Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

Short Story Review: “Don’t Look Now” by Henry Kuttner

November 10th, 2022

(Cover by Earle Bergey. Startling Stories, March 1948.)

Who Goes There?

Henry Kuttner began writing pretty young, being first published in either 1931 or 1936 (ISFDB claims the former, but something tells me they’re wrong), the latter at the very least introducing Kuttner under his own name to the world of SFF with “The Graveyard Rats.” Said story, a pretty solid one-man show about rats and claustrophobia, has been very recently adapted into an episode of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. Kuttner would come to define himself, though, not as a practitioner of horror, but of humor, though the two are not always mutually exclusive. In the late ’30s he wrote prolifically, but not with a whole lot of success; he became known as one of many hack writers for the pulps, but unlike most of them he really did have talent lurking underneath. 1940 was a watershed year for Kuttner, as he married fellow writer C. L. Moore (they both got their start in Weird Tales, and Kuttner started as a big fan of hers), and together they wrote an impressive streak of SFF that remains essential.

While he more or less worked in collaboration with his wife (and vice versa) for the rest of his career, Kuttner would continue to write on his own (essentially if not quite literally) after 1940. Mostly outside of Astounding Science Fiction, Kuttner had stories submitted under his name alone, presumably because magazines like Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories were less reputable, and also because these stories were deemed more Kuttner-y than his more outright collaborations with Moore. After 1950, Kuttner’s productivity dropped to about one story a year (the same happened with Moore, as they both focused on their education), and unfortunately it never recovered; Kuttner died of a failed heart in 1958, only 42 years old. To quote Brian Aldiss (or maybe it’s David Wingrove) from Trillion Year Spree, “Our own minds were extinguished a little in response.”

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March 1948 issue of Startling Stories, which is on the Archive. “Don’t Look Now” has been reprinted a good number of times, at least one of which, My Best Science Fiction Story, is also on the Archive; actually there are two versions of this anthology, and thankfully the version that’s archived, the abridged version, still has Kuttner’s story. More importantly, we have an introduction by Kuttner himself explaining why it’s his “best” story—and look, I normally don’t look for authors’ comments on their own work, but this is glorious. I won’t quote the whole thing, but it’s so deliciously sarcastic—it alone would be worth the price of admission.

Why I selected Don’t Look Now as my favorite science fiction story is because it has the technical accuracy of Jules Verne; the realism of H. G. Wells, the social implications of Tolstoi (Leo—the Count, I mean), the freedom of Laurence Sterne, and the terseness of the Bible (the King James translation, of course).

These comparisons are BULLSHIT and Kuttner knows it. He takes apart the idea of an artist choosing their own favorite work and by extension the idea of making an anthology out of such a premise. He then finishes with the cherry on top: “Anyway, my wife wrote it.” Almost certainly untrue, by the way; after having read it I can say “Don’t Look Now” feels like a Kuttner story through and through. Kuttner’s really playing with the reader here, a forecasting of what will be an almost (if not equally) just as subversive a story.

Right, other reprints. The Great SF Stories: 1948, edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg; by extension we also have The Golden Years of Science Fiction: Fifth Series, being an amalgamation of The Great SF Stories: 1947 and 1948. More curiously perhaps we have The History of the Science Fiction Magazine Part 3: 1946-1955, edited by Mike Ashley, which despite sounding like a non-fiction series is actually an anthology series. The most essential reprint is, of course, Two-Handed Engine: The Selected Stories of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, which I brought up in my review of Moore’s story “Daemon” and which I recently managed to get my hands on. All seem to be out of print, but given that you have at least two free online resources I don’t think it’s a bad deal at all.

Enhancing Image

This is a barroom story, which is how you know it’s good. A lot of shit goes down in bars, whether it be between strangers or friends. We meet Lyman, our protagonist, who’s a bit of ~~a weirdo~~ an eccentric, making conversation with a man in a brown suit (let’s just call him the brown man, he doesn’t have a name), and things get a little weird right off the bat. Lyman starts talking about Martians, and how Martians live among us, and how everyone has a Martian whose job is to look after them and make sure they stay in line. Lyman’s Martian happens to be on break, how convenient. He also had been tailing the brown man all day, which is totally not creepy. The fact that the brown man doesn’t hightail it out of there simply because of Lyman’s weirdness perhaps says more about the brown man than it does about Lyman.

Not that the brown man is just some guy Lyman found off the street, he’s a journalist, which you’ll notice is a running thing in old-timey SF especially; if something “out there” is afoot then there’s a good chance a journalist will get involved. Lyman himself is supposedly an inventor. An accident involving “supersonic detergents” went awry and resulted in Lyman’s brain getting rewired, altering his senses such that he could now see and hear Martians—to an extent. He still doesn’t know what they really look like; they apparently walk around in human skin suits. That’s right, this story has actual skinwalkers. Reptilians who secretly rule the world. All that good stuff. Now Lyman is the Man Who Knows Better™, and he’s out to spread the word!

Did the movie They Live take after this? Is this plagiarism?

Anyway, given the alien invasion craze of the ’50s (think Invasion of the Body Snatchers), it’s surprising to me that “Don’t Look Now” was published in 1948, since it feels partly like a commentary on all those alien invasion stories. While there is a fine layer of paranoia coating things, there’s also a good deal of humor, as is typical of Kuttner. We get a reference to the famous Orson Welles radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds—you know, the radio drama that allegedly convinced thousands of people that there was an actual alien invasion going on. According to Lyman it was obviously fiction, but the novel the radio drama was adapting? Maybe not so much. “With Orson It was just a gag. H. G. knew—or suspected.” Again I’m surprised this was published in 1948 and not 1958, because it feels like the kind of self-aware takedown that would come about after a fad’s run its course.

Lyman also has the notion that cats were actually the ones who ran the world before the Martians, and they can even detect Martians as well. As someone who has (not owns) two cats, I find this credible enough.

Truth be told, it’s hard to talk too much about “Don’t Look Now,” for a few reasons. It’s probably the shortest short story I’ve reviewed so far, and I actually worried its length would be a problem; it’s only half a dozen magazine pages long, which translates to about a dozen book pages. Okay, that’s too bad. The thing is that it’s also chatty. This shit is like My Dinner with Andre if it was written by Thomas Pynchon, it’s a little gonzo and it almost feels mashed together. And because the vast majority of it is dialogue, with just two characters in one location, you might get the impression that nothing happens, which in a way is true. The stakes aren’t too high. We don’t suddenly break out into an action sequence. The Martians don’t barge in and wreak havoc. I know that’s entering spoiler territory, but I just wanna set the right expectations, because “Don’t Look Now” works almost like a Socratic dialogue—with a twist at the end, of course.

As such, this is my shortest review thus far; I’d be a little embarrassed if it wasn’t. Which is not to say the story is dull, or that it’s bad. Quite the contrary! Kuttner’s economy of style is empeccable; he does not waste any time and he doesn’t try to “elevate” it with flowery descriptions. Kuttner’s strength lies in punchy storytelling, so even though virtually nothing happens in “Don’t Look Now,” you don’t get the sense that Kuttner is just spinning his wheels, though you may be wondering what he’s up to. There’s definitely a point, but it’s saved for the very end, which naturally is where we’d get to spoilers. I’ll just say here that the story’s sense of paranoia lives up to the paranoia implied in its title, even if it is a bit jokey about it.

There Be Spoilers Here

The ending changes everything. Up to this point we’ve been led to believe that there’s a Martian in the bar, and that anyone could be it. Is it the brown man? The barkeep? Someone we were not aware of until now? No, it turns out that the Martian is… Lyman himself.

Lyman sat there. Between two wrinklesi n his forehead there was a stir and a flicker of lashes unfurling. The third eye opened slowly and looked after the brown man.

He was telling the truth about at least one thing: Martians have a third eye that they keep hidden. Most of everything else is probably a lie. The explanation about Martians appearing in infrared pictured has to be a lie. We’re still not sure what the Martians really look like. Lyman, since he is the protagonist and viewpoint character, has been taken for granted with regards to his trustworthiness, but we find out at the very end that the person who supposedly knows about aliens living among us is actually an alien himself. There’s even a subtle misdirect right before the final line where it looks like the barkeep might reveal himself as a Martian, but this is a red herring. Rarely do yoo come across a story where a good 90% of it is a red herring, come to think of it; the final reveal makes us doubt ourselves.

This raises a peculiar question, though: Why in God’s name did Lyman tell the brown man about Martians in the first place? What did he have to gain from it? Why would he rat out his own race like that? Unless, of course, you assume most of what he said was wrong on purpose; that he was giving the brown man just enough cookie crumbs to become paranoid about alien overlords, but then steered him off the patch by giving false information. Now why would someone in power deliberately give out misinformation? Hmmm. Not to mentions it explains Lyman’s erratic behavior before, which is revealed to have been very much calcualted. It would’ve been too easy for Lyman to get caught by a Martian, given he’s not being exactly secretive about his findings, so Kuttner does the smart thing and makes the Martian the last person we would suspect.

In “Don’t Look Now” we don’t see the solving of a mystery but the planting of one. You know how in Inception their normal job is extraction, which is to steal information from people’s dreams, but plnating false info is much harder? Lyman and Kuttner do that, and they do it pretty well.

A Step Farther Out

If “Don’t Look Now” feels somehow minor it’s because it’s set on so small a stage. There are only two principal characters and most of the word count is dedicated to their dialogue. Hell, only one of the characters is given a name. It’s all rather theatrical, like a one-act play. For a while I wondered where it was going, or rather what the point of it was, but I have to say the ending makes up for the lack of immediate point; it’s the kind of twist that makes you look back on the rest of the story and try to rearrange the pieces of the puzzle you’ve been given. Kuttner, more than anything, is clever, and he waits for the perfect moment to pull the rug out from under you. I would consider it his best, but I think it encapsulates what separates a Kuttner story from a Moore story.

In the years following World War II, there was an uptick in paranoid SF, projecting fears about nuclear weapons, the newfangled Cold War, or both. “Don’t Look Now” belongs to a certain subset of SF story from that period, leaning into the anxieties of the era and presenting something like an allegory. I don’t know where Kuttner stands on the issue of the Cold War, about the possibility of Soviety infiltrators in the US, the ending not really clarifying anything on that front, but I think that lack of clear intention only adds to the intrigue. While published in 1948, this is very much indicative of social anxieties prevalent in ’50s American SF. I would check it out, especially if you’re a sucker for that breed of fiction like I am.

See you next time.
Serial Review: We Who Are About To… by Joanna Russ (Part 1/2)

November 6th, 2022

(Cover by Rick Sternbach. Galaxy, January 1976.)

Who Goes There?

The ’60s saw an influx of explicitly feminist SFF writers, in correspondence with the sexual revolution of the period, with authors like Ursula K. Le Guin and Kate Wilhelm (although the latter had debuted in the late ’50s) coming to prominence. Perhaps the most abrasive of these new voices in the field was Joanna Russ, whose professional debut was in 1959 and who really hit the scene with her classic vampire story “My Dear Emily” in 1962. Her series of stories about Alyx the barbarian are of interest for a few reasons: first was the novelty of having a female protagonist in what amounted to heroic fantasy, and the second was that said heroic fantasy hopscotched its way between that genre and science fiction. What made Russ most famous (or infamous), though, was her 1975 novel The Female Man, which had apparently been written half a decade earlier but remained shelved until then. Russ, in both her fiction and her criticism (she, along with Judith Merril, was considered one of old-timey SFF’s great critics), was a real warrior with the pen—her combativeness earned her some enemies, but also much respect.

Due to health problems, Russ’s output petered out after the ’70s, and her career as a novelist was short-lived, with her first and last novels (Picnic on Paradise and The Two of Them, respectively) being published only a decade apart. She did, however, get some awards recognition, winning the Hugo for Best Novella with her 1982 novella “Souls,” which, though people must not have figured it at the time, had come out during Russ’s twilight years as a fiction writer. Still, as arguably the most outwardly spoken vanguard of second-wave feminism in relation to SFF, it’s possible that by 1985 Russ had said pretty much everything she wanted to say. While she lived until 2011, Russ’s legacy is very much conjoined to prevailing feminist modes of thought in the ’60s and ’70s.

Placing Coordinates

Part 1 of We Who Are About To… was published in the January 1976 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. I assumed that this novel would be out of print, but this is not so! There’s a paperback from Wesleyan University Press that looks like it’s still in print, and the same goes for a more recent paperback from Penguin Books; yes, apparently Penguin thought We Who Are About To… was significant enough to give it a fresh printing. Of course, the Wesleyan edition is superior by virtue of not being British. Keep in mind also that this is a very short novel—170 pages in its first edition and just under 120 in the Wesleyan, almost making it a novella really.

It could’ve been even shorter, I’m just saying.

Just as interestingly, this was published in Galaxy during that period when Jim Baen was editor. Baen was a truly remarkably editor, one of the all-time greats, but it’s funny to see a serial by leftist firebrand Joanna Russ in the same issue as pieces by such grumpy right-wing stalwarts as Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle; mind you, Baen’s fondness for out-of-left-field (pun intended) authors like Russ and Le Guin paled in comparison to his devotion to the conversative/libertarian crowd.

Enhancing Image

Before we get into the actual plot, let’s talk about a niche but weirdly prolific and popular subgenre, if you can even call it a subgenre: the stranded astronaut story. You know the drill, it’s when an astronaut (or at least someone who is spacefaring) gets stranded in some hostile environment and has to find a way either call for rescue and live in that new environment. Even by 1976, when Russ’s novel was serialized, this was a real old chestnut of the genre, and evidently it continues to be hugely popular in the present day if The Martian is anything to go by. Name an SF author and they probably wrote a stranded astronaut story at some point, and more often than not such a story is fundamentally optimistic about the prospect of humanity surviving amongst the stars. Such a premise is very much Campbellian, and while it didn’t start in John W. Campbell’s Astounding, it appeals to that sensibility.

We Who Are About To… does not hold such an optimistic view of humanity being able to overcome such obstacles; this is a novel that basically tells us right at the beginning that everyone will be dead by the end, so I’m not counting that as a spoiler, since it’s all but predestined. You may be wondering what I’m gonna do about the spoilers section, since I always have that for these reviews: don’t worry, you’ll see. You may also be wondering what the point is of Russ introducing us to these characters that she’s pointing at and saying, “Hehe, I’m gonna fucking KILL them by the end of this!” Well, you know what they say about the journey and the destination; more importantly, this novel would not be able to justify its own existence if it didn’t result in a kill-’em-all type of ending. Let’s pretend, though, for a second that we might get invested in these people.

Now, as for the characters…

There are eight of them at the outset, but only maybe half of them really matter. Five women and three men, and one of those women is very much underage (there’s a ’70s-ism here that I don’t feel like getting into, except to say that putting barely-in-their-teens characters in sexually compromising situations seemed like something you just did as an SFF writer in that era), not to mention a daughter of one of the other women. We have Mr. and Mrs. Graham and their daughter Lori, Cassie, Nathalie, Alan, John, and the unnamed female narrator. John is possibly the most interesting of the bunch since he acts as kind of a foil to the narrator, thinking himself an intellectual when in reality he’s a know-nothing bureaucrat. Alan is the youngest of the men and the closest the novel has to a conventional antagonist; he’s the only one who, prior to Part 1’s climax, resorts to physixal violence. Nathalie is a bit of a nonentity while Cassie is the closest (aside from Lori) the narrator has to an ally in all this. Not that that means much.

Our Heroes™, as part of an interplanetary expedition gone awry, crash land on what is probably a “tagged” planet, which is to say a planet whose makeup is not immediately fatal to humans. So it’s more habitable than Mars, which is something. Left with only the remains of their vessel, a land rover (or something like it), and some supplies, it’s time for the group to get their act together and see if they can make the best of a bad situation. They may as well get used to it since they have no way of calling for help and the planet itself is so distant from human civilization that help is simply not coming. But it can’t be all bad, can it? Well, the narrator thinks it’s all bad.

John Ude said, “Come on now, come on, dears. It’s a tagged planet. It has to be. Too much coincidence otherwise, eh? The air, the gravity. Now if it’s tagged, that means it’s like Earth. And we know Earth. Most of us were bom on it. So what’s there to be afraid of, hey? We’re just colonizing a little early, that’s all. You wouldn’t be afraid of Earth, would you?’’

Oh, sure. Think of Earth. Kind old home. Think of the Arctic. Of Labrador. Of Southern India in June. Think of smallpox and plague and earthquakes and ringworm and pit vipers. Think of a nice case of poison ivy all over, including your eyes. Status Asthmaticus. Amoebic dysentery. The Minnesota pioneers who tied a rope from the house to the barn in winter because you could lose your way in a blizzard and die three feet from the house. Think (while you’re at it) of tsunamis, liver fluke, the Asian brown bear. Kind old home. The sweetheart. The darling place.

The narrator has a snarky sense of humor—humor which, if absent, would render the novel borderline unreadable. The snark helps both the character and the reader cope with how hopeless things are. The narrator proceeds to list all the problems with a “tagged” planet and how basically nobody in the group is equipped to live long-term on such a planet, let alone set up a colony. Think of how many parts of our world are uninhabitable and compare that to a planet Our Heroes™ know nothing about, and whose very water could be lethal to humans. Something that constantly gets ignored or handwaved in these stranded astronaut stories is how fucking difficult (i.e., impossible) it would actually be to live in an environment that’s not suited for human habitation. While I have my issues with Russ’s novel, its mission statement as a strong dose of anti-Campbellian SF is admirable, even if I find it far too pessimistic for its own good. I do often prefer my SF to be at least a bit more hopepilled, just saying.

While the narrator is incessantly bitchy, her fatalistic viewpoint (we may as well play Uno until we die of starvation) is not unfounded. As far as she’s concerned, everyone died in the crash (not physically, but more metaphysically) and all this talk of setting up a colony is just delaying the inevitable. She might be more invested in survival if, say, they were literally the last human beings in the universe and if they didn’t procreate then the race would die out, but something tells me even if that was the case her response would still be “meh.” Naturally this attitude does not vibe well with the rest of the group, and she’s soon treated as a buzzkill at best and some kind of antisocial deviant at worst.

Take this little exchange between the narrator and John (again), which is easily one of my favorite bits of dialogue in Part 1:

“Civilization must be preserved,’’ says he.

“Civilization’s doing fine,’’ I said. “We just don’t happen to be where it is.’’

To say the narrator is thorny would be putting it mildly. Assuming the doom-and-gloom premise doesn’t alienate you, the total unlikability of the protagonist (even calling her an anti-heroine doesn’t feel right) just might, and I suspect is also the big reason why contemporary reviewers were not kind to the novel. It would be one thing if the narrator was set in her ways and she just wanted to be left to her own devices, but those dumb fellow humans keep trying to rope her back in, but she’s so nasty to everyone (except the Grahams, and even with them she’s standoffish) that we’re not sure why the others would want to keep her. The most plausible explanation is that they need everyone they can get, even the person who refuses to cooperate, if they hope to rebuild on this strange new planet, but I feel like it’s possible to do without just one person, especially if that person is a huge pain to be around.

Indeed, while the narrator is not without redeeming qualities, the conflict is only allowed to happen because she, for some reason, refuses to just take a hike and kill herself in peace, at least sparing everyone else the trouble. The whole idea is that she wants to die, since she sees no point in living under such dire circumstances, yet she keeps going. Oh, there are attempts from the others to keep the narrator from hurting herself, but she still has plenty of opportunities, not to mention means, of ending her own life, yet she can’t do it. She has a gas pellet gun which she can load with poison and enough drugs on her person to take down an elephant or two, so it shouldn’t be that hard. Of course, the narrator’s lack of drive to do what she herself thinks ought to be done is probably the point, which finally brings us to…

There Be Spoilers Here

Most of them die. End of Part 1.

…..

…………..

……………………

Okay, there’s more to it than that.

I can’t remember now when it happened exactly, but I realized that the narrator reminded me of a certain other character, and while I wasn’t expecting the comparison, it makes total sense to me now. I’m talking about Hamlet. The doomed prince of Denmark was a revolutionary character in theatrical storyteller, and, being innovative, he’s easy to poke fun at. The tragedy of Hamlet is that he is a man who is all thought and no action; every action he takes in the place is either misguided or comes about too late. To have the protagonist of your tragedy spend so much of the story saying so much and doing so little is probably frustrating for a lot of modern readers/viewers, but consider how unique Hamlet is as possibly the first true introvert in the history of theatre. The tragic hero, no matter how doomed, is typically a person who acts, while Hamlet is a person who thinks.

Similarly, the narrator of We Who Are About To… spends so much of her time thinking and so little time doing, so much so that the violent confrontation at the end of Part 1 struck me as more action-packed than it really was. The narrator is forced to take action against the rest of the group once she had literally nowhere left to run, resulting in her killing John, Alan, and Nathalie, and with Cassie, opting to do the reasonable thing and no longer put up with the narrator’s bullshit, killing herself. Had the narrator done so herself earlier, none of this would have happened, but like Hamlet she either acts in the wrong way or too late. Also like Hamlet, she thinks about suicide a good amount, and while I have to think of the novel’s pro-suicide (or at the very least pro-euthanasia) stance as almost more a shock tactic than an actual argument Russ is making, I also think it makes sense that she would (like Hamlet) struggle to go through with shuffling off this mortal coil.

The narrator being a Hamlet-esque figure does something to explain (if not to justify totally) her constant antagonism toward the rest of the group, not to mention her obsession with death. It’s all engaging on a thematic level, and it’s nice to think about—I just wish I could say the same for it as a reading experience.

A Step Farther Out

Part 1 ending where it does immediately brings up a structural problem, since by this point most of the cast is dead and there’s frankly not much than can happen from this point onward. At the end of Part 1 it feels more like we’re approaching the last third, or even the last quarter of the novel, and not the second half. It’s also a problem of length, since even taking into account how short it already is, I can’t help but feel like We Who Are About… can stand to be even shorter; it would be feasible, possibly even desirable, to whittle this 50,000-word novel (I would say Part 1 is about 25,000 words) down to a 30,000-word novella without sacrificing the important things. After all, we don’t need this many characters who inevitably will be snuffed out, nor do we need to know too much about them aside from how they figure into (i.e., oppose) the narrator’s viewpoint. Also, while I do find some of the narrator’s snark mildly funny, there’s only so much of her ultra-pessimistic unlikability that I can stomach.

Despite my reservations, I am curious as to how Russ plans to justify what looks to be mostly a one-woman show in the novel’s back half, and how that might impact my enjoyment of the whole thing as opposed to just admiring its thematic audacity. I’ve been burned before.

See you next time.
Novella Review: “Another Orphan” by John Kessel

November 3rd, 2022

(Cover by Barclay Shaw. F&SF, September 1982.)

Who Goes There?

John Kessel is one of the defining SFF authors of the ’80s, although like many of his contemporaries he had debuted in the ’70s, in the likes of Galileo and Galaxy Science Fiction. Adjacent to the newfangled cyberpunk movement of the period but decidedly not a cyberpunk writer himself, Kessel, like close contemporary Bruce Sterling, is startlingly diverse in his output. His 1986 story “The Pure Product” is one of the more haunting explorations of time travel in modern SFF, and his slightly autobiographhical story “Buffalo” could lay claim to being one of the best short stories (inside or outside of SFF) of the ’90s. On top of his fiction, Kessel is an active genre critic and anthologist, the latter often in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly. While he has a few novels to his credit, Kessel has reserved most of his writing energy to short fiction and genre commentary.

“Another Orphan” is a relatively early outing from Kessel, but as we’ll see, it reads like the work of a stone-cold master. I should say it now so that I won’t have to ease you into it in some coy fashion: this is Moby Dick fanfiction. You may be thinking, “Now Brian, this is obviously not fanfiction!” I guess you’re right; it was, after all, published professionally, and so technically it doesn’t count. But “Another Orphan” is about an original character being plopped into a story that was first written by a different author, a premise which has since become an old and tired chestnut for fanfic writers. It’s what Kessel does with such a premise, though, that makes the result special.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the September 1982 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. Despite winning a Nebula, and being regarded as one of Kessel’s most major works, “Another Orphan” has not been reprinted often. Still, we have two options that I would consider major. The first is The Best Fantasy Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by Edward L. Ferman, which is a bulky hardcover that you can find used pretty cheaply, and it also has a lot of stories that I consider of strong interest. More recently (so recent it came out THIS YEAR!) we have The Dark Ride: The Best Short Fiction of John Kessel, a fancy hardcover from Subterranean Press, which I would recommend if you’re already a fan of Kessel and/or you wanna play this game on Hard Mode. Limited edition with copies signed by Kessel himself, so you’re looking at at least $30, and that price will only go up with time.

Enhancing Image

A bit of context, because while it’s not necessary to have read Moby Dick in order to enjoy “Another Orphan,” the latter is very much in conversation with the former. Herman Melville is one of the great eccentrics in American literature, and especiallty 19th century American literally; his magnum opus, Moby Dick, is a bizarre, freewheeling, often meandering novel that alienates a lot of readers because at face value it seems to fail as an adventure narrative, when the reality is that Moby Dick, if anything, is a grand subversion of the seafaring adventure narrative. If you go in expecting what you imagine a canonical work to read like, or if you’re expecting an action-packed romp on the high seas, you’ll be disappointed, but if you’re expecting one of the weirdest and most enigmatic novels in American literature then you might come out of it with a new perspective on what is possible with the written word.

I say all this because our protagonist, Patrick Fallon, is someone who, once he realizes where he is and what he’s in, does not initially give the world of Moby Dick the respect it deserves. Patrick is a commodities analyst for some firm (let’s just call him a yuppie and be done with it) who, after a fight and an apology fuck with his girlfriend (I don’t think they’re married) one night, inexplicably finds himself awaking in the crew’s quarters on a whaling vessel—and not just any whaling vessel! He doesn’t immediately figure it out (he at first thinks it’s a dream, or that he got shanghaied), but he soon realizes that he’s on the Pequod, the doomed ship in Moby Dick that hunts the white whale for three days before being smashed to smitheroons, with only one survivor. Which is a bit of a problem.

Oh right, spoilers for Moby Dick, which is now over 170 years old and whose plot beats a lot of (at least American) readers are familiar with. I know some people are very sensitive about spoilers, but you have to draw a line somewhere. It’s like telling a grad student that Santa Claus isn’t real.

They had been compelled to read Moby Dick in the junior-year American Renaissance class he’d taken to fulfill the last of his Humanities requirements. Fallon remembered being bored to tears by most of Melville’s book, struggling with his interminable sentences, his wooly speculations that had no bearing on the story; he remembered being caught up by parts of that story. He had seen the movie with Gregory Peck. Richard Basehart, king of the sci-fi flicks, had played Ishmael. Fallon had not seen anyone who looked like Richard Basehart on this ship. The mate, Flask—he remembered that name now. He remembered that all the harpooners were savages. Queequeg.

He remembered that in the end, everyone but Ishmael died.

I appreciate the shoutout to the John Huston movie, which, by the way, was written by Ray Bradbury. The more you know…

The first thing I thought of when reading “Another Orphan” was actually L. Ron Hubbard’s Typewriter in the Sky, in which a musician somehow gets sucked into the world of his hack writer friend’s latest novel, in which he’s given the role of the villain. The thing is, of course, that said hack writer always kills off his villains at the end, which means our guy has to find some way to get (or at least alter events so as to avoid his doom) before it’s too late, and there’s a similar ticking-clock element in “Another Orphan.” Just know, though, that while there’s a bit of snarky humor at work, Kessel’s story is a good deal more serious than Hubbard’s, and a lot more thematically ambitious despite having half the word count.

Patrick, interestingly, is not put in the place of Ishmael, but he’s not in the place of some other preexisting character either; he’s known to the whalemen as Patrick Fallon, as if he had always been on the ship, although he’s treated like a bit of an outsider. He’s also not very strong, physically, which presents a problem when trying to fit in as a sailor on a ship full of sweaty hardened whalers. (I wanna go on a slight tangent about the homosexuality or rather the lasck of it. Moby Dick is infamously a pretty homoerotic novel, unintentionally or by design, but Patrick is straight as an arrow and he doesn’t speculate even slightly about homoerotic activity that might sprout between men who go out on a sailing vessel for months on end. Kessel’s story comments on or challenges a lot of things about Moby Dick, but that’s not one of them.) The situation only gets worse when he inevitably encounters the captain of the ship: Ahab.

And boy, Ahab’s flamboyance (really his campiness) does not disappoint. Patrick assumes, though (incorrectly, as it turns out), that Ahab is a caricature because of his maniacal rants. More generally he writes off the heightened atmosphere of the Pequod as unrealistic and silly, partly based on his murky remembrance of the novel and partly because he underestimates Melville’s intentions. A mistake Patrick makes repeatedly is that he fails to respect the artistry and intricacy of the fictional world he’s been thrown into; he thinks that because Ahab is subject to manic episodes and that the sea seemingly conforms to the energy of these episodes (a thunderstorm rages during one of Ahab’s monologues, which Patrick considers on-the-nose) it means these experiences can’t possibly be real. Or can they? Does Ahab’s mania, which to some extent reflects Melville’s own, count as a real experience, and not just scenes of heightened emotion concocted by a writer?

Ahab as represented in Kessel’s story is a pretty interesting character, but I’ll save him for spoilers since his “big scene” is saved for the climax. For now there is the question of Ishmael, and who he is, where he is, and who the hell Patrick is in all this. If you’ve read Moby Dick then you may recall that while Ishmael is the narrator, it would be misleading to call him the protagonist. While the first hundred pages or so have Ishmael as an active presence, once he boards the Pequod he becomes less and less a flesh-and-blood character until, for a good portion of the novel, he basically disappears into vapor. I don’t think there’s a single time while on the Pequod that another character calls Ishmael by his name; he’s a bit of a spook. It takes a minute for the realization that Ishmael is effectively a nonentity, and that he could be anyone on the ship, to hit Patrick.

Then an unsettling realization smothered the hope before it could come fully to bloom: there was not necessarily an Ishmael in the book. “Call me Ishmael,’: it started. Ishmael was a pseudonym for some other man, and there would be no one by that name on the Pequod. Fallon congratulated himself on a clever bit of literary detective work.

Yet the hope refused to remain dead. Yes, there was no Ishmael on the Pequod; or anyone on the ship not specifically named in the book might be Ishmael, any one of the anonymous sailors, within certain broad parameters of age and character—and Fallon wracked his brain trying to remember what the narrator said of himself—might be Ishmael. He grabbed at that; he breathed in the possibility and tried on the suit for size. Why not? If absurdity were to rule to the extent that he had to be there in the first place, then why couldn’t he be the one who lived? More than that, why couldn’t he make himself that man? No one else knew what Fallon knew. He had the advantage over them. Do the things that Ishmael did, and you may be him. If you have to be a character in a book, why not be the hero?

Ishmael is definitely not “the hero,” but that’s beside the point.

Patrick basically has two choices: he can take on the role of Ishmael and hope for the best, or he can find some way to prevent Ahab from going on the three-day hunt for Moby Dick that will doom the ship. Sparking a mutiny would be a high-rick high-reward option, not helped by the fact that with one or two exceptions nobody can stand to be around Patrick, let alone persuaded by him. However, if anyone can be persuaded to go “off script,” then it would be Starbuck, the first mate and the bottom to Ahab’s top. Readers of Moby Dick will remember Starbuck as the well-meaning but ineffectual right-hand man who considers overthrowing Ahab at one point, being well aware of the captain’s mania, but chooses not to through with it. Unfortunately Patrick’s efforts to stoke the fires of rebellion in Starbuck prove unsuccessful, but it seems like these “characters” are ultimately capable of making their own decisions.

At first I was wondering if Kessel genuinely disliked Moby Dick or if it was just Patrick’s snarky narration, but eventually I had to conclude it was the latter. I mean sure, it would make little sense to spill so much ink just to rag on a 170-year-old book, but occasionally it was hard to tell. There’s a scene where Patrick observes the harpooneers (Queequeg, Dagoo, etc.) and how they’re all POC, chocking their roles up to racism—although he’s not clear if it would be due to the ship owners’ racism or Melville’s, though it’s probably the former; Melville, it must be said, was considerably less racist than the average 19th century writer. Unfortunately, in what feels like a bit of a missed opportunity on Kessel’s part, we get practically zero dialogue from the harpooneers, and despite being a modern man with presumably modern-ish sensibilities, Patrick makes no attempt to befriend the harpooneers.

These are criticisms, sure, but they’re really just quibbles, especially in light of the back end of the novella, which is so masterfully done that it made me look back on the rest of the story in awe. The lengths Kessel goes to subvert one’s expectations do not reveal themselves until a good ways in.

There Be Spoilers Here

Normally in this kind of narrative, there’s an explanation for why the protagonist was suddenly taken out of their normal enviornment and plopped into something else; it doesn’t have to be a good explanation, but we would at least get an answer. No such relief for Patrick Fallon. Not only has he so far been unable to avert the ship’s course, but the source of his predicament remains completely mysterious. Is this a Schrodinger’s butterfly scenario? Is the world of the book a horribly elaborate dream, or was his prior life in the “real world” the dream? Which one is real? Could they possibly coexist? Why Moby Dick, a book Patrick had read years ago and wasn’t fond of, of all things? Kessel knowingly piles question upon question and refuses to answer, because to give answers would be to undermine the story’s aura as an existential nightmare.

Why should he not have a choice? Why should that God give him the feeling of freedom if in fact He was directing Fallon’s every breath? Did the Fates weave this trance-like calm blue day to lead Fallon to these particular conclusions, so that not even his thoughts in the end were his own, but only the promptings of some force beyond him? And what force could that be if not the force that created this world, and who created this world but Herman Melville, a man who had been dead for a very long time, a man who had no possible connection with Fallon? And what could be the reason for the motion? If this was the real world, then why had Fallon been given the life he had lived before, tangled himself in, felt trapped within, only to be snatched away and clumsily inserted into a different fantasy? What purpose did it serve? Whose satisfaction was being sought?

What had started out as a whacky misadventure has gradually turned into something more ominous and mysterious, but because of that sense of mystery it also becomes more enthralling. There’s a brief scene where Patrick, inexplicably, wakes up back in his old life, with his girlfriend and his yuppie job and all that, but even at the beginning of that scene something feels off. Before long the world of Moby Dick bleeds into the “real world” and Patrick awakens back on the Pequod, as if the reality of Patrick prior life were waning, giving into the growing reality of Melville’s fiction. The growing disparity between worlds, the diminishing hope of finding a way home, is almost of cosmic proportions. At first Patrick found the operatics of the novel to be unconvincing, but now he thinks them perfectly logical. The fading star of his prior life has become his own white whale.

People don’t realize that Moby Dick is a cosmic horror narrative—possibly the first (and to this day the most experimental) of its kind.

The final scene involves a one-on-one confrontation with Ahab, who while very much a character has not been much of a direct presence thus far. They get into something like an existential debate before a fight breaks out, with Ahab victorious—not just physically the winner, but also spiritually. After all he’s been through, Patrick has come no closer to returning home, indeed now with the Pequod appearing to be where he’s truly supposed to be. The final lines of the story echo those of the novel prior to the epilogue, and some of you might recall that Ishmael reveals himself to have been the ship’s sole survivor in that closing chapter. But no such epilogue exists here. I would say this is an anticlimax, and you could say it is, but it’s too deliberately written to feel like that; the lack of proper closure is necessary to nail home the feeling of existential dread. To cop the final words from the SF Encyclopedia’s entry on Melville (which is surprisingly detailed, given that Melville basically didn’t write any SF), Patrick ultimately finds himself “with no surcease in view, no escape from prison.”

A Step Farther Out

Is it fair to compare a 20,000-word novella to a 200,000-word novel? No, of course not, and I’m not gonna do that. “Another Orphan” is effectively a standalone deal; you’ll miss out on some of the juicy details if you’ve not read Moby Dick, but Patrick provides enough context for things that you probably won’t be confused. But as someone who loves Moby Dick I have to admit I was predisposed to either loving or hating “Another Orphan,” and I’m not sure how one would go about hating it. Kessel, incidentally, was about the same age as Melville (early 30s, which is insane when you consider the intricacies of Moby Dick) when he wrote “Another Orphan,” and part of me wonders if he saw the long-dead author as a kindred spirit. Patrick, on the other hand, while not a villainous character by any means, is what we would call a sellout; he repeatedly says he’s not a hypocrite (which is kind of a weird thing to say about yourself), but clearly he’s lacking in integrity. Maybe it makes sense, then, that a work of pure artistry like Moby Dick would serve as the playground for Patrick’s new purgatorial existence.

Very simple evaluation here. If you want your high seas adventures to be a little more thematically substantive, you’ll like this. If you want an ingeniously constructed fantasy narrative, you’ll like this. If you like Moby Dick, you’ll get a lot out of this. And if you’re a Kessel fan then you’ve probably already read “Another Orphan,” because this is essential reading.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: November 2022

November 1st, 2022
(Cover by Fred Gambino. Asimov’s, August 1996.)

Now we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming! Only not quite, but I’ll save that for the end. We’ve come back to our novella and serial reviews, which I’m thankful for; as fitting as it is to focus only on short stories and novelettes for a month of horror, I found it weirdly draining to review all those short stories back to back. With serials and novellas we’ll have more variety, never mind the lack of a horror theme.

I must’ve gone back and forth on this schedule too many times to count, frankly. The thing is that I like having a schedule for my reviews, as I think it allows me to plan some silly stuff in advance, like the fact that I’ll be tackling Joanna Russ and Poul Anderson stories back-to-back (for those of you who don’t know, I recommend looking up a certain exchange those two reportedly had), not to mention stuff like last month’s review slate. But I’m not here to waste your time, let’s get to the meat of the matter!

For the serials:
1. We Who Are About To… by Joanna Russ. Published in Galaxy Science Fiction, January to February 1976. Russ was a divisive figure in the field and We Who Are About To… in particular was not received well. Even so, it has its defenders, perhaps the biggest of them being Samuel R. Delany (who I always trust), and it also received a glowing review from Joachim Boaz over on his site. I have to admit my experiences with Russ have not been great up to this point, having found her Hugo-winning novella “Souls” underwhelming, but this could be a change of pace!
2. We Have Fed Our Sea by Poul Anderson. Published in Astounding Science Fiction, August to September 1958. It was nominated for the Hugo for Best Novel, and was published in book form as The Enemy Stars. Anderson was apparently a beloved figure when he was alive, but since his death his star power has faded somewhat, perhaps due to the scattered vairety of his fiction. He was a reliable and insanely prolific writer, and I often like (but rarely love) his work. We Have Fed Our Sea was one of THREE Anderson serials running in Astounding in 1958.
For the novellas:
1. “Another Orphan” by John Kessel. Published in the September 1982 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Kessel can be thought of as adjacent to the cyberpunk movement of the ’80s, though it would be a mistake to consider Kessel himself one of the cyberpunks. Renowned for both his fiction and genre criticism, he’s also edited several anthologies, often in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly. “Another Orphan,” which won the Nebula for Best Novella, is apparently a riff on a classic work of American fiction…
2. “The Kragen” by Jack Vance. Published in the July 1964 issue of Fantastic. Like with Poul Anderson, Vance is a writer I often like but rarely find myself strongly attached to. Also like with Anderson, Vance represents to some extent SF writing typical of the pre-New Wave ’60s (i.e., relatively conservative), focusing less on literary experimentation and more on The Big Picture™. “The Kragen” may strike some readers as familiar because they had read it in a different form: it would be expanded into the novel The Blue World two years later.
For the short stories:
1. “Don’t Look Now” by Henry Kuttner. Published in the March 1948 issue of Startling Stories. You didn’t think I’d forget about Kuttner, right? Making his professional debut in 1936, Kuttner was not the instant success like hie future wife, C. L. Moore, was; actually he had a reputation as a hack writer for a while, and to this day his immense talent tends to be undervalued. Alongside Moore Kuttner would write some of the most beloved SFF of the ’40s, but he also remaimed prolific more or less on his own, “Don’t Look Now” being an example.
2. “Mountain Ways” by Ursula K. Le Guin. Published in the August 1996 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Le Guin is one of those grandmasters of the field who really needs no introduction. She only appeared sporadically in the magazines from the ’60s to the ’80s, but the ’90s saw a major resurgance for Le Guin as a magazine presence, with her Hainish cycle especially getting more attention. “Mountain Ways” is a standalone Hainish story, and it won the James Triptree Jr. (now regrettably called the Otherwise) Award for gender-bending SF.
If you’re reading this post and it’s the first day of November then you’ll notice there are two new departments for my blog: one of them is simply a quality-of-life improvement while the other is more of a “I’m doing this for funzies” thing. Firstly we have an author index now! Reviews are organized by authors’ last names, and while this page may be small now, there will come a point when it will be massive, and since I don’t rate my reviews, this is probably the best way to help readers find what they’re looking for. The second is The Observatory, which like Things Beyond is an editorial department, but whereas Things Beyond is meant for forecasting reviews, The Observatory will be more like a conventional magazine editorial where I’ll spend a thousand words on whatever subject I feel like writing about—although, of course, it will be SFF-related.

Since Things Beyond happens at the beginning of every month, it seems only natural to have an Observatory editorial posted on the 15th of every month, so that it’ll never be skipped and it’ll fall exactly between two of my regular review posts. With these changes I feel like I’m one step closer to making my blog a “professional” (by that I really mean well-rounded) review site for magazine SFF.

Won’t you read with me?
The Author Index

November 1st, 2022
Aickman, Robert
- “The Same Dog”
Aldiss, Brian W.
Anderson, Poul
Anthony, Piers
Arnason, Eleanor
- “Checkerboard Planet”
Ashwell, Pauline
- “The Wings of a Bat”
Ballard, J. G.
- “The Voices of Time”
Bear, Elizabeth
- “Shoggoths in Bloom”
Bear, Greg
- “Hardfought”
Beaumont, Charles
- “Free Dirt”
Bester, Alfred
Bishop, Michael
- “The Samurai and the Willows”
Bisson, Terry
- “Bears Discover Fire”
- “First Fire”
Blish, James
- “There Shall Be No Darkness”
Bloch, Robert
- “The Hungry House”
- “The Movie People”
Bradbury, Ray
- “Lorelei of the Red Mist” [with Leigh Brackett]
- “Punishment Without Crime”
Brackett, Leigh
- “Enchantress of Venus”
- “Lorelei of the Red Mist” [with Ray Bradbury]
Brown, Rosel George
- “David’s Daddy”
Brunner, John
Bryant, Edward
- “Strata”
Budrys, Algis
- Hard Landing
- “Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night”
Bujold, Lois McMaster
Butler, Octavia E.
- “The Evening and the Morning and the Night”
Campbell, Ramsey
- “The Scar”
Carter, Lin
- “Uncollected Works”
Chandler, Raymond
- “The Bronze Door”
Charnas, Suzee McKee
- “The Ancient Mind at Work”
Chesterton, G. K.
- The Man Who Was Thursday
Clement, Hal
Counselman, Mary Elizabeth
- “Night Court”
Davidson, Avram
- “Manatee Gal Ain’t You Coming Out Tonight”
Davis, Dorothy Salisbury
- “The Muted Horn”
De Bodard, Aliette
- “The Jaguar House, in Shadow”
De Camp, L. Sprague
- “A Gun for Dinosaur”
- Lest Darkness Fall
DeFord, Miriam Allen
- “The Voyage of the ‘Deborah Pratt’”
Del Rey, Lester
- “Pursuit”
Delany, Samuel R.
- “The Star-Pit”
Dick, Philip K.
Disch, Thomas M.
Doctorow, Cory
- “Craphound”
Drake, David
- “The Automatic Rifleman”
- “Time Safari”
Egan, Greg
- “Oceanic”
- “Singleton”
Ellison, Harlan
- “Grail”
- “The Human Operators” [with A. E. van Vogt]
Emshwiller, Carol
- “Day at the Beach”
Etchison, Dennis
- “The Smell of Death”
Farmer, Philip José
- “Mother”
Flynn, Michael F.
- “House of Dreams”
Grant, Charles L.
- “Hear Me Now, My Sweet Abbey Rose”
Graves, Robert
- “The Shout”
Greene, Graham
- “The End of the Party”
Griffith, Ann Warren
- “Captive Audience”
Guin, Wyman
- “Beyond Bedlam”
Haldeman, Joe
- “To Fit the Crime”
Hamilton, Edmond
- “Day of Judgment”
- “The Star-Stealers”
Hand, Elizabeth
- “Last Summer at Mars Hill”
Harness, Charles L.
- “The Rose”
Heinlein, Robert
Henderson, Zenna
- “Something Bright”
- “Subcommittee”
Herbert, Frank
Hollis, H. H.
- “Eeeetz Ch”
Howard, Robert E.
Jackson, Shirley
- “The Omen”
Jacobs, Sylvia
- “The Pilot and the Bushman”
Jemisin, N. K.
- “Non-Zero Probabilities”
Jingfang, Hao
- “Folding Beijing”
Kanakia, Naomi
- “Everquest”
Kelly, James Patrick
- “Friend” [with John Kessel]
Kessel, John
- “Another Orphan”
- “Friend” [with James Patrick Kelly]
King, Stephen
- “Beachworld”
- “The Jaunt”
Kipling, Rudyard
- “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw”
Kirk, Russell
- “Balgrummo’s Hell”
Knight, Damon
- “The Earth Quarter”
Kornbluth, C. M.
Kress, Nancy
- “Dancing on Air”
- “Inertia”
Kritzer, Naomi
- “The Year Without Sunshine”
Kushner, Ellen
- “The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death”
Kuttner, Henry
Larson, Rich
- “There Used to Be Olive Trees”
Laumer, Keith
- “The Body Builders”
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Lee, Tanith
Leiber, Fritz
Leinster, Murray
- “Pipeline to Pluto”
- “Proxima Centauri”
Ligotti, Thomas
- “The Last Feast of Harlequin”
Liu, Ken
- “The Perfect Match”
London, Jack
- “The Shadow and the Flash”
Long, Frank Belknap
- “The Hounds of Tindalos”
Lovecraft, H. P.
- “The Dreams in the Witch-House”
MacDonald, John D.
- Wine of the Dreamers
MacLean, Katherine
- “Pictures Don’t Lie”
- “The Snowball Effect”
Martin, George R. R.
Matheson, Richard
- “Little Girl Lost”
- “Steel”
McCammon, Robert
- “Yellowjacket Summer”
McHugh, Maureen F.
- “The Naturalist”
McKenna, Richard
- “They Are Not Robbed”
Merril, Judith
- “Project Nursemaid”
Miller, Walter M.
Mills, Samantha
- “Rabbit Test”
Moorcock, Michael
- “The Dreaming City”
Moore, C. L.
Niven, Larry
Norton, Andre
- “Mousetrap”
Nourse, Alan E.
- “Prime Difference”
Oates, Joyce Carol
- “In Shock”
Oliver, Chad
- “Let Me Live in a House”
Pangborn, Edgar
- “Angel’s Egg”
- “Longtooth”
Phillips, Peter
- “Lost Memory”
Pinsker, Sarah
- “And Then There Were (N-One)”
Pohl, Frederik
- “The Census Takers”
- “Nightmare with Zeppelins” [with C. M. Kornbluth]
Pournelle, Jerry
Quick, Dorothy
- “Strange Orchids”
Quinn, Seabury
- “Roads”
Rambo, Cat
- “Crazy Beautiful”
Raphael, Rick
- “Code Three”
Reed, Kit
- “Cynosure”
Resnick, Mike
- “Travels with My Cats”
Rice, Jane
- “The Idol of the Flies”
Roanhorse, Rebecca
- “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™”
Robinson, Frank M.
- “The Oceans Are Wide”
Robinson, Kim Stanley
- “Green Mars”
Rusch, Kristine Kathryn
- “Recovering Apollo 8”
Russ, Joanna
Shea, Michael
- “Polyphemus”
Sheckley, Robert
Shepard, Lucius
- “The Jaguar Hunter”
Silverberg, Robert
Simak, Clifford D.
Smith, April
- “Birthright”
Smith, Clark Ashton
Smith, Cordwainer
- “Drunkboat”
- “Think Blue, Count Two”
Smith, E. E.
- Triplanetary (Part 1/4)
Smith, Evelyn E.
- “The Agony of the Leaves”
- “The Princess and the Physicist”
St. Clair, Margaret
Sterling, Bruce
- “Green Days in Brunei”
Stevens, Francis
- Sunfire (Part 1/2)
- Sunfire (Part 2/2)
Sturgatsky, Arkady
- “Initiative” [with Boris Strugatsky]
Strugatsky, Boris
- “Initiative” [with Arkady Strugatsky]
Sturgeon, Theodore
Swanwick, Michael
- “The Blind Minotaur”
Swirsky, Rachel
- “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window”
Tenn, William
- “Medusa Was a Lady!”
Tiptree, James
- “Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket”
Triantafyllou, Eugenia
- “Loneliness Universe”
Tuttle, Lisa
- “The Horse Lord”
- “The Storms of Windhaven” [with George R. R. Martin]
Utley, Steven
- “The Glowing Cloud”
Van Vogt, A. E.
Vance, Jack
Varley, John
- “Retrograde Summer”
Vinge, Joan D.
- “The Storm King”
Vinge, Vernor
- “Apartness”
- “Original Sin”
Vonnegut, Kurt
- “The Big Trip Up Yonder”
Wagner, Karl Edward
- “In the Pines”
- “Two Suns Setting”
Wellman, Manly Wade
- “The Ghastly Priest Doth Reign”
- “The Valley Was Still”
Wells, H. G.
White, James
Wilhelm, Kate
- “Yesterday’s Tomorrows”
Williams, Walter Jon
- “Surfacing”
Williamson, Jack
Willis, Connie
- “All Seated on the Ground”
Wolfe, Bernard
- “Self Portrait”
Wolfe, Gene
- “Memorare”
Wong, Alyssa
- “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers”
Worrell, Everil
- “The Canal”
Wu, William F.
- “Wong’s Lost and Found Emporium”
Yu, E. Lily
- “The Witch of Orion Waste and the Boy Knight”
Zahn, Timothy
- “Cascade Point”
Zelazny, Roger
- Doorways in the Sand (Part 1/3)
- “The Keys to December”
Short Story Review: “There Shall Be No Darkness” by James Blish

October 31st, 2022

(Cover artist uncredited. Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1950.)

Who Goes There?

James Blish is one of the defining practitioners of ’50s SF, although his legacy is sort of a mixed bag and he has not retained nearly the level of popularity of, say, Isaac Asimov or Ray Bradbury. Like Asimov, Blish spent his formative years as part of the Futurians, a left-leaning New York-based fan group (although Blish’s politics were much murkier). Thus, Blish hung out with the likes of Frederik Pohl, Judith Merril, Donald Wollheim, and C. M. Kornbluth. The Futurians would have an incalculably large impact on the history of the field, and like Kornbluth and others, Blish got his professional start in the early ’40s writing for Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories. Also like Kornbluth, Blish would go on hiatus during America’s involvement in World War II, and would not return until the tail end of the ’40s, by this point having metamorphized into his “mature” phase.

1950 was an especially important year for Blish, as he started his epic Cities in Flight series with the novelette “Okie,” in the April 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. That same month (although technically it would’ve been a month prior) we got “There Shall Be No Darkness,” one of the most notable SF-horror efforts of its era. The story was considered major enough (or at least fit enough for adaptation, and I would agree on that) to be made into a film, titled The Beast Must Die. But whereas as the source material is more concerned with rationalizing lycanthropy in scientific terms (it is, as I’ll explain, totally SF and not fantasy), the film looks to be more of a straight murder mystery. The Beast Must Die remains the only film adaptation of Blish’s work, which is a big shame because something like “A Work of Art” or “Surface Tension” could work great as a short film—maybe in the next season of Love, Death & Robots?

Little bit of trivia: Blish’s A Case of Conscience is so far (assuming they bring back the Retro Hugos) the only story to have won the Hugo twice, as the novel version won the Best Novel Hugo in 1959 while the novella version (which from what I’ve heard is the first third of the novel) won the Retro Hugo for Best Novella. This is also if we’re not counting Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, which won both a special series Hugo and a couple Retro Hugos.

Placing Coordinates

First appeared in the April 1950 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories, which is on the Archive. Was later reprinted in the January 1969 issue of Magazine of Horror, also on the Archive. Unless you have a real phobia of two-columned writing (in which case you should not be reading old-fashioned SFF magazines like yours truly), it’s pretty easy to find online. Ah, but those book reprints! Because “There Shall Be No Darkness” is a somewhat famous story we have some options here. Firstly there’s A Treasury of Modern Fantasy by Terry Carr and Martin H. Greenberg; as I said in my review of C. L. Moore’s “Daemon,” this and Masters of Fantasy are the same anthology. There’s also The Fantasy Hall of Fame, edited by Robert Silverberg, which seems to have a pretty loose conception of “fantasy” but whose contents are nonetheless of exceptional quality.

For single-author collections we have some good ones. If you’re a collector then I would suggest The Best of James Blish, as part of the Ballantine/Del Rey Best Of series from the ’70s and ’80s; these babies are old but gold, and their covers all range from good to excellent, making them fine collectors’ items. More recent, and even being in print, is Works of Art, which strives to be a more comprehensive collection of Blish’s short fiction. It’s a fancy hardcover from NESFA Press and it’s reasonably affordable (if you consider $30 to be reasonable). This is definitely one of that more reprinted stories I’ve reviewed thus far.

Enhancing Image

We start at a house party, the people therein being functionally the entire cast; there are something like eight or nine people at the party, but only six of them are plot-crucial, so I’ll focus on those. We’ve got Paul Foote, Jan Jarmoskowski, Doris Gilmore, Chris Lundgren, and Tom and Caroline Newcliffe, the host and hostess respectively. Tom and Caroline are filthy rich, and it’s not a coincidence that all the guests have to do with the arts and sciences—Painter being a painter, Jan and Doris being pianists (Doris actually being a former student of Jan’s, though they’re only seven years apart in age), and Chris being a psychiatrist as well as the story’s resident Mr. Exposition. Paul is the protagonist by virtue of the fact that he’s the POV character for most of it (I say most, put a pin in that one), since he’s not much of a hero; he’s more or less an ordinary guy who thinks, right from the beginning, that there’s something suspicious going on at the party.

There was another person in the room but Foote could not tell who it was. When he turned his unfocused eyes to count, his mind went back on him and he never managed to reach a total. But somehow there was the impression of another presence that had not been of the party before.

Jarmoskowski was not the presence. He had been there before. But he had something to do with it. There was an eighth presence now and it had something to do with Jarmoskowski.

What was it?

What is off about Jan, exactly? For one, his index and middle fingers are the same length, which admittedly is a little weird. Paul also notes that throughout dinner, Jan keeps stratching the palms of his hands (which also look unusually hairy), and, perhaps most telling, his canines are more pronounced than one would expect. If you’re in a werewolf story and you’re aware that you’re in a werewolf story, these all sound like very obvious signs that the person is a werewolf, but Paul is working off a hunch here—a hunch he acts on when he thinks the time is right. Unfortunately for Paul, he does something you’re very much not supposed to do in a horror story: confront the person who is probably (i.e., almost certainly) the killer by himself. I’m not sure what compelled Paul to do all this in the first place, as it’s not implied that he believed in werewolves before all this, though we soon find out that a certain other character knows a lot more than he lets on.

When Paul interrogates Jan, silver knife in hand (it has to be silver), we get what is very much not a twist but which feels like it could be one in another writer’s hands, which is Jan’s transformation. From what I’ve heard, The Beast Must Die tries really hard to save the werewolf reveal until the third act, but in “There Shall Be No Darkness,” there is no such stalling; we get a confirmation of Jan’s lycanthropy less than a third into the story, and frankly, it was telegraphed pretty strongly in advance. If you’re looking for a straight murder mystery, you’ll be let down, but Blish is clearly going for something else here. This is not, contrary to my initial expectations, a rehash of John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?” The reveal of Jan as the werewolf is not what the story is about; rather, the reveal of the werewolf serves as only the beginning of what makes this story so interesting: its science-fictional rationalization for lycanthropy.

Normally we would waist a lot of time with Paul trying to convince the other guests that there’s a werewolf on the property, but not so! Doris happened to catch a glimpse of Jan in his wolf form, mistaking him at first for one of the mansion’s dogs, though Jan is a big black wolf with red eyes. It’s a cool design, and it’s no surprise that Virgil Finlay would use it as inspiration for his badass interior art—ya know, the thing that convinced me to pick up this story in the first place. Finlay sure can get it.

Now, about how lycanthropy works in this story, because while it is inventive, and Blish’s attempt is an ambitious one, he can’t make it work 100%. Firstly, lycanthropy is treated basically like a physical illness with psychological ramifications, like a combination of tuberculosis and epilepsy. Like with TB back in ye olden times, someone with lycanthropy is rendered an outcast, even if the people casting them out can’t quite articulate what’s wrong with them. There is a truckload of technobabble Blish employs to make it sound like it makes sense, but basically a lycanthrope is able to manipulate organic matter to such an extent that they’re able to morph into animals whose skeletal structures are similar enough—at will! Hence, a lycanthrope can change into a wolf. This even extends to their clothes, assuming the clothes are made of organic material like cotton or what have you.

A lot of questions are raised with regards to how lycanthropy works here, and while Blish doesn’t answer all these questions, the mechanics behind lycanthropy are surprisingly not the most far-fetched thing in this story. But we’ll get to that in the spoilers section. Point being, werewolves are a bit different in “There Shall Be No Darkness,” but there are consistencies that will strike horror veterans as familiar; for one, Paul was right to confront Jan with a silver weapon, as lycanthropes are in fact weak to silver. They’re also weak to wolfsbane (called wolfbane in-story) and related plants, which was actually what made Jan scratch himself and act irritable—he was having an allergic reaction to the plants around the mansion.

We get all this information from Chris Lundgren, who, on top of being an apparently highly respected psychiatrist, is also experienced in dealing with lycanthropes. It’s not surprising, then, that he’s the first to believe Paul’s claim that Jan is a werewolf; what is surprising is that despite having known Jan for some time, Chris remained unaware of his lycanthropy while Paul, the average dude, had his suspicions. Regardless, without Chris the story would be standard horror as opposed to horror-tinged sicnec eifction, which is certainly unique; rarely is a story’s genre dependant on a single character. None of these characters is written with too much depth, and like I said, Chris is Mr. Exposition, but it says something of Blish’s vision and storytelling prowess that things remain very much engaging.

The question then becomes one of how to deal with Jan. Silver would work great, but the only silver Our Heroes™ have that could be used for weaponry is knives and candlesticks. They try melting some of the silver to make homegrown bullets, since the Newcliffes are hunters and have some guns to go around, but these prove to be woefully inaccurate, never mind possibly dangerous to the shooter. Ambushing Jan would be incredibly unlikely, due to his agility, so a hand-to-paw fight would probably not end well. Not helping matters is a snow storm which eventually turns into a blizzard, essentially trapping everyone on the property while Jan is on the prowl. “Why doesn’t he just go off somewhere and never be seen again?” Well, the explanation is a weird one: basically, Jan specifically has Doris in mind for his next victim, or at the very least is drawn to her, since during the first stretch of the story he imagined a pentagram on her hand which marked her. The obsession with the pentagram apparently last seven days, which is why Jan doesn’t escape right away.

Blish is very fond of putting science and religion in the boxing ring and seeing who wins, and while it certainly doesn’t go as in-depth as A Case of Conscience, there’s a bit of science-versus-religion with “There Shall Be No Darkness.” It’s all but said that Jan is a Christian, and a particularly superstitious one at that. According to Chris the vision of the pentagram is a hallucination lycanthropes have might compell them to unleash beastly violence (hence my earlier comparison to epilepsy, what with afflicted people having visions because of their seizures), but Jan probably believes the pentagram carries real metaphysical weight. Indeed, the larger effort to understand a mythical creature like the werewolf in scientific terms seems to be Blish trying to reconcile science with supernatural forces.

There Be Spoilers Here

What to do about the silver bullet problem? You’ll never guess. I said before that the Newcliffes are a rich couple, but what happens strains suspension of disbelief so hard that it actually put ths werewolf technobabble in perspective. Tom Newcliffe orders a shipment of guns and silver bullets to be FLOWN IN OVERNIGHT, DURING A SNOW STORM. This would be hard enough to take if the story was set in modern times and Tom had an Amazon Prime account, never mind the cartoon shit that we get here. Perhaps more than anything else, this passage tells me that Blish could’ve had a masterpiece on his hands if he had so much as gone through one more rewrite; alas, this was the ’50s (or more accurately the late ’40s) and people writing for the pulps were not inclined to revise too much.

I wanna take this moment to talk about where and when “There Shall Be No Darkness” was published, because I think it explains the story’s unique but unrefined nature. Thrilling Wonder Stories was, along with its sister magazine Startling Stories, a second-rate SFF magazine in an era when Astounding was king; there was no question that Campbell’s magazine paid the most and had the most prestigious image. Which is not to say there weren’t alternatives! Albeit not many, especially for a horror tale like Blish’s. Weird Tales was still going, and you could argue “There Shall Be No Darkness” is what could’ve been called a “weird-scientific” tale, but it’s totally possible that Weird Tales paid an even lower rate at this point than Thrilling Wonder Stories. I wouldn’t know off the top of my head. It almost certainly would not have appealed to Campbell, whose tastes were starting to narrow, and who very soon would unleash a cataclysm upon the field: Dianetics.

Maybe it was for the best that Blish’s story ended up where it did.

A lot happens in “There Shall Be No Darkness,” much of it best experienced without having the whole thing spelled out, so I won’t delve too much here. It’s a long and complex story; ISFDB erroneously cites it as a novella, when really it comes out to about thirty book pages, but that mistake says something about its density. I’ll zero in on the climax, which I think actually leans closer to tragedy than horror. Following the deaths of a couple characters, and with Jan nowhere to be seen, Paul contemplates what might happen if Jan were to escape off the property and spread the disease of lycanthropy far and wide (lycanthropy being an infectious disease, not unlike our modern conception of zombies). We arrive at perhaps the most Blish-esque passage, which seems to forecast one of Blish’s chief concerns during his mature phase: mankind’s metaphysical place in the universe.

Maybe God is on the side of the werewolves.

The blasphemy of an exhausted mind. Yet he could not put it from him. Suppose Jarmoskowski should conquer his compulsion and lie out of sight until the seven days were over. Then he could disappear. It was a big country. It would not be necessary for him to kill all his victims—just those he actually needed for food. But he could nip a good many. Every other one, say.

And from wherever he lived the circle of lycanthropy would grow and widen and engulf—

Maybe God had decided that proper humans had made a mess of running the world, had decided to give the nosferatu, the undead, a chance at it. Perhaps the human race was on the threshold of that darkness into which he had looked throughout last night.

But Jan comes back—to Doris. Perhaps he hasn’t killed her yet because he loves her, and she’s had a crush on him for years; if not for the current circumstances, they might be perfect for each other. Like something out of the book of Genesis, Jan tempts Doris by making her an offer, and a pretty simple one: he bites her, “infects” her with his disease, and they run off together, two lycanthropes who will have nothing except each other. Despite what Paul suspects, lycanthropy is a genetic dead end; it can only be spread via infection, and lycanthropes, no matter where they go, will be treated as pariahs. Could two lycanthropes also breed in order to continue this pseudo-species? Probably. Blish isn’t very clear on that, but then, oddly less so than the earlier Jack Williamson novella “Darker Than You Think,” “There Shall Be No Darkness” is not really concerned with sex. Regardless, lycanthropy sounds like a fine recipe for succumbing to madness, then death.

Paul, who we’re told has a habit of eavesdropping, uses his habit for good this time when he stops by Doris’s room and catches the two talking, and… well, you can get what happens next. Not that Jan seems to mind dying too much; for him it would either be that or living an impossible dream with Doris. Think living day after day as a werewolf would be cool? Think again! Of course, it seems like in werwolf media a person’s life expectancy whittles down to a fraction of what it would normally be if they become a werewolf; if authorities or werwolf hunters don’t get them then their own inevitable self-loathing will. Damn near every werewolf narrative I can think of is ultimately a tragic one, in the sense that we get a grim end that comes about because of a combination of circumstances and the main character’s flaws. In the context of the story, lycanthropy may as well be a terminal illness, and Jan no longer wants to be treated—he just wants it to end.

A Step Farther Out

I would highly recommend “There Shall Be No Darkness,” even though I think it’s obviously flawed in parts. A problem I’ve often encountered with Blish (except for “A Work of Art,” which I think is a masterpiece) is that his prose does not quite match up with the breadth of his ideas. You could make that criticism with a lot of old-timey SFF authors, especially guys like Philip K. Dick and A. E. van Vogt whose raw prose does not do justice to what they’re writing about, but Blish was heavily inspired by the modernists of all people! He was a big fan of James Joyce! He thought Joyce’s “The Dead” was the best short story ever written. Clearly he wanted to be like Joyce, or at least a D. H. Lawrence, but like most SFF writers (especially from that period), Blish was not a poet; he did not have a delicate ear for the English language. I say all this because “There Shall Be No Darkness” is a very good story that feels like it could’ve been a truly great story, and in that it feels both deeply satisfying and disappointing at the same time.

Well, that’s spooky month for you. Despite the fact that I’ve covered three vampire stories this month, I have to admit I’m more fond of werewolves; it’s just a shame that there don’t seem to be as many werewolf stories as vampire stories. I can think of several reprint anthologies wholly dedicated to vampire stories, but werewolves don’t get that much love. If you’re looking for some vintage but inventive werewolf action, then today’s story will almost certainly do the trick. I’m quite fond of it.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Idol of the Flies” by Jane Rice

October 27th, 2022

(Cover artist uncredited. Unknown, June 1942.)

Who Goes There?

The story of Jane Rice is one of the more quietly tragic in the history of fantasy and horror fiction—but not because of her personal life. Actually, Rice seemed a pretty well-adjusted woman, and it’s not like her career took a nosedive on the part of some grave career error; she did not, for instance, get wrapped up in Dianetics or something like that. Rather, Rice’s career as a writer was forever hampered by the fact that historically speaking, the magazines have been a poor market for fantasy; there just has never been that much demand for fantasy in the magazines. When John W. Campbell launched Unknown, Astounding‘s fantasy-leaning sister magazine, in 1939, he went out of his way to publish fantasy that was a lot more than just occult horror and heroic fantasy, like in Weird Tales; its scope was far more ambitious. Rice made her debut in Unknown in 1940, and a good third or so of her total output would be published in this magazine, in the span of just three years, despite her career spanning more than half a century.

And no, she’s not to be confused with Anne Rice, nor are they related in any way, although you may be tempted to confuse one with the other!

Rice’s fiction (from what I’ve read of it anyway) is unique, even among the Unknown stable of writers, for its often rural locales, being inspired by Rice’s Kentucky upbringing, and for a mean streak that would almost make Flannery O’Connor blush (almost!). Her werewolf story, “The Refugee,” appeared in that magazine’s final issue, and has been (rightly) reprinted quite a few times over the years. Unfortunately, Unknown‘s sales were never high, despite being issue-for-issue stronger than Astounding, and when Street & Smith, the publisher for both, pulled the plug on the former because of wartime paper rationing (Astounding itself barely survived World War II), several stories which had been purchased were left stranded. At least one, Anthony Boucher’s “We Print the Truth,” would see print in Astounding, but what would’ve been Rice’s debut novel, Lucy, not only did not get published, but it got lost in Street & Smith’s files; it’s been lost media for nearly eighty years. The loss must’ve been devastating, and except for a spat of short stories in the ’80s, Rice would never be nearly this productive again.

Placing Coordinates

“The Idol of the Flies” was first published in the June 1942 issue of Unknown, which is on the Archive. The weird thing about this one is that there aren’t any reprints that are in print, and only some are reasonably cheap; you’d actually be better off finding the older sources. Perhaps the anthology of most interest here is Witches’ Brew: Horror and Supernatural Stories by Women, edited by Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini. Another curious anthology reprint is Children of Wonder: 21 Remarkable and Fantastic Tales, edited by William Tenn of all people, with Rice’s story appropriately falling under the section called “Terror in the Nursery.” There’s also the single comprehensive collection of Rice’s short fiction, The Idol of the Flies and Other Stories, but unfortunately it’s a collector’s item; the copies I see on eBay go for over a hundred bucks, which even for me is ridiculous.

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Pruitt is seemingly a normal boy, except for the fact that he’s an orphan, now living with his spinster aunt and having a private tutor. Pruitt’s parents died… somehow, and now the boy mostly goes off and does his own thing: in his case this “case” tends to involve torture of some kind. A sadistic kid might bully his little sister, or pull the legs off a bug one but one, but Pruitt’s brand of sadism is amplified by him seemingly having the power to order flies to do his bidding. Dozens of them. Hundreds of them. And his tutor, Ms. Bittner, is deathly afraid of flies. Personally I find flies to be way more annoying than scary, but to each their own.

Most of the fantasy published in Unknown is not horror, but “The Idol of the Flies” most certainly is; if the stuff with the flies doesn’t creep you out enough, then Pruitt doing things any normal child can do almost certainly will. Not only does he pull epic pranks on the adults in the house, but he also bullies a local man with severe scoliosis (or something like that), physically tormenting him to the point where I actually wondered if Pruitt might kill him. Oh, and if that’s not enough for ya, read about what Pruitt does with a toad and twig—or maybe don’t, it’s not for the faint of heart. What makes these things so disturbing is that you don’t need anything supernatural in order to make them possible, and indeed much of the story reads like non-supernatural horror. How does the whole controlling-flies thing figure into it, though? Because of course something fantastical has to be going on, and there has to be an explanation for how Pruitt is able to use all these flies for his schemes.

The interior artwork for the story (which I’ll get into more in the spoilers section) shows Pruitt with an idol he’s made out of coal tar and which resembles a fly. Where did Pruitt get the idea to do this? I don’t remember us being given a clear answer on that, but that doesn’t matter too much. You might think he’s an incarnation of the devil like it’s The Omen or something, but I’ll just say right now it’s not that. It would be one thing if Pruitt was a demon in a human’s skin, but he’s just a normal-ass child; he does what he does because he loves nothing more than to hurt others, as if he were a child’s innate desire to destroy taken to its logical extreme. I suppose he’s like the kid from Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life,” though God help us if he had reality-warping powers.

We don’t get much of a line into Pruitt’s mindset, but when we do, it’s pretty ugly. He comes off like a Flannery O’Connor character in that rural grotesque way, though this was published several years prior to O’Connor’s first story. I’m sure O’Connor never read a Rice story in her life, but I can’t help but feel like there’s a connection…

Pruitt scuffed his shoe on the stone steps and wished he had an air rifle. He would ask for one on his birthday. He would ask for a lot of impossible things first and then—pitifully—say, “Well, then, could I just have a little old air rifle?” Aunt would fall for that. She was as dumb as his mother had been. Dumber. His mother had been “simple” dumb, which was pretty bad—going in, as she had, for treacly bedtime stories and lap sitting. Aunt was “sick” dumb, which was very dumb indeed. “Sick” dumb people always looked at the “bright side.” They were the dumbest of all. They were push-overs, “sick” dumb people were. Easy, little old push-overs.

Come to think of it, one of the few things that gives me the creeps is one of tried-and-true staples of horror: creepy children. Maybe it’s because someone young like me probably has anxiety about the prospect of parenthood, or maybe it’s because it feels so unnatural for a child, who after all has experienced so little of the world, to do things that are so heinous, or maybe it’s just because human children are the least adorable children in the world (consider that a baby crocodile is cuter than a human child) and they just suck, but creepy children will almost always get me to some extent. Pruitt is exceptional, even in the pantheon of bastard fictional children (let’s not forget Village of the Damned while we’re at it), in he seems to do everything of his own volition; it’s not like he’s brainwashed or being controlled by a demonic overlord, although that is a possibility. Thankfully, for how dastardly her pint-sized villain protagonist is, Rice has something just as dastardly in mind for her creation.

There Be Spoilers Here

So we’ve had animal abuse and Pruitt ruthlessly bullying a disabled man, but just how evil is he? He hasn’t actually killed another person, has he? He’s like six or seven years old, he can’t be that bad! Well…

We’ve heard before that Pruitt is an orphan, now living with his late dad’s sister, his parents appearently killed in an accident—which, as it turns out, was no accident. Pruitt’s been a little shit to his aunt and tutor, and also basically everyone else, up to this point, but we’ve not quite plumbed the depths of his sadism until now, in this tangential but horribly revealing passage wherein he reminisces (pretty happily, mind you) on the death of his parents—or more accurately, how he killed them:

This was the way he felt when he knew his father and mother were going to die. He had known it with a sort of clear, glittering lucidity—standing there in the white Bermuda sunlight, waving good-by to them. He had seen the plumy feather on his mother’s hat, the sprigged organdy dress, his father’s pointed mustache and his slender, artist’s hands grasping the driving reins. He had seen the gleaming harness, the high-spirited shake of the horse’s head, its stamping foot. His father wouldn’t have a horse that wasn’t high-spirited. Ginger had been its name. He had seen the bobbing fringe on the carriage top and the pin in the right rear wheel—the pin that he had diligently and with patient perseverance, worked loose with the screwdriver out of his toy tool chest. He had seen them roll away, down the drive, out through the wrought-iron gates. He had wondered if they would turn over when they rounded the bend and what sort of a crash they would make. They had turned over but he hadn’t heard the crash. He had been in the house eating the icing off the cake.

I was expecting, at some point, for there to be a reveal that Pruitt is the way he is because he’s possessed by some demon or supernatural power, but no, it seems he’s been this way for as long as he was able to conceive of such horrid acts. I think what’s scary about all this is that while they are extremely rare, children (especially as young as Pruitt) who are so malicious do exist in the real world—only they don’t worship an idol made of coal tar. It’s also disquieting how (like a real child) Pruitt uses his youth and presumed innocence as a weapon, playing puppydog with other people so as to deflect blame; sure, they think, he might be a bit of a rascal, but ultimately he’s just a child! Except that children are perfectly capable of doing horrible things—they’re just too ignorant to know better.

If I do have a problem with this story, it’s that the climax is rather abrupt, though I suppose it’s easy enough to anticipate if you know your demonology. The twist is also pretty strongly alluded to in the story’s interior artwork, courtesy of Kolliker.

What happens when you deal with the devil for your fly-manipulating powers? Eventually the devil comes to collect. He’s called Beelzebub here, which, ya know, lord of the flies and all that, though the story’s title seems to refer to both Beelzebub and the coal tar idol Pruitt uses. Anyway, despite his single-digit age, Puitt gets sent to HELL, which is pretty epic. Normally I’d be disturbed by such an outcome, but Puitt is shown to be such an irredeemably evil creature that in the context of a story’s world where the devil (and presumably God) exists, maybe it’s best to kick this kid off the top of the highest mountain.

While I take issue with how the climax is paced, I find the ending immensely satisfying. How often does a child in a story (particularly of this vintage) get killed off, and on top of that said child is also the protagonist! Truth be told, it would’ve been too dark if Pruitt had gotten away with everything, so as weird as it is to this, it’s fitting that Rice give him the fire-and-brimstone treatment. I also think it may be too on-the-nose for Bittner, in the final scene, to be reading a textbook entry on Beelzebub (perhaps in worry that readers might not get who “Asmodeus” is), but the dramatic irony of her being unaware of Pruitt’s fate is also satisfying. If what we’ve been reading prior to the climax was discomforting, watching this little shit doing all these things and not get punished for it, then the ending is worthy compensation.

A Step Farther Out

Did not think one of the oldest stories covered this month would also be the scariest, but I’m gonna say “The Idol of the Flies” is thoroughly disquieting. Ironically the demonic climax might be the least scary part of the whole ordeal, if only because the protagonist is devilish enough on his own. Pruitt has to be one of the most evil children in literature, and he’s arguably the most evil main character we’ve come across—yes, even more than Kornbluth’s Mindworm, which is more amoral than sadistic. Just letting you know that if you haven’t read it already, expect some animal torture and abuse of the disabled; this thing doesn’t mess around, all the more remarkable given its vintage. I can’t say I’m totally surprised, though, as the quality of the average Unknown story is much higher than average; really I would say the average Unknown story beats out the average Astounding story nine times out of ten. Rice showed herself to be a master of horror in the making, and it’s a shame that because of Unknown‘s premature death and the loss of her debut novel made her career as a fantasist screetch to a halt.

If you’re looking for a horror story about how children are vicious little monsters just in time for Halloween, boy do I have a recommendation!

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Grail” by Harlan Ellison

October 24th, 2022

(Cover by Jim Warren. Twilight Zone Magazine, April 1981.)

Who Goes There?

Where to start with Harlan Ellison? He resented being called a science fiction writer, but in his defense, he wrote a lot more than just SF; he was one of the most important and most productive writers of genre fiction from the second half of the 20th century. SF, fantasy, horror, things not so easily categorized? Ellison did it. He got his start in the ’50s as a middling young author along the lines of Robert Silverberg at the start of his career, but the ’60s saw a profiund step up for him as he began refining his craft, not only putting out award-winners like “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” but also writing for shows like Star Trek and The Outer Limits. Of course, things are not nearly as simple as that. Ellison’s involvement with Star Trek proved a fiasco, and when he was not being unprofessional (his degree of procrastination was legendary) as a writer, he was being a thorn in a lot of people’s sides as a fandom personality.

Perhaps the most memorable controversy with Ellison, for me, is his inability to finish (or seemingly even to start) what was to be the concluding entry in a trilogy of anthologies, The Last Dangerous Visions. Dangerous Visions was a landmark original anthology, as was its sequel (said to be superior at least in some ways), Again, Dangerous Visions, both edited by Ellison, but Ellison’s lack of initiative with working on TLDV (which was announced in 1972 but never published) has spawned many justifiably vitriolic reactions. While some stories that were sold to Ellison have since been published elswhere, the majority of the stories submitted for TLDV have yet, after all these decades, to be released to the public in any capacity. With Ellison’s death in 2018, followed by his late wife Susan’s in 2020, not only will we never get TLDV as Ellison envisioned it, but it looks like the Ellison estate has been thrown in disarray recently.

With all this said, and taking all of Ellison’s shortcomings as a writer (not to mention as a person) into account, he’s still one of the Big Names™ of short fiction in modern times, not just in SFF but outside of it. “Grail,” as I’ll elaborate on shortly, is a good example of Ellison’s vigorousness as a storyteller, as well as someone who (I say this in a good way) wears his emotions on his sleeve.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the April 1981 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine, which is on the Archive and which also happens to be that magazine’s inaugural issue. Twilight Zone Magazine is exactly the kind of publication that would get some TLC on my blog, as it’s a bit quirky, a bit out of left field, and most importantly, it didn’t last that long. Oh, TZM did fairly well, and for the first half of its existence it was edited by T. E. D. Klein (this is like if you gave Thomas Ligotti a horror magazine), who while not the most prolific of authors proved quite the reliable editor. Unfortunately, despite some high-quality fiction and fancy packaging, and despite its numbers never tanking, TZM did not quite survive the ’80s. Another story I recgonized from this issue is George R. R. Martin’s “Remembering Melody,” which I will absolutely get around to reading/reviewing… at some point.

Where else to find “Grail”? There are Ellison stories which have been reprinted many times (frankly too many times), but “Grail” is not one of them—not helped by the fact that, for some reason, it has become considerably harder to find Ellison books in the wild in recent years. I don’t know what happened. It looks like even the most essential Ellison collection have gone out of print; you can find them on the second-hand market, but you won’t find new editions, and even used copies are inexplicably harder to acquire. Still, there are a few options. “Grail” was reprinted in the Ellison collection Stalking the Nightmare, which is very much out of print but thankfully is not hard to find used. If you like Ellison like I do then you may be interested in The Essential Ellison, which is a massive volume that collects short fiction and essays and which comes in two distinct editions. The older edition is easier to find, but it’s still something of a collector’s item.

Enhancing Image

Christopher Caperton (which sounds like a name someone made up) is a shy kid who grows up desperate to seek adventure, and seek it he does. From the time he’s a child and for the rest of his life, Chris is deeply concerned with one question: What is love? ~~Baby don’t hurt me~~ Not just familial love or even romantic love, but True Love, that most elusive of abstractions. What does it look like? Does it have a face? Is it possible for Chris to find The One? Despite his life experiences, and despite reading the works of every author under the sun on subject of love, he’s no closer to finding True Love. As an aside, I find it funny that apparently John Cheever knows even less about love than our protagonist, as I’m not sure if Cheever’s turbulent personal life and bisexuality were public knowledge in 1981 (probably was for the former but not the latter). Speaking of which, queerness doesn’t really come up in-story; it’s alluded to, but the narrator makes it very clear to us that Chris is, to paraphrase the protagonist of Silverberg’s Dying Inside, drearily heterosexual. Oh well.

As a young man Chris finds himself in Vietnam in the late ’60s running drugs with a woman named Siri, who is not as normal as she seems. The two become lovers as well as partners in crime, and when all is said and done this is probably the happiest relationship Chris ever has; unfortunately it doesn’t last long. A random artillery strike kills Siri, but before she dies, she spends an impressively long amount of time explaining to Chris this artifact that’s supposed to represent True Love, an artifact which Siri had been looking for for years but had sort of given up on recently. She didn’t find True Love, but she found the next best thing. Siri is an interesting character because she’s one of those story figures who doesn’t get much screentime (or pagetime?) but whose plot relevance is immense; in this case she’s the one who basically kicks the plot into gear and sends Chris on his quest. Of course her dying words do not just encompass “This thing exists, now go get it,” as she also gives Chris some very specific and very unusual instructions.

More on that in a minute.

Something I wanna say right now is that when I picked “Grail” as part of my spooky short story lineup for review, I was under the impression that it would be straight horror. Not so! There’s a bit of horror, primarily having to do with a certain character, but overall it much more reads as an adventure narrative with a philosophical bent. Still, it’s spooky enough to serve as the first cover story for Twilight Zone Magazine, and more importantly, it’s good enough a story to earn that position. I can’t properly explain it, but the vigor that’s apparent in Ellison’s writing makes even his lists (and there are a few times where he basically just lists things in “Grail”) engaging to read. You could theoretically write a 300-page novel with “Grail” as a blueprint and the novel would not feel stretched thin, but Ellison zeros in on only the most relevant of info, resulting in what almost feels more like a compressed novel than a short story.

In my review of C. M. Kornbluth’s “The Mindworm” I noted Kornbluth’s use of compression and how he was able to cram a lot of history and worldbuilding into a tight space, and Ellison does basically the same thing here—only maybe even more impressively. Get this, the bulk of the artifact’s history as Siri understood it:

Between 1914 and 1932 the object—while never described—turned up three times: once in the possession of a White Russian nobleman in Sevastopol, twice in the possession of a Dutch aircraft designer, and finally in the possession of a Chicago mobster reputed to have been the man who gunned down Dion O’Banion in his flower shop at 738 North State Street.

In 1932 a man visiting New York for the opening of the Radio City Music Hall just after Christmas reported to the police who found him lying in an alley on West 51st Street just below Fifth Avenue that he had been mugged and robbed of “the most important and beautiful thing in the world.” He was taken to Bellevue Hospital, but no matter how diligently he was interrogated, he would not describe the stolen article.

In 1934 it was reputed to be in the private art collection of the German architect Walter Gropius; after Gropius’s self-imposed exile from Nazi Germany it was reputed to have passed into the personal collection of Hermann Goering, 1937; in 1941 it was said to be housed with Schweitzer in French Equatorial Africa; in 1946 it was found to be one of the few items not left by Henry Ford at his death to the Ford Foundation.

Its whereabouts were unknown between 1946 and February of 1968. But Siri told Chris, her final love, that there was one sure, dangerous way of finding it. The way she had used originally to learn the hand-to-hand passage of the artifact that was True Love from the Palace of Minos to its present unknown resting place.

So now we get to the spooky character in “Grail,” which is the minor demon Surgat. Siri left instructions so that Chris could not only summon Surgat (supposedly a demon who can pick any lock) but also stay protected from the demon’s treachery. Because a demon doesn’t want to help you, it’s more like a form of indentured servitude. There’s a bit of a deal-with-the-devil narrative here, although it’s more a case of two people who clearly hate each other’s guts but are forced to work together. The first time Chris summons Surgat he’s naturally unnerved about the whole thing (How often does one get to draw pentagrams and summon demons?), but given the very recent death of Siri and everything that’s happened this marks the start of his evolution into a badass. Surgat opens the trove that contains Siri’s most secret things, having to do with her search for the artifact, but before he fucks off he takes Siri’s body as a… treat.

The implications are a wee bit concerning.

From here on out, Chris is on his own. The man who started out as a bit of a wimp is now on a quest to find True Love, and if there’s one thing he’ll do anything for, it’s love. It’s at this point that we get a few time skips (remember what I said about the compressed novel thing), jumping from the late ’60s through the ’70s as Chris wanders the globe, “a nameless, stateless person, someone out of a Graham Grene suspense novel.” Again I’m taken back by how Ellison is able to squeeze so much in here, making years pass by in mere words without making us feel like we’re missing out on too much. It helps, too, that while Chris is not the most complex of characters, his mission, his want, is deeply relatable, and we’re given enough context about his life to see why this would be so important to him.

There Be Spoilers Here

Even more than a decade of searching, Chris has tracked the artifact to what seems to be its most recent resting place, in the hands of some super-rich mogul (I don’t think we even get his name), who also happens to be on his deathbed. The mogul has the artifact locked behind a ridiculously convoluted security system (it would make Mission: Impossible look like a documentary), but this doesn’t stop Chris from summoning Surgat again and revealing the artifact anyway. The artifact, which is indeed a grail, reveals in its liquid the face of True Love, but it’s not what Chris has been expecting all these years. The final twist of the story is subtle, yet deeply tragic, and shows Ellison twisting the knife that he’s just thrust into us; he’s very good at that.

This is not the very end, technically, but it’s enough:

He looked down into the loving cup that was True Love and in the silver liquid swirling there he saw the face of True Love. For an instant it was his mother, then it was Miss O’Hara, then it was poor Jean Kettner, then it was Briony Catling, then it was Helen Gahagan, then it was Marta Toren, then it was the girl to whom he had lost his virginity, then it was one woman after another he had known, then it was Siri—but was Siri no longer than any of the others—then it was his wife, then it was the face of the achingly beautiful bride on the cover of Esquire, and then it resolved finally into the most unforgettable face he had ever seen. And it stayed.

It was no face he recognized.

Years later, when he was near death, Christopher Caperton wrote the answer to the search for True Love in his journal. He wrote it simply, as a quotation from the Japanese poet Tanaka Katsumi.

What he wrote was this:

“I know that my true friend will appear after my death, and my sweetheart died before I was born.”

I’m gonna keep it real with you: I thought this was devastating. Ellison has done sadistic endings many times before, his protagonists sometimes being defeated outright or achieving a sort of Pyrrhic victory, but “Grail” mixes that sadism with a genuine tragedy. When I say “tragedy” I mean it in the proper sense of the word, which is to say Chris, due to a combination of circumstances and his own flaws, fails nobly. When people call something tragic they simply mean to say something bad has happened (don’t worry, I do this a lot too), as opposed to what it really means, but Ellison understands real tragedy. These are words coming from a man who, due in part to his own personality flaws, had loved and lost over and over. His famous novella, “A Boy and His Dog,” perfectly captures Ellison’s brand of wounded-dog misogyny (that’s right, it is a misogynistic story, but it’s a psychologically arresting story specifically because of its apparent distrust of women), but “Grail” achieves a similar effect without the blatant woman-hating.

I can believe that “Grail” is a middle-career piece from Ellison, because I don’t think the Ellison who wrote “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” the Ellison who was younger and not as adjusted to his fame, could have written it. This story, and especially this ending, reads to me as by someone who still has a lot of fire in his belly but who also has been in the game long enough to pair that fire with real craftsmanship and insight. Even “The Deathbird,” which might still be my favorite Ellison story, and which still reads as totally experimental, does not distill its disquieting effect as succinctly as “Grail” does. This story made me feel something.

A Step Farther Out

I was shocked to find that “Grail” is only ten pages long; mind you, this is in TZM, which is not only two-columned but has frustratingly small type. What impresses me is that Ellison is able to tell what is basically a man’s whole life story in that span, and it doesn’t feel rushed or like we’re missing important information. Like sure, it’s compressed, the whole thing is an exercise in compression, but it’s a fully developed tale of one man’s search for the impossible. Chris starts out as a socially awkward nobody before tragedy sends him on a path to becoming a globe-trotting badass, but at the cost of something he can’t put his finger on. The question of finding true love is an ages-old but still deeply relevant one for most people, including myself, and personifying it as something akin to the Holy Grail is probably not new either, but it’s how Ellison gives it its own history, its own sense of weight, that makes the ending tragic. Indeed the ending would be an existential nightmare, were it not so sad and relatable.

I was expecting something more horror-centric, but I can’t say I was disappointed with what I got. Ellison is, if nothing else, an emotionally potent writer (sometimes to the point of edgy tedium), and “Grail” is an example of the mature Ellison flexing his muscles. On the one hand I’m a little surprised it didn’t get more awards attention (though it was up for the coveted Balrog Award), and also that it hasn’t been reprinted more often. Oh sure, “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” can be reprinted literally a hundred times, but an objectively better and more layered story like “Grail” is apparently deemed a minor work by virtue of its lack of exposure. Well I’m gonna change that! Maybe not “change,” but I do wanna tell more people about this one; I think it’s a bit of a hidden gem.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Horse Lord” by Lisa Tuttle

October 20th, 2022

(Cover by Rick Sternbach. F&SF, June 1977.)

Who Goes There?

Lisa Tuttle came about in the early ’70s, as part of a new generation of horror authors, though unlike Stephen King and Anne Rice, who would build their reputations as novelists, Tuttle devoted much more energy to her short fiction. She debuted professionally when she hadn’t quite turned twenty yet, and despite having only put out a couple short stories (none of which were up for awards), she would share the second ~~John W. Campbell~~ Astounding Award for Best New Writer with Spider Robinson (the only time so far that this award resulted in a tie). She also won a Nebula for her 1981 story “The Bone Flute,” under controversial circumtances (not because of Tuttle herself but because of a certain fellow nominee, it’s a bit of a story), but her most lauded (and probably most popular) work was done in collaboration. In the ’70s and early ’80s Tuttle worked with George R. R. Martin on what would become something of a fix-up novel, Windhaven, based on two earlier novellas, both of which were Hugo and Nebula nominees.

While Tuttle’s involvement with SFF has been long-running, she seems to be first and foremost a practicioner of horror, especially of the supernatural variety. Due to changes in the market, with how horror novels have thoroughly superseded horror short stories (in influence, if not in quality) for the past four decades, Tuttle’s short fiction has gone relatively underexamined. Even so, her dedication to the genre has not wavered; for the past half-century she has kept the faith.

Tuttle celebrated her 70th birthday last month.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 1977 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. “The Horse Lord” has three notable reprints, two of them being single-author collections: first we have A Nest of Nightmares, which collected Tuttle’s horror fiction up to about the mid-’80s, and it’s still in print! We also have a real collector’s item, Stranger in the House: The Collected Supernatural Short Fiction, Volume One, which is a limited edition hardcover and which will cost you a pretty penny if you can even find the damn thing. For anthology sluts like myself we have a meaty volume edited by Stephen Jones, confusingly published under three titles, The Mammoth Book of Terror, The Anthology of Horror Stories, and The Giant Book of Horror. Out of print, but it’s easy to find used.

Enhancing Image

Marilyn and Derek are both writers who have, along with their five kids (partly from Derek’s previous marriage and partly from a tragedy involving a relative), moved to a farm in upstate New York that one of Derek’s ancestors owned once upon a time. I don’t know why horror authors tend to have writers be their protagonists. What’re they trying to tell us? (I’m half-joking, don’t kill me!) The place is a shithole, but supposedly the rural and secluded atmosphere will help with the couple’s writing (they write separately, it’s sadly not a Kuttner-Moore situation). Despite being responsible for getting us to the farm in the first place, and despite it also having been owned by an ancestor of his, Derek is not the protagonist—actually he barely registers as more than a footnote, all things considered. Marilyn is our POV character, which is probably for the best since she’s the one most reluctant about living in this maybe-haunted locale and therefore the one most likely to generate conflict.

“The Horse Lord” is a haunted house story, except it’s not the house itself that’s haunted—it’s the horse stable, which hasn’t been used in many years. The ancestor who had owned the farm in the late 19th century, James Hoskins, was apparently killed by Indians, along with his wife, while his daughter went missing and was never found. Does this sound like the start of The Searchers to anyone? I also find it funny that Kelly, the oldest of the children, is a horse girl, because let’s face it, nothing good ever happens with horse girls. The very first thing we’re told about Kelly is that she loves horses and my first thought was, “This does not bode well for the parents.” I wasn’t wrong, but I’ll get into that in the spoilers section.

The farm would be shrouded in mystery, but luckily (or unluckily) for Marilyn there’s a series of a memoirs written by one of Derek’s uncles about his family history, and there are dusty hardcover copies of these memoirs right in the house. How convenient! The memoirs, which are of course biased, speculate that Hoskins and his wife had been killed by Indians, but if Hoskins’s own words are anything to go by it was not the local indians that got him; maybe it was the spirit which lurked on that plot of land, the genius loci (a phrase I’ve grown fond of very recently) that has had dibs on it for a pretty long time. Hoskins does not take the Indians’ advice, and admittedly if you were in his position you would probably not listen to them either, though probably more from a sense of modern materialism (or lack of superstition) than because your homie Jesus got your back.

Get this:

“The land I have won is of great value, at least to a poor, wandering remnant of Indians. Two braves came to the house yesterday, and my dear wife was nearly in tears at their tales of powerful magic and vengeful spirits inhabiting this land.

“Go, they said, for this is a great spirit, as old as the rocks, and your God cannot protect you. This land is not good for people of any race. A spirit (whose name may not be pronounced) set his mark upon this land when the earth was still new. This land is cursed—and more of the same, on and on until I lost patience with them and told them to be off before I made powerful magic with my old Betsy.

“Tho’ my wife trembled, my little daughter proved fiercer than her Ma, swearing she would chop up that pagan spirit and have it for her supper—which made me roar with laughter, and the Indians to shake their heads as they hurried away.”

“The Horse Lord” indulges in a trope I’m not terribly fond of, and while I assume Tuttle means well, I expected a bit better: it’s the Wise Indians Who Know Better™ trope. It’s especially conspicuous here because Hoskins has no legitimate reason to believe the locals, since they don’t back up anything they say with hard evidence—indeed, it comes off more as several layers of hearsay. Even so, despite being a materialist herself, Marilyn is discomforted by the farm’s history, by the grisly and mysterious deaths of Derek’s ancestors, and by the possibility that something otherworldly owns the abandoned horse stable—something which, if disturbed, might just fuck everyone’s shit up. But since the stable is locked and since surely no one wants to enter it, things will be fine this time, right? Marilyn is a rational and educated person, even if she’s frazzled by the fact that she has to look after five kids, something she did not even imagine until recently.

But will history repeat itself? Let’s see…

There Be Spoilers Here

I appreciate that the stable is not haunted because it was built on an Indian burial ground or something; no, it’s haunted by something else. Marilyn reads more about the doomed James Hoskins and finds that he had been warned by the Wise Indians Who Know Better™ about the genius loci that owns this very particular spot of land, and in typical stupid white man fashion he failed to listen. I feel like even by the ’70s the whole Indian burial ground thing must’ve become a worn-out cliché (which did not stop people from continuing to use it, mind you), so I appreciate the subversion, even if it still relies on writing Indian characters as more symbols of wisdom than actual flesh-and-blood people.

The children have been acting weird lately. As Marilyn becomes more paranoid at the prospect of the horse stable being haunted for realz, she’s not helped when she and Derek find a peculiar chalk drawing in the now-opened stable. Get a load of this:

It was not a horse. After examining it more closely, Marilyn wondered how she could have thought it was the depiction of a wild, rearing stallion. Horses have hooves, not three-pronged talons, and they don’t have such a feline snake of a tail. The proportions of the body were wrong, too, once she looked more carefully.

Derek crouched and ran his fingers along the outline of the beast. It had been done in chalk, but it was much more than just a drawing. Lines must have been deeply scored in the earth, and the narrow trough then filled with some pounded white dust.

Do the adults take the drawing of the horse-like creature as a warning and get the hell out? No, of course not. So you have an idea as to what happens next. Of course, since Our Heroes™ don’t have any horses themselves, the thing that happened to James Hoskins can’t happen to them too, right? Well sort of, no. The story has a twist up its sleeve at the very end, and I have to admit it’s… a little silly. The children, who have started gravitating towards this genius loci which rules over the stable, are then possessed by it, despite not being “animals.” Except according to the story’s logic, or at least something Marilyn speculates right before her presumed demise, children are animals! Very scary. I mean normal children are scary enough, imagine possessed children that (inexplicably) now have super-strength. Not to toot my own horn, or to give the wrong impression, but I would’ve beaten the shit out of those kids easy. Like realistically, fuck them kids. It asks too many logistical questions for me, but I do think the ending have a haunting quality about it, not unlike a similar story I’ll bring up in a moment.

The ending makes me think about the story’s strongest theme, especially for someone like me who’s in his mid-20s, which is the fear of parenthood. Tuttle herself must’ve only been 23 or 24 when she wrote “The Horse Lord,” and right from the beginning there’s Marilyn as the put-upon young woman who suddenly finds herself the mother of five. Things only get worse from there! Like something out of a Shirley Jackson story, the children are depicted as being, at best, sort of distant from their parents, and more often as acting as if they live in another dimension—and it’s not a nice dimension. But whereas Jackson seemed to write about the nightmare world of being a parent from day to day (her child characters often being demons in human skin), there’s more the fear of becoming a parent in “The Horse Lord.” Yeah, I think I can do without raising kids for a long time.

A Step Farther Out

There came a point when I was getting a sense of déjà vu with “The Horse Lord,” and I think I know why now: this is basically a ghostly rendition of “Zero Hour” by Ray Bradbury. Ya know, children unwittingly bringing doom to their parents and all that. Structurally it also hits the same beats as Bradbury’s story, using the same chess board but with different pieces. I do think, in Tuttle’s defense, there’s a lot more to chew on thematically with “The Horse Lord,” even if I am deeply weary with the whole Wise Indians Who Know Better™ trope. I suppose I had an experience here similar to another horror story I’ve read recently: “Pig Blood Blues” by Clive Barker. I love me some Barker, but I would not consider “Pig Blood Blues” to be his finest hour by any means, mostly because I struggle to find a spooky farm animal scary. Spooky, sure, and “The Horse Lord” has a good amount of spookiness, but it’s not as scary as it could be.

I admire Tuttle juggling a few themes here, though, in the span of just a dozen pages. We’ve got American colonialism, the mistreatment of indigenous peoples, mistreatment of the environment, reconciling one’s attempts at artistry with one’s personal life, fear of parenthood, a few of these now being old chestnuts for modern horror but which were comparitively fresh at the time. I’m interested in reading more of Tuttle’s solo work, but I also wanna catch her at a later, more mature stage.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Daemon” by C. L. Moore

October 17th, 2022

(Cover by Lawrence. Famous Fantastic Mysteries, October 1946.)

Who Goes There?

When I reviewed Clark Ashton Smith’s “Genius Loci” some days ago, I said that Smith, H. P. Lovecraft, and Robert E. Howard were the defining authors during the “classic” period of Weird Tales, in the ’30s. This is not entirely true. I omitted a fourth name because I knew I was gonna get to her very soon, and now she’s getting her own introduction. C. L. Moore was one of the great practicioners of SFF in the ’30s and ’40s, and her rise to prominence was swift in a way that most authors’ are not. Her first professional sale, “Shambleau,” was published in Weird Tales in 1933, and it instantly made her a big deal to that magazine’s readership. During this early period, Moore created two series, both set in the same continuity (though this was not immediately known), named after their protagonists: Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry. The former leans toward planetary romance while the latter leans toward heroic fantasy, and this duality was a line Moore would walk for the rest of her career.

Things get complicated when Moore marries a fellow author, Henry Kuttner, in 1940, after the two had already collaborated on a story or two. Kuttner was a few years younger than Moore, and was a big fan of her work, soon exhanging letters with her and assuming (erroneously) at first that she was a man. Once misunderstandings were out of the way, they formed inarguably the biggest power couple in old-timey SFF, collaborating prolifically throughout the ’40s and writing together so seamlessly that they could not tell apart each other’s writing, and neither can anyone else. To this day there’s no agreement as to who wrote what or how much one contributed to the other’s writing, even when a story is credited to only one of them. “Daemon” is credited to Moore solo, and for reasons I’ll get into I believe firmly enough that Kuttner had basically nothing to do with its creation.

Placing Coordinates

First printed in the October 1946 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, which is on the Archive. FFM was primarily a reprint magazine without zeroing in on a specific genre, covering science fiction, fantasy, and even non-supernatural horror. In the October 1946 issue alone we have reprinted stories by H. G. Wells (a presumably abridged version of The Island of Dr. Moreau) and Bram Stoker, but “Daemon” was an original story. One need not look far to see why Moore would submit her fantasy-horror story to a reprint magazine: the magazine market for fantasy was quite small in the ’40s, with the only other notable outlet being a now past-its-prime Weird Tales. Now, why, when reading these stories for review, do I always try to read the original magazine version? Partly this is because sometimes there are revisions made between the magazine publication and the book publication, but also, there’s flavor when reading anything within the confines of a magazine issue. Take, for instance, Virgil Finlay’s interior illustration for “Daemon,” which as usual is stunning, and which we would not have gotten in a book reprint.

When it comes to reprints of “Daemon” we’re talking quality over quantity; none of the reprints seem to be, well, in print, but these volumes are both good collector’s items and easy enough to find. First we have The Best of C. L. Moore, part of a best-of series by Ballantine Books (Henry Kuttner also got one), and boy do I wanna get these two together. Then we have A Treasury of Modern Fantasy, edited by Terry Carr and Martin H. Greenberg, which might be the same book as Masters of Fantasy; it’s edited by the same people, and unless I’m missing something the contents are also the same. If you’re fond of Moore and Kuttner, at some point you have to get your hands on Two-Handed Engine: The Selected Stories of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, a mammoth tome that collects all the essential short fiction by both authors, solo as well as in collaboration.

Enhancing Image

“Daemon” is a deathbed confession (not a spoiler, our narrator is upfront about this) told by Luiz o Bobo, his title apparently coming from his simplemindedness. Luiz, despite his own admitted lack of intelligence, has a special gift that may well be more of a curse: he sees these things that accompany other people, calling them daemons when they could just as easily be called ghosts. According to Luiz, everyone has a daemon on his shoulder—everyone except him. At the outset of the story we’re far more planted on the horror end of the horror-fantasy spectrum which “Daemon” plays with, and there’s some delicious eeriness at work here. “Do you know who stands beside you, padre, listening while I talk?” says Luiz at one point. The daemons themselves don’t seem to do anything exactly; they don’t have voices, they don’t talk, they can’t interact with the material world—at least not directly. As we’re to find out later, though, it’s maybe possible for a daemon to take possession of its host.

Luiz recalls the death of his grandmother, for a long time the only earthly person who treated with decency, and how her daemon changed as she was dying; it was an unusual event, as the daemon grew brighter, radiating a brightness that threatened to blind Luiz, before finally disappearing once his grandmother’s spirit has moved to—somewhere else. What this could signify, the daemon changing colors as its host nears the end of their life, we’re not given a clear answer on, but then Luiz is no rocket scientist. Actually, let me take a moment to talk about Luiz’s characterization, because this is easily the most interesting part of the story for me: Luiz is obviously neurodivergent. While “Daemon” is on its face a dark fantasy yarn about a man who gets shanghaied and then stranded on an island with a bunch of magical creatures, it’s more potently a tale of alienation, about a man who is unable to relate to other people in the conventional sense, who quite literally sees something “normal” people have that he lacks. Make sure to put a pin in this one.

Oh right, getting shanghaied. Luiz has a bad night at a saloon and finds himself an unwilling passenger on a trading vessel. As you do. The fact that Luiz is not very smart, and can’t even read, makes him an easy target. It’s here that we come across the closest the story has to a villain: the captain of the ship. The captain, who normally would not be the happiest or kindest of men, seems to have his violent urges heightened by a suitably evil-looking daemon which follows him around. The causal relationship between host and daemon is not clear, but it’s quite possible that a daemon’s disposition influences its host, with the captain’s daemon being a particularly nasty example. The captain’s daemon’s uncanniness is not helped by the fact that not only is it blood-red, it doesn’t seem to have eyes.

Now, most men have shapes that walk behind them, padre. Perhaps you know that, too. Some of them are dark, like the shapes I saw in the saloon. Some of them are bright, like that which followed my grandmother. Some of them are colored, pale colors like ashes or rainbows. But this man had a scarlet daemon. And it was a scarlet beside which blood itself is ashen. The color blinded me. And yet it drew me, too. I could not take my eyes away, nor could I look at it long without pain. I never saw a color more beautiful, nor more frightening. It made my heart shrink within me, and quiver like a dog that fears the whip. If I have a soul, perhaps it was my soul that quivered. And I feared the beauty of the color as much as I feared the terror it awoke in me. It is not good to see beauty in that which is evil.

Luiz does find one ally on the ship, called the Shaughnessy (we don’t get his actual name), a dying man from “a foreign land called Ireland” who apparently also comes from a very well-to-do family, and who stands as the only thing between Luiz and oblivion. The captain hates his guts and there will come a point when the Shaugnessy will not be around to protect him. This early-middle section of the narrative, with Luiz on the ship, is probably my favorite part; it’s atmospheric, exceptionally brutal, it’s set on the high seas (which I have a fondness for), and it elaborates on the disconnect Luiz feels with other people. It’s not so much that Luiz befriends the Shaughnessy as he sees the Shaughnessy as a guardian figure, since the most Luiz can hope for, realistically, is not be treated like garbage by others. This is not to say Luiz is a blank slate or a totally passive protagonist; nay, he’s quite active, even if he doesn’t articulate his internal anxieties vocally.

It’s here that Moore does something seemingly clever and really plants the seeds of doubt for us, as to whether Luiz is right or if he’s just delirious. The ship’s water gets tainted, which is pretty bad. “A man can pick the maggots out of his salt pork if he must, but bad water is a thing he cannot mend.” Not helping things is that a particularly brutal encounter with the captain results in Luiz getting what is probably a skull fracture (saying he heard his skull crack, which sounds horrific), and it’s amazing he doesn’t simply die on the ship. Hell, dying at this point might not be so bad. Luiz contemplates suicide, which in his predominantly Catholic homeland of Brazil would be deemed a mortal sin, but Luiz rationalizes that he can’t go to Hell if he doesn’t have a soul, but virtue of not having a daemon. Checkmate, Christians! But no, he does not kill himself, and it’s about here that things get very weird indeed.

Before we get to the spoilers section, I wanna return to something I said earlier, which is that “Daemon” is pretty discernibly a solo Moore effort and not a collaboration. Not that I want to downplay Kuttner’s talent (which happens too often, such as on ISFDB where works under just Kuttner’s name are far more likely to be listed as collaborations than with Moore), but I can’t find any Kuttner-esque elements here. More tellingly, this has the tone and polish of a Moore tale, in the sense that it’s deeply melancholy, even humorless, yet there is a real humanity to Luiz’s character that makes him relatable. I’m not sure why, but Moore tends to sympathize with the underdog, not in a self-congratulatory way, but in a genuinely empathetic way, where she manages to convey a character’s fears and aspirations. Kuttner was an excellent humorist, but Moore was almost like a poet, and “Daemon” reads in parts almost like a poem. Moore wears her emotions on her sleeves, which feels prescient given how often old-timey SFF authors are demeaned (sometimes rightly) as emotionally inept Tough Guys™.

There Be Spoilers Here

You may be thinking, what does that Virgil Finlay illustration have to do with the story? Well…

Luiz and the Shaughnessy get stranded on an island and it’s not some ordinary Robinson Crusoe island: it’s a magical island. The Shaughnessy kicks the bucket, but not before giving Luiz some instruction that he doesn’t do a good job explaining. That’s fine, since, probably unbeknownst to the Shaughnessy, Luiz is not left all lonesome after the fact; he quickly finds some friends. Luiz had aludded to nymphs, or as he called them, “ninfas” (I’m not joking when I say I had first misread it as ninjas), at the start of his confession, but now we’re actually getting to those. Finlay’s illustration shows one of these nymphs, called the orlead (who actually talks with Luiz), and a unicorn. Yeah, there’s a unicorn. This place fucking RULES. Admittedly, I don’t buy into the Eden-like nature of the island, as this pure place where there’s no pain (the Shaughnessy is pretty chill about dying), as it feels too idyllic, not to mention it casts doubt on Luiz’s story despite the fact that he’s telling the truth.

But soon there’s trouble in paradise, and the captain has landed in search of his castaways, most likely to do away with them. With the Shaughnessy already dead he need only worry about one now, but Luiz has the fantasy creatures of the island on his side. Okay, I should be a bit more specific here: these are, at least in part, Greek mythological creatures, hence the appearance of the humanoid goat-footed god Pan who comes in as a sort of deus ex machina. I have to admit the image of Pan chasing the captain (who can now see him, apparently) literally around the island until the captain, thoroughly exhausted, runs back to the place he started at, is funnier than it’s supposed to be. It’s weird, sure, and it’s not boring, but it’s a touch goofy.

I said before that a person’s daemon grows brighters as that person’s death nears, and while I’m not a fan of the turn towards action in the climax, I have to respect just how creepy the captain’s final moments are. We’re not totally sure what happens, because Luiz averts his eyes, but it’s clear that the captain, in the last moments of his life, becomes aware of the red-hot daemon that had been stalking him the whole time, and the way Moore writes his death is the closest the story comes to being genuinely scary, as opposed to just eerie.

Some knowledge deeper than any wisdom warned me to cover my eyes. For I saw its lids flicker, and I knew it would not be good to watch when that terrible gaze looked out at last upon a world it had never seen except through the captain’s eyes.

I fell to my knees and covered my face. And the captain, seeing that, must have known at long last what it was I saw behind him. I think now that in the hour of a man’s death, he knows. I think in that last moment he knows, and turns, and for the first time and the last, looks his daemon in the face.

I did not see him do it. I did not see anything. But I heard a great, resonant cry, like the mighty music that beats through paradise, a cry full of triumph and thanksgiving, and joy at the end of a long, long, weary road. There was mirth in it, and beauty, and all the evil the mind can compass.

After a detour into fantasy we’ve swung back around into horror, almost of the cosmic variety. There are things people are not supposed to see—like their own daemons. Weirdly, I find this aspect to be the least involving, as the scope of the story has by now thoroughly gone beyond Luiz’s psychology and grappled onto something that’s quite “spooky” by not very scary. For me “Daemon” works better as a horror-tinged character study than a straight horror yarn, and likewise I don’t find the stuff with Pan and the nymphs to be totally convincing, although Moore’s lyrical hand stays steady, and I have to admit there’s a bit of a sense of wonder with the island and its fantastical secrets. This isn’t pulp horror but rather something in the Unknown tradiction, and hell, “Daemon” could’ve been published there had it not gone bust in 1943. My point is that Moore can sure as hell write, even when she does something that conceptually I don’t think is the most interesting thing ever.

A Step Farther Out

After I finished “Daemon” I did something I’ve not done before for these reviews, and it’s really something I ought to do again: I looked up readers’ reactions. Not modern reviews of the story (I haven’t even checked if there are any), but FFM‘s letter column, which, as it turns out, was fairly active. Not on the same level as Planet Stories, mind you, but still, we’ve got some yays and nays from the peanut gallery! As far as I can tell reception to “Daemon” was pretty damn positive, although there is one comment that I found interesting, made by some bloke named R. I. Martini, in the February 1947 issue:

Miss Moore’s name is all too seldom in your table of contents, but when listed she inevitably brings forth a new and unique situation. “Daemon,” in that respect, held to standard, though somehow it didn’t have the scope or pimch anticipated. It was when she came to the “ninfas” that disillusionment as to its cIassic qualifications set in. Albeit the atmosphere was there, so saving whatever was left of the day.

I really loved the first half or so, when Luiz is on the ship, whereas I merely liked the second half, when he’s on the island. I think I get where Martini is coming from, because I can’t help but feel like something is lost once the nymphs come into play, and it’s basically spelled out that what happened to Luiz had to be fantastical and not a big hallucination as the result of, say, the brain damage he had undoubtedly suffered. Which is not to say my earlier evaluation of Luiz was rendered invalid by the second half, because I think his character still very much works on an allegorical level; I just wish the literal level was a bit more satisfying. Moore is still a strong writer on a sentence-by-sentence level, her penmanship bordering on the poetic—indeed I wouldn’t be surprised if her lyricism influenced George R. R. Martin’s early work. “Daemon” doesn’t feel like it comes from the ’40s, but rather feels a bit more timeless than that, like Moore is tapping into a study of human loneliness that remains relevant, and for that I admire it.

See you next time.