, which I guess is meant to illustrate his burgeoning human connection to them (and maybe his massaging of somebody's feet is supposed to remind us of John 13), but again, it gets a little repetitive.  There is also little suspense in the story--once the first marginalized person sacrifices himself, you sort of know that they are all going to do it, and you can guess pretty early that the real journey Russell's story describes is Mallet's journey from racist xenophobe to diversity advocate, so whether he makes it to the settlement doesn't matter.

Merely acceptable.  Obviously a story to read if you are interested in depictions of racism and anti-Semitism and xenophobia in SF, and sympathetic depictions of Christianity in science fiction.

"U-Turn" (1950)

Lester Del Rey (in the intro to The Best of Eric Frank Russell) reports that Russell was John W. Campbell, Jr.'s favorite SF author, and here we have one of several stories from Somewhere A Voice that was first printed in Campbell's towering magazine, Astounding.  There the story was credited to Duncan H. Munro, a pen name Russell used three or four times, and appeared alongside tales by A. E. van Vogt, L. Ron Hubbard and L. Sprague de Camp.  It would later show up in the 1974 Dutch collection Welkom Op Aarde... and the 2000 American collection Major Ingredients.  

"U-Turn" showcases themes we see in lots of these old SF stories--the idea that utopia is overrated and to thrive people need challenge and even hardship; the cognitive elite who manipulate the masses for their own good; and the smart guy who uses logic and his science knowledge to figure everything out.

Our protagonist is a big success in the future of freedom and plenty that has been built by high technology, and Russell gives us lots of examples of how easy life has been made for the human race, and also lets us know that mankind seems to have reached its limit.  Rockets routinely carry people between Earth, the Moon, Venus and Mars, and Mars and Venus have been completely civilized.  However, rockets can't reach the planets beyond the asteroid belt, much less those of other star systems, and the matter transmitters in use that can transport things further than a rocket are not that reliable, so are only used to move inanimate objects.  Progress has ended--life on the inner planets can't be made any more luxurious and men can't venture further out--so our super rich protagonist, after over 200 years of productive life (he's on his third rejuvenation treatment) finds life a bore.  So he heads to the suicide facility, where a series of clerks try to gently dissuade him from destroying himself.  He is determined, however, and so steps into what is ostensibly an elevator to the upper floors where he will be euthanized, but which is in fact one of those unreliable matter transmitters.  Our guy reappears on the primitive Callisto colony, one of the lucky few whose atoms get correctly rearranged upon arrival.  Life is dangerous on Callisto (everybody wears a side arm) and everybody works hard using hand tools under the beautiful view of Jupiter, which is just the kind of life and work our hero is looking for!

In the last section of the story we learn that the protagonist had predicted that the suicide facility was actually a teleporter to a distant colony, and in the dialogue between him and the colonists who greet him, Russell explores some speculative sociology and political economy.  The utopian society is a bewilderingly complex machine, and a radical change might lead it to collapse.  If the general public knew there was even a slim chance of moving to a colony where life consists of real productive work with their hands and exciting fights with monsters, there would be a huge wave of volunteers to take that chance, which would put dangerous stress on the delicate economy and social order, so the authorities have kept the colonization program a secret, and just left a few clues for the smarty smarts to figure out how to volunteer and erected obstacles to deter all but those truly determined to leave their lives on Earth behind.

This story is more compact than "Somewhere A Voice" and the little details of the future world are more interesting than the details of the jungle in that story, and the themes of "U-Turn" are more challenging than the "don't be a bigot" preaching of "Somewhere A Voice."  I'm giving this one a mild recommendation.      

"Seat of Oblivion" (1941)

Here we have an entertaining sort of weird crime story, my favorite so far today.

Wade is an inventor, and he has built a working prototype of a device that bathes you in radiation that increases your spiritual power.  With all that extra spiritual power, your soul can free itself from your body.  This isn't as awesome as it sounds initially, as your body dies immediately upon you vacating it, and the extra spiritual power you have absorbed dissipates pretty quickly, so you have to take over another person's body quite soon after vacating your own, and doing so casts the other's soul into oblivion.  

A big fat investor financed this invention, and he isn't too crazy about the result--how can he make money on what amounts to a suicide-murder machine?  Scientist and humanitarian Wade isn't interested in money--he has the idea that his machine can be used to aid mankind by ensuring the longevity of people like himself.  Instead of executing heinous criminals in the electric chair, with the new machine geniuses who are elderly or terminally ill could migrate into the healthy bodies of convicted felons.  (Russell, in this story, dismisses materialist explanations of intelligence, personality and memory--your memories are not engraved on your brain physically or chemically, but are a component of your soul, so if you take over some other guy's body you don't take on any of his psychological attributes or gain access to any of his memories, or lose any of your own intellectual attributes.  This sort of thing makes "Seat of Oblivion" feel more like a weird tale than an actual science fiction story, but when I say that I am just describing, not complaining--you know I love Weird Tales as much as I do Astounding.)

The obese moneybags may not see possibilities for this machine, but Jensen the professional thief and three-time murderer does!  Jensen recently escaped from death row and is eavesdropping on Wade's conversation with his overweight backer.  Jensen murders the fat guy, forces Wade to teach him how to use the machine, and then takes possession of the machine and embarks on a crime spree; again and again he takes over some innocent person's body, robs a bank, and then takes over some other guy's body.  The public and the authorities are flabbergasted by the series of robberies committed by previously upstanding citizens who are then found dead, their bodies unmarred by any injury.

Wade works with law enforcement and they figure out a way to catch Jensen; Wade then destroys his invention, convinced the human race is not ready for it.

The 1979 German trans. of Somewhere A Voice (right) is abridged, including only
the title story, "U-Turn," "Seat of Oblivion" and "Dear Devil"

"Tieline" (1955)

Here's another Astounding piece that appears under the pseudonym Duncan H. Munro.  It would go on to be included in an Ace Double first published in 1958 and then reprinted in 1971 with different covers, Six Worlds Yonder.  

"Tieline" addresses a topic I associate with Barry Malzberg--the worry that participation in the effort to conquer space will drive people insane.  Our protagonist is the only man on a little island on a planet almost entirely covered in calm waveless oceans; his job is to maintain a transmitter that acts as a beacon, and he will be here all alone for ten years.  There are no large land animals, just fish and utterly silent insects, and the boredom and loneliness and silence threatens to drive the guy insane.

There are many such beacons across the galaxy tended by lone individuals, and the authorities are always trying to figure out new ways to stave off the plague of insanity that threatens to afflict their interstellar lighthouse keepers.  This brief story details a few of the methods they come up with to try to keep our particular guy sane; the idea is to create a connection ("tieline") to life on Earth.  A supply ship delivers recordings of Earth sounds, but they grow boring once they are too familiar.  Then a praying mantis is delivered, but the protagonist finds it too quiet and too alien--he's never seen one before, the mantis was never part of his life on Earth, so cannot serve as a tieline for him.  The story ends when something that really reminds him of his youth on the Outer Hebrides is delivered--hundreds of sea gulls.

Acceptable.

**********

'Seat of Oblivion" is actually a good thriller, and the other three stories, while not as entertaining, represent efforts by Russell to address interesting or important issues, issues where the lives of individuals and societies intersect, and he more or less succeeds in saying something intellectually or emotionally arousing.  Four stories worth the time of the classic SF fan.

Fredric Brown: "Cry Silence," "I'll Cut Your Throat Again, Kathleen," "A Little White Lye," & "The Joke"

In our last blog post I invoked the names of Beaver Creek Antiques and Fredric Brown, and I do so again today.  On a recent trip to the BCA, I purchased a 725-page paperback collection edited by Jonathan Eeds, Miss Darkness: The Great Short Crime Fiction of Fredric Brown.  I bought it because I thought I might not be able to find the stories easily on line, and it didn't hurt that on the publication page we find thanks to our hero Barry N. Malzberg (as well as to Stephen Haffner.)

There are 31 stories in Miss Darkness, separated into titled sections.  Let's read four 1940s stories from the "Tinglers" section, on the basis of my theory that "tinglers" are stories that are scary or creepy or yucky.  All four of today's stories would be reprinted in the 1985 Brown collection Carnival of Crime, which, in fact, is at the internet archive, so if you want to read old crime stories heartily recommended by the Sage of Teaneck, they are just a click away.

"Cry Silence" (1948)

Here we have a story that first appeared in Black Mask and would be reprinted in multiple magazines, among them the British Suspense, and multiple anthologies, including The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask stories.  

This is a good story, quick and legitimately creepy.  The narrator is waiting at the train station next to a big strong guy who ignores him, apparently because he is deaf.  Meanwhile, a railroad employee and another guy are having the tired old argument about whether a tree falling unwitnessed in a forest makes a sound.  When the narrator chimes in on the argument, he hears a tale of murder, trickery, and suicide!  

The big strong guy is a farmer who, not long ago, was diagnosed as deaf.  Recently, he padlocked the only exit to a building on his farm--while his wife and her alleged lover were inside!  The farmer reported them as missing, but they died of thirst before anybody found them.  The farmer has escaped any sort of punishment; after all, if he is deaf, how could he hear their cries for help?  The railroad employee is certain the farmer is faking his hearing loss and is a murderer, and whenever the farmer is at the train station he talks to whoever might be around about the alleged killings, obliquely or just directly like today, endeavoring to, by reminding the farmer of his crime, to drive him to suicide.

Good.

"I'll Cut Your Throat Again, Kathleen" (1948)   

This one debuted in an issue of Mystery Book featuring on its cover a sweater girl, a skeleton and a boxer (something for everybody!) and would be reprinted nine years later in Mystery Digest.

Too long, not particularly disturbing, and with a plot that is convoluted and not quite convincing, "I'll Cut Your Throat Again, Kathleen" is inferior to "Cry Silence," though acceptable.

Our narrator, a successful musician, wakes up in a mad house with scars on his wrists and very little memory of how he ended up in this unhappy condition.  He doesn't even remember what the men in his orchestra, or even his wife, look like.  He is told that he went bonkers and tried to slash his wife's throat and then tried to kill himself, but wifey, who had only suffered a flesh wound, staunched the flow of blood from his wrists and saved his life. 

One of the few things the narrator can remember is the joy of creating music, and he is miserable over the fact that, his tendons being permanently damaged, he will never play saxophone or clarinet again.  Brown spends a lot of time describing the musician's life and career and he lays on us some of those florid descriptions of the powerful effect good music has on a sensitive sophisticated listener that we periodically have to endure from writers who love music, though Brown's efforts in this genre are not as extravagant as Harlan Ellison's.

When the narrator gets out of the loony bin and meets his wife there are clues and other things that jog his memory and he figures out what really happened the night his wife's neck and his own wrists got cut and he then exacts a terrible revenge on the party responsible.

The stuff in this story that is compelling--a nagging controlling manipulative woman and the norm-defying men of low morals who suffer under her reign and then snap and take radical steps to achieve their freedom or at least vengeance--takes up too little space and the stuff that is kind of boring--a guy really loves music and is a critically-acclaimed musician--too much, and the mechanisms of the woman's diabolical scheme and those behind the principal characters' physical and psychological injuries are too complicated to be really believable.

Merely acceptable.

"A Little White Lye" (1942)    

"A Little White Lye" is a competent suspense thriller story, more smoothly told than "I'll Cut Your Throat Again, Kathleen," but less transgressive and surprising.  It may make the skin of feminists crawl, however, as its female lead sees as the focus of her life being a good housewife and when she doubts her husband she is making a big blunder.

Ginny and Dirk met just a month ago and are already married!  Shortly after the honeymoon, Dirk finds them a nice house at a bargain basement price!  Why is it so cheap?  Because the last residents were a married couple, a young man and an older widow with a lot of money, whose marriage ended abruptly when the man murdered the woman and tried to dissolve her body in the bath tub with lye.  The killer has yet to be captured, and the whole neighborhood is wondering if he found the money the widow is said to have hidden someplace within the house, and, if he didn't, when he'll be back to look for it!  Much of the suspense of the story revolves around the suspicions of Ginny and we readers that Dirk is the killer in disguise--after all, we hear that the killer was an actor and we all know those actors are adept at using make up.

"A Little White Lye" debuted in Ten Detective Aces. 

"The Joke" (1948)

"The Joke" first saw print as a cover story of Detective Tales under the title "If Looks Could Kill!" and seems to have been a big hit, reprinted many times in at least six languages, mostly in collections of Brown SF stories.

Like "I'll Cut Your Throat Again, Kathleen," this one is satisfyingly gruesome but is undermined by an overly long set up that describes its protagonist and a plot that is a sort of Rube Goldberg contraption that relies on a series of unlikely coincidences.  Just OK.

Jim Greeley is a travelling salesman.  A big practical joker, he works for a manufacturer of practical jokes and his sample case is full to bursting with fake bugs, hand buzzers, and other gags, and Brown expends a lot of ink describing the different tricks and getting across the idea that Jim is a total jerk who loves to put things over on people.  Jim has a wife and kids back home, but he also has girlfriends in the various towns in his territory.  He calls up one of these girlfriends, a beautiful and faithless married woman, on the phone to make a date; in this convo we learn that the woman has a bad heart and any sudden shock could kill her.  (Are people this frail really the sort who cheat on their spouses on the regular?)  

Jim goes to a barber to get a shave before his date with the married woman.  He tells the barber all about the practical joke he is going to play on his date--when he picks her up he plans to be wearing a new form of super-realistic mask; he shows the barber how convincing the mask is (I guess the mask is the SF component of the story).  Jim is a real blabbermouth, and tells the barber the woman's full name and her job (she is the landlady of a boarding house--her husband works outside the home, doing what, Jim doesn't know.)  The barber gives Jim a facial massage and Jim falls asleep.  When he wakes up the barber tells him he has done him a favor by affixing the mask on him--Jim's joke is going to work like a charm!

When the faithless wife opens the door she doesn't recognize her date; the philanderer takes off the mask and she drops dead of shock.  Jim goes back to the barber shop, and in the reflection of the store window sees that the barber (who we learned earlier participates in amateur theatricals) has made up Jim's face so he looks like a corpse!  Through the window Jim can see the barber has hanged himself, and he also notices the sign in the window giving the barber's name--this guy, of course, is Jim's lover's husband.

**********

Three OK stories and one good one; not a bad record.  We'll read more Fredric Brown "tinglers" from Miss Darkness soon.

Super Science Stories Nov '49: F B Long, M Leinster, R Bradbury & J D MacDonald

At Beaver Creek Antiques in Hagerstown, MD, a great stop for the vintage SF and comic book fan, I spotted an alluring copy of Super Science Stories, the November 1949 issue, whose cover depicts comely young ladies escaping four-armed aliens via the medium of transparent bubbles.  This magazine is full of stories by people we read here at MPorcius Fiction Log, so I was moved to look it up at the internet archive and read a bunch of stories from it.  Two major stories that we are skipping are Fredric Brown's "Gateway to Darkness" and Neil R. Jones' "Parasite Planet," the former because it was rewritten to form half of the novel Rogue in Space, which we read in 2016, the latter because it is one of Jones' later Professor Jameson stories and we tentatively plan to try to read them in order (we've already read six of those which were published in the 1930s--"Into the Hydrosphere," "Time's Mausoleum" and "The Sunless World" in 2015, and "Zora of the Zoromes," "Space War" and "Labyrinth" in 2021.)  That still leaves a lot of stories in this issue for us to grapple with, as well as Fred Pohl's book review column, in which he praises L. Ron Hubbard's Triton and dismisses George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 as mere "political tracts," albeit "powerfully effective" ones, that "have no meaning and no substance of [their] own" and don't really qualify as "art," but just "politics."  Is Pohl irritated that a non-SF personage has produced in 1984 one of the most popular and influential SF works of all time, or, that a fellow leftist has unleashed upon the world two extremally popular attacks on socialism and the USSR? 

"The Timeless Man" by Frank Belknap Long

It looks like this story by one of H. P. Lovecraft's closest associates has never been reprinted.  "The Timeless Man" is a paean to the power of art and a sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy for creative people; the science fiction gimmick at its center bears some similarity to that in A. E. van Vogt's "The Monster" (AKA "Resurrection,") which appeared in Astounding in August of 1948.

Holden is a painter who loves life, loves doing his work, loves seeing the beauty of the world around him.  A nuclear was has broken out, and even as the deadly radiation is penetrating his flesh, killing him, he is painting his final canvas.

When aliens arrive on Earth, Holden's dedication to his art receives extreme vindication--he put so much of himself into his last painting that the aliens are able to deduce his entire psyche and physical form from the canvas and construct a duplicate of him.  I guess because it is necessary for the plot, the aliens don't stick around until Holden II wakes up, ostensibly because the radiation still enshrouding the Earth is unhealthy for them, which is ridiculous, because if they have a starship they must have some kind of radiation shield technology.  Anyway, the duplicate Holden wakes up and sees their ship receding into the sky, and then his own skeleton, identifiable by the ring on its finger.

Holden II manages to survive in post-atomic war America, finding that breeding populations of fruits and birds and small animals have endured.  The story's climax is when he meets a small tribe of humans--savages, cave people.  The tribe accepts him, and he resumes his career as an artist, using paints he makes from berries and dirt.  

I like this one--Long's argument that art is essential, eternal, and can be a source of joy in any circumstance is a little naïve, self-serving, and saccharine, but I appreciate the sincerity he brings to the story and I can sympathize with, even identify with, his vision.  

"This Star Shall Be Free" by Murray Leinster

More cave people!  The place: Northwest Europe. The time: Over thirty thousand years ago.  The man: Tork.

Tork is a subordinate male in a small tribe of people who have fire and pointed sticks, but no stone or flint blades yet.  One day aquatic aliens--their reflective silver starship and their spacesuits are filled with water--arrive.  These Antareans are telepathic and also have a machine, a box, that sends out hypnotic waves--those close to the box focus their thoughts on a certain type of creature, and that creature is irresistibly attracted to the machine.  With this attractor box they draw Tork to their ship.  As an experiment in ecology, they give Tork stone knives, spears with stone points, a bow, and arrows with flint heads; they also give him the attractor box and explain how to use it.  They even supply him with pictures of local animals to help him use the device to attract animals--it is easier to concentrate your thoughts on an animal if you have a picture of it to look at.  The aliens, who are callous jerks who have overpopulated their own world and are looking for other watery planets to colonize, think that with the weapons and the attractor box the Earthers will exterminate the local wildlife and then starve themselves.  

Tork, using these tools, makes himself chief of the tribe, and earns the envy of many other tribes; people start stealing the weapons.  So Tork figures out how to use the attractor box to attract the Antareans, in hopes the aliens will replenish his weapon supply.  To concentrate strongly enough about the aliens to compel them to come, the cave people draw images of the Antareans--the aliens have not only inspired man to begin using complex tools, but to begin making representational art.  The humans are such a nuisance with their use of the attractor box that the Antareans abandon Earth before seeing how their experiment in ecology works out.  In their absence, the people of Earth learn how to make their own weapons and create increasingly more sophisticated art.

When the Antareans return 30,000 or so years later to colonize Earth they find the humans have a heavily armed interplanetary space fleet.  The Antareans are outfought and the Terran space navy captures a specimen of their interstellar drive--foolishly, the Antareans have twice spurred technological and cultural growth among humans, enabling them to conquer the galaxy.

An acceptable entertainment.  isfdb lists three anthologies in which "This Star Shall Be Free" has been reprinted: Groff Conklin's Invaders of Earth, which saw quite a few editions, Michael Sissons' Asleep in Armageddon, and Thomas E. Sanders' Speculations, which looks like a 600-page textbook that mixes people like James Dickey, W. H. Auden and Graham Greene in among SF Grand Masters like Robert Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt and Fritz Leiber.      

"Impossible" by Ray Bradbury

"Impossible," isfdb tells us, was included in The Martian Chronicles (printed in Britain as The Silver Locusts) under the title "The Martian."  It is an effective story of grief and loss.

Two older people have retired to Mars, to a homestead near a canal; they lack indoor plumbing and bring water in buckets from the canal.  Their son died as a teenager on Earth long ago, but, amazingly, he suddenly shows up, still fourteen years old.  The husband realizes this must be a Martian shape shifter who has read in their minds their memories of their son, but the wife is more susceptible to the weird native's hypnotism.  The Martian seems friendly, to want to be loved as much as the settlers want to love, so maybe it will be OK.

Tragedy strikes!  The wife recalls how much their son enjoyed going into town back on Earth, so she insists they take their boat down the canal to the nearby town.  The "son" is very reluctant to go, but she overcomes his resistance.  In the town, other humans see the shape shifter as some dead person from their own past, and everybody fights over the alien, who can't take the pressure on his not-exactly-voluntary shape-shifting ability and expires.  Sad!

Quite good.

"Appointment for Tomorrow" by John D. MacDonald

Here we have a story by famous detective novelist MacDonald.  We here at MPorcius Fiction Log (feel free to call it "The MFL" for short) have read MacDonald's SF novel Wine of the Dreamers and six of his SF short stories: "Ring Around the Redhead," "A Child is Crying,"  "Flaw," "Spectator Sport," and "A Condition of Beauty."  Here comes lucky seven, which, if isfdb is to be believed, was never reprinted.

You can see why this one wasn't included in anthologies and collections like some other of MacDonald SF stories we have read: the main gimmick is kind of weak and the human story simple and sappy.  Reminding us of Robert Heinlein's "Lifeline" (Astounding, 1939) and Isaac Asimov's sprawling Foundation series (the first of which appeared in Astounding in 1942), in the future the government can use statistics to figure out what day you will (probably) die.  Six months ago, 40-something widower and big business president Samuel Larkin got a notice from the "Future Bureau" that his day was approaching if he didn't make radical changes in his life.  Larkin felt he couldn't leave his job, there being thousands of people relying on him, and so today the feds have come to his office to warn him that tomorrow is the day he will die!  This doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense to the reader, seeing as Larkin is perfectly healthy, but all the characters have trust in the science and believe the Future Bureau's calculations implicitly.

Larkin says farewell to everybody and writes memos to his successor on how to handle all the current projects and otherwise straightens up his affairs.  His gorgeous secretary, 20-something Martha Hood, admits she has been in love with him for seven years.  Then Larkin takes a long walk through the night city (we are to believe he is going to buy the farm tomorrow but he is hale and hearty enough to walk from dusk till dawn), drinking in the atmosphere of the city for the last time.        

The text has been hinting at some "alternative," and the twist ending that greets readers is that the government offers a way to radically change your life so you can beat the statistics and survive.  The most radical change you can make to your life is flying to another planet, right?  So, people who are predicted to die can "volunteer" to join the space colonization effort, a very unpleasant and dangerous enterprise, but better than death while you are still healthy, right?  After his long walk, Larkin boards the star ship and is strapped in.  At the last moment Martha Hood hurries on to the ship, one of the vanishingly small number of people who sign up for these horrifying space missions even though the government stats suggest they have many years to live.  Her love overcame her fear of space, and Larkin can now look forward to the future with hope.

The idea that statisticians can predict a healthy person will die of an accident on a specific day is very hard to take, at least for me.  I am seriously considering that the Future Bureau is a government scam to trick capable people into colonizing space, but MacDonald doesn't seem to leave much room for this interpretation, which would make more sense in a totalitarian society in which the government keeps a tight rein on information and punishes dissent, not the liberal market society he depicts here.   

Weak filler.   

"The Sleepers" by John D. MacDonald

MacDonald gets a second bite at the apple today because he has two stories in this issue of "The Big Book of Science Fiction," this one appearing under the pen name John Wade Farrell.  Maybe "8" is the lucky number today.

In fact, "The Sleepers" is another filler story, but it is more internally consistent and believable than "Appointment for Tomorrow," and its themes, you might say its ethos, are more amenable to my own sensibilities, so I'm judging it as solidly acceptable.

It is the future.  For like 1,300 years the vast majority of the human race, generation after generation, has lived in a sort of induced coma, stacked up in niches in a uniform city of hundreds of identical buildings, fed intravenously, their waste products sucked away by tubes.  People are conceived in a machine, moved to a cold niche where their hearts beat just ten times an hour, then, after a century or so of life, they die and are put in the furnace.

The population of over a billion sleepers are tended to by 8,000 workers.  Workers are men (and only men) who are woken from sleep, indoctrinated hypnotically by machines, and then serve a twenty-year tour of duty at such tasks as handling the conception and birth of new people, maintaining the machines that keep the sleepers alive, and trundling them off to the furnace when they expire.  The indoctrination not only teaches them to speak and read and to fulfill their duties, but stifles all desire for sex or freedom or friendship, deadens all curiosity about the past and about the world beyond the monotonous city of the sleepers.  The workers also can't remember the dreams they had while sleeping, but are told their dreams are wonderful, are of a life in paradise, and so are generally eager to return to sleep after twenty years of service.

Due to various factors, indoctrination is not perfectly reliable in all cases, and sometimes workers in their second decades of service begin to become curious or horny or even to remember the dreams they had while sleeping.  The plot of "The Sleepers" concerns two such men.  One of these men, by chance, is the head of the whole city!  The other is a rank and file worker who found some old books about life before the era of the sleepers, and who has fallen in love with a sleeping woman of great beauty.  This guy remembers the dreams he had before he was awakened to work.  Maybe the first generation of sleepers had wonderful dreams of a paradise, because they went to sleep with brains full of memories of a life of sex and family and food and work and hobbies, but later generations, because they have never had lives, have dreams of absolute sterile blackness!  

These two guys, because one of them can order the workers around and manipulate work schedules and so forth, are able to thaw and wake some people, teach them how to talk and so forth in the old fashioned way, and then lead this small band in a break out from the city of sleep and into the wilderness.

The setting is interesting and I like the theme of people fighting tyranny in pursuit of love and freedom, so "The Sleepers" is an acceptable if not remarkable entertainment.

**********

A tolerable crop of stories.  The best of them, the Bradbury has real human feeling, and the Long and the "Farrell" express sentiments about life I can get behind, while Leinster's story is an interesting bit of "what if" speculation that ends on a sense-of-wonder note.  Only the story that appears under MacDonald's real name has so many problems that it is rendered annoying instead of entertaining.  

More short stories from magazines published before you were born in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.

The Running of Beasts by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg

"The whole point of the crimes is to attract attention, to convince himself of his own reality.  Since he hasn't been caught yet, he'll keep on doing it until he is, until he's discovered, and in the process discovers himself, finds out who he is."

Hey, blood fans, let's read a "superb suspense thriller" that has an ending that the Albany newspaper called "a smasher" and was written by our hero Barry N. Malzberg in collaboration with his pal, critically-acclaimed detective novelist Bill Pronzini.  At the internet archive we find a scan of a 1976 paperback edition of The Running of Beasts with a red woman-in-peril cover painting by Jerome Podwil; that is what I'll be reading today, but all you collectors out there can pick up one of the numerous paperback copes for sale on e-bay--if Jerome Podwil ain't your cup of meat, there is a 2012 edition with a skull on it and a 1988 Black Lizard printing whose cover illo highlights the role of newspapers in the story.  

Barry and Bill start off their 300-page novel cleverly, with a typescript draft of a newspaper story about the three recent murders of women in the decaying Adirondack town of Bloodstone, NY.  Written by Jack Cross in a bizarrely  unjournalistic and solipsistic style, the draft is covered in handwritten corrections and notes from Cross's editor, Henry Plummer, owner of the local weekly paper, so not only fills us readers in on the background of the murder spree but on Cross's immature personality, parlous career and unhappy relationship with his colleagues.  This is followed by a police report and then a letter from young up-and-coming New York City journalist Valerie Broome to a magazine editor, proposing she write a story on the Bloodstone murders.  She tells the editor that she is specially equipped to handle the story because 1) she grew up in Bloodstone, a town she says has a resident population of less than 500 people--people who are small-minded bigots who hate outsiders, the poor, blacks, and homosexuals, and 2) she knows a headshrinker, Dr. James Ferrara, who has a theory about the killer--that the killer is insane and doesn't even know he is the killer, but commits the murders while in a sort of trance or "amnesiac fugue."

Broome and Ferrara leave New York City and head up to Bloodstone where we get to know the various characters.  We got Cross the young journalist who collects Superman comics, doesn't get along with his mother (who is sleeping with his boss, Plummer), and hopes to write a book on the murders that will make him rich and famous.  There's Constable Alex Keller, the only cop in town, a veteran of the Chicago police force with whom he lost his job for beating up a '68 convention protester.  There's former actor and recovering alcoholic Steven Hook, who has been making his living for six years betting on the horses.  Rounding out our four lead male characters is State Police Lieutenant Daniel Smith, who is in charge of the murder investigation, has some kind of stomach ailment, and shares with Plummer a love of baseball trivia.

Over the first half of the novel we learn these four guys'  histories, idiosyncrasies and neuroses, and observe as they each inch closer to personal breakdowns.  Hook's system of betting on the horses is failing and he is losing money instead of making it, and considers turning back to drink to ease his anxiety.  Cross is a premature ejaculator who is so obsessed with Superman that he calls his girlfriend "Lois" while he is fucking her and yet she still nags him to marry her.  Keller is obsessed with finding the killer and so he can't leave town to patronize a prostitute, which means he is getting uncomfortably horny.  Smith's stomach problem (probably an ulcer) is getting worse and he can't talk to his fat wife about this or any other of his problems and he can't get along with Keller either.  All four of these guys are alienated, have sexual performance issues, have suffered blackouts or delusions or fits of violent rage in the past, and each has the feeling that some woman has damaged his life, making them all--in the eyes of the reader--suspects.

We also learn all about Valerie Broome's personality and background; she is the most sympathetic and admirable character in the novel; as a sensitive and and good-looking woman who has achieved success in her field of journalism, she is the one lead character who doesn't feel like a villain or a loser.  Broome seems to represent the authors' attitudes, to voice their concerns--an educated big city resident who is concerned about all the isms and looks down on small town America, she sees Bloodstone as a 

microcosm...of what is going on in America today...assassinations, mass murders, public freakouts, private collapses, television spectaculars, grand funerals, small griefs, dead politicians, living politicians who are dead...a pressure point where modern technology and alienated man are forced at last to meet each other.

Hook discovers the body of the fourth victim, and is shaken, and Broome starts an affair with him; it is suggested in part because she feels sorry for him--as a sensitive soul, Hook's suffering melts her heart.  Hook is probably the character second most sympathetic and second most like the authors; for one thing, his theater background offers Bill and Barry opportunities to talk about Shakespeare and Victor Hugo and James Agee ("the running of beasts" is apparently a quote from Agee's corpus.)  Keller is the most openly villainous character; an obsessive man who is hostile to everybody and in particular complains about liberals and homosexuals, he competes with the state police effort to the catch the killer instead of cooperating with it, and suspects Hook and relentlessly pursues him, to the point of illegally harassing him, even though he lacks any real evidence.  As for Smith, the authors use him to illustrate the human struggle to believe that the universe is orderly and logic and reason can describe it when everything feels chaotic and seems inexplicable.

He could, would, overcome all of these obstacles with patience and absolute confidence in the ordered universe--but how long would it take?  And how many more obstacles would there be before methodology finally took him to the truth?

In the middle of the book, Cross's mother Florence reports that she has been attacked, and then Cross's girlfriend, Paula the schoolteacher, informs him she is pregnant and demands he marry her--Cross wants her to have an abortion ("Everything's legal in New York now") but she refuses:

"No.  Abortion's a sin, it's murder.  I won't murder a helpless infant."

"Embryo," Cross said.  "Fetus."  

"I won't do it," she said flatly.

One of the reasons we read old books is because they offer insight into life and thought in the past.  This passage in which James Cross and Paula Eaton discuss abortion is interesting because we all know how good liberals like Malzberg are required to feel about abortion nowadays, but almost fifty years ago he and Pronzini are putting the "it's just a clump of cells" rationalizations into the mouth of a character who is irresponsible and delusional and deploying the abortion issue as a strategy of hinting to the reader that Cross might be the murderer because he is quite comfortable with killing the weak and innocent.  From the perspective of 2023, this somewhat ambiguous, perhaps hostile, view of abortion sits uncomfortably with all the complaints that rural white people are violent racists and homophobes that are sprinkled throughout the book. 

Speaking of dim views of rural white, the townspeople become angry at the authorities for their failure to stop the killings, and there is some talk among them of setting up a vigilante patrol; Broome compares some raucous attendees of a town meeting to a lynch mob, and, when an ordinary citizen tries to catch the killer himself he only causes more trouble for everybody.    

The last third or so of the book starts with a good chase scene set during a night thunderstorm which starts with poor Paula being murdered and then sees Keller and Smith independently chasing down Hook; Smith has a life-threatening ulcer attack during this caper and it is Keller who arrests Hook, but he has to hand him over to the state police and so can't fulfill his dream of confining him in his own local jail.  Cross, following Keller in his role of investigative reporter, witnesses Smith's collapse and Hook's arrest--this scene, which brings all four of our suspects together, foreshadows the novel's climactic scene in which they will be reunited in even more dangerous circumstances.

An interesting theme that dominates the portion of the novel between this chase scene and the climactic chase concerns parallel psychological crises suffered by Florence Cross and Valerie Broome.  Florence wrestles with her belief that her son James is the killer, while Broome struggles with her own suspicion Steven Hook, her new boyfriend, is the killer--each finds the idea that a murderer of women was inside her--as a baby in the Cross case and as a sex partner in Valerie's case--morbidly fascinating and so horrifying they strive to refuse to believe it.  Also adding to the tension in this stretch is the evolution of Smith, who previously has been the most normal, the most reliable, of our four male leads.  Gradually he begins to act recklessly and erratically, to, under the pressure of his ulcer and his desperation to catch the killer, take on some of the unhealthy character traits of Cross (whereas Cross sometimes wonders how Clark Kent would handle a situation, Smith begins using baseball analogies to guide his decision-making) and Keller (like the Constable, Smith becomes determined to solve the case himself without the help of other cops.)  

In the novel's climax, after a chase involving boats as well as cars, Valerie, Hook, Smith, Keller and Cross all end up in a sort of amusement park slash museum fashioned to look like a colonial fort and village and full of mannequins in 18th-century garb--Pronzini and Malzberg's novel is about how terrible (rural) America is, and so the final explosion is set in a sort of caricatured archetypal (frontier) American setting.  The action climax in this ersatz fort stresses how similar the four men are, how each of them might have been the killer--the novel is also about how everybody (at least every man) is terrible.  One of our four suspects, totally insane, declares himself to be the killer and commits suicide in the fort.  In the epilogue that follows the other three experience dreadful fates--one goes insane, one dies, and one--the real killer--murders Valerie Broome.

As you probably already know if you are reading my blog, Barry Malzberg was a science fiction fan who aspired to be a serious mainstream literary writer like John Updike or Saul Bellow or Vladimir Nabokov but couldn't achieve his career goals in the shrinking mainstream literary market and so sold stories and novels to the SF market about abnormal psychology, sexual dysfunction, and the social dysfunction of post-JFK America by setting them in an SF context, this context sometimes being a pretty thin veneer.  In The Running of Beasts we see Malzberg working out his typical themes in a different genre framework, the serial killer thriller mold, describing four different male characters who are alienated and sexually dysfunctional and share or illustrate interests of Malzberg's--betting on the horses, struggling to succeed as a writer, a fascination with political violence, and a commitment to literature and the fine arts.  

The Running of Beasts succeeds as a Malzberg novel, and I am giving it a thumbs up--James Cross in particular, the talentless confessional writer who never stops thinking of Superman, has delusions he is going to win a Pulitzer Prize and get lots of chicks, can't satisfy his girlfriend in bed and treats her like crap out of bed, and has a creepy relationship with his mother, is a classic Malzberg protagonist whom Barry's fans will appreciate.

But does The Running of Beasts succeed as a horror novel or a detective novel?  Malzberg's work often employs experimental techniques and often lacks traditional literary and entertainment values like vivid descriptions or a strong plot that moves logically from point A to point B, and thus much of Malzberg's work can be hard to follow, but, probably because of Pronzini's involvement, The Running of Beasts is very clear and straightforward in its descriptions and in the way its narrative operates; the characters' personalities and motives all are easily discernible and the plot functions conventionally, with a beginning, middle, climax, resolution, and then twist ending that clues you in unambiguously as to what was really going on.  The two chase scenes are good.  On those bases the novel has to be counted a success as a mainstream popular entertainment.  However, gorehounds should be forewarned that the novel features less blood and guts (though far more gastrointestinal distress) than I expected, and mystery fans should know there was less detection jazz than I expected, and the detective stuff that is present is a debunking of the idea that the detective can, via logic and intelligence, figure out whodunit and achieve justice--any clues anybody discovers they discover by accident, the authorities and sympathetic characters never figure out who the criminal is and never catch him, and the sympathetic characters all get killed or driven bonkers.  Smith, a man committed to police techniques and methodologies, learns to his dismay that the world is not orderly and man cannot master it--our lives are chaos, our goals are beyond our grasp, and we are likely to suffer death or madness at any moment.

As for weaknesses, some people might find the passages that consist of 1930s baseball trivia or of a detailed description of horse betting strategy too long, and I admit they were mostly Greek to me.  Another issue is the fact that the way Ferrara accurately diagnoses the killer's neuroses from reading newspaper reports is hard to believe, and undermines the novel's theme that the universe is inexplicable chaos that experts cannot penetrate any more deeply than can ordinary schlubs.  These are minor issues, though.

A satisfying entry in the Malzberg oeuvre, and one that (probably because of Pronzini's contributions) presents Malzberg's customary themes in an easy-to-read form.  A Malzberg book that it is easy to recommend to all genre fiction fans.