Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

Serial Review: Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch (Part 2/4)

April 13th, 2023

(Cover by Eduardo Paolozzi. New Worlds, August 1967.)

Who Goes There?

There’s debate as to when the New Wave of science fiction started, since certain works, such as Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, anticipated the transgressions made during that movement. Authors who would be often affiliated with the movement, such as Kate Wilhelm, R. A. Lafferty, and Harlan Ellison, also usually got their start in the field well before the mid- to late-’60s height of the New Wave. Another author who came around just in time was Thomas M. Disch, who in the ’60s saw pbulication on both sides of the Atlantic, in both the US (ohh) and the UK (eww), and aside from having the handicap of being a filthy British magazine, New Worlds proved to be the ground where Disch could be his saltiest and most transgressive. Camp Concentration saw serialization in New Worlds in 1967, just before that magazine was to run into some real legal (on top of the already financial) problems, and thus, regardless of its flaws (I do have some quibbles), it can be seen as emblematic of New Worlds during its peak, despite being written by an American author. Disch’s novel would see book publication in the UK the following year, although weirdly American readers would have to wait until 1969 for an American edition.

Placing Coordinates

Part 2 was published in the August 1969 issue of New Worlds, which is on the Archive; and just to keep my bases covered I think this will be the first time I’ve linked to Luminist. Just be aware that PDFs on Luminist tend to be BIG, including this one, but at least its collection of New Worlds is more complete than the Pulp Magazine Archive’s. As for book versions there aren’t a lot of options, but it looks like the Vintage paperback is still in print and readily available, so yeah, probably go for that.

Enhancing Image

Before we get to the plot, which there isn’t a whole lot of for this installment, let’s talk about interiors and how they can relate to the stories they’re supposed to be illustrating. Sometimes an interior, depending on where it’s placed, can be illustrating something that has already happened in the text, or it can serve as a kind of foreshadowing, alluding to something that will happen later in the text but which, upon seeing the interior, we will not have read for ourselves yet. Part 2 of Camp Concentration opens with an interior by Zoline, depicting a rabbit on its hind legs kissing a cherub, which sounds transgressive but also like a non sequitur—for now. Believe it or not this is a pretty good use of illustrative foreshadowing, as it sets up the meat of what is to come in Part 2, though we’re not able to connect those dots yet. I guess it’s NSFW, given the cherub’s dingus is hanging out, but that’s also not an uncommon sight in religious paintings and sculptures.

Observe:

Last time we ended with a performance of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus that went wrong, with the magic pixie dream boy George having fallen violently ill with what turns out to be a condition all the prisoners at Camp Archimedes have—a condition that gives them only months to live. George soon dies and there’s a funeral held for him; we didn’t get to know him very well, but he clearly serves as the sacrificial lamb for both Camp Archimedes and the novel, Disch seemingly telling us that even the most innocent of the lot are not safe. Louis, who was already an unhappy camper (lol) before this, threatens to have a breakdown.

The prisoners do things to preoccupy themselves, partly because the drug they’ve been given has heightened their intelligence and thus their need to satiate cognitive activity, and partly to keep their minds off the fact that they will all die rather soon. Louis starts writing a three-act play of his own, titled Auschwitz: A Comedy, which perhaps for the best we learn very little about. This is one of those little things about the novel that can be taken as either simply edginess for the sake of itself or a bit of very dark comedy; I’m inclined to think it’s the latter. I’m reminded of a line in the film Crimes and Misdemeanors wherein a character insists that comedy is simply “tragedy plus time,” a philosophy Disch might agree with—that is to say, once enough distance in time is made from a terrible event, that terrible event can be warped and recontextualized to become funny.

Louis has another conversation with the camp doctor and local Ms. Exposition (not to mention the novel’s only female character), Dr. Busk, where we’re finally told what exactly the prisoners have been injected with, because it’s not just any drug. To make a long story short, the prisoners of Camp Archimedes have been infected with a highly advanced form of syphilis, that most horrible of vinereal diseases in a pre-AIDS world which sees the victim succumb to insanity, then death. Some famous people thoughout history were known, or at least suspected, to have contracted advanced syphilis, the most famous example probably being Friedrich Nietzsche. Yet, as Dr. Busk points out, these people who were ultimately ruined by the disease also seemed to have flashed of brilliance amidst the madness that could have been a direct result of the disease, and though he is loathe to admit it, Louis has to agree somewhat.

But it has been suggested—and by some very reputable people (though they were not usually in the medical line)—that neuro-syphilis is as often beneficent as it is at other times malign, that the geniuses I’ve mentioned (and many others that I might add) were as much its beneficiaries as its victims.

Meanwhile there’s an apparent rivalry between Haast and Busk with regards to certain activities the prisoners take up to preoccupy themselves, with Haast being on the side of the mystic and Busk being on the side of the materialist—a rivalry that involves Louis and Mordecai. Mordecai, last time we saw him, had taken a keen interest in alchemy, which by now has blossomed into an autistic fixation. It’s here that we get the most memorable scene in the installment, and the point of inspiration for that opening interior illustration. Mordecai, who by this point become perhaps a little unscrewed mentally, introduces Louis to his three “familiars,” those being rabbits who have also been infected with the disease and who subsequently only have a short time to live—though for them it’s a matter of weeks rather than months. The rabbits seem to all be male, for they also have incredibly swollen testicles because of the disease.

That’s one half of the equation for the illustration, but we’ve not quite reached the other half involving the cherub yet…

There’s an obvious parallel between the prisoners and the rabbits, with the two being treated more or less the same. Testing on animals, and rabbits especially, has historically been pretty common, to the point where the imagery of rabbits in cages in some laboratory has been shorthand for experimental (and unethical) testing. I do have to wonder if Disch was thinking of Flowers for Algernon when writing Camp Concentration, since the two have similar premises and play with the same notion of accelerated human intelligence. Of course, the premise of Flowers for Algernon is actually a bit more implausible because scientists, no matter how unethical, would not test their hypothesis on a single rodent and then greatly upscale that experiment for a human. Disch also uses his premise to comment on the US government’s gross treatment of protestors during the Vietnam war; it’s not hard to think the government at this time would see infecting a bunch of naysayers with a terminal disease in the name of “science” as a convenience, even killing two birds with one stone.

I know I mentioned this in the previous installment, but the Tuskegee experiment, wherein dozens of African-American men were unknowingly infected with syphilis, was still in progress, unbeknownst to Disch and the rest of the American public. The lesson here is to never underestimate the potential evils of government—then or now. This is all made extra eerie since Mordecai is easily the most prominent black character among the ensemble, and it’s clear that he’s also been taking his condition not too well. We’re never sure how sincere Mordecai is being about his turn towards mysticism, but what’s not so ambiguous is that he’s dying, and he’s a man in the midst of an existential crisis. “The whole goddamned universe is a fucking concentration camp,” he says at one point, and for him that might indeed be true; for a terminally ill man, where freedom is impossible, life itself has become a prison where “escape” means death.

There Be Spoilers Here

Mordecai, with Haast’s approval, performs a religious ritual on Midsummer’s Eve, one which pushes Dr. Busk’s buttons, but while the not-so-good doctor is triggered in the short term (of course the one female character is a total stick in the mud), she feels morbidly vindicated when the “elixir” Mordecai has been working on seemingly has no effect; not only that, but Mordecai dies, pretty abruptly, before completing the ritual. Haast, who really did believe in Mordecai’s promise as an alchemist, feels betrayed by both his death and the lack of effectiveness of his studies, and he has quite the episode. Mysticism has failed, and materialism does not provide a cure for the specter of death which plagues them all.

What’s strange about the series of revelations in this installment is that Louis treats his own terminal condition like it’s supposed to be a surprise; like sure it sucks that you’ll die from syphilis in a few months, but given what we’ve known up till now I would’ve just assumed that was the case. Of course it makes sense symbolically, in a deal-with-the-devil fashion: Louis and the other prisoners were trapped in more conventional prisons, ones which had shitty living conditions but which at least showed the posibility of release, and they made a deal with Haast where they got to live in an underground facility that was more like a hotel than a prison—only, unbeknownst to them, they had all been given death sentences. Still, I can’t always make sense of Louis’s reactions to plot developments, like how I also can’t tell if he’s merely a lapsed Catholic or an apostate; he certainly sounds concerned with the theological minutia of the Church scriptures.

Speaking of which, the actual ending of Part 2 is a protracted dream sequence, which Louis is somehow able to recall in detail (writers beware that dreams, and the recollection of dreams, basically never work this way), wherein he has a rather odd conversation with a monstrously fat Thomas Aquinas, with cherubs as minions. Louis, eyeing one of the cherubs, notices something worrying about it, “the distressing inflammations that had swollen its tiny scrotum and caused the poor thing to walk with a strange, straddling gait.” Does this sound familiar? Now it all adds up… sort of. I’m still not quite sure what Disch means with the swollen testicles bit, but he’s clearly drawing a line between rabbits and people, with cherubs standing in for the latter. There’s also a subliminal homosexuality about all this, since both the rabbits and cherubs, given their genitals, are supposed to be male. (I know what you’re thinking: that sounds bioessentialist. I’m talking specifically in the context of the novel, which is so lacking in women anyway that male homosexuality is all but inevitable, even without Disch’s teasing.) What could it all mean, though? I’m not sure yet.

On a final note, we’re one again reminded of the Faustian theme of man’s hunger for knowledge at any price, with Aquinas’s obesity being symbolic of his insatiable hunger for knowledge. Obesity is typically used in fiction as shorthand for a character’s greed (a gross demonizing of obesity that even left-leaning people are guilty of using at times), but at least here I can sort of look the other way since Disch is using it less to illustrate Aquinas (who after all is just a figment of Louis’s imagination here, and thus a projection of his own insecurity) and more to illustrate Louis’s character, not to mention how it ties into the novel’s general thesis. How problematic this all could be considered is a topic for another time, perhaps.

A Step Farther Out

Sorry for the relative brevity of this one, but given how short these installments are and how pressed for time I am I don’t see why not. There’s also not a whole lot to say with this one, since it has middle-of-the-trilogy syndrome written all over it—just replace “trilogy” with “quartet.” Something I’ve come to realize about this novel is that, structurally, it has peaks and valleys: there’s a long conversation or three followed by a Very Important Event™ that changes the course of the plot. We have scenes where characters are just talking, which in some way set up what’s about to transpire, followed by a crescendo wherein Louis’s world is rocked.

Strange thing about Part 2 in particular is that we get basically two climaxes: the first one with Mordecai, and then at the end we have the dream sequence with Aquinas which, admittedly, bordered a little too much on padding for my liking. I think I get where Disch is going with the latter, symbolically, but given how short this novel already is I have to wonder if he drew out the dream sequence as long as he did because he realized oh shit, one of the novel’s major characters is dead and we’re only about halfway through. Still, it says something about the evocativeness of that symbolism that I’m still thinking about it a couple days after having read it.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Big Night” by Henry Kuttner

April 10th, 2023

(Cover by Earle Bergey. Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1947.)

Who Goes There?

Last month I reviewed C. L. Moore’s “The Black God’s Kiss” (review here), which was a reread and a reminder that sometimes rereads are important. As I delve deeper into the works of Moore and her first husband, Henry Kuttner, the more I think that there ought to be a major resurgance in interest with regards to these two. In the ’40s Kuttner and Moore were the writing duo in science fiction, being so seamless in their collaborations that they struggled to tell who wrote what—a layer of ambiguity that has plagued genre historians ever since. With some stories it’s safe enough to say who did what, but sometimes it comes down to “educated” guesses: a rule of thumb is that if a story post-1940 is credited to Moore alone then it probably is just her, but Kuttner sadly does not receive the same treatment for stuff published under his byline without Moore. The two as a pair contributed frequently to Astounding Science Fiction, but each would also submit to other outlets solo, and Kuttner especially appeared without Moore’s next to his quite often in Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories. It might be that because Kuttner did not have as high a reputation as Moore that he was more inclined to appear in second-rate magazines.

It’s true that Kuttner was a less refined writer than his wife; his technique was more steeped in the tradition of pulp craftsmanship, being more adept at producing “raw” story over memorable lines of prose. As such, Kuttner is harder to judge on a line-by-line basis, but rather should be judged by the total effect his work has, which at its best certainly rivals Moore’s. Kuttner was also one of the great humorists of classic SFF, being one of John W. Campbell’s court jesters in the peak days of Astounding and Unknown, but the downside is that his knack for comedy can cast a veil over his talent for social commentary and, yes, a bit of philosophy. Today’s story, “The Big Night,” is relatively serious for Kuttner (though it’s still knee-deep in pulp prose), which might be why he had it initially published under the pseudonym Hudson Hastings.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 1947 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories, which is on the Archive. The good news is that if you want a more readable digital copy you’re in luck, because for some reason this story fell out of copyright and it’s available, perfectly legally, on Project Gutenberg. As for paper reprints you only have a few options, but the ones I recommend are pretty good. First, and as will usually be a source for Kuttner/Moore reviews, there’s Two-Handed Engine, a massive tome that collects “essential” stories from Kuttner and Moore, both solo and in collaboration, and you can get a used copy for a reasonable price. There’s also the Ballantine paperback volume The Best of Henry Kuttner, which admittedly relies too much on stories that were most likely written in collaboration with Moore (Moore does not get the same treatment for her Ballantine Best Of volume). Suprisingly “The Big Night” has not been anthologized anywhere, not even for like a stray collection of pulp-era space opera stories. Oh well.

Enhancing Image

Normally when we’re introducing to spaceships, especially in pulp-era SF, there’s an attempt on the author’s part to capture a sense of wonder with the ship’s bulk and speed, but Kuttner doesn’t do that; instead we’re introduced to La Cucaracha (yes, that’s its name) with language that would be considered unflattering, her “fat body” scarred with a molten streak across her middle and with spot-welds standing in for liver spots. La Cucaracha is an old ship and she’s on her last leg, and to make matters worse her skipper, Sam Danvers, is drunk again. Danvers mostly plays second fiddle to the story’s real protagonist, Logger Hilton, the first mate.

(An aside before we continue is that I wouldn’t go into this expecting female representation at all, as there’s not a single named female character and La Cucaracha‘s crew is all-male.)

Hilton is called to talk with Danvers, or rather to talk him out of his stupor, as Danvers is indeed quite drunk and, like his ship, is very old. “He was a big man, or rather he had been once, but now the flesh had shrunk and he was beginning to stoop a little.” We aren’t told ages, but judging from some comparisons I’d say Hilton is in his forties while Danvers is in his seventies, so you know we’re not dealing with spring chickens. When we meet Danvers he’s “making a speech to an imaginary Interplanetary Trade Commission.” The ITC, as I’ll call it from now on, had recently done a routine inspection of the ship and found she’s “unsafe,” which isn’t surprising given she’s riddled with scars and she may break apart any moment. On the one hand Danvers is fundamentally a sympathetic character, and from his perspective the ITC (i.e., government regulation) is the villain, but both Danvers and Hilton know that La Cucaracha is not long for this world.

You see, La Cucaracha is a hyper-ship, which is to stay a ship that can cross hyperspace and easily venture into what’s called the Big Night—the space beyond our solar system. To get around the speed-of-light barrier in space travel authors will opt for some kind of shortcut, and jumping into hyperspace—a dimension totally removed from ours—is this story’s shortcut of choice. Interstellar travel was, up till recently, done with hyper-ships, but something has been threatening to make these great ships obsolete: long-distance teleportation. More useful for transporting cargo than people, but still teleportation presents a cheap and relatively safe alternative to hyper-ships. The implication, which Kutter might agree with, is that the introduction of “matter-transmitting” will be a net positive for interstellar relations and commerce (important because, as we’ll see, there are a few intelligent alien species to contend with), but still hyper-ships being outmoded will put thousands of men out of work.

So about those aliens. We’re introduced to several characters on the ship, not all of whome are human. There’s Hilton and Danvers; there’s Wiggins, the second mate; there’s Saxon, a fresh “recruit” who is not exactly there of his own volition; but most intriguingly for me there’s Ts’ss, a Selenite, Kuttner’s most original creation here. The Selenites are a tentacled raxce akin to octopi, and in disposition they’re rather stoic, a very old and wise race, even bearing a resemblance to Vulcans. Ts’ss is the Spock equivalent, which… look, I’ve held off on this long enough: I can’t help but make comparisons to Star Trek with this one, they’re too obvious. Even hyperspace reminds me of a ship warping, although the blinking-in-and-out-of-existence part is more stark here; you can’t see SHIT in hyperspace, you have to calculate where you’ll end up. “You had to work blind here, with instruments. And if you got on the wrong level, it was just too bad—for you!” Anyway, in a story where characters each have a single defining trait (we can’t afford more than one), Ts’ss is the closest we get to someone multi-layered, though ultimately he is still merely a support player.

At a little over 10,000 words this is a novelette, but “The Big Night” has perhaps one too many characters/subplots. There’s a subplot with the ship meeting up with a trader on a distant planet, which naturally doesn’t work out because the trading post there is set to have teleporters installed; there’s a subplot with Saxon, the new recruit, which doesn’t do much aside from provide a sort of deus ex machina for the climax; there’s a weird little detour involving another alien race that I’ll get into deeper in the spoilers section that could’ve been cut. Generally this story suffers from being overstuffed considering the simplicity (albeit effective simplicity) of its tone and thesis. Kuttner also does the thing where alien races are boiled down to traits that basically all members of that race share, but for a short story this is more forgivable than if it was a whole novel.

Kuttner was always the pessimist, but that sense of doom was usually counterbalanced by a healthy dose of humor; not so with “The Big Night.” While I just shat on this story for its pacing, I’m impressed that something from the late ’40s can be this fatalistic about the future of space travel. By most metrics the crew of La Cucaracha would probably be tried in court for smuggling and kidnapping; a fraction of the crew, including Saxon, the new guy, were shanghaied, a fact that Hilton and Danvers find bitter but ultimately a necessary evil to keep the ship going. There just aren’t enough people signing up for hyper-ships these days, and even Hilton plans to put his engineering degree to good use once this last trip is finished. The end of an age coming and nobody can stop it.

There Be Spoilers Here

The second alien race we come across are the Canopians, who are considered to be morons as far as sentient races go, albeit with one attribute that makes them indespensible space-farers: they have a real knack for navigation. While at the trading outpost Hilton gets roofied by Danvers, in a way, Hilton is well aware, not dissimilar from how the ship shanghais people, but this time it’s to get Hilton back on the ship without him putting up a fight—over the fact that Danvers recruited a Canopian. Hilton just wants to go home and be done with this whole business, but Danvers isn’t done yet. The Canopian’s skill with navigating and Saxon’s background as a teleporter engineer (a little fact that Hilton is hesitant to tell Danvers) rescue La Cucaracha from almost certain destruction during its return trip. The back end of “The Big Night” is a little too convoluted for me, and if I didn’t run it through Google Docs (Is there a more efficient way to get a word count for something?) I would’ve assumed it was a longer novelette.

By the end we’ve reached the point where the ship has some more time bought for itself, but how long is the question. Now doubt some of the crew will jump ship on the next step; there may even be threats of mutiny, which anyway is always a concern with ships. It’s here that we get my favorite bit of dialogue, which naturally comes from Ts’ss, and it really sums up Kuttner’s point in a way that borders on poetic:

“The reason I keep shipping on La Cucaracha is because I can be busy and efficient aboard, and planets aren’t for Selenites any more. We’ve lost our own world. It died long ago. But I still remember the old traditions of our Empire. If a tradition ever becomes great, it’s because of the men who dedicate themselves to it. That’s why anything ever became great. And it’s why hyper-ships came to mean something, Mr. Hilton. There were men who lived and breathed hyper-ships. Men who worshipped hyper-ships, as a man worships a god. Gods fall, but a few men will still worship at the old altars. They can’t change. If they were capable of changing, they wouldn’t have been the type of men to make their gods great.”

Ts’ss supposes that yes, teleportation is replacing the hyper-ships, but then eventually something else will come along and replace teleportation. No doubt the riders of horse carriages felt a similar sense of doom when the automobile started becoming commercially viable, or when silent movie actors had to face spoken dialogue. Some do not make the transition, and that’s a perfectly natural byproduct of change, if unfortunate. Danvers would rather die than give up his ship, and given his age that’s likely to happen whether anyone would want that or not. Some people will never give up the old ways. Kuttner doesn’t seem to be rooting for tradition here (he hardly strikes me as a conservative), but he may be saying that there’s virtue in stubbornness, if that stubbornness serves something great.

A Step Farther Out

I said at the beginning that Kuttner’s writing ought to be taken in totality, and that very much applies to “The Big Night,” a story that could’ve been a thousand words shorter but which remains, at its core, a bittersweet passing the torch in the distant future. Usually in SF we see spaceships and teleportation working in tandem, and realistically, if the two were to ever happen, they probably would not conflict so much—but still Kuttner considers, more than some other authors, the possible repurcussions of teleportation. I’m reminded specifically of the early section of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and also Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, where there’s a palpable sense of an era coming to an end, and also Kirk and Danvers not being that dissimilar: both love their ships too much to pack it in just yet. Most of Kuttner’s work that I’ve read up till now has been set on Earth and in the near future or even the “present” day, but “The Big Night” makes me wonder what other space-faring SF he wrote…

See you next time.
Serial Review: Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch (Part 1/4)

April 6th, 2023

(Cover by M. C. Escher. New Worlds, July 1967.)

Who Goes There?

Thomas M. Disch started out not too dissimilar from close contemporaries Samuel R. Delany and Roger Zelazny, being at least adjacent to what we’d call the New Wave period of science fiction. Like Delany and Zelazny, Disch was literate, uncompromising, at times crass, but also quite funny; he had a sense of humor, even when working with premises that produced the bleakest outcomes. His debut novel, The Genocides, is apparently one of the bleakest works in the genre’s whole history, and he was just getting started with that one. Disch wrote a ton in the ’60s (about half his novels were published that decade, so by the time he turned thirty) for a variety of outlets, but his presence at New Worlds, under Michael Moorcock’s editorship, had to be the most unconstrained, the most vulgar. New Worlds was the only SFF magazine on either side of the Atlantic at the time where you could see dirty words like “fuck,” “shit,” “piss,” “pussy,” “cock,” “cunt,” “twat,” and “Englishman.” As such it shouldn’t be surprising that the first installment of today’s novel, which appeared in New Worlds at the height of its powers, has some of those words along with ones I did not mention.

I’ve been curious about Camp Concentration for a while, and since starting this site of mine I’ve gotten a good reason to read it carefully. It’s also the longest serial I’ve done so far if we’re going strictly by number of parts, but in its book form Camp Concentration clocks in at only about 180 pages. Each part is only 10 to 25 pages, but keep in mind that the type is microscopic, on top of being two-columned, and in A4 format—some made-up British thing, I think. Not a long book, this one, but it looks to pack a punch.

Placing Coordinates

Part 1 was published in the July 1967 issue of New Worlds, which is on the Archive. Just a heads up, we’ll be moving to Luminist at some point for this serial, because the Pulp Magazine Archive’s coverage of New Worlds is a bit spotty right now. This is a very nice cover by M. C. Escher too, which is a nice change; a lot of the covers for New Worlds from this period are just kind of ugly. Anyway, this is not a novel that has been reprinted very often; it wasn’t even printed in the US until 1969, hence American reviewers were slow to cover it. I do believe the most recent paperback release from Vintage is still in print, so try looking for that one. It’s at least much easier to find than the chapbook release of Disch’s “The Brave Little Toaster,” which has been out of print since the ’80s and which goes for prices that’ll make your wallet weep.

Enhancing Image

Louis Sacchetti is a poet, and at the outset he’s also a political prisoner, with a history of dissent. A few things immediately struck me about Louis, all of them seemingly contradictory. Despite his history of protest he does not act like one of those “flower children” that would’ve been making the rounds on college campuses and at rock concerts in the ’60s, but rather someone of the older generation who was sympathetic to the cause. He’s also a believing Catholic—a “WASC,” he calls himself at one point, although aside from confessionals he hasn’t done much that could be considered Catholic-y as of late. He’s also, really by his own admission, an egocentrist: he gets a kick whenever someone mentions that they’ve read his poetry, which he hasn’t been able to read in book form himself on account of being held prisoner. “For ten years I could lay claim to no book but my wretched Doctor’s thesis on Winstanley; now my poems are in print—and it may be another five years before I’m allowed to see them.” We start off in a normal everyday prison, without any science-fictional trappings aside from what’s happening outside the prison, but we won’t be here for long.

Right, so I don’t think we’re given an exact year, but Camp Concentration takes place in the near future—like the very near future. The US president is McNamara, as in presumably Robert McNamara, which seems to imply that he would succeed Lyndon B. Johnson; keep in mind now that Johnson and McNamara were partly responsible for the war effort in Vietnam (which hadn’t even gotten so bad yet when Disch was writing this novel, probably in late 1966) escalating like it did. Pretty much immediately we’re placed in what now reads as an alternate past wherein the US’s efforts to “defend” South Vietnam grew more drastic than anticipated—or maybe just as drastic as reality would have it. Something you have to understand about Camp Concentration is that it’s a bit of a time capsule; Disch makes no secret of what current events he was taking inspiration from when writing it. In that way the novel feels very much “of its time,” but there were also few SF novels at the time that placed such a high bet on capturing that specific time frame, to the point where metaphor is all but expelled.

The novel is written in the form of Louis’s diary, which he keeps at the prison he starts at and will keep when he’s moved, unexpectedly, to somewhere else without his knowledge or consent. We’re given a month and day but not a year. In this initial sequence we’re introduced to a few characters who will probably never be seen again once we get to that other place, namely a couple “faggots” (look, I’m bisexual and Disch was gay, I think we can use that word with impunity) who share Louis’s (what I have to think is a large) cell with a “Mafia” guy. These first several diary entries establishes Louis’s character somewhat, and get us in touch with the unabashed crassness of the novel’s world, but we’re given very little insight as to what’s happening or what any of this might signify. Not gonna lie, I was worried the salty language was just gonna be there because this is New Worlds and we gotta have some shock value at first, and I was also worried that this would be one of those SF novels where the SF element is so subtle that it might fly over my head, but thankfully this will not be the case.

There’s a brief pause where Louis is unable to write in his diary before he’s given it back at the new place: Camp Archimedes, which is not a prison in the conventional sense but something else—call it a testing facility. There’s a bit of eerie prescience set up here, because I’m not sure how aware Disch could’ve been of several gross human rights violations that the US government was committing against its own citizens at the time; the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, for one, would not be made public until five years after this novel’s publication. Anyway, Louis is introduced to the head of Camp Archimedes, Humphrey Haast, or as he likes other people call him, H. H., a former big-time military man who now in his old age looks after this little testing facility of ours. Haast pretends to wanna be on friendly terms with Louis, but seems aware that kidnapping a man is not a surefire way for him to become buddies with you—even if you compliment his poetry and he’s always up for such a compliment.

Louis is horrified to be here at first, but soon becomes relatively accustomed to the quirks and mysteries of Camp Archimedes, which after all proves a much different and possibly less dreary existence than back when Louis was in Springfield Penitentiary. “Shall I confess that there is a kind of pleasure to be had in the situation, that a strange castle is rather more interesting than the same old dungeon all the time?” Why yes it is, maybe. It’s here, once we’ve gotten introduced to a few of the main characters, namely Haast, local Ms. Exposition Dr. A. (stands for Aimée) Busk, George the happy idiot, and Mordecai, the unofficial leader among the “students” of this establishment. Or you know, if you’d rather think of them as guinea pigs, which really they are. A lot of the men here are exmilitary, brought in on insubordination, aggrivated assult, those sorts of things, being given the choice between prison and Camp Archimedes and picking the latter; it must’ve at least sounded more exciting for them. Everyone here plays a role, with Louis as the equivalent of the town poet, as well as a sort of middle man between the fellow prisoners and the leaders of the place.

A few things to note here before we get to the climax of Part 1, since there both is and is not a lot of ground to cover. With a couple exceptions we don’t get any meaningful descriptions of places and objects; this is the sort of thing you’d expect from someone writing in a diary. One of the chief advantages of having a first-person narrator write a diary or memoir, especially for a new writer, is that you need not worry much about giving places and things flowery descriptions, because realistically, if you were the one writing in a journal or whatever, you’d focus on what matters to you specifically, which would probably be people’s personalities and your conversations with them. There’s also some possibility (I’d argue almost inevitability) of Louis being an unreliable narrator, since he recites quite a few conversations (indeed these convos take up the bulk of the “action”) that probably didn’t go down exactly as how he recalls them, but chances are we’re supposed to take his writings at face value. If you’re looking for adventures with spaceships and rayguns then you might have to wait—or that stuff might not come at all; what we have is a series of dialogues that border on Socratic.

There Be Spoilers Here

By the back end of Part 1 we’ve come to know that there is very little that’s off the table for Camp Concentration, with homosexuality and harsh language being not implied but overtly parts of the text. There’s another thing that would usually be considered taboo that gets referred to almost with glee here: drug here. Unfortunately for Louis and the others, the prisoners are not taking drugs of the fun kind, but rather something wholly experimental that is supposed to raise one’s intelligence. Now, we’ve seen many stories in the field before this that played with the notion of accelerating human intelligence, and drugs may have even played a part in some of them, but probably not as depicted in Disch’s novel. The prisoners are given a drug that might work, or it might not—or hell, it might work but have some serious side effects. People are only now, in the year 2023, coming to the realization that the truly dangerous drugs are not cocaine and heroin, but prescription drugs that you can buy perfectly legally. The legality of Camp Archimedes is pretty murky, of course, but given that the military is involved to some extent and that the site is backed by “a private foundation,” the US government probably doesn’t mind.

George, the friendliest if not brightest man among the lot, has been ill as of late for reasons none of the other prisoners can explain, but that doesn’t stop our boys from performing Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (with a shoutout to Goethe’s version, of course) in Part 1’s climax. Keep in mind that up to this point both Louis and Disch have toyed with intertextuality in a way that’s kind of frivolous but which also bring some light to what’s going on within the novel, especially Dante’s The Divine Comedy. The connection with the Faust/Faustus myth being made explicit is only the cherry on top, what with humanity’s quest for knowledge and the repercussions of that quest, and I have to wonder if Disch is teasing us here. Disch, like Delany and Zelazny, loves to play with mythology and juxtapose myths from ye olden times with “modern” lingo and anxieties.

I find all this amusing, but I have to admit I’m a little concerned that the pyrotechnics of Part 1’s climax might be something that Disch cannot top, or at least elaborate upon. the point being that its here that George illness enters dire territory, and it’s here that the prisoners are all suddenly made aware that George’s declining health is not unique to him—that it is, in fact, something that will afflict them all within a matter of months. The fruit of knowledge reveals the worm inside…

A Step Farther Out

At first it was rough going a bit, just because we spend time in a location that we never come back to, and at first we’re not even sure what the plot is. Once we enter Camp Archimedes, though, it’s off to the races. On the one hand I’m tempted to call Disch’s use of profanity edgy, and yeah, it’s a bit edgy, but don’t we tend to use saltier language when we’re chatting with close friends? Despite the darkness of the atmosphere, and the mass death implied at the end, it’s far from a dour novel—at least so far. Louis is a conversational and pretty coloquial narrator, and while he is egocentric and pretentious, he readily admits to that. Indeed the point, so far, seems partly to challenge Louis’s vanity and bring him down to the level of the rest of the prisoners. This is in essence a prison novel, complete with references to homosexuality, but it’s also playful riff on multiple myths: Disch knows that we know that he knows, so he has fun using intertextuality like a carrot on the end of a stick. I very much await what he has in store for us…

See you next time.
Novella Review: “Forgiveness Day” by Ursula K. Le Guin

April 3rd, 2023

(Cover by Wojtek Siudmak. Asimov’s, November 1994.)

Who Goes There?

Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the decorated and universally beloved authors in all of genre fiction, and indeed is one of the few authors I know whose impact can be felt in both science fiction and fantasy almost equally. She started late, already in her thirties when she sold her first SFF story, but by the time she turned forty she had become one of the major voices in the field, and the ’70s only cemented her dominance. With novels like The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, and The Dispossessed all published only a few years apart it’s not hard to see how Le Guin earned her stripes. It was also during this period that she established the two series that would occupy much of her output for the rest of her life: the Earthsea series and the Hainish series. For my money it’s the latter series that makes Le Guin one of the greats for me, with every Hainish story I’ve read being at the very least interesting, and often being very much food for thought. Unfortunately, Le Guin would abandon Hain and the many worlds of that series for about a decade and a half to persue other avenues.

But then she came back! The ’90s saw a major resurgance for the Hainish series, with Le Guin also starting to contribute regularly to genre magazines while she was at it. Today’s story, “Forgiveness Day,” was first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction but later was collected in the book Four Ways to Forgiveness—not a novel but a collection of stories linked by setting and themes. Among the many worlds of the Hainish series the stories in Four Ways to Forgiveness all have to do with the sister planets Werel and Yeowe, and a massive slave rebellion on one that impacts the other. The second, third, and fourth of these stories were first published in Asimov’s, with “Forgiveness Day” being the first.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the November 1994 of Asimov’s, which is on the Archive. Like I said it’s part of Four Ways to Forgiveness, or Five Ways to Forgiveness if you’re reading the Library of America edition, as that includes the later story “Old Music and the Slave Women.” The collection is not hard to find, regardless of the version, but “Forgiveness Day” has also been anthologized elsewhere, namely The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twelfth Annual Collection and The Best of the Best Volume 2, both edited by Gardner Dozois; the latter collects some of the best novellas to have been included in Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction series up to that point. There’s also The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin, which includes most of the stories in Five Ways to Forgiveness plus several novellas and novelettes from throughout her career.

Enhancing Image

Within the first page we’re told a good deal about our first protagonist (I say that because there’s a second one we’ll get to in a bit), Solly, who is young but has been “around,” as it were. With hundreds of lightyears under her belt and having been on a dozen planets, Solly is perfectly qualified to act as Envoy despite her age. Her latest assignment as an agent of the Ekumen (basically the Hainish equivalent of Star Trek’s Federation) is to venture to the kingdom of Gatay, on the planet Werel, to observe and partake in one of that kingdoms holidays—indeed the titular holiday, the Day of Forgiveness. With Solly are two men, a guide and a bodyguard: the former is not so important but the latter will become our second protagonist, so let’s go through each of them in an orderly fashion, yeah?

First there’s San, the guide, who is somewhat smarmy but still useful, acting as Mr. Exposition for both Solly and the audience, letting us in on some cultural nuances of Gatay, “showing [Solly] with a bare hint what was expected or what would be a gaffe.” And we’ll need that guidance too, because Gatay, being part of Werel, is not at all what we’d call progressive or a libertarian paradise; there are rules to be followed. The first thing Solly learns is that being a woman in Gatay sucks some major dick: your capacity to speak with others is limited and you’re not allowed to partake in male activities—which, in Gatay, is most things. There are exeptions, of course. For one, it’s okay to talk with another woman if the rules of society deem her to not be a “woman” in the full sense of the word, because as it turns out, slaves aren’t really to be considered people here.

Right, so slavery is in vogue on Werel, as it was on Yeowe before the slaves revolted en masse on that planet. “On Werel, members of the dominant caste are called owners; members of the serving class are called assets. Only owners are referred to as men and women; assets are called bondsmen, bondswomen.” So you have people who are, depite being fully-fledged adults, someone else’s property. Some of the conflict that arises throughout the story is Solly’s reluctance to respect other people’s cultures, and indeed her crassness may be her chief character flaw, but in her defense slavery is not a cultural practice worth respecting. (It occurred to me early on that Le Guin probably modeled the slave culture of Werel on the Antebellum South, what with its lack of democracy and its highly decadent upper crust.) As such Solly’s interactions with other characters depends on if they’re “assets” or “owners,” or agents of the Ekumen like herself.

(Another aside: The natives of Werel and Yeowe are noted to be dark-skinned, and I’m sure Le Guin got a small kick, thought she would never say so, out of the irony of creating a culture of dark-skinned slave-owners.)

Speaking of which, we have Teyeo, the bodyguard. Teyeo seems to be a shadowy figure at first, but soon we’ll find he’s about as important and certainly no less heroic than Solly, despite a dark past which continues to haunt him. Teyeo is one of those people who seems mentally predisposed to always be a soldier or involved in military affairs to some extent; in that way he’s rather old-fashioned himself. The third-person all-seeing narrator gives us a rundown of Teyeo’s character, or at least how he is at the outset, with this (and more) to say:

“His reality was the old reality of the veot class, whose men held themselves apart from all men not soldiers and in brotherhood with all soldiers, whether owners, assets, or enemies. As for women, Teyeo considered his rights over them absolute, binding him absolutely to responsible chivalry to women of his own class and protective, merciful treatment of bondswomen. He believed all foreigners to be basically hostile, untrustworthy heathens.”

Mind you that Le Guin basically turns back the clock to give us a recap of events partway into the story, but from Teyeo’s perspective. It’s here that we find out that Teyeo took part in the fight against the slave uprising on Yeowe, which he did less out of wanting to make sure assets were denied their freedom and more as a government man; even so, having one of your heroes (and he is supposed to be heroic) aim his gun against slaves is a bit of a tough pill to swallow. As is made clear, though, these are different cultures which value different things. For example, cross-dressing is perfectly fine on Werel (hmmm), both for actors since, like in the days of Shakespeare, male actors would also play female roles, and for women like Solly who want to sneak into male-oriented gatherings. Indeed Batikam, who is rather famous locally and who catches Solly’s attention, is one of these so-called “transvestite” actors, though he’s not as important to the plot as he would seem at first. In one of the more implausible moments in the story, Bakiman, a stage actor, is shown to not be strictly homosexual, as Solly makes no secret of being horny for him and so they get it on at one point.

(Bakiman, on top of being a crossdresser, both on- and off-stage, is also technically an asset: he and his fellow actors are owned by a company rather than an individual person, which does give them a bit more leeway. Le Guin also has some fun with the reversal of pairing Solly, a woman who dresses like a man so she can see Bakiman perform, with a man who dresses like a woman, seemingly because he likes the aesthetics of women’s clothing. It should come as no surprise that “Forgiveness Day” was up for the ~~James Tiptree, Jr.~~ Otherwise Award, which funnily enough Le Guin won that year for a different story.)

Le Guin is an impressive writer because she wears a multitude of hats, depending on what you’re reading: she could be wearing her anthropology hat, her feminism hat, her humanism hat, her anarchism hat, her Taoism hat, among a few others. “Forgiveness Day” sees Le Guin in full anthropology mode with a dash of feminism; it’s clear that we’re supposed to connect the systemic and inflexible misogyny of Werel with that planet’s normalization of slavery—that the two seek to control what people can and cannot do, to turn people essentially into product, hence “asset” as a euphemism. A gripe I have with this sort of worldbuilding is that for some reason Le Guin thinks it’s fine for whole planets to represent cultures, as opposed to real life where you’ll be in for a rude awakening if you travel from California to Texas (or even from Austin to Houston) expecting the exact same values and customs. If you can get past that, it’s pretty interesting.

There Be Spoilers Here

There both is and is not a lot to say about “Forgiveness Day.” You may notice that I’ve delved into the characters and backstory a fair bit but less so the plot, and that’s because while the backstory is multi-faceted and at times ambiguous, the plot itself is straightforward. I think it’s straightforward. You could theretocially cut out flashbacks and worldbuilding to make this a novelette rather than a novella, but a) it’d be rendered incomprehensible, and b) it’d be way less engrossing. The backstory is the story, you see. The situation Solly and Teyeo end up in is the result of their personal flaws combined with the systemic problems of their environment, as opposed to a Rube Goldberg machine of plot beats.

Here’s the plot in a nutshell:

A woman is sent with a guide and a bodyguard to a kingdom where the woman is play what should be a simple part in a ceremony for one of the kingdom’s big religious holidays. The woman has to contend with this society’s backwards customs regarding the treatment of women, along with slavery being part of everyday life, but ultimately she keeps going with the mission she is to accomplish. One night the woman and her bodyguard are kidnapped by people who at first seem to either want to kill her or hold her for ransom, but they’re shown to be well-intentioned—if incompetent. As it turns out the woman was spared an assassination attempt at the ceremony by some religious fanatics. Eventually, after sitting things out and doing some rather intimate bonding, the woman and her bodyguard are rescued with a non-violent solution and they all live happily ever after.

Correct me if I’m wrong about that, I’ll be sure to edit this part and act like I didn’t make that mistake to begin with. Point being, the back end of the novella is concerned with Solly and Teyeo being stuck in a room together and talking for the most part. There’s a good deal of paranoia, including the possibility that the Ekumen conspired to have Solly killed and blame it on those who support the slave revolt on Yeowe. Loyalties are not always clear, “slaves and masters caught in the same trap of radical distrust and self-protection,” with the paranoia being implicitly a byproduct of a culture that treats a fraction of its people as property. The disease of slavery permeates all social interactions and the happy ending for Solly and Teyeo implies both Werel and Yeowe being rid of this practice.

The story’s explicit anti-slavery stance and far less explicit anti-capitalist stance makes me wonder how neo-Confederates (i.e., slavery apologists) reacted to it and the book it became a part of at the time. This is an older and more mature Le Guin (I’m not sure if the Le Guin who wrote The Word for World Is Forest would’ve made Teyeo so sympathetic), but still this is Le Guin with a clear purpose. Contemporary reviewers seemed to laud “Forgiveness Day” and Four Ways to Forgiveness as Le Guin’s strongest science-fictional statement in quite a few years, and I have to agree that even this lone novella lacks the low energy and frivolous writing that one would expect from an author was then in the fourth decade of her career.

A Step Farther Out

I don’t entirely understand this one, but that has less to do with Le Guin’s writing, which is often lucid if also given to chunky expository paragraphs, and more to do with the density of the worldbuilding. While it is functionally a standalone narrative, “Forgiveness Day” alludes to a much larger conflict that can’t be summed up in a single novella, so it’s no wonder that we’re given a few other stories to explore the setting further. Le Guin always had an anthropologist’s mentality with storytelling, but it seems like that side of her only became more prominent as she aged, with the Hainish story “Mountain Ways” (review here) also being ultimately more concerned with the background of the characters than the characters themselves; unlike that story, though, “Forgiveness Day” has an actual ending, and a pretty good one to boot. Five months after publication we got another novella centered round Werel and Yeowe in Asimov’s, with “A Man of the People.” Given how these stories were published close together and how they relate to each other, that certainly gives me an idea for a future review…

See you next time.
Things Beyond: April 2023

April 1st, 2023
(Cover by Steve Hickman. Fantastic, May 1976.)

It’s the first day of April… and I don’t have a prank in mind.

I’m just gonna do what I do with every one of these forecast blogs, which is to give you a quick update on things and then list off what I’ll be reviewing in the coming weeks. Hope you did your taxes well in advance and aren’t scrambling now! If you’re a filthy American, that is.

Anyway, the biggest thing to happen to this blog recently has been the opportunity to get interviewed by German warrior queen and Hugo winner Cora Buhlert (link here), which naturally gave me the warm fuzzies. This is a relatively young blog, but already I feel I’ve made major progress with it, and it’s been a reliable excuse for discovering new (to me) authors and returning to old favorites. My goal with this site has been to indulge my own quirky and admittedly retro-leaning love of genre fiction, with a literary if also highly colloquial bent, and on that front it’s been a success. Honestly there are too few active fanzines in the field right now, with a good number of them being one-man shows like myself, and goddamnit we deserve to get more notice among industry regulars.

Now, where was I?

Right. It’s been what, four months since I covered a so-called complete novel? And uhh, we still haven’t gotten there yet: April is thirty days, not 31. Sad. Just one more month, I promise. In the meantime we have a serial, two novellas, and two short stories. Admittedly we have more familiar faces in the lineup than I would normally prefer, but given my schedule as of late I’ve made an exception for myself. Let’s see what we have.

For the serial:
1. Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch. Published in New Worlds, July to October 1967. Disch is one of those American authors who appeared regularly in New Worlds during the height of the New Wave era, alongside Samuel R. Delany and Roger Zelazny. This is a four-part serial, but don’t be fooled! From what I can tell each installment is pretty short, which adds up because the novel in book form is like 180 pages. Short, but potent—or so I’ve heard. I’ve read a few short works from Disch before but this will be my first novel of his.
For the novellas:
1. “Forgiveness Day” by Ursula K. Le Guin. From the November 1994 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Hugo and Nebula nominee for Best Novella, and winner of the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. I hate to say this as someone who likes Le Guin a lot, but I’ve yet to read the linked collection Four Ways to Forgiveness—thought apparently now it’s titled Five Ways to Forgiveness (they found another one). Three of the stories in this collection were published in Asimov’s in fairly close succession, with “Forgiveness Day” being the first.
2. “Memorare” by Gene Wolfe. From the April 2007 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. This is one of those F&SF special author issues. Hugo and Nebula nominee for Best Novella. Wolfe made his first SFF sale in 1951, but he didn’t start writing regularly until the mid-’60s, where from then on he became one of the field’s most distinguished authors. He’s most famous for The Book of the New Sun and the fix-up novel The Fifth Head of Cerberus, but Wolfe did not shy away from short fiction, with “Memorare” as but one example.
For the short stories:
1. “The Big Night” by Henry Kuttner. From the June 1947 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. I covered C. L. Moore again last month, so I figure I ought to do Kuttner the same. The two are often treated as a package deal, forming like Voltron under their own names as well as a variety of pseudonyms, especially for the high-paying Astounding Science Fiction. Kuttner also appeared in several magazines apart from Moore. Take “The Big Night,” for example, which Kuttner had published under the pseudonym Hudson Hastings.
2. “The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr” by George R. R. Martin. From the May 1976 issue of Fantastic. Martin has spent the past few decades so entrenched as a fantasist that it’s easy to forget there was a time when he mostly wrote science fiction instead, and that it was fantasy which was reserved for once in a blue moon. In 1976 you had two fantasy magazines: F&SF and Fantastic, and the latter paid worse. But Martin was good buddies with Ted White, Fantastic‘s editor, and this saw the publication of Martin’s first “pure” fantasy.
That’s it, that’s all I have. I take way too long to come up with these forecasts. I actually wrote this about a week ago; you’re only reading it now. Funny how time works. And as for those adventures in time and space…

Won’t you read with me?
Short Story Review: “Roads” by Seabury Quinn

March 31st, 2023
(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, January 1938.)

Who Goes There?

Some authors are vindicated posthumously while others see their high reputations in life dwindle in death: Seabury Quinn is one of those latter authors. In the ’20s and ’30s he was almost certainly the most popular author to appear in the pages of Weird Tales; he was so popular that, as far as the disreputable realm of pulp fiction went, he was basically a celebrity. (I’m thinking of an anecdote wherein prostitutes in a New Orleans brothel recognized Quinn as that most prolific and starred contributor to Weird Tales, offering him a “round” free of charge.) His Jules de Grandin series, starring the eponymous occult detective, would alone have made him a household name, but as fate would have it both Quinn and de Grandin are overlooked nowadays—names to be checked off for people like myself who get a kick out of genre factoids. Yet Quinn was surely not bereft of talent, as he was deemed both good and overlooked enough to have “won” the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award.

No doubt a good portion of Quinn’s output was hackwork; this was not unusual among authors of the era, who had to crank out story after story to make a quick buck. All this, however, brings us to today’s story, which Quinn had apparently written out of passion and which, ironically, did not become the cover story for that month’s issue of Weird Tales. “Roads” is a Christmas story, one of such high caliber that Sam Moskowitz (who mind you was not religiously inclined to hold Christmas in special reverence) considered it the best Christmas story ever written by an American, putting it in the same league as Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. This is my first time with Quinn and something tells me I’ll be tracking more of his stuff down, because “Roads” fucking rules.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January 1938 issue of Weird Tales, which is on the Archive. ISFDB says there was also a highly limited chapbook release that same year, but it does not give a month of publication, which means the chapbook was probably released some months after the story’s magazine appearance. Of much more interest is the chapbook from Arkham House that released in 1948, which a) is riddled with lovely illustrations by Virgil Finlay, and b) may trick you into thinking this is a novella—a trick that even fooled the folks at Wikipedia. No, “Roads” is not a novella; the type in the Arkham House chapbook is almost laughably big, never mind the Finlay illustrations. There are two facsimile reproductions of that chapbook: one in hardcover and the other in paperback, with the former by Red Jacket Press and the latter by Shadowridge Press. The facsimiles are pretty affordable, and if you don’t mind your wallet crying that original Arkham House chapbook is still circulating in the second-hand market.

Enhancing Image

The thing about “Roads” is that I reckon it’s no longer than H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch-House” (review here), but whereas Lovecraft’s story is a novelette that just goes on and on, “Roads” is essentially three short stories for the price of one; it’s split into three distinct sections, each covering a different period in will turn out to be a very long life for the protagonist. Just how long are we talking? Wait and see…

We start in Biblical times, indeed not long after Jesus’s birth, the star over Bethlehem and all that. As should be expected, though, life in ancient Roman-occupied Jerusalem is brutish and often short, encapsulated with the opening scene, wherein some marauders try to kill and rob Our Hero™, who is very much not a man of Biblical times: he is Klaus, later (Quinn all but tells us in advance) to become Santa Claus, and he’s a decorated gladiator for Herod—and a Viking. Some of you may be raising an eyebrow at this, since the Vikings would not become a thing for several more centuries. It’s not like this was a silly little detail Quinn snuck into the narrative; no, much is made of Klaus being Nordic, and, in contrast to pretty much everyone else in the story, built like a brick shithouse. On top of being dressed for battle, Klaus carries “a double-bladed ax” and “a long two-handed sword with a wide, well-temptered blade, pointed and double-edged,” which makes me wonder how the fuck these bandits hoped to rob him.

The affair goes about as well for the bandits as you’d expect. Actually a bit better, because Klaus breaks a guy’s wrist rather than smash his head against a stone. Later opponents will not be nearly as lucky.

Klaus, being a stranger in a strange land, is not terribly picky about whom he serves; the idea seems to be that he’ll fight for you so long as you treat him with decency, and so long as you don’t order troops to go around killing infants. Right, about that. Klaus gets along surprisingly well with the Roman occupiers, who treat him basically like a good dog and who even give him a sort of pet name. “Though he had been among the Romans since before his beard was sprouted, their rendering of his simple Nordic name of Klaus to Claudius had never failed to rouse his laughter.” Trouble brews, though, when local king Herod, having been told a prophecy that another will take his place, orders men to go out and slaughter any Jewish boy under the age of two. If you’ve read the novel (or at least the Wikipedia synopsis for the novel) that “Roads” is loosely based on then this sounds like a faithful adaptation so far, insofar as the Jesus narrative is concerned.

Klaus, a natural warrior who is used to fighting with honor, is naturally repulsed when he discovers that legionaries have been marching through the streets and snatching babies from their mothers’ breasts. Although he is not aware of it at the time, Klaus does in fact save an infant Jesus from a small group of soldiers, as the kids parents (though not his real dad) try to get the hell out of Dodge. The fight between Klaus and the soldiers is one of the more shockingly violent scenes I’ve read in recent times, but it’s justified partly because of Klaus’s swordsmanship and partly because of his righteous fury that so-called honorable soldiers would carry out such an order. He fucking cuts a dude in half diagonally. A lesson a lot of people should but do not learn throughout the story is that you don’t want an angry Northman who looks and acts like he belongs in a Robert E. Howard adventure on the rampage. Anyway, Joseph and Mary thank Klaus and inform him of the massacre, and meanwhile there’s something a bit odd about their own, which naturally spooks Klaus at first.

(So Joseph says, “Only last night the Angel of the Lord forewarned me in a dream to take the young child and its mother and flee from Nazareth to Egypt, lest the soldiers of King Herod come upon us unawares.” People took dreams very seriously in Biblical times, but also Joseph taking his family out of Nazareth without warning anyone else in advance is, if you ask me, more than a little morally dubious. Indeed if you want to see the actual moral quandry that would spawn from such an action I recommend checking out José Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Good novel, that one. I’m getting a little sidetracked here. Quinn is writing a compelling Christmas story, but he’s also deliberately toying with very old and revered material that some people take very seriously.)

The infant Jesus, unbeknownst to Mary and Joseph, communicates with Klaus with what I can only call telepathy. Of course we know that Jesus, being both entirely God and man, is conversing with Klaus in the former form while his baby self just stares at him and makes blup-blup sounds. It’s here that Jesus tells Klaus about the broad strokes of the rest of the plot and how he will eventually give up his warrior ways to become a friend to all children—and not only that, but that Klaus will be made immortal, something that only a couple figures in the entirety of the Bible are granted. (No one is sure what happened to Enoch; maybe he went out to get some milk.) The baby Jesus with his Jedi mind powers has this to say:

When the name of Odin is forgot, and in all the world there is no man to do him reverence at his altars, thy name and fame shall live; and laughing, happy children shall praise thy goodness and thy loving-kindness. Thou shalt live immortally in every childish heart so long as men shall celebrate my birthday.

It’s here that the first section of “Roads” ends, with Klaus and the infant Jesus parting ways, Jesus to return to the land of his birth eventually and Klaus to stay with the Romans. Between the first and second sections there’s a thirty-year time skip: Klaus, a man who should at least be pushing sixty, has not aged a day while Jesus, the man destined to rise from the dead, sees himself at the other end of his mortal life. By the time the two meet again Klaus has become the right-hand man of Pontius Pilate, who, as he is depicted in “Roads,” is a little bitchy and a little antisemitic, but who ultimately has little interest in executing or even punishing Jesus. I know I’m biased, and I’m thinking of a certain movie while reading this tale, but I keep imagining David Bowie in the role of Pontius Pilate; it must be the bitchiness and coded gayness, what with how he calls Klaus “my Claudius.” Well, you can take the Roman out of Rome but you can’t take Rome out of the Roman, or something like that…

This review may seem frontloaded with summarizing the first section, but I wanna give you some time to adjust to the nature of the story’s world before we get into spoilers, which after all are hard to define since, like I said, the broad strokes of the plot are laid out for us in advance. We know that Klaus will eventually become Santa Claus and that his role as a friend to children and the downtrodden is inextricably tied to Christianity (ironic, given that Klaus is, at least for much of the story, a devout pagan). An old platitude goes that it’s not the destination that matters so much as the journey, though, and what follows makes good on the promise made in that first section—that being that this will be one of the weirdest and most capitvating Christmas stories I’ve read in a long time.

There Be Spoilers Here

This section is basically gonna be a series of random notes for me, because while I would looooove to give a beat-by-beat rundown of this story, I’m pressed for time and also, as I said, this one is hard to spoil. As such I’m more interested in the ways Quinn messes with the Jesus narrative and other things more than the beats of the plot. Some may say the liberties Quinn took border on blasphemy, but as far as I’m concerned he’s simply taking a story that is already at least partly fabricated and moving some pieces of the jigsaw puzzle around, occasionally also adding in pieces from a totally different puzzle. In fact let’s make this a list, shall we?
1. Despite Pontius Pilate sending Jesus, a man Klaus had served before, to his death, Klaus remains loyal to both Pilate and Jesus, even staying by the former’s side while he’s on his death bed. At first it may seem odd that Klaus bears Pilate no ill will, but Jesus makes it clear that he is supposed to be crucified, and that while Klaus and the others are not in on the details of Jesus’s plan, Jesus tells Our Hero™ to not be too worried about it.
2. Speaking of the crucifixion, one of the most striking little things Quinn does, as far liberty-taking goes, is he puts Klaus in the shoes of the soldier who spears Jesus’s body between the ribs to make sure he’s dead, rather than leave him to the elements. “’Tis long since I have done that favor to a helpless man,” says Klaus, and Jesus in his spirit form thanks him for this act of mercy, however morbid it may be.
3. I was worried for a bit during the middle section that Quinn was pulling a Mel Gibson and overemphasizing the role Jewish religious leaders played in Jesus’s execution, and I’m still not totally convinced there isn’t some antisemitism at play here. However, while nobody likes or respects the Jewish priests, this turns out to be a running theme in the story, not just with Jewish religious leaders but Christian ones later one. Be sure to put a pin in this note.
4. Klaus later rescuse a girl from a collapsed building following an earthquake—a girl who will turn out to be Mrs. Claus. Oh boy, a few things to unpack here. First, Erinna is a prostitute who came from Lebanon, a fact that revolts Klaus until Jesus tells him to stop being an asshole and not slut-shame her. (Reminder that Jesus’s “cast the first stone” speech might be the oldest call against slut-shaming in the history of human literature, just so puritanical Christians in the audience are aware.) Klaus, being in need of companionship and aware that Erinna fucks like a champ (that’s right, Mrs. Claus is a SLUT), takes her as his wife, with her being made immortal as well.
5. With Erinna taking on the married name of Unna, as is apparently a custom for Klaus and his people, the two start traveling the world and working for a number of governments, first over a span of decades and then centuries. Quite remarkably (by that I mean implausibly), Klaus and Unna being both famous and apparently ageless does not become a problem for them until Christianity has become the majority religion in mainland Europe—so like, a few hundred years at least. What I find interesting, though, is that the immortality thing doesn’t really become a problem for them until the crusades start.
6. Ultimately this is still a “Christian” Christmas story, but something tells me Quinn did not get along with religious authorities, because regardless of their religion, they’re consistently depicted here as at best obnoxious and, later on, as actively murderous. When some Christian do-gooders capture Unna with the intention of executing her as a witch, Klaus shows them no mercy in rescuing his wife. Klaus is also repulsed when crusaders sack Muslim cities and murder what he considers to be innocent people in their homes. I wonder how alt-right shitheads are supposed to take all this.
7. While it’s implied, via crosses Klaus and Unna wear in later years, that the former eventually abandons his pagan beliefs, we never actually get a conversion scene for Klaus. This is not a preachy work wherein the heathen “sees the light” and is swayed to become a Christian; rather Klaus spreads the best potential of Christianity because he wants to follow the words of a man he respects and whom he knew personally. Giving up his sword and ax at the end to become Santa Claus (with elves and reindeer and all that) at the end is merely the conclusion to an arc that had been in mottion since the beginning.
I could keep going, by the way. The fact that Klaus, who longed to return to his homeland at the beginning, goes back north at the end to evade persecution, only to meet up with the elves (who really are akin to Tolkien’s dwarves in that they’re short and born craftsmen), a fellow persecuted race; the fact that the first time he helps a child in an impoverished town he happens to be dressed in red; the fact that his Roman name of Claudius sets up his changing his name again, this time permamently. A lot happens, and not all of it “makes sense,” but this only really matters if you’re someone asking for strict rationalization in a story that, even without Quinn’s inserts, does not and cannot entirely make sense. The result is an adaptation that’s only slightly more fantastical than the source material, and no less quirky, only it’s not preached as being gospel.

A Step Farther Out

I wouldn’t call “Roads” perfect, but I’m also not sure if I’ve read anything else quite like it. Charlatans, or just people who don’t like to have fun, would knock this story for its “flaws,” but I’d argue those flaws are what give it character—for anything bereft of flaws cannot possibly be considered human, and “Roads” is very much a human story. We have here a retelling of the Jesus narrative with Santa Claus inserted as a Viking out of both time and place, a warrior with sword and ax who becomes a friend to all children. If you ever wanted to see a totally jacked Santa Claus cut down legionaries and crusaders like they’re trees, for some godforesaken reason, then boy do I have just the thing for you. This has to be the most violent Christmas story I’ve ever read/seen that wasn’t made to be edgy on purpose, and yet I can’t say Quinn is being disingenuous; on the contrary, the violence being juxtaposed with Klaus finding his calling as the role we know he’ll ultimately play makes the latter more profound. This is a Christmas story for those true believers who also happen to be fans of Conan the Barbarian.

So Finally we’ve reached the end of my month dedicated to stories from Weird Tales. I revisited a few familiar faces and came across some others whom I had never read before. It was also nice to take a break from covering serials and novellas, much as I love them. There was a lot of hackwork in Weird Tales, and some experiments that didn’t work out, but I was reminded that at the height of its popularity, Weird Takes was easily more daring than most of the pulp magazines on the market, even being a good deal edgier than the relatively puritanical Unknown which all but succeeded it. During this month we covered space opera, vampires, mad scientists, sword and sorcery, good old-fashioned ghost stories, and everything in between. You have to admit that’s a lot of variety for one magazine!

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Strange Orchids” by Dorothy Quick

March 27th, 2023

(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, March 1937.)

Who Goes There?

Dorothy Quick is a name I recognize but prior to today’s story have not read anything by; specifically I know her as a contributor to Unknown, wherein her most prominent work would be a series of short stories called the Patchwork Quilt series, which sadly only has three entries and which Quick apparently abandoned by the time Unknown died. We don’t know a lot about Quick: we know she started writing SFF in the early days of genre pulp and that she basically stopped once the first incarnation of Weird Tales went under. She seems to be one of those authors whose genre output positively correlates with the state of magazine fantasy, in that once Unknown closed that was a market gone for her, and Weird Tales later closing must’ve been the last straw. She did, however, continue to write fiction in mainstream outlets. Anyway, I feel bad because I don’t have much to say about today’s story and I can’t say reading it filled me with confidence about covering Quick in the future, though I do wanna get to those Patchwork Quilt stories.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March 1937 issue of Weird Tales, which is on the Archive. Judging Margaret Brundage covers, on a scale from 1 to 10 with 1 being chaste and 10 being “Is this pornographic?,” I would give this one a 2 or a 3; it’s pretty tame. I didn’t even notice the naked girl with the orchid on her body at first. Anyway, sad reality with most pulp-era lady authors is that their stuff doesn’t get reprinted often, and “Strange Orchids” is no exception. As far as I can tell there’s only one reprint, that being Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction (ed. Patrick B. Sharp and Lisa Yaszek), which thankfully looks to be in print in hardcover and paperback. But yep, looks like those are all your options.

Enhancing Image

We start with Louise, the narrator/protagonist, telling us that everything basically turned out fine in the end: oh sure, her hair is white now from getting spooked so hard, but she came out of whatever ordeal it was fine and she even ended up with this guy she really likes. This might be the fastest way possible to defuse tension, and I don’t know why Quick informs us of the bittersweet ending so far in advance. Within just a few sentences we get one of my biggest issues with this story, which is that Louise is not in any real danger; at most she has a tough time for a bit, we already know she gets better, and thus this is a hard story to spoil.

Whilst at a friend’s party, Louise meets the other two corners of what amounts to a love triangle: Rex, who is obviously a Good Guy™ and the aforementioned handsome fella Louise gets together with; and Angus, who is so obviously the villain that it’s actually not funny. (Never trust a guy named Angus.) Just how obvious is Angus’s villainy? Well, there have been several girls who’ve gone missing as of late, under similar circumstances, and Angus over here is acting incredibly suspicious—to the point where, if not for the plot that unfolds, Angus would probably be the first white man in history to get arrested simply for acting like someone who ought to be arrested. That Angus acts creepy towards Louise, simultaneously insulting her and trying to seduce her, should already make him a suspect.

Hmmmmmm.

To make things slightly more complicated, Rex is a G-man who’s part of a task force looking for these missing girls; already this story strains my suspension of disbelief by depicting a federal agent as a good guy who will not do anything morally dubious. I’m getting ahead of myself, as you may guess, but there’s really not much of intrigue here. I will, however, list off a couple things—really little more than references themselves—that I found at least memorable, if not very substantive.

The first is that there are several references to homosexuality sprinkled in the text that ultimately don’t amount to anything, but which are still work mentioning considering this is the ’30s and it was uncouth to mention homosexuality in pulp fiction. Right away, during the party in the opening stretch, we have a reference to “female impersonators,” whom we’re to take as transvestites (probably the word that would’ve been used at the time, or something even less flattering). Any queer man who’s lived in the past century will be at least a little familiar with the term “female impersonator,” which seems to cover anyone from drag queens or just gay men who dress in feminine-leaning attire. Again, not flattering, but Quick even mentioning this at all is above what we’d normally expect from ’30s pulp fiction.

The other thing is the coded homosexuality of Angus, who despite seeking to own Louise (as a wife but also maybe as something else), comes off as a bitchy and effeminate gay man, even being called “Oscar Wildish” at one point. He dresses well and Louise can’t help but notice the soft whiteness of his hands, “the hands of an artist or a dreamer,” which indicate that a) he’s not used to doing menial labor, and b) he pays more attention to grooming himself more than the average man. He’s also obsessed with flowers, especially orchids (I wonder why), with flowers typically being taken as symbolically feminine. There’s another reason why Angus’s heterosexuality is rather hard to take at face value, but I’ll get to that (briefly) in the spoilers section; it’s not like I can talk about much else.

Finally, we get a reference to contemporary cinema here, which does not happen often in genre fiction from any era, let alone one where sound film was still a recent phenomenon. There’s a movie starring Lionel Barrymore (yes, related to Drew Barrymore) wherein a mad scientist “reduced people to dolls” and made them do his bidding. I’m pretty sure this is supposed to be The Devil-Doll, but it goes unnamed in the story—point being it’s almost certainly a real movie. Now isn’t that fun?

Easy to forget I’m a movie buff, but whatever.

There Be Spoilers Here

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…

Okay, I do wanna talk about the ending a bit, if only because it kinda pisses me off; not because the ending on its own is bad, but because it wastes the last chance this story had to become really interesting.

Louise and Rex hatch a plan to nab Angus, since Rex already suspects Angus (as would anyone with more than two brain cells) but lacks hard evidence with which to book him. The plan goes amiss since for some reason Angus is telepathic and can read Louise’s intentions, thus kidnapping her and having a rather protracted James Bond villain moment wherein he explains (at length) what he plans to do: namely he wants to turn Louise into another slave, hypnotized via a special kind of orchid Angus has been breeding, to go along with the other girls he has kidnapped.

But all is well! Well Rex and the other feds are unable to save the other girls, who by this point have become humanoid abominations with orchids sprouting out of their chests, they’re able to save Louise in the nick of time. They uhh, gas Angus’s mansion? I wonder how that would read to a post-World War II audience. Anyway, my main problem here is that Louise is never in real danger, in that she does basically nothing in order to save the day since Rex is at her beck and call and the feds managed to break in without her input. Despite being the narrator, and you’d think the protagonist, Louise is ultimately little more than a damsel in need of rescuing, and I have to say I expected better.

How disappointing.

A Step Farther Out

In covering exclusively Weird Tales stories this month I’ve run the spectrum of genres that saw print in that magazine, but also a spectrum of how I feel about these stories, from the sublime (“The Black God’s Kiss”) to the putrid (“The Dreams in the Witch-House”) and everything in between, and “Strange Orchids” is certainly in that nebulous “in between” spot. This is about as middle of the road as you can get for me, in that I don’t dislike it exactly but I also don’t have anything strongly positive to say about it. If this story has committed a crime it’s the crime of being totally predictable, to the point where I was anticipating some kind of twist or catch to what seemed to me like a strictly formula affair, only to find out that no, this is not really a creative story but something that would’ve struck readers even at the time as nothing to write home about. I almost prefer something memorably bad like “The Dreams in the Witch-House” over a story so forgettable.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Vulthoom” by Clark Ashton Smith

March 24th, 2023

(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, September 1935.)

Who Goes There?

Clark Ashton Smith was the third of the big three contributors to Weird Tales during the height of that magazine’s first incarnation—at least with hindsight; Lovecraft or Smith would be replaced with Seabury Quinn if we’re judging by initial popularity. Smith, Lovecraft, and Robert E. Howard were part of a circle who frequently exchanged letters, and there’s little doubt that this association allowed Smith any sort of exposure after he mostly stopped writing fiction; that he outlived Lovecraft and Howard by a couple decades and was able to provide commentary on this period in pulp history certainly helped. A strange thing about Smith is that he has to be one of the best writers, at least of the pulp era, who wrote fiction largely for the sake of profit: he found, early in life, that he loathed menial labor too much while also struggling to envision himself hunched over in an office—thus he turned to fiction. Smith’s initial artistic love was poetry, and by the end of his life he had turned to sculpting, but it’s his short fiction (he never wrote a novel in adulthood) that maintains his legacy.

Over a period of about five years (1930 to 1935) Smith wrote the vast majority of his 100+ short stories, amassing a body of work that’s quite big (despite the lack of anything approaching even novella length) and surprisingly varied, ranging from sword and sorcery to science fiction of the ’30s super-science variety; and it’s this latter category that today’s story very much falls into. I like Smith quite a bit, but sadly I’m gonna have to rag on him at points during this review because “Vulthoom” is… not very good. It’s not terrible, it certainly has points of interest which I’ll discuss, but Smith fails to capitalize on his talents with this outing, namely his knack as a highly lyrical prose stylist. Some people give Smith shit because his prose is highly baroque, but when Smith is on the ball there’s a distinct rhythm to his style that, aside from Lord Dunsany and maybe a couple others, is very hard to find elsewhere. In other words, the style is the substance.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the September 1935 issue of Weird Tales, which is on the Archive. This is one of the more overtly lurid Brundage covers; there’s even a nipple outline! I don’t know how one would feel buying a copy of Weird Tales with a Brundage cover at a newsstand. “Vulthoom” first saw book publication in Genius Loci and Other Tales, from Arkham House, and later saw print as part of Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy series, in the Clark collection Xiccarph. You’d think the Smith collections from Ballantine would go for a reasonable price, but these little mass market paperbacks now go for at least $30 used. As for in-print options we have The Maze of the Enchanter: Volume Four of the Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith, part of a series that collects all of Smith’s short fiction.

Enhancing Image

We start right off with what will sound like an assbackwards criticism, but hear me out: the first stretch of “Vulthoom” is too fast. Right away we’re introduced to Our Heroes™, two guys who are down on their luck and whose misfortunes have made them become friends. Haines got kicked off his former ship and is now struggling to find a new crew, while Chanler is “a professional writer of interplanetary fiction” whose money has run low. Rather than give us a scene or two where Smith shows these characters interact and grant us insight into their daily troubles, Smith instead opts to tell us outright what their problems are, which is unusually direct and unpoetic for him. We learn everything we need to about Our Heroes™ in not even half a page, but the problem is that we proceed to learn nothing more about them; they remain basically the same at the end as they do the beginning, despite the mind-bending second act.

We do at least learn some about this version of Mars, which sadly is not very imaginative either: it’s a dying planet with a somewhat feudal system of governance, and the Martians themselves are humanoid. And of course there are canals, because this is old-timey SF and Mars has to have canals. Smith’s version of the red planet is undoubtedly informed by Edgar Rice Burroughs and the pulp writers who immediately followed in his wake; what makes its saminess less excusable is that “Vulthoom” came out more than a year after Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey,” which revolutionized SF depictions of Mars by introducing aliens that are truly alien and not just humans with differences in height and skin tone. Smith was fairly inventive with his fantasy, but less so with his SF is what I’m saying.

Anyway, Haines and Chanler come across one of these Martians one night, an unusually tall guy who, apropos of nothing, informs Our Heroes™ that his master (the tall Martian is a servant) is aware of their plight and wants to make a deal with them. The men, who really should say no to strangers but who have indeed fallen on hard times, reluctantly agree to the proposition—a reluctance that will only grow once they enter a secret underground cavern. The cavern is populated by Martians who are unusually tall like the servant (so we’re told, since we never get to meet a “normal” Martian), with these Martians working for someone called Vulthoom. (This is all in the first five pages, by the way.) Vulthoom is apparently the ancient Martian equivalent of Satan, but the men theorize that the underground Martians work for an anti-government revolutionary who simply has taken on the name of Vulthoom as an alias, which is a curious theory but whose political questions come to nothing since the conflict becomes something totally different.

Even so there’s a sense of wonder to be had during this discovery of the vast cavern, with Smith allowing himself to put the plot on hold for a second to describe this new world, telling us “the improbable was verified, the fabulous had become the factual.” It’s just frustrating to me that Smith fails to play to his strengths here. As someone who often likes Smith’s fiction, I’ve gotten enough experience with him that I can point out his Achilles’ heel, namely his lack of inventiveness as a plotter. Consider his relatively grounded ghost story “Genius Loci” (review here), which is memorable not for its plot, which is pretty simple, but for its psychological intensity, atmosphere, and the rhythmic if also dense structuring of Smith’s prose. At the risk of making myself sound like a moron, “Vulthoom,” in comparison with Smith’s best like “Genius Loci” and “The Dark Eidolon,” is too readable. Characters and plot beats are laid out plainly with little to no poetic digressions, with only the setting and a certain something later on getting the full Clark Ashton Smith treatment, which ultimately makes it read like Smith is imitating a less talented and more conventional writer.

Things do spice up, though, when we meet Vulthoom—or at least hear the voice of Vulthoom, since we never actually see him. Haines and Chanler are taken to what I can only call a giant flower, which seems at first to be Vulthoom’s form but is in fact merely a tool for Vulthoom, who is… somewhere else. It’s hard to separate spoilers from non-spoilers with this one, what with how future developments are easily telegraphed, but I think it’s safe to say here that Vulthoom is a Lovecraftian creation in that it’s impossible for the human characters to comprehend him fully. What we do understand early on is that Vulthoom is leading these Martians to one day leave the red planet and eventually head for Earth, having planned all this for centuries and even putting himself and his minions through thousand-year-long periods of hybernation. I have serious questions about the chronology of the hybernation periods and Smith’s understanding of time, but I think I’ll just head to the spoilers section.

There Be Spoilers Here

Vulthoom wants Our Heroes™ to act as human ambassadors for when they make the trip for Earth, which turns out to be not as innocuous a mission as it sounds… rather predictably, I might add. The flowers release a perfume with a strong hallucinogenic effect, not to mention the capacity to control minds, and for a bit the story becomes something of an anti-drug screed. Look, I love doing some drugs myself, so I’m predisposed to roll my eyes at Smith’s finger-wagging, but I also have to admit that the scene where Haines and Chanler trip some massive balls because of the perfume is pretty entertaining, even if Smith wants to have his cake and eat it too. Oh sure, say drugs are bad while also pulling out all the stops for what equates to an acid trip sequence, whatever you say. Even when it comes to what is undoubtedly the high point of the story, my feelings are mixed.

Something about Vulthoom that I found interesting but which went underdeveloped (like basically everything else) is his androgyny. One of the men sees what he deems an attractive figure inside one of the flowers, but Smith is vague about attributing a gender to said figure, though Vulthoom himself goes by male pronouns. There’s a feminine quality to Vulthoom as both a seducer and how he’s associated with flowers and perfume, but I don’t know what Smith is trying to say here and honestly I’m not convinced he’s actually trying to say anything. It’s a shame because there’s a subtle eroticism and ambiguity with the hallucinated figure in the flower, described as “elfin” and of “symmetrical” beauty, yet Smith refrains from attributing a gender or even a sex to this figure. Vulthoom is effectively the evil temptress often found in pulp fiction of the era, only he’s said to be male…

Rather than continue to dwell on this I’ll just bring up the solution to the problem Our Heroes™ face, or rather how they hope to stall it since they can’t escape and can’t even get word back to the surface that there’s an underground plot to invade Earth. Early on we’re introduced to giant glass bottles that store a vapor which apparently causes everything to go into the aforementioned hybernation for a thousand years, which struck me as obvious, like yes of course we’ll get back to these bottles for the climax. And so we do. The victory however is arguably pyrrhic, as Vulthoom points out, since not only are the humans sacrificing themselves, but Vulthoom and his minions are merely entering a period of deep sleep prematurely; eventually they’ll be back to their usual business.

Of course, while a thousand years will pass by like the blink of an eye for Vulthoom subjectively, it’s still a long time for anything not in hybernation. A lot can change in the span of a thousand years, but perhaps wisely Smith leaves this final question unanswered.

A Step Farther Out

Smith has written well on the topics of obsession and cultish behavior, but this is not really one of those good examples. I’m more disappointed than anything. Vulthoom himself (itself?) is a fine creation, but it’s wasted on human characters who are dull as dishwater, such that Smith gives us their backstories upfront and then refuses to elaborate. One is a writer who occasionally says a stereotypical writer thing and the other doesn’t have any distinguishing features to speak of. The setting is also sadly underdeveloped; we start on the Martian surface and we’re there for about two pages before going underground. See, the thing is that Smith’s science fiction is mostly glossed over because he wasn’t a very good science-fictionist: he was a poet first, then a fantasist, and then whatever came after that. “Vulthoom” seems to be Smith deliberately writing in what was the standard super-science mode, and I have to wonder if he considered submitting it to Astounding Science Fiction before going to his regular outlet, Weird Tales. Regardless, this is far from what I consider essential Smith.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Black God’s Kiss” by C. L. Moore

March 20th, 2023

(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, October 1934.)

Who Goes There?

C. L. Moore is remembered by certain readers as one half of an immensely talented writing duo, the other half being her first husband, Henry Kuttner. Moore and Kuttner, from about 1940 to Kuttner’s untimely death in 1958, wrote seamlessly and prolifically together in just about every corner of SFF that was conceivable at the time. The two were actually unsure as to who wrote exactly what in their collaborations, and to this day speculations on who did what largely remain just that: speculations. Before their coming together, though, Moore was one of the most respected authors to contribute regularly to the peak era of Weird Tales, and unlike most authors her success started with her first story. “Shambleau,” Moore’s first professional sale and the first to feature spacefaring himbo Northwest Smith, made a splash when it came out in late 1933, with Farnsworth Wright being pretty open about wanting to buy whatever Moore was selling.

In the ’30s, most of Moore’s output was comprised of two series: the aforementioned Northwest Smith adventures, and also Jirel of Joiry, sword and sorcery’s first heroine. The first entry in the latter series, “The Black God’s Kiss” (definite article removed for most reprints), is a reread for me, but I now like it much more since I’ve gotten to a) read it more carefully, and b) read it in what I consider the proper context. I had first read it as part of The Future Is Female! (ed. Lisa Yaszek), which collects science fiction stories by women published prior to 1970, and with all due respect to Yaszek and a few people I know, it’s a fatal error to classify “The Black God’s Kiss” as SF. The logic seems to be that because Jirel of Joiry shares continuity with Northwest Smith, thanks to some time travel fuckery in a later entry, that means Jirel of Joiry must be, at least retroactively, considered SF as well.

The problem is that, at least in “The Black God’s Kiss,” there’s virtually nothing to support this argument in the text itself. At best the argument is misleading: when I first read “The Black God’s Kiss” I was distracted by this sword-and-sorcery story being erroneously included in an SF anthology and thus struggled to enjoy it for what it actually was. Now I’ve rectified the issue by reading this story as it was originally published, wherein it’s clearly framed as fantasy—albeit with a remarkably dark tinge, being a mix of heroic fantasy, cosmic horror, and psycho-sexual mania.

Before I enter plot synopsis mode I wanna issue a sort of content warning. Despite its vintage “The Black God’s Kiss” overflows with eroticism and sexual angst, especially in its subtext. Sexual assault is what kicks off the plot and things only get murkier from there, just so you know.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales, which is on the Archive. Didn’t I cover something from this issue just last month? Why yes; and eventually I’ll be sure to cover Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Seven Geases.” Anyway, “The Black God’s Kiss” has been collected and anthologized quite a few times over the years. On top of the aforementioned The Future Is Female! we have The Best of C. L. Moore, part of the fabulous Ballantine best-of series, and also Black God’s Kiss, which collects all of the Jirel of Joiry stories—not that there are too many of them. One place where you won’t find this story is Two-Handed Engine, which is irritating because it’s one of the few actually essential Moore/Kuttner stories not in that collection; meanwhile there are a couple more minor stories that could’ve been replaced with “The Black God’s Kiss,” if space was a concern. Point being, you won’t have a hard time finding this one.

Enhancing Image

Moore is not fucking around, because we start in media res with a battle at the castle of Joiry having already taken place, Joiry having been invaded and with the outcome being disastrous—for the castle. Guillaume is a haughty Frenchman (as if there’s any other kind) and leader of marauders who demands the commander of the fallen troops of Joiry be brought to him, presumably for a flashy execution. However, when the commander is brought forth, Guillaume demands the commander’s helmet be removed, and this is where we get what has to be one of the first instances of the “Samus is a girl” trope—if not the first. Admittedly this tiny twist is spoiled if you know literally anything about Jirel of Joiry in advance, and also are reading a copy without any illustrations, but it’s the thought that counts. Because he is a hetereosexual man with functioning eyeballs, Guillaume’s intent with Jirel makes a 180 and turns from murder to lust.

It’s here that we get a forced kiss, the first of three kisses in the story actually, and a very pissed-off redhead. Guillaume forces a kiss on Jirel, which doesn’t go well for either of them: for Jirel for the obvious reason, and for Guillaume became he damn near gets his throat torn out when Jirel maneuvers to bite his neck. “She missed the jugular by a fraction of an inch.” Like anyone upset that his would-be rape victim would dare fight back, Guillaume knocks Jirel out, but rather than kill her he locks her up in the dungeon of her own castle—a show of mercy he’ll ultimately regret. Because this world apparently operates on Metal Gear Solid logic, Jirel knocks out the guard for her cell pretty easily and has the opportunity to sneak out of the castle, only she doesn’t do that; for one, in her defense, it’d be cowardly, but also there’s clearly something to be done about the guy who thinks he can have his way with her. The result is a rape-revenge plot with a few twists contained therein, and that’s what we’re here for.

“The Black God’s Kiss” is a novelette that very easily could’ve been a novella, had Moore wanted to flesh out the setting and background behind Joiry—only she deprives us of that backstory because really it’s not necessary to us understanding Jirel’s character. Jirel is an impressive creation, partly because she’s a Woman™, but also because this was still pretty early in the formation of sword and sorcery as a subgenre; hell, Conan had only debuted two years prior to this. Even in this first entry in the series we see multiple facets of Jirel’s character, her virtues and flaws, and there’s ambiguity about her that, at least in this story, does not sharpen into clarity. Being the heroine of a heroic fantasy plot would be enough, but Jirel is also in several ways a subversion of what was expected of female characters in pulp fiction at the time. After having escaped, she meets up with ~~Ricky~~ Father Gervase, the castle chaplain, who I guess was not fed to pigs when Guillaume took over, and it’s here we find out a few things of interest…

For one, it’s implied that we’re in an alternate medieval France—a world where ancient Rome was still a thing, but also the fantastic has intruded upon the normal human world. Jirel is shown to be a practicing Catholic, but she sure is not a pious one; she is French, after all. She makes it clear that Guillaume’s forced kiss was not her first; she is not the waifish virgin of most pulp fiction women, being neither waifish nor virginal. Sex and religion are not uncommon sights in the pages of Weird Tales, in that their imagery makes it in for the sake of titilation and shock value, but they’re rarely discussed by characters within those stories. “The Black God’s Kiss” is unusual for several reasons, but what struck me the most is its willingness to tackle the complex web of emotions involved in sex—and this is way before we even get to the ending! Anyway, Jirel is looking for a specific weapon she might use to wreak her vengeance on Guillaume; she doesn’t know what the weapon is, but she knows where it is.

There’s a level of the castle beneath it that goes down—far further below ground than the dungeon, a place so horrid that Jirel’s only gone there once before, and she got too spooked before she could venture that far. Gervase was with Jirel during that earlier venture to the realm below, and perhaps wisely he tries to convince Jirel to not go (for the sake of her immortal soul more than anything), only Jirel will not be convinced. As the following dialogue shows, Jirel is thinking about her immortal soul, but she’s thinking about doing terrible things to Guillaume way more:

“To wreak my vengeance upon Guillaume I would go if I knew I should burn in hell for ever.”

“But Jirel, I do not think you understand. This is a worse fate than the deepest depths of hell-fire. This is—this is beyond all the bounds of the hells we know. And I think Satan’s hottest flames were the breath of paradise, compared to what may befall there.”

“I know. Do you think I’d venture down if I could not be sure? Where else would I find such a weapon as I need, save outside God’s dominion?”

“Jirel, you shall not!”

“Gervase, I go! Will you shrive me?” The hot yellow eyes blazed into his, lambent in the starlight.

After a moment he dropped his head. “You are my lady. I will give you God’s blessing, but it will not avail you—there.”

Savor this, because with one exception this is the last bit of dialogue we get in the whole story and we’re only about five pages into it. Something I realized is that once Jirel starts making her way to the lower depths the writing becomes entirely either action or the narrator trying to capture Jirel’s mindset. Anyway, Gervae reluctantly gives Jirel his blessing and she heads off on her own to make her way to the lower depths. There’s a bit of subtle fanservice with Jirel’s getup for the journey: at the beginning of the story she wore armor bulky enough that Guillaume at first assumed she was a man, but now her attire is more flexible and revealing, wearing “a fresh shirt of doeskin” and “a brief tunic of link-mail.” She’s able to carry a sword and a dagger in her belt, but can’t bring a torch—a hindrance that may ultimately prove to be an asset.

As she finds the trap door leading to the lower depths and begins her descent, Jirel is reminded, to her horror, that the spiraling staircase going down was almost certainly not built by humans—rather the architecture seems more fit for a giant snake. I have a couple questions such as, “Who built this castle anyway?” and “If the lower depths were built by something non-human, would it have preceded the castle’s construction? How much did the builders know about this place?” Questions which go unanswered, but really we need not worry about those things. The castle of Joiry, much like an onion or an ogre, has layers, which are peeled back once the revenge plot kicks into gear. Because she doesn’t have a torch Jirel is unable to see SHIT, but it turns out there could be another reason for the unfathomable darkness of these depths—a reason that can only be deemed supernatural rather than super-scientific, at least without serious retconning.

We get what might be called a demented sense-of-wonder bit when Jirel realizes what has been causing her to be unable to see anything in the depths, and it’s here that the story switches gears from medieval fantasy to something much harder to classify, though I think “heroic Lovecraftian fantasy” might do the trick. Jirel came to this unholy place with a crucifix, a holy object, round her neck, which she finds may be preventing her from taking in her surroundings. Get this:

She lifted her hand and found the chain of her crucifix taut and vibrant around her neck. At that she smiled a little grimly, for she began to understand. The crucifix. She found her hand shaking despite herself, but she unfastened the chain and dropped the cross to the ground. Then she gasped.

All about her, as suddenly as the awakening from a dream, the nothingness had opened out into undreamed-of distances. She stood high on a hilltop under a sky spangled with strange stars. Below she caught glimpses of misty plains and valleys with mountain peaks rising far away. And at her feet a ravening circle of small, slavering, blind things leaped with clashing teeth.

They were obscene and hard to distinguish against the darkness of the hillside, and the noise they made was revolting. Her sword swung up of itself, almost, and slashed furiously at the little dark horrors leaping up around her legs. They died squashily, splattering her bare thighs with unpleasantness, and after a few had gone silent under the blade the rest fled into the dark with quick, frightened pantings, their feet making a queer splashing noise on the stones.

From here on, Jirel is on her own in her surreal nightmare adventures, the last conversation in the whole story happening between her and a ghoulish doppelganger, which tries to trick her at first but then points her towards what she wants: a temple on an small island, in the middle of a lake of stars. Here the plot gets rather hard to summarize, since it’s basically an episodic adventure wherein Jirel sees or fights off some weird thing in the midst of this vast underground realm—a realm which, given the appearance of a sky, cannot possibly be underground unless it’s an elaborate optical illusion. I’ll discuss one or two of these highlights, plus the ending in the spoilers section, but I’ll say for now that if this episodic style of fantasy storytelling is up your alley then you’ll have a lot of fun with this. The loose narrative might’ve turned me off on my initial reading, but now I can see more clearly what Moore is going for, and it must be said she’s quite good at it.

There Be Spoilers Here

The temple on the island, connected to the rest of the realm via an invisible bridge, houses a black Buddha-esque statue with one eye, “and its mouth was pursed for a kiss.” Jirel is unable to explain in words how she feels about this statue, something perhaps beyond human comprehension compels her to kiss the statue, hence the title and Margaret Brundage’s cover for the issue. After having fought off indescribable little horrors and seen some rather disconcerting stuff (the most evocative of these being a herd of blind and insane white horses, galloping through the dark fields), there’s a peculiar sense of relief—almost ecstacy—when Jirel kisses the black statue and gains what she deduces to be a poison kiss—a kiss she’ll then pass on Guillaume. Very strange, that of all the weapons she could be given a kiss of deah is what will satisfy her bloodlust.

Firstly, the kiss is clearly meant to be a stand-in for sex, as a kind of very thin metaphor; and not just one of the three kisses but all of them. Guillaume forces a kiss on Jirel, but we’re to understand that, at least subtextual, this was more than “just” a kiss; and Jirel kissing the black statue strikes me as a variation on the deal-with-the-devil plot turn (I’m thinking specifically of the film Belladonna of Sadness wherein the heroine has sex with the devil and becomes a powerful witch), even though the statue is inanimate. The black god’s kiss itself is mystifying, but it’s also a sexual experience. It may seem assbackwards that the weapon Jirel has sought requires such close content with her would-be victim, but the intimacy is deliberate since Jirel wants not only vengeance on Guillaume but also to dominate him—to have that kiss again, but on her terms this time.

This brings us to the ending, which is divisive and rather hard to explain since it’s here that the psycho-sexual angle kicks into high gear, and indeed it’s hard to rationalize what happens at the end without psychoanalysis. When Jirel hurries back to the surface (being made suddenly afraid to see the horrors of the depths with full clarity), she finds Guillaume with his men, and also Gervase, who may or may not have ratted on Jirel. The confrontation here is made all the more bewildering because there’s not even a word of dialogue in this scene, and while the narrator does a little explaining we do not get a play-by-play of Jirel’s mind. Rather than have Jirel killed on the spot, Guillaume does the heterosexual male thing and seems pretty happy to see her again, for some reason expecting a consensual kiss from her this time—which in a way he does get.

It’s not hard to imagine an alternate version of this story where Jirel and Guillaume have sex and it’s her lips down there that deliver the poison, and the strangest thing of all is that the outcome would basically be the same; more importantly, despite sex being far more overtly erotic than a kiss, the erotic power of the kiss is still perfectly intact and comprehensive. The moment of the kill is almost orgasmic for Jirel, but this is immediately followed by the lowest of lows—the realization, too late, that Guillaume living rent free in Jirel’s head this whole time was not simple due to hatred: it was also all-consuming lust which manifested as murderous obsession. Maybe not love, as the text hints at, but certainly there’s an attraction between the warrior maid and the conqueror that, under different circumstances, could have led to a wonderful partnership.

They knew he was dead. That was unmistakable in the way he lay. Jirel stood very still, looking down upon him, and strangely it seemed to her that all the lights in the world had gone out. A moment before he had been so big and vital, so magnificent in the torchlight—she could still feel his kiss upon her mouth, and the hard warmth of his arms…

Suddenly and blindingly it came upon her what she had done. She knew now why such heady violence had flooded her whenever she thought of him—knew why the light-devil in her own form had laughed so derisively—knew the price she must pay for taking a gift from a demon. She knew that there was no light anywhere in the world, now that Guillaume was gone.

Jirel regretting killing Guillaume is a character choice that some will find hard to swallow: this is, after all, akin to a rape victim falling in love with her rapist after the fact. Another way of looking at it is that Jirel, having been obsessed with Guillaume, suddenly finds her existence devoid of meaning once she’s gotten rid of the object of her obsession. Another way of looking at all this is that Moore may be suggesting that the relationship between Jirel and Guillaume is tragic, as they are (in some ways anyway) kindred spirits who have the misfortune of being on opposite sides of the battlefield. Certainly Moore did not understand consent in 1934 as we understand it now, but I can’t help but feel like she’s trying to say something about the occasional blurriness of consent, and how sexual desire may manifest in ways people can’t predict. I can speculate all I want, but it’s still impressive that the actual meaning behind “The Black God’s Kiss” remains, after nearly a century, elusive.

Oh, and to complicate thing further, we get notice at the very end of a direct sequel in the wings, “Black God’s Shadow,” which will be available in the December 1934 issue of Weird Tales. Well, I guess I know what the next Moore story I cover will be!

A Step Farther Out

I’ll be honest, when I read “Shambleau” I enjoyed it enough but didn’t think it was all that special—though it was certainly well-written considering Moore was barely out of her teens at the time. However, on a deeper reading, “The Black God’s Kiss” strikes me as easily the more impressive venture, and it’s a shame that she basically gave up sword and sorcery once she started teaming up regularly with Kuttner given her obvious knack for it. The premise is simple, with as little context for the conflict being given as possible, and there are a few logical questions left unanswered, but this is a disturbed and deeply evocative piece that showed Moore (who, mind you, was still very early in her career) as a force to be reckoned with. The ending is not for everyone, but I’m convinced Moore knew what she was doing, especially considering she seems to have written “Black God’s Shadow” before the first story was even published. Speaking of which, there’s only a two-month gap in publication between these stories…

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Dreams in the Witch-House” by H. P. Lovecraft

March 17th, 2023

(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, July 1933.)

Who Goes There?

I’m about to talk some shit. I can’t say I’m a fan of H. P. Lovecraft, even though I’ve read a good portion of his work at this point and have liked some of it. Lovecraft, when he’s really up my alley, is pretty good: “The Rats in the Walls,” “Cool Air,” and “The Shadow Out of Time” are all bangers for me, with that last one especially standing out for its marrying of cosmic wonder with an equally strong dose of cosmic anxiety. But Lovecraft, IN MY OPINION, can also be pretty boring and full of himself, never mind his other limitations. You may notice for instance, especially in his later stories, that Lovecraft hates writing dialogue and will do anything to get around having to write basic human conversation. The irony is that, at least regarding his letter-writing, Lovecraft was very talkative; indeed the only reason we laymen even know about Lovecraft is because he formed several connections that proved valuable for preserving his work after his death. Based on his fiction alone, Lovecraft should have by all rights stayed as obscure as his close contemporary Clark Ashton Smith, whose stories are often more entertaining and who was overall the more elegant writer.

This, of course, is all just opinion, because the objective reality is that Lovecraft is the most influential horror writer of the 20th century and it’s not even close. Oh sure, Stephen King is the most popular, but popularity does not equate to influence and if we’re talking about authors whose tangibly left an impact on other authors, Lovecraft’s only serious rival would be Edgar Allan Poe. Everyone who even dabbles in cosmic horror must contend with Lovecraft’s legacy and it’s no coincidence that “Lovecraftian” horror is used interchangeably with cosmic horror; he didn’t invent the subgenre (Lovecraft made it clear that he was not the first), but he was, more than anyone, the guy who connected the dots and brought clarity to what must have seemed to a lot of people like just a bunch of stories written at different times by different people. His long essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” is arguably the single most important document on the history of horror fiction, and it also gives us precious insight into how Lovecraft himself—that is to say, as a keeper of the flame that is horror fiction.

A little bit of bashing, a good deal more of praise. I’m putting all this upfront because there’s gonna be more bashing to come: today’s story is… not fun. “The Dreams in the Witch-House” (the hyphen removed for reprints) is a later Lovecraft story, set in what we now call the Cthulhu Mythos, and it’s what we might also call a noble failure. See, people called this story a turkey before it was even published: August Derleth admitted to not liking it, which didn’t stop him from submitting it to Farnsworth Wright, who promptly bought it. “The Dreams in the Witch-House” was written a year after At the Mountains of Madness, but was published three years before that short novel on account of the latter being rejected by Wright and collecting dust. I find this all ironic since while I think At the Mountains of Madness is unspeakably boring, the poor editing of “The Dreams in the Witch-House” strikes me as less excusable.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the July 1933 issue of Weird Tales, which is on the Archive. You may notice that the aura of these Weird Tales covers has changed radically since last time we saw them, the greys being replaced with an erotic blueness. Margaret Brundage did basically all of the covers for the magazine at the very height of its popularity, so from about to 1933 to 1937, and she sure did love her female nudes. Anyway, because this is a Lovecraft story, it’s very easy to find. You can read an easily legible online version via the H. P. Lovecraft Archive, found here. “The Dreams in the Witch-House” has been collected and anthologized many times over the years, despite opinion on its quality being widely varied; if you look up a given Lovecraft collection it’s probably in there.

Enhancing Image

Before I dig into this piece of shit, there are a few nuggets in the opening stretch that may trick you into thinking you’re about to read a good Lovecraft story, like “The Dunwich Horror” or “The Colour Out of Space.” For one, this is one of the few Cthulhu Mythos stories where Arkham is the main setting, whereas more often it’s simply alluded to. If you’re a Mythos fan there are chestnuts of the series you’ll notice quickly, such as the Necronomicon and that classic college for goths and edgy white dudes everywhere, Miskatonic University. Lovecraft even tips his hat to Robert E. Howard by including Von Junzt’s book (see my review of Howard’s “The Black Stone”), albeit under a different title. These Mythos stories all radiate Lovecraft’s undying love for New Endland, and “The Dreams in the Witch-House” might be the most New England-y of them all, not only taking place in Arkham but referencing Salem, that real-life eldritch location, heavily.

Speaking of Salem, the keyword for today is “witchcraft.” The villain of the story, Keziah Mason, is a 17th century witch whose exploits very much interest our hapless protagonist, Walter Gilman, a Miskatonic student who has rented a room in the house where Keziah had lived. The house, lorded over by unhinged Christian Joe Mazurewicz, is unique both for its history (having harbored a known witch and all) and its architecture, which Gilman finds to be… a little odd. The walls and ceiling of Gilman’s room are at odd angles, and I have to wonder if Lovecraft was inspired by the angular set design of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or if he had even seen that movie. (As weird as it sounds, Lovecraft really enjoyed movies, and on at least a couple occasions, including his late masterpiece “The Shadow Out of Time,” he was apparently inspired by movies he saw.) Any reasonable person would have rented some other goddamn house, but as the omniscient narrator makes clear, Gilman is not a reasonable man, with his closest ally, housemate Frank Elwood, also being a bit of an eccentric.

Back to witchcraft, Keziah was tried in Salem, in the court of one Judge Hathorne, a name that will ring a weird bell for some people. Hathorne was a real person in 17th century Salem, and was indeed the direct ancestor of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who changed his last name slightly to distant himself as a descendant of someone who persecuted innocent people under the guise of Puritan justice. Lovecraft was a devotee of horror literature and he sure knew his Hawthorne; indeed his enthusiasm as a student of weird and macabre fiction is what I like most about him. Keziah was set to be executed, but by means incomprehensible to normal humans was able to escape her jail cell, never to be seen again, as explained here:

She had told Judge Hathome of lines and curves that could be made to point out directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond, and had implied that such lines and curves were frequently used at certain midnight meetings in the dark valley of the white stone beyond Meadow Hill and on the unpeopled island in the river. She had spoken also of the Black Man, of her oath, and of her new secret name of Nahab. Then she had drawn those devices on the walls of her cell and vanished.

A few things to unpack here…

The gimmick of “The Dreams in the Witch-House,” aside from the feverish dreams that Gilman has, is the way in which Keziah conducts her witchcraft, because it’s not the usual toil-and-trouble routine. Lovecraft’s writing increasingly delved into the cosmic as his career progressed, and in that sense I can believe “The Dreams in the Witch-House” was written after At the Mountains of Madness; there’s a preoccupation with geometry and special awareness here that is simply not present in Lovecraft’s fiction from a decade earlier. I dare say it makes sense that an eccentric college boy would rent a space with weird dimensions so that he could study this nifty bit of local history. Besides, the witch is surely dead by now, no harm can come from it, just don’t think too much about the sleepwalking.

The other thing is that Keziah is in cahoots with what Lovecraft calls “the Black Man,” although after a certain point he stops capitalizing for no reason and calls him “the black man.” Okay. So the Black Man is a Mythos character, he’s mentioned in the Necronomicon, and contrary to what his title would imply, he’s not black: he has charcoal skin but is supposed to have “white” features, “a tall, lean man of dead black coloration but without the slightest sign of negroid features.” First off, oof. Second, I know what we’re all thinking: Lovecraft is being his usual racist self again. To an extent that’s true, because it seems he goes out of his way to word things a certain way, and also the people who are clearly of Eastern European background in the story are described in unflattering terms, but it would be a mistake to call the story racist, for reasons I don’t feel like getting too much into.

The thing about Lovecraft is that if we’re talking about his fiction, and for this site that’s mostly what we’re talking about, his racism is not exceptional, even for ’30s pulp fiction—especially for ’30s pulp fiction, considering the myriad Yellow Peril narratives from the era that were deemed perfectly acceptable. Hell, Howard’s “The Black Stone” has some rather conspicuous racist underones, as indeed does a good deal of Howard’s other fiction. The difference between Lovecraft and Howard, though, is that the latter was actually willing to depict POC… at all? And not just that but as flesh-and-blood people when he wasn’t using racist tropes. Howard being a proud Irishman, at a time when the Irish being treated by WASPs as “unclean” whites was still recent history, definitely also informs his views on race and particularly his imperfect but sympathetic views of non-white peoples; meanwhile Lovecraft grew up in a WASP bubble and he never entirely broke out of said bubble, though he did eventually try.

I’m getting sidetracked, but then this story’s not terribly interesting.

Something I should’ve mentioned earlier is Keziah’s familiar, Brown Jenkin, a half-man half-rat thing with a human face and hands/feet but the body of a rat, which admittedly is an uncanny creature design. The problem is that none of this is scary; if anything it’s a bit silly. I don’t understand why Lovecraft, a known heathen, would indulge in tropes about witches that would’ve been old hat even when he wrote this story. Of course Keziah is an ugly old hag, because she must either be that or Marilyn goddamn Monroe, and of course the ugly old hag is up to no good. I’m sorry, is the implication here that the Salem witch trials were justified? It’s such an odd marriage, between old-timey witchcraft and a subgenre of horror that was comparatively young and less superstitious. The weirdest thing of all is that the aforementioned Eastern Europeans, who are rabidly Christian and thus would discomfort Lovecraft for both their religion and their ethnicity, are obviously in the right when they shun the witch-house.

Before I head into spoilers (not that there’s much that can actually be spoiled) I wanna let you know that this story took me THREE DAYS to get through. Technically two, but I took a day off from reading before finishing it, which for a short story is damning; of course I say that, but this is a long novelette, close to 15,000 words, and it really needn’t be that long. I criticized Hao Jinfang’s “Folding Beijing” (review here) for feeling bloated to mine eyes, but let it be known that while Jingfang’s story is about a thousand words longer than Lovecraft’s, the latter still felt longer. Gilman has several acid trip dream sessions with Keziah and Brown Jenkin and soon these scenes become reptitive, with little progress outside the dreams being made, not to mention the reliance on dreams gives the whole ordeal chopped-up pacing that makes it feel longer than it is. And then there’s what I said at the beginning, with Lovecraft summarizing (not concisely, mind you) conversations rather than actually writing them. I’m amazed Wright readily accepted this, because it so obviously could’ve used an editor’s blue pen.

There Be Spoilers Here

A lot happens, but deceptively little of it is proves to be concequential. Gilman keeps having these dreams with increasing vividness, to the point where a couple of drunkards claim to have witnessed one of his sleepwalking sessions—only this time he’s accompanied by Keziah and the Black Man. It’s pretty clear to us but not to Gilman what is happening, until it’s almost too late. In his dreams, in that other dimension, Gilman finally takes the initiative and tries to stop the blood sacrifice of a child, using the crucifix Mazurewicz gave him to stun Keziah momentarily before strangling her.

I have a couple questions…

Gilman pulling out the crucifix and it actually spooking Keziah is one of the most baffling things to happen in a Lovecraft story, and as far as I can tell there’s no defense for this. Lovecraft, an avowed atheist, uses a crucifix as a deus ex machina against a witch who by all logic should not be spooked by Christian iconography, on account of her being able to, ya know, travel between dimensions and cheat death literally for centuries. I’m also baffled by the fact that there’s not a single actual subversion of what Puritans thought witchcraft to be like, even down to witches sacrificing childen to what may as well be the devil. Oh sure, the Black Man is not Satan, but the result is exactly the same.

It seems that Lovecraft wanted to elevate what would otherwise be a standard evil witch narrative with a dash of cosmic horror, but if I’m being honest this is the least convincing use of the Necronomicon, the Old Ones, and so on that I’ve seen in a Lovecraft story. Arkham may as well be Salem, and while it seems at first like Lovecraft might be setting up what would’ve been standard witch hijinks only to subvert our expectations, he ultimately chooses to play everything straight—albeit more gruesomely than one would expect. Gilman kills the witch, but Brown Jenkin kills the child and completes the sacrifice, not to mention gets out alive. The climax is a bittersweet one, with Gilman daring to be heroic and partly succeeding but still failing to save the day to an extent.

Elwood finds Gilman in his bed, dazed. “On his throat were the marks of murderous hands, and on his left ankle was a distressing rat-bite. His clothing was badly rumpled, and Joe’s crucifix was missing.” Gilman, soon rendered deaf by an unearthly sound, never regains full lucidity—and in typical fashion for a Lovecraft protagonist, he will not live much longer. One day Elwood finds him very much dead, his chest having been eaten through by what is clearly meant to be Brown Jenkin; again this is gorier than is typical for Lovecraft, but the effect is hollow. Quite reasonably, this experience drives Elwood to madness temporarily (he gets better), and Mazurewicz soon abandons the house. The old damned place is evacuated, and as far we’re concerned this is where the story ends.

BUT WAIT, WE’RE NOT DONE YET!

The house is condemned, then partly demolished. The attic, which had been kept a mystery up to this point, collapses and covers the upper level of the house, no doubt killing anyone who would have been where Gilman was. I get that this collapse could have only happened after Gilman killed the witch, but I like to think of an alternate ending where Brown Jenkin doesn’t kill Gilman and instead Our Hero™ dies in some freak accident. Would that ending make the story better? Hmmm. Nobody wants to scavenge the remains, except someone has to; and the results will be shocking to the remaining townspeople, if not to us.

Among the rubbish which had crashed through the ancient slanting ceiling were several things which made the workmen pause and call in the police. Later the police in turn called in the coroner and several professors from the university. There were bones—badly crushed and splintered, but clearly recognizable as human—whose manifestly modern date conflicted puzzlingly with the remote period at which their only possible lurking place, the low, slant-floored loft overhead, had supposedly been sealed from all human access. The coroner’s physician decided that some belonged to a small child, while certain others—found mixed with shreds of rotten brownish cloth—belonged to a rather undersized, bent female of advanced years. Careful sifting of debris also disclosed many tiny bones of rats caught in the collapse, as well as older rat-bones gnawed by small fangs in a fashion now and then highly productive of controversy and reflection.

They then find what we know to be the skeleton of Brown Jenkin, since all the features match: unusually large rodent body, but with what appear to be humanoid hands and feet. The implication is that Keziah and Brown Jenkin have been dead in this dimension for centuries, but have stayed alive in that other dimension thanks to evil maths. We also get hard evidence that what Gilman had been experiencing was real and not a dream, even though we already would’ve figured a normal rat could not have eaten through his chest like it did. It’s only here, after this lengthy epilogue, that the story actually ends and by extension ends my suffering.

Something to keep in mind is that this final scene changes NOTHING. What useful information do we get here that we did not know about before? More importantly, all the characters have by this point left the scene, so we’re not attached to the people who find the hard evidence of supernatural shenanigans. If this was supposed to be confirmation of things that were “ambiguous” before, it fails because the aforementioned happenings were not ambiguous. If Lovecraft meant it to be a twist, it fell flat.

A Step Farther Out

There you have it, the second story I’ve reviewed for this site that I just don’t like; and unlike Tanith Lee’s “Bite-Me-Not or, Fleur de Feu” (review here), where it was my first story of hers and so I gave her the benefit of the doubt, I know I caught Lovecraft on a bad day with this one. “The Dreams in the Witch-House” is tedious, overly long, and more than a bit hackneyed, not so much Lovecraft repeating himself (which he does sometimes) as taking cues from older, more superstitious horror fiction. Despite enhancing the affair with some neat cosmic imagery, and treating witchcraft as like a sort of perverted mathematics, Lovecraft still plays the evil witch narrative straight from start to finish. What interests me is that Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos stories, despite sharing continuity, run the gamut from occult horror to outright science fiction, with “The Dreams in the Witch-House” falling into the former end with a few hints of the latter, and if you know me then you know which end of the spectrum I prefer. Point being, this was a chore to get through; the chances of me ever rereading it are low.

See you next time.