(Cover by Frank R. Paul. Amazing Stories, February 1927.)
Since it’s now the new year for everyone, it’s only natural that we have some new things to look forward to or new things to do. I have a few New Year’s resolutions myself: some movies on my watchlist, quite a few video games I hope to get around to playing. I have hundreds of games in my backlog and even more books to be read in my personal library. I have multiple hobbies, which is something I would recommend to everyone. Unfortunately another thing on my to-do list for 2026 is to either get a second job or to try my hand at writing professionally, which would take time away from this hobbies, including this here blog.
Truth be told, I’ve been winding down productivity here for a minute, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise. I’m seemingly incapable of uploading posts “on time” (but of course who’s keeping time except for myself), and I’ve been missing one or even two reviews every month for the past several months. I wouldn’t be too worried, for the few of you who read this, since I’m not gonna be shutting down this site—just lowering my productivity. Granted, for the first couple years I ran this site I was writing at a feverish pace; in hindsight I’ve not really sure how I did that while also having a day job. In 2023 and 2024 I wrote over 200,000 words a year, according to the stats, which is a lot for one person. There was less wordage for 2025, and now for 2026 you can expect fewer posts as well. But this is like being on a flight and going from 20,000 feet to 10,000 feet.
Now, as you may know, Amazing Stories turns 100 this year. It was revived (again) not too long ago as basically a fanzine, but I would like to celebrate Amazing Stories as a professional magazine, which still means going through material that spans seven decades or so. It’s a lot, not helped by the fact that it has a pretty messy history as far as changes in editorship and publisher go. Except for maybe the beginning of its life it always played second fiddle to competing magazines, but it survived (sometimes even thrived) for an impressive stretch of time, given the circumstances. So, every month (except for March, July, and October, where you can expect short-story marathons) I’ll be covering a serial, novella, or short story from the pages of Amazing Stories. This should be interesting.
With the exception of the aforementioned months we’ll be doing only one serial, one novella, and one short story every month from now on, plus at least one editorial. Anyway, we have one story from the 1900s, one from the 1930s, and one from the 1950s.
For the serial:
The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells. Serialized in Amazing Stories, December 1926 to February 1927. First published in 1901. Feel like it would be criminal to pay tribute to Amazing Stories without bringing up Wells at least once, possibly even twice, since he was heavily associated with the magazine in its first few years. Wells himself is arguably the most important SF writer to have ever lived, with his influence being felt to this day practically everywhere you look. Any given SFnal premise likely has its roots in something Wells did over a century ago. This is even more impressive when you consider that Wells at the height of his powers lasted only half a dozen years or so. The First Men in the Moon is one of the last of his classic novels.
For the novella:
“The Gulf Between” by Tom Godwin. From the October 1953 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Godwin became somewhat famous in SF circles for exactly one story, “The Cold Equations,” which he wrote pretty much in collaboration in John W. Campbell. It might surprise some people that Godwin had in fact written other stuff, and I admit I’m part of the problem because I don’t think I’ve read any Godwin aside from “The Cold Equations.” But I’m gonna fix that. “The Gulf Between” was Godwin’s first story, and it’s notable, if for no other reason than that the cover it inspired would later be reworked as the iconic cover for a certain Queen album.
For the short story:
“The Cairn on the Headland” by Robert E. Howard. From the January 1933 issue of Strange Tales. Over the course of about a dozen years, Howard wrote nonstop for every outlet that would accept his work, and he was not just a fantasy writer, also writing horror, Westerns, sports stories, and non-supernatural adventure pulp. He wrote everything except for SF, which he didn’t seem to have an interest in. Conan the Cimmerian occupied much of Howard’s later years, to the point where he began to resent his creation, but this didn’t stop him from doing standalone yarns like this one.
Carol Emshwiller was one of the most acclaimed short-story writers of her generation, made more impressive because she kept doing good work for about half a century, longer than most authors’ careers. She started in the ’50s, at the tail end of the magazine boom, and kept writing, albeit mostly in the realm of short fiction and never too prolifically, until her death in 2019. She likely would’ve still become a favorite of readers from across a few generations even had she not been married to Ed Emshwiller, but that certainly helped, with Ed even illustrating some of her stories. It was one of those rare marriages where you had two very talented artists, and whose works even sometimes fed into each other. Emshwiller (Carol, that is) was also not an SF doctrinaire, but someone who was open to experimenting with genre boundaries from pretty early in her career, so it makes sense that she was one of the few women to appear in Dangerous Visions. Today’s story is itself very much outside the boundaries of SF, although I hesitate to call it horror as well, even though that’s what it is marketed as. “I Live with You” is a short and simple story that doesn’t easily fall into any genre; if it’s horror then it’s by virtue of the uncanny nature of the relationship between the two women at its center. This is a story that’s meant to be taken allegorically, rather than literally.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the March 2005 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 17 (ed. Stephen Jones) and the Emshwiller collections I Live with You and The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller Vol. 2.
Enhancing Image
The narrator is a ghost, maybe, or perhaps just unhoused lady who has somehow been living off of table scraps, in a book store for a while and in a department store before that. She’s been hiding for who knows how long, but nobody has caught her yet, and as she says, “I never steal.” At least this was the case before she started hiding in Nora’s house. The narrator looks enough like Nora to be her doppelganger, but the two don’t seem to be related. The only other company at this house is the cat, which Nora doesn’t get along with very well, although the little beast takes much more of a liking to the doppelganger. She spends her time in the attic, when Nora is home, but otherwise she has the whole house to herself. It takes weeks for Nora to figure that someone might be intruding, and even then she doesn’t call the cops, but instead has a deadbolt installed for her bedroom door. Nora is so out of it, so passive in her day-to-day life, that she doesn’t even notice when her doppelganger is just one room over from her. The narrator, partly out of pity for Nora and partly as a means of entertainment for herself, figures it’s time for Nora to get herself a man—or rather for the narrator to get one for her. The more pitiable the better. In stories in which a “normal” person meets their doppelganger, the latter is typically more adventurous or mischievous, if not outright evil, and the same holds true here. The disparity is such, in fact, that Nora comes off as the uncanny one in the pair, rather than the narrator, on account of how empty she is as a person. The narrator schemes to bring a man to Nora’s home because she’s frustrated with how dull Nora is. As the narrator says:
At the book store and grocery store at least things happened all day long. You keep watching the same TV programs. You go off to work. You make enough money (I see the bank statements), but what do you do with it? I want to change your life into something worth watching.
There’s the question, firstly, of why the narrator continues to live with Nora if she finds her so boring, and it’s a question she doesn’t answer in any straightforward fashion. There’s also the question (also never quite answered) of what the narrator is supposed to be and why she’s a dead ringer for Nora. There’s something supernatural going on, maybe, but Emshwiller doesn’t care to give us answers to these questions, if for no other reason than that an explanation might distract from the unusual dynamic between the women. As a rule of thumb, good horror (and “I Live with You” is ostensibly horror) should abstain from explaining or rationalizing the horrors of its world. Certainly from Nora’s perspective this ordeal would count as horror, as it uneases her enough to get deadbolts for her bedroom door—for the inside and then, rather irrationally, for the outside. The real question is, who is really the woman living in the attic? Literally it’s the narrator, but she’s so comfortable living in Nora’s house that it’s Nora who comes off as the one living here as an outsider. The narrator comes and goes as she pleases, taking bits and pieces of Nora’s stuff, although it’s always stuff Nora was unlikely to appreciate in the first place.
Things get more interesting once the two women finally meet face to face, and of course it’s by accident. This is in the midst of the narrator’s scheming to have a guy with a gimp leg, named Willard. It’s possibly the most memorable passage in the whole story, if only because of how neatly it illustrates the contrast between the women. As the narrator says, “I’m wearing your green sweater and your black slacks. We look at each other, my brown eyes to your brown eyes. Only difference is, your hair is pushed back and mine hangs down over my forehead.” Worth mentioning that while “I Live with You” is technically a first-person narrative, the doppelganger refers to “you” as if you were Nora, or rather as if she were talking directly to Nora. The reader is meant to be in the place in this plain, unassuming, seemingly empty-headed woman. In a way it makes sense, because who else could she be talking to? If it has to be told in the first person, then making it border on second-person like this makes sense enough. It also adds a touch of creepiness, since the doppelganger, this unnatural person, is talking directly to us, although she means no harm.
There Be Spoilers Here
The threeway(?) doesn’t exactly go well. Willard comes over under the impression that the woman who wrote him the letter was Nora and not the narrator, a confusion compounded because of the ladies’ identical looks. Nora seems to be taken in, though, after some initial fumbling (quite literally at one point, as the narrator trips her on purpose), and it seems like the two might at least be hitting off for a one-night stand. It’s implied that the narrator is here to watch, except that when things do get steamy she’s disappointed by the lack of spectacle. (Given that Emshwiller would’ve just turned eighty, I’m a bit surprised that sex plays as big a factor in this story as it does.) Nora fumbles for the last time, though, and Willard leaves. The narrator also decides to leave at this time, having left Nora traumatized but also a more mature woman than before. I’m actually not sure how old the two women are supposed to be, certainly old enough that Nora has a house and a job; but despite her assumed age, Nora’s implied to possess a certain innocence which by the end of the story has been taken and replaced with something. Maybe something better, who’s to say? Even for full-grown adults there are events in our lives in which we feel like we’ve been compelled, or maybe pushed or shoved violently, into being one step closer to enlightenment. As with the stories of Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Aickman, whom Emshwiller may have been thinking of, the crossing of the shadow-line is framed as traumatic.
A Step Farther Out
“I Live with You” won the Nebula for Best Short Story that year, which is curious, for one because it’s pretty unassuming, but also this was in the sixth decade of Emshwiller’s career. The fact that she had won her first Nebula just a few years earlier is in itself unusual; authors typically don’t write work this solid this deep into their careers. I unfortunately can’t say I agree with the Nebula win for “I Live with You,” but it is a tightly knit and moody story with a feminist bent. It’s hard to write about something that’s both this self-contained and which more or less already speaks for itself, so the only thing I can really do is recommend you read some Emshwiller, especially since her career coincides with much of genre SF’s history, from the pre-New Wave years into the 21st century.
Here we have one of the most respected Victorian writers, if also perhaps underread to this day, with Mrs. Gaskell. A lot of her work was, even after her dead, accompanied with the byline of “Mrs. Gaskell,” but Elizabeth Gaskell was very much her own woman. She was born in 1810 and was close contemporaries with the likes of George Eliot and the Brontë sisters, to the point of being close friends with Charlotte Brontë and writing the first major biography of her. Gaskell was also an accomplished novelist, in part helped by her friendship with Charles Dickens at a time when Dickens was the most popular author in England. “The Old Nurse’s Story” was itself first published in the Christmas 1852 issue of Household Words, a magazine Dickens was editing at the time. While she’s not as popular now as Eliot or the Brontë sisters nowadays, her novels, especially Cranford, North and South, and the sadly unfinished (on account of Gaskell dying suddenly just before she could write the ending) Wives and Daughters, are very well-liked. Her biography of Charlotte Brontë, whilst now being acknowledged as a biased account, also guarantees her a spot in Victorian literature that will probably always be considered worth remembering.
Gaskell, aside from writing novels about social justice (namely the downtrodden lives of those living in the newly industrial parts of England) and more personal topics, partook in what was becoming a fine tradition among British (and to a lesser extent American) writers: the ghost story. In the years long before Fortnite and even the internet, long before even the horror story got walled off and put in its own genre ghetto, it was quite common for “literary” authors in the Anglosphere to write spooky tales of the supernatural, especially with the intention of them being read aloud at Christmastime. Ya know, for the fun of it. “The Old Nurse’s Story” is a very good example of such a tale, as well as being a Gothic narrative in the most classic sense. While the Gothic novel had waned in both popularity and works being written by the 1820s, the Gothic short story picked up the pieces a couple decades down the road.
Placing Coordinates
First published in 1852 and reprinted in the October 1927 issue of Weird Tales. It’s also been reprinted in The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (ed. Robert Aickman), The Gentlewomen of Evil: An Anthology of Rare Supernatural Stories from the Pens of Victorian Ladies (ed. Peter Haining), Minor Hauntings: Chilling Tales of Spectral Youth (ed. Jen Baker), The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories (ed. Tera Moore), The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce (ed. Michael Newton), and the Gaskell collection Curious, If True. Because it’s very old and very public domain, you can find it online easily.
Enhancing Image
Hester, the titular nurse, relates to us (in the position of Rosamond’s children) the story of a particularly strange and traumatic series of events in both their lives. Rosamond, now a grown woman and a mother, was once a child in Hester’s care, at first part of the time and then full-time, following the deaths of both of Rosamond’s parents. Her father died of fever while her mother died shortly after childbirth, to a stillborn baby which would’ve been Rosamond’s younger sibling. (Sounds dramatic, I know, but it would not have been so unusual back in those days.) On her deathbed the mother makes Hester promise to look after the little Rosamond, although really she didn’t have to say anything about that, for “if she had never spoken a word, I would have gone with the little child to the end of the world.” Hester, herself barely an adult at this time, is made to be both Rosamond’s nurse and surrogate mother whilst the two are taken in by the Furnivalls, that is Rosamond’s mother’s relatives. After that slightly convoluted prelude, we find ourselves at Furnivall Manor, the big spooky mansion where the rest of the action is to take place. Given that the framing device sees Hester and Rosamond alive and in good health, we can safely assume that they will come out of these spooky happenings more or less fine, but then we’re not reading this story for the question of if Our Heroines™ will persevere, but rather how. That Hester is also telling us this story in first-person, in a conversational tone, gives the impression that this is a story one should read aloud to an audience, perhaps on the night before Christmas.
(Of course, I say “conservational,” but this is by the standards of mid-Victorian speech, which is more verbose and long-winded than what we’re used to nowadays. Let’s say that Gaskell, in a way not untypical for her time, likes to abuse the semi-colon.)
Furnivall Manor is home to four old farts, namely Grace Furnivall, her maid “and companion” Mrs. Stark, and James and his wife Dorothy. The only exception is Agnes, the one servant in the house who does not have a close relationship with anyone else. As for the current Lord Furnivall, he’s always away from the manor, and I don’t think we ever see him. The west drawing-room is open, but the east drawing-room is locked shut and nobody ever goes in there, for reasons Ms. Furnivall refrains from giving. It doesn’t take long at all for us to find that this mansion has a dark family secret, and we can infer this straight from the fact that Ms. Furnivall had an older sister who died many years ago, from decidedly unnatural circumstances. There’s also eerie organ music that plays in the halls at night, despite there being no one playing the instrument and everyone having gone to bed. Oh yeah, “The Old Nurse’s Story” wastes no time in getting to the good stuff. In fact, despite its length, this is by no means slowly paced, but rather is as long as it is because of Gaskell’s style that she uses here, where there’s no stone left unturned and paragraphs tend to go on for nearly a page at a time. There’s a whole family history delved into here, in a story that’s only about 25 pages, much like in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” But whereas “Usher” has to do with a rich family dooming itself via an incestuous streak, the Furnivalls are cursed from a combination of pride and jealousy. Just how exactly these sins play into the ghostly proceedings, we will soon see, for as I said, it’s a question of how the manor is haunted.
For one, we know (or rather are told) that Old Lord Furnivall loved music, both to hear and to play it, and also that he was quite the bastard when he was alive. He apparently mistreated his two daughters, Maude and Grace, although just to what extent we can’t say for sure. We know that the Furnivalls are dominated by pride in their wealth, or at least the appearance of wealth, even in the living relatives, to where James can’t help but look down on his wife Dorothy a bit for having been a farmer’s daughter. Rosamond’s own mother, despite being from a high-born family, had chosen to marry a man of the cloth (I believe it was Anglican, not Catholic, kinda goes without saying), who while virtuous also didn’t make much money. Class figures greatly into “The Old Nurse’s Story,” both thematically and even how it plays a major role in the underlying conflict. This is unsprising, given that Gaskell, like Dickens, was politically progressive, despite being actively religious (specifically she was a Unitarian Christian). The idea that one can be both a practicing Christian and decidedly on the political left may sound far-fetched now, but believe it or not, such strange creatures can occasionally be found in the wild to this day. As for the characters in the story, religion doesn’t play much of a role; but still there’s a palpable class tension between the modest Hester and Rosamond and the rather haughty upper-class Ms. Furnivall and Mrs. Stark. And then there are the ghosts, who are a different matter entirely. There’s Old Lord Furnivall at his organ in the dead of night, and more distressingly there’s a child, slightly younger than Rosamond, who prowls the frosty manor grounds…
(It’s worth mentioning that Hester says winter has hit the manor when it’s only October, which sounds weird, but it’s also worth mentioning that in the northernmost part of England the murderous chill of winter would have set in quite early in the year.)
The first big scare, and the most effective (mostly because it’s something that can happen in real life), is when Rosamond goes missing one day, and it’s both frightfully cold and snowing outside the manor. Hester nearly scares herself to death with fright in trying to find Rosamond, who herself is only rescued thanks to a farmer who lives not too far from the manor, the child nearly frozen to death. Yet strangely Rosamond is not scared of what she found in the snowy outdoors, namely a child who beckons Rosamond to come play with her. The child is obviously a ghost, and is implied not to be leading Rosamond to her death out of malice, but rather out of loneliness, not being fully aware of what she’s doing. It’s unclear if the ghost child is even aware that she’s a ghost. But between the ghost child and the ghost of Old Lord Furnivall, there are a few spirits lurking at the manor that have not yet been laid to rest. Ms. Furnivall has been keeping a secret all these years, and despite being somewhere in her seventies and being deaf enough that she has to use a horn, she’s not too feeble to confess a wrongdoing of the past. Again it’s worth observing that Rosamond is saved by a man of low stature, and that Hester, being merely a nurse-maid, is unequivocally the most heroic figure in the story—which is not to say that all the low-born characters in the are story are virtuous. Gaskell generally sides with the working class, but her view of individual virtue and how it relates to class conflict is more nuanced, as we are about to discover.
There Be Spoilers Here
Back when they were young, Maude and Grace Furnivall were the starlets of the manor and two fine ladies from that part of the country. Old Lord Furnivall wanted nothing less than the best for his daughters, although when I say “the best” I specifically mean the best in terms of status. Only a man with high enough status is deserving of either of these sisters, which doesn’t stop the ladies from having ambitions of their own. There was a time when a “dark foreigner” would visit the manor from abroad once a year, being a talented musician but naturally also one who was not rich. Old Lord Furnivall admired the man’s talent, and also loved to have the foreigner listen to his own playing, but he probably would not have approved of the musician marrying one of his daughters. This didn’t stop the musician from “walking abroad in the woods” (going on walks between man and woman was like going on a date) with each of the sisters at different points. The musician and Maude got married in secret and the musician knocked her up. Maude managed to hide her pregnancy and even to raise her daughter, under the guise that the child was a charity case from some working-class home. But the musician had skipped town, never to return, and Grace was the only other person who knew the secret; so, in a moment of fiery jealousy, she ratted out her sister to their father, who was not pleased. Maude and her child were evicted from the manor, with her later being found under a tree, crazed and nearly frozen to death, her child dead in her arms. Maude died not long after that, and the guilt never left Grace.
Hester coming to the manor with Rosamond reopened a wound that seemed to have nearly healed, or at least would have probably died along with Ms. Furnivall. The climax is theatrical, and if I had a gripe with this story I think the final confrontation is a bit overblown, compared to what came previously, although the very end is haunting. Having confessed to what she had done to Maude, Ms. Furnivall has lifted the curse from the manor and placed all on her own shoulders. There’s peace for everyone else, but not for her. She dies in her bed shortly after, in agony, with the words: “Alas! alas! what is done in youth can never be undone in age! What is done in youth can never be undone in age!” It’s a pretty bleak ending, the only thing preventing it from being a total downer being that Hester and Rosamond come out of the ordeal in one piece. If we can infer from the framing device, Rosamond (although we hear not a word from her adult self) has not repeated the mistakes of her relatives.
A Step Farther Out
I had read this one only yesterday, and part of me wishes I got to sat it on longer. This is a story that requires some retracing of steps and understanding the whole of it in order to better appreciate. The syntax Gaskell uses here also takes some time getting accommodated with, but this is coming from the perspective of someone who hasn’t read that much Victorian literature. While the walls of text and the convoluted family dynamics can be a bit intimidating, I do very much recommend seeking out “The Old Nurse’s Story,” especially if you’re into ghost stories by the likes of Robert Aickman and M. R. James.
(This post will be discussing spoilers for Carnival of Souls, including the twist ending, so if you haven’t seen the movie already I suggest you do just that before reading any further.)
I was supposed to write a review two goddamn days ago, except I realized that I had made a mistake and somehow gotten my own schedule wrong. I had read the first installment of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Inferno, except I was actually supposed to read Arthur C. Clarke’s “Against the Fall of Night.” So, no review happened for the 3rd or the 4th. With any luck I’ll get around to Clarke’s novella sometime this month, and of course you can expect my review of Inferno (the first stretch) very soon, as in tomorrow or the day after. For now, let’s content ourselves with an editorial I had in mind for last month but couldn’t find the time or proper motivation for at the time, a not-review of a certain cult classic. Carnival of Souls is one of the best horror movies of the ’60s, almost in spite of itself, being made on a very low budget by a crew comprised of people who had not worked on a feature film before, and whose cast was similarly comprised of non-actors and people (including its lead actress) who would not have a future in movies. There’s a lot to say about it, but one can only say so much without giving away the whole plot, so it’s best to start at the ending and then slingshot back to the beginning. It’s that kind of movie.
Mary Henry is dead, to begin with. We start with a logo for Harcourt Productions, which I have to think was made specifically for this movie, since this is the only movie ever to be produced by this company. Before said logo can even fade to black we’re met with a jarring (maybe deliberate, maybe not) shift in the form of the opening scene: an impromptu drag race between two cars, one filled with dudes, the other filled with Mary and her gal pals. A few things are going on in this first scene, which seems to me an effort in disorienting the viewer. At the very beginning here, Mary doesn’t say anything, and she has kind of this quizzical expression on her face, as if she’s unsure about the race but is too shy to discourage her friends from taking part. Her skepticism is more than justified, since it takes all of about one minute for the race to go wrong, as the cars go across a rickety bridge and the girls’ car tips over into the river below. You would think the girls, if not killed from the impact, would at least drown, and you’d be right. A rescue team comes in, more to salvage the car than anything, and if you pay attention to the dialogue you can hear that they’ve been looking for three hours. Obviously nobody can be alive still.
Except for Mary—or so it seems.
(The film’s director as a ghostly visitor.)
Wet from the river and caked with mud, Mary walks dizzily out of the water, as if some kind of ghoul emerging from a swamp, quite miraculously to everyone around her. It’s telling that when asked about what happened Mary can only say, “I don’t remember.” It’s her first line of dialogue, and in a striking formal decision it’s spoken offscreen. From this scene to the next there’s an unexplainable gap in time, and it’s only then that we see Mary talk for the first time. Having apparently recovered from the accident, Mary takes up a job as an organist for a church in Utah, despite being irreligious herself. The man at the organ factory doesn’t mind Mary’s disposition much, but the minister at the church where she’ll be working is more concerned. (We know that this must take place in fantasy land because somehow Mary is able to afford rent with a non-job like “church organist.”) Interestingly, the only woman of note that Mary interacts with throughout the rest of the movie is Mrs. Thomas, her landlady; otherwise she’s beholden to a handful of male figures. These men fall on a spectrum that ranges from uselessly benevolent to openly hostile, but the point is that they either try and fail to help her or are looking to make her day worse. The worst of these might be John, the neighbor in the apartment building, who unsubtly creeps on Mary and tries to get her in his bed at all costs. If this movie took place in modern times, John would be an incel and/or one of those guys who follows macho influencers for “dating advice.”
(Mary and a typically pushy John.)
Let’s take a step back to talk about the acting and directing, since this is a movie that does a lot with only a few resources, and also where a lot happens despite clocking in at just under 80 minutes. The director, Herk Harvey, had experience as a filmmaker from making PSA-type shorts about urban and industrial areas, with Carnival of Souls being his first and only narrative feature. He directed, produced, worked on the script with John Clifford, and even plays a major role as an actor here, as a pale-skinned ghostly man who stalks Mary throughout the film. Like I said earlier, the people acting in Carnival of Souls have never been in a movie before, with maybe an exception or two in there. This is quite a surprise with Candace Hilligoss as Mary, since she gives unquestionably one of the defining lead performances of ’60s horror, and her presence gives one the impression that she could’ve been in a hundred movies. The way she often stares off into the distance, dissociating, or sometimes how she cranes her neck like a flightless bird, gives one the impression of Mary being like a confused animal. The closest reference point I can think of with Hilligoss’s performance is Elsa Lanchester’s performance as the bride in Bride of Frankenstein, where similarly Lanchester plays a worried and at times frightened animal in human skin. Lanchester as the bride only shows up for a few minutes in her movie, nevertheless leaving a mark on people’s imaginations; but luckily for us we have a whole movie to spend with Hilligoss as Mary.
Harvey and his crew shot on location in Utah, on a budget of just over $30,000 in 1962 money, and since they obviously couldn’t afford sets they shot the scenes of the titular carnival at the Saltair Pavilion (specifically Saltair II), a resort that hit hard times during the Great Depression and which wss finally abandoned a few years before Carnival of Souls was shot. Securing a permit for shooting at Saltair II was cheap and easy. There are a few scenes set in urban locations, namely Salt Lake City, but the most memorable stuff in this movie has to do with the shabby apartment building Mary lives in and the industrial shithole just out her window, namely the abandoned carnival that haunts her dreams. The lack of sets, combined with harsh lighting and industrial locales, gives one the feeling that maybe David Lynch had taken notes from this movie during the long process of making Eraserhead. Mary, being a ghost unbeknownst to herself, lives in a world that itself comes off as ghostly. Of course, it is not the abandoned carnival which turns out to be haunted, but rather Mary. I have a soft spot for ghost stories in which a person instead of a place is haunted, either because the person is a member of the undead or attracts the undead like a magnet. Harvey and Clifford took inspiration from the Ambrose Bierce story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” which (spoilers for a short story that’s over a century old) is similarly about someone who seemingly survives being killed, only to find out afterward that they are a ghost. So we have a ghost who unwittingly haunts people, and who herself is haunted by a dead (abandoned) place. I know it can be a little hard to believe, given its cheap and grimy aesthetics, but this is an intelligently crafted film.
(An exterior shot of Saltair II.)
If taken literally, Carnival of Souls is a spooky story about a woman who thinks she has cheated death, but if you try even slightly you’ll find that this is a resonant and prescient study of a woman suffering from some undiagnosed mental illness, trying to live in a world dominated by “normal” people. It is at the very least explicitly about a woman who, following her accident, lives in a permanent state of disconnect from the rest of humanity, a kind of switch being flipped in her brain which she may or may not be able to flip back the other way. It’s ambiguous if Mary’s unusual mental state is something she had before the accident or if it’s brought on from trauma, but regardless she acts as if being around people for longer than short controlled bursts is a burden on her—to other people’s dismay. As the minister says during their first meeting, “But my dear, you cannot live in isolation from the human race, you know.” At first Mary is content to live on her own, with her crummy job and not having any friends, but eventually the loneliness does get to her; but at the same time she has some unwanted company, with John from the side of the living and the pale man from that of the dead. She quite literally phases in and out of reality at a few points in the movie, where people can’t see or hear her and she fully becomes a ghost. She’s stuck in a liminal position, between wanting but being unable to socialize with the living while also being scared of the ghosts she sees dancing at the carnival at night. During the daytime the carnival just a normal industrial area, totally empty of human life; but while there’s no ghost who can torment her here during the day, it’s eerily missing that human touch. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the sequence at the halfway point of the movie, where Mary explores Saltair II, might be my favorite.
(Mary in a huge pipe, in one of the more memorable shots.)
The most helpful character is Dr. Samuels, a psychologist who just so happens to run into Mary during one of her daytime scares. (How is she paying for this? Is she paying for it? Does Samuels put their first session on the house? We don’t ask these questions when watching a movie.) The best thing he does is allow Mary to articulate her state of mind, especially her strange (to other characters) indifference to intimacy with those of the opposite sex. The language wasn’t around at the time, but the idea is that Mary is queer, by virtue of being asexual and possibly also aromantic. This quirk with her sexuality is treated as unusual, but not harmful, which for a movie of this vintage is pretty forward-thinking. Indeed what modern viewers might appreciate most about Carnival of Souls, more than what it’s able to accomplish on a tight budget and its capacity for genuine chills, is its sympathetic depiction of someone who is both mentally ill and outside the realm of cisgender-heterosexual normality. We have a complex figure with Mary, helped by Hilligoss’s nuanced performance, a woman who is tormented by men who either shun her or try to coerce her into unwanted sex—and that’s not even going into the literal ghouls following her. The ending of the movie is obviously meant to be taken as eerie, but Mary’s ultimate fate, as a ghost who gets dragged screaming into the afterlife, also has a tragic aspect. The “dead all along” twist has arguably been done with more elegance in one or two other movies, but the inevitability of it in Carnival of Souls is crushing.
Carnival of Souls is not a perfect movie by any means; on the contrary it’s pretty rough around the edges. Actually the whole movie is rough. The lighting is amateurish at times, the acting is a mixed bag (understandably), there are a few shots I can think of that could’ve used another take, and of course someone watching this today would find the twist to be pretty obvious—although this was not so much the case back then. As typically goes with B-movies, it languished in obscurity for a couple decades, until it was revived thanks to late-night TV airings and being discovered by the international arthouse crowd. Roger Ebert wrote a positive review of it in 1989. It’s now in the Criterion Collection. I’ve seen three or four times myself over the years, and each time I’ve found more small and subtle things about it to like. This is a pulpy exploration of mental illness via supernatural horror, which nowadays feels almost overdone as one of the genre’s many modes. But trust me, it’s a good one.
A short and sweet review forecast for this month, partly because I’m running behind on my writing a bit and so am pressed for time, but also because I don’t have a particular theme in mind here. Of course, if you thought I was gonna take a break from reviewing spooky fiction altogether after last month, you’d be mistaken, as both of the short stories due for November are horror pieces. We’re still deep in autumn, after all, and honestly my thirst for spooky shit has not been quenched.
Another thing I just randomly decided to throw in there is that both of the serials are novels written in collaboration, by authors who gained a good deal of acclaim and presumably money from working together. In one case there’s decades-long besties Larry Niven and the late Jerry Pournelle, who shared similar politics and also writing philosophies. There’s also the husband-wife duo of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, perennial favorites on this site, who wrote most of their novels together, although for decades Fury has been erroneously credited to just Kuttner.
We’ve got one story from the 1850s (the oldest I will have reviewed thus far), two from the 1940s, two from the 1970s, and one from the 2000s.
For the serials:
Inferno by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, August to October 1975. Niven had quickly established himself as one of the major hard SF writers by the end of the ’60s, but Pournelle had a longer road to success, first being active as a fan and then not writing his first stories and articles professionally till he was deep in his thirties. In the ’70s and ’80s Niven and Pournelle wrote several successful novels in collaboration.
Fury by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, May to July 1947. Kuttner and Moore wrote so much, both together and each solo, that they resorted to a few pseudonyms, one of them being Lawrence O’Donnell. Fury takes place in the same universe as the earlier Kuttner-Moore story “Clash by Night.” Despite Fury historically being credited to Kuttner alone, Moore claimed years later to having been a minor collaborator.
For the novellas:
“Against the Fall of Night” by Arthur C. Clarke. From the November 1948 issue of Startling Stories. Clarke is one of the most famous SF writers ever, to the point that by the ’60s he had become, along with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, a media personality. He collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on the script for 2001: A Space Odyssey whilst writing the novel version parallel to it.
“The Region Between” by Harlan Ellison. From the March 1970 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Ellison is similarly a pretty famous (if more controversial) figure, being just as notorious for his real-life antics and combative nature as for his writing. This novella, one of Ellison’s longest stories, works as a standalone but was commissioned as part of a series which features the same main character.
For the short stories:
“The Old Nurse’s Story” by Elizabeth Gaskell. From the October 1927 issue of Weird Tales. First published in 1852. Now here’s a name you probably didn’t see coming. For someone who gained notoriety as one of the finest novelists of the mid-Victorian period, as well as being Charlotte Brontë’s first major biographer, Gaskell also wrote a fair amount of supernatural fiction.
“I Live with You” by Carol Emshwiller. From the March 2005 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. By this point Carol had outlived her late husband, Ed Emshwiller, by over a decade, but she had long since made a name for herself. The last Emshwiller story I wrote about was from the late ’50s, but nearly half a century later we still find her seemingly in her prime.
(Cover by Stanislaw Fernandes. Omni, October 1987.)
Who Goes There?
Happy Halloween, ghouls and gals!
George R. R. Martin is now one of the most famous American authors alive, but this was not always the case. When he made his professional debut in the early ’70s he was just another post-New Wave writer who wanted desperately to be published in Analog, as he idolized (and still idolizes, really) John W. Campbell. In a bit of a cruel twist of fate, Martin didn’t make his first sale to Analog until right after Campbell’s death, but that didn’t stop him from appearing in that magazine regularly throughout the ’70s and ’80s. Martin started his A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series in 1996, but prior to that his career was a lot more winding—one might say directionless, but I prefer to think of the first couple decades of his career as showing Martin at his most versatile. He wrote science fiction, fantasy, and horror in more or less equal measure, although he’s admitted to being perhaps a horror writer by instinct. This is easy enough to believe, even for someone who only knows Martin for his big series, considering the monsters, zombies, ghouls, and remorseless killers which populate A Song of Ice and Fire. For better or worse (he has his reactionary/boomer moments), Martin is our biggest connection to an era of genre writing that is long past us, to the point where a lot of current readers have no personal memory of it and no passion to dig up its bones. He’s the one living author I know who has enough clout to make young readers check out the works of Jack Vance.
My experiences with Martin have been a bit mixed over the years, since I have to admit I’m not keen on his big fantasy series from what little I’ve read of it; but at the same time I do like his early SF and horror a lot more. This month has been kind of a wash for me, as far as getting my spooky shit on goes, with movies and also reads, even what I’ve been reviewing here as of late. The good news is that we’re going out on a high note, because “The Pear-Shaped Man” is a darn good tale of paranoia and suspense, being quite effective while also seeing Martin on his best behavior. Understandably it won the Stoker for Best Long Fiction that year, although at maybe 13,000 words it’s not that long.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the October 1987 issue of Omni. It’s been reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy: First Annual Collection (ed. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling), Omni Best Science Fiction Two (ed. Ellen Datlow), The Horror Hall of Fame: The Stoker Winners (ed. Joe R. Landsdale), and the Martin collection Dreamsongs: Volume I.
Enhancing Image
Jessie is freelance book illustrator (the narrator jokes that this is not a “real” job) who’s moved into an apartment recently, and so far everything has been going about as expected. She has a few friends and she gets enough work that she won’t be homeless in a week. There is one problem, though, which has to do with the man who lives in the apartment building’s basement. The man, as far as anyone can tell, does not have a name, for even the tenants who have lived here for years don’t know what it is, despite all of them having interacted with him at some point or other. “All of them, every one, called him the Pear-shaped Man. That was who he was.” He’s a man of unusual proportions, being certainly chubby, but with his torso being (predictabtly) pear-shaped: narrow at the shoulders, yet with a real dump-truck of an ass. His head is described as like a small pear on top of the big pear that is his body. Nobody in the building really likes him, but he’s someone who generally keeps to himself, even with his strange habit of seeming to only eat cheese curls of a specific brand and drink Coke. This would be considered par for the course with YouTubers and Twitch streamers in the current year, but it would’ve been strange back in the days when people cared about balancing one’s diet. The Pear-shaped Man lives right below Jessie and her roommate Angela, but while the latter is chill about the man’s eccentricity, Jessie quickly finds a bone to pick.
“The Pear-Shaped Man” is example of what we would call apartment horror, which sounds specific but actually has some room for a variety of fun (or maybe not-so-fun) times. It could have to do with getting a roommate who turns out to be a psychopath, neighbors who are secretly murderous cultists, neglectful management (as if there’s any other kind), or some combination. Maybe there’s a Lovecraftian monstrosity lurking in the water pipes, or maybe (to take from a certain Lovecraft story) the air conditioning stops working on the worst of days. It’s a kind of horror that could’ve only sprouted in a post-industrial urban society, and the more people are packed together like sardines the better. Apartment horror stands on the diametrically opposite end of the spectrum from rural horror, since whereas rural horror often goes into a sense of isolation and what little human company there is being off, apartment horror tackles terrors that are unique to the urban experience. It’s also an example of another kind of horror story, albeit more a twist on it than a straight example: the tormented-woman story. I wish there was a better name for it, but it’s a very old and proud tradition in the genre, in which you have a woman (it’s usually a woman) of questionable mental stability who finds herself suffering at the hands of an antagonist, sometimes unseen but other times hiding in plain sight. Here, the supposed antagonist tormenting Jessie is a man whom everyone in the building already knows about, and who to all appearances hasn’t done anything except act in a way that doesn’t abide social norms; the worst thing he’s done is be kind of a weirdo.
Now, I say this is a twist on the tradition, because Jessie really ends up being her own worst enemy, to the point of being a Karen. She is clearly in the midst of a psychotic break, but she also acts entitled—not that the people around her are exactly innocent. She repeatedly has dreams about having a weirdly sexual encounter with the Pear-shaped Man, and her obsession gets to the point where she unconsciously paints his features in an illustration, which her boss doesn’t take too kindly. This is the kind of thing one would seek professional help for, but not only does Jessie fail to consider this, but her friends and acquaintances actively choose to make the situation worse once or twice. Martin walks a bit of a tightrope here, because on the one hand Jessie is not the most likable of protagonists, being bitchy, whiny, and something of a Greenwich Village-type hipster, but also she seems to be suffering from some undiagnosed mental illness. She talks with Selby, the apartment manager, in trying to persuade him to dig up the Pear-shaped Man’s lease so that he can be identified, which as Selby’s justified to point out is a big invasion of the man’s privacy; and yet the fact that he doesn’t seem to even have a lease should in itself be concerning, never mind that he only ever pays rent with cash, and single-dollar bills at that. (This feels like a plot point that could’ve only been plausible at least thirty years ago, since nowadays rent is fucking astronomical unless you live in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere.) It doesn’t help that even though he hasn’t done anything, the Pear-shaped Man stood outside watching Jessie’s place for an uncomfortable amount of time on one occasion, and during the few times they interact he wants her to come see his “things.” Nowadays this would be considered stalking and/or harassment.
There’s a sexism angle to “The Pear-Shaped Man” that goes unsaid, which is probably for the best since my experience with Martin has taught me that he can be unreliable on feminist issues. So much the better that Jessie’s plight being elevated by men who by and large don’t take her seriously is kept as subtext, then. Really, what’s impressive about this story, considering Martin’s habits as a writer the pop up now and again, is that’s both subtle in a psychological sense while also building tension at just the right pace. This is a novelette, like I said about 13,000 words, but it feels a bit shorter than that. Early in his career Martin was prone to writing mood pieces, stories in which not much actually happens and there’s a focus on character and vibes, but with “The Pear-Shaped Man” he found a right balance of character and action. Previously I’d only written about Martin early in his career, whereas this story shows someone who is both a seasoned professional and in his element. He can be as gory and erotic as he wants later, with A Song of Ice and Fire, but with his earlier fiction, mostly printed in magazines, he feels the need to restrain himself at least a little bit. The descriptions of the Pear-shaped Man as this grotesque figure, his skin unnaturally pale and his fingers like worms or maggots, spark one’s imagination and may even gross you out a bit, but Martin doesn’t overdo it.
There Be Spoilers Here
Not a negative criticism, but the ending is a very strange one. I was unnerved a bit, but also confused. I don’t even wanna give it away here, both because I’m not entirely sure what happened (it’s clearly meant to be taken as metaphorical rahter than literal, but that doesn’t help much), and because I do recommend this story quite a bit and I think a first-time reader should go into it blind up to a point.
A Step Farther Out
Recently I had read Martin’s Fevre Dream, which is one of his few standalone novels and certainly the most well-known novel of his that isn’t part of that series; and while I enjoyed it, I also kept wishing it was about a hundred pages shorter, with the third act being tightened up massively. Martin, like any writrr with two brain cells to rub together, writes for money, and the horror market in the ’80s called for novels that were unnecessarily large and horizontally challenged. With short fiction, though, one still had the restraints one needed to write something that could be frightening and chilling, sure, but also calculated. I very much recommend “The Pear-shaped Man” as an introduction to George R. R. Martin the horror writer, as opposed to George R. R. Martin the fantasist, assuming you haven’t already read “Sandkings,” which sees Martin in both horror and SF mode. I do love “Sandkings,” by the way.
Kathe Koja started getting professionally published in the late ’80s, as part of a generation of new horror and SF writers, appearing more or less fully formed with her short fiction. It didn’t take long for her to write her debut novel, The Cipher, which I’m actually in the middle of reading as I’m reviewing today’s story. Koja’s fiction is a lot more colloquial and more visceral than the work of close contemporary and fellow Michigander Thomas Ligotti; whereas Ligotti unabashedly owes a debt to Lovecraft, Koja can be considered more in line with the movies of David Cronenberg. The first decade of Koja’s career saw her often mixing horror with SF in a way that still feels novel, if only because there’s also a distinctly ’90s grunge sensibility with her early work. After a hiatus, she switched gears to writing YA and historical fiction, which might go to explain why it’s rather hard to find her stuff in bookstores these days. The Cipher and her third novel, Skin, recently got brought back into print thanks to a certain independent press, but her early work remains sadly obscure. “Reckoning” itself has hints of speculative fiction, but while it’s primarily horror, its top priority is to function as a domestic tragedy.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the July 1990 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s only been reprinted once, in the Koja collection Extremities, which itself is very out of print.
Enhancing Image
Drew is a down-on-his-luck artist, or more accurately he’s a bit too lazy and a bit too much of a drunkard for his own good. His relationship with his girlfriend Lucy turns from bad to worse as she dies in a car accident shortly after the two have a major fight. As sadly happens too often in real life, their final interaction is a bitter one, and this combined with Lucy’s death sends Drew into a beer-tinged spiral. Just when it seems like he has a chance to at least get back on his feet professionally, with an art commission, he does everything except work on said commission, including sleeping in his car on the side of the road. With his car parked outside an abandoned shed/garage (it’s not made clear which), Drew has a chance encounter with a woman who reminds him of a certain someone he knows, except she puts her hands on him seemingly with the goal of suffocating him. This ends up not being the case, though, as the woman is Lucy, suddenly alive and well again—except for the fact that her skin is a bit paler than before, and more conspicuously her eyes are now solid silver in color.
But hey, nobody’s perfect.
The reanimated Lucy, aside from looking a bit off, is otherwise the Lucy Drew had known in life. Indeed she and the others who live in the woods here can only be considered zombies by virtue of the fact that these are all people who have died before, and who all similarly have pale skin and the silvery “angel eyes.” Norah, who for all intents and purposes is the leader of the group, talks in fluent Expositionese, explaining to Drew that a) he himself is still very much alive, and b) the undead retain both their memories and personalities from before. These are not raging bloodthirsty monsters, but simply people who have gone through something pretty strange and unexplainable. The only exception is Wesley, the only man of the pack, being stanoffish and “obviously seriously strange,” but this is explained by him being a suicide, and generally he prefers to keep to himself. We’re led to expect at first that Wesley might become the story’s villain, but this is a red herring; he’s barely in it to begin with. The three main characters are Drew, Lucy, and Norah, and even then the crux of the whole story is Drew and Lucy’s complicated relationship. What do you say to someone who used to be the love of your life and who has not only been dead (from your POV) for eight months but someone you remember hurting deeply the last time you two were together?
“Reckoning” is a horror story, but only nominally; it’s not like Koja’s chief goal here is to scare or unnerve the reader. The subject matter is morbid, and in a way this is a story about zombies (although Lucy and the others explicitly don’t call themselves that), but it’s at least as much a love story. Well, it’s not a happy love story, but then how many upbeat love stories worth a damn are there? Drew and Lucy have sex maybe one too many times in such a short span, but in a way I get it. I mentioned that there’s a viseral edge to Koja’s writing, which includes candid descriptions of physical intimacy. Sex for Koja, as with Cronenberg, plays a major role in tandem with the horror, both for the sake of eroticism and also to be juxtaposed with the grimness of the surrounding material. Drew is arguably having sex with a corpse, never mind that Lucy’s angel eyes are uncanny. The eyes themselves apparently give the undead second sight, like in The Dead Zone (oh hey, it’s Cronenberg again, albeit adatping Stephen King), although Lucy and Norah are at odds as to whether these eyes let one see into the future. Believe it or not, of her early stories I would say “Reckoning” is on the tamer end. The eroticism here is pretty vanilla, compared to “Angels in Love,” the last Koja story I wrote about, which does go into fucked-up territory.
I will say that Koja’s style is not for everyone, being rather vulgar and snappy in a way that may have resulted from both the first wave of cyberpunk (already come and gone by the time Koja made her debut) and the incoming grunge era. There’s something about Koja’s early ’90s work that screams flannel and faded jeans. For better or worse, Drew being a fuck-up with no money and no direction in life sort of encapsulates the existential malaise Gen X Americans at this point in time. That Lucy and the others have each other’s company but very little else, living on the fringes of society and afraid to go out amongst “normal” people for fear of being discovered, works as like a collective counterpart to Drew’s individualistic problems. Both the individual and the group are in a rut, a post-Reagan point of post-nut clarity as the Cold War is ending with the US winning over the Soviets and yet nobody being happier for all this.
There Be Spoilers Here
Drew and Lucy’s relationship is tragic, first because of the circumstances of the latter’s death and second because the former is still alive. The bulk of “Reckoning” sees Drew caught between two worlds which happen to exist on the same land, the world of the living and the much smaller world of the undead. At some point, something will have to give: either Drew leaves Lucy and the others behind for the sake of returning to a life that was not a very good one anyway, or he dies. It’s obvious which option Koja will take, although I have to say I’m not keen on how she gets there. Word has gotten around about the not-zombies, and a small gang of young hunters goes looking in the woods, thinking they’ve gotten one when they shoot Drew dead, only to find he does not have the angel eyes they had heard of. I have a question as to what’s supposed to happen with these characters Koja pulled out of thin air, considering they committed a murder and they don’t act too concerned about having done such a thing. I also have to wonder what the hell they could expect to do if they had caught one of the undead. Is there prize money? Would they get it taxidermized? It’s still a person, so I feel like there would be a huge legal problem. These questions are none of Drew’s concern, of course, on account of him being dead at the end—or rather undead. It’s a nicely bittersweet ending, but I feel like Koja could’ve gotten us to this point more elegantly.
A Step Farther Out
This was a decent read, although it doesn’t show Koja at her best. When it comes to reprints of genre stories by women, from the time before the internet or even when the internet was in its infancy, there’s an unmistakable tendency for anthology editors to underrepresent female talent. It can be hard to gauge what’s the really good stuff in advance and do the necessary weeding-out when it comes to women writing SFF up until the past couple decades. In the case of “Reckoning” it’s understandable why it’s only been reprinted once since its initial publication, since there are at least a few Koja stories I recommend reading first.
(Dark Forces. Cover by One Plus One Studio. The Viking Press, 1980.)
Something I don’t typically get to write about here is the topic of original anthologies, which is to say anthologies of short fiction comprised of material never before published. Of course, said fiction could later be reprinted in magazines, as has happened many times, but the implied purpose of an original anthology is fundamentally different from that of its sibling, the reprint anthology. Both involve similar work, with an editor trying to procure stories from authors or authors’ estates, as well as reading dozens upon dozens of stories, most of which end up not being worth printing. There’s the question of how many words/pages can be crammed between two covers. There’s the question of pricing, because an anthology will pretty much always be more expensive than a single magazine issue. Nowadays anthologies and magazines fill respective niches and try not to step on each other’s toes, since it’s no longer a problem of what can be printed in magazines, whereas in the days before Fortnite and even the internet there was the (true, at least up to a point) conventional narrative that editors and publishers of original anthologies were allowed to be more risqué than their magazine counterparts.
When Dangerous Visions hit shelves in 1967, its key appeal (at least for American readers) was that it was jam-packed with stories that could not be published in magazines of the era, on account of being too edgy, experimental, etc. You had a thick book (over 500 pages) from a mainstream publisher (Doubleday) with an all-star cast of authors, all of whom at least claimed to be putting forth their most mind-bending and transgressive material yet. You had such top talents as Philip K. Dick, John Brunner, Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, and so on, and commissioning this stuff could not have been cheap. The gambit paid off in spades, though. Dangerous Visions sold very well, remains in print to this day (a rarity for an anthology, especially an original one), and it even won a special Hugo. That Harlan Ellison, the editor, never quite recaptured that lightning, is beside the point. Not every story was a winner, but Dangerous Visions was the right book that entered the market at just the right time, serving as a harbinger of the New Wave. Just as importantly, publishers realized that there was some money to be made with original anthologies—maybe not on the same scale as Dangerous Visions, but rather cheap paperbacks of maybe half the size and half the number of stories; and maybe these books wouldn’t try to reinvent the wheel like their inspiration did, but instead took on more humble mission statements. You can have editors who are maybe not as discerning as Ellison was, who would also get the work done in a timelier fashion. It was a matter of quantity over quality.
There a meteor shower, or maybe a oversaturation, of original paperback anthologies from the late ’60s through much of the ’70s, until that particular bubble burst. These were books that often focused on science fiction, rather than fantasy or horror, although there was a trickle-down effect with those other genres. Still, standards had dripped, in large part (although he was not the sole offender) due to Roger Elwood’s extremely prolific tenure as editor for a few different publishers; the number of anthologies he edited between 1972 and 1976 alone is staggering. While he was able to procure work from big names, this work ran a good chance of being mid- to low-tier stuff that would’ve likely stayed on the shelf. A major exception was Epoch, which Elwood co-edited with Robert Silverberg, a lavish and well-received book, placing first in the Locus poll that year; but this is indeed an exception that proves the rule. By the end of the ’70s the market for original anthologies had inevitably gone into decline.
Meanwhile, in the waning days of the original anthology, Kirby McCauley made his living as a New York-based literary agent with some big talent on his hands. By 1980 he had already edited one well-received original horror anthology, with 1976’s Frights, which won the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology/Collection. Frights was a hardcover original from St. Martin’s Press with a nice wraparound cover, but while McCauley procured stories by some of the top talent in horror at the time, including Ramsey Campbell and Robert Aickman, he found that he wanted to go one step further. The introduction for Dark Forces makes McCauley’s intentions with this bulky new anthology clear. McCauley’s inspiration was twofold, between August Derleth’s work as head of Arkham House and wanting to make a horror-themed counterpart to Dangerous Visions. Arkham House in its prime printed hardcover volumes with exquisite covers, all these being focused on horror, SF, and dark fantasy, from reprints of H. P. Lovecraft’s work to collections of never-before-published fiction by fresh young writers. McCauley grew up on books of horror that Derleth had edited, so in that way he overtly pays tribute to a fallen (Derleth had died in 1971) master of the field. The relationship that Dark Forces has with Dangerous Visions is more complicated, however, as there are a few major differences in how these books’ respective editors went about their businesses.
Consider that when Harlan Ellison edited Dangerous Visions, a process that took about two years, he was coming at it from the perspective of a reasonably successful author, which is to say he was a writer, first and foremost, as opposed to an editor or agent. This lack of experience with editing eventually came back to bite Ellison in the ass, with the shitshow that was the making of Again, Dangerous Visions, and far more infamously with The Last Dangerous Visions; but in the ’60s, it was novel for a writer with practically no editing experience to work with his fellow writers in such a way. Conversely, McCauley had already proven his ability with an original anthology, plus a couple reprint anthologies, and he was enough of a professional that he understood how to work with writers as people, and not just as practitioners of a certain craft. In the introduction he recounts his encouraging relationship with Stephen King while the latter wrote (first as a novelette, then ballooning into a long novella) The Mist. He also recounts having a get-together with Isaac Bashevis Singer in the latter’s apartment (they were both New Yorkers, and thus there had to be some inherent sense of kinship there), just months before Singer won the Nobel Prize for Literature. King and Singer are radically different in just about every way, in work ethic, style, and worldview, the former a flaming-liberal New Englander and the latter a conservative Polish-Jewish immigrant; yet McCauley makes it appear easy to work with both.
You may have noticed also that Singer is not a name that comes up much, if at all, in horror circles, because while a good portion of his fiction involves the supernatural, he’s not a “horror writer.” Thus we have another big difference between Dangerous Visions and Dark Forces, because while Ellison reached out to everyone in the SF field he could get his hands on, McCauley reached outside the field of horror and dark fantasy, the result being that there are authors in Dark Forces who are not primarily horror writers, and there are even a few who are known to be “literary” types. It’s not so unusual today, but back in 1980 it was a novelty for acclaimed novelist (and prolific tweeter) Joyce Carol Oates to appear in a horror anthology. You have some of the usual suspects of horror from that period (King, Campbell, even Robert Bloch late in his career, etc.), but you also have a really left-field choice like Davis Grubb, who was known at the time as author of The Night of the Hunter. You have writers like Edward Bryant and Joe Haldeman who, while they have sometimes written horror, are much more known for writing science fiction. You have a surprise appearance from Ray Bradbury, who by 1980 had long since entered the literary mainstream, and who also didn’t write much of anything at this point in his career. One can have gripes with who made it in and especially who didn’t (there are only two female authors here, Oates and Lisa Tuttle), but I can readily believe McCauley when he says he tried getting stories from everyone.
It’s also worth mentioning that McCauley didn’t construct Dark Forces with the intention of it being a boundary-pusher for the field of horror (he even explicitly says he didn’t want it to be “as revolutionary” as Dangerous Visions), and this ends up being to its benefit. True, there are a few stories here that may have been transgressive for 1980 (I’m thinking of Theodore Sturgeon’s tale of venereal agony, “Vengeance Is.,” and if I had a nickel for every “pregnant man” story in this book, I would have two nickels), but being extra-gross or what have you was not the name of the game. What might be Dark Forces‘s secret weapon and the biggest reason for its having aged pretty well is how its contents cover pretty close to the whole span of short horror literature up to circa 1980. While we don’t have much dark fantasy a la Robert E. Howard’s weird Conan stories, or the “extreme” horror that would start making the rounds in the proceeding years, there’s a great deal of variety in these 500 pages. We have traditional ghost stories such as Singer’s “The Enemy,” a rendering of the Sweeny Todd narrative with Robert Aickman’s “Mark Ingestre: The Customer’s Tale,” a cautionary tale of one unlucky busybody and a nest of vampiric creatures with Campbell’s “The Brood,” some rural “redneck” horror with Grubb and Manly Wade Wellman’s stories, and so on. There are also a couple non-supernatural tales of terror, as with Oates’s “The Bingo Master” (a personal fave of mine) and Bloch’s “The Night Before Christmas.” There are even a couple stories that fall into a certain genre that’s become rare in recent decades, that being the Christian allegory, with Gene Wolfe’s “The Detective of Dreams” and Russell Kirk’s “The Peculiar Demesne.”
And then there’s The Mist.
A story that “gets away” from the author, as it were, can sometimes be a bloated abomination, but in the case of The Mist we have one of King’s best and most tightly wound stories. Indeed King’s bad habits are pretty much absent here, and the fact that he’s able to reconcile ’50s B-movie monster action with genuine eeriness shows the level of craftmanship he’s capable of when he stops fucking around and focuses on what really matters. While the movie adaptation has a radically different ending (one that many, including King himself, prefer), I do have a soft spot for the novella’s ambiguity and cautious optimism. It was a simple choice for McCauley to put the longest story last, making The Mist the grand finale of Dark Forces, but it’s an example of how sometimes the simplest choice is also the best. Unlike the King collection Skeleton Crew, which sees The Mist as the protracted opening salvo, its position as the closing story of Dark Forces gives one the impression that the whole book had been building up to this moment. It was risky to include such a long story here (it takes up about 1/4 of the book), since if it failed then it would majorly tarnish what is otherwise a good read and leave a sour taste in the reader’s mouth; thankfully The Mist was a success, and has become one of King’s most beloved stories.
Dangerous Visions has, as far as I can tell, never gone out of print, although sadly the same can’t be said for Dark Forces. Anthologies, and especially original anthologies, have a bad tendency to have one or maybe two print runs, then go out of stock until the end of time. The only time Dark Forces has been reprinted this century was a super-expensive limited edition from Lonely Road Books in 2007. Bantam apparently did a paperback printing of Dark Forces in the early ’80s, but otherwise it’s only ever been published in hardcover in the US. It could be that Dangerous Visions was such a monolith at the time of its release, and has gone down as such an important entry in SF history, that its status (despite understandable attempts to knock it down a peg, especially as it continues to show its age more and more) has been more or less secured for the foreseeable future. Dark Forces is arguably a better book and set a better precedent (it served as an inspiration for Clive Barker to get into writing horror, and as we all know, the rest of that is history), but it also now reads, with hindsight, as one of the last big gasps for short fiction as a significant player in the realm of horror. Starting in the ’70s, both novels and movies started taking larger slices out of the pie in terms of what “mattered” for innovation and trends in horror, a field that historically largely hinged on the short story and novella. There would be major practicioners of the short horror story (see Barker, also Thomas Ligotti) to come after 1980, but Dark Forces celebrated (again, with hindsight) the short story as a form with authors who are, by and large, happiest and at their best when writing short stories and novellas.
Some authors see their reputations wither after death, and indeed this is more often than not the case; but there are also authors who have the good fortune to receive a second wind posthumously. Octavia E. Butler was a pretty well-respected writer in her lifetime, but in the years since her untimely death in 2006 she has become one of the select few from the old school to be both widely read and respected among the modern SF readership. This is despite Butler not having written a great deal over the course of her life, going from fairly productive in the ’70s and ’80s to only writing two novels in the ’90s, and then finally just one in the 2000s. She also only wrote little more than half a dozen short stories, just enough to fill a single collection, Bloodchild and Other Stories, which is also padded out with an afterword for each story and a few essays. While Butler wrote very little short fiction, though, she won back-to-back Hugos for it, with “Bloodchild” itself winning her that second Hugo, plus a Nebula. “Bloodchild” is one of the most acclaimed and famous (or infamous) of all “modern” SF stories, being Cronenberg-esque body horror while also being surprisingly melancholy. It is Butler’s “pregnant man” story.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the June 1984 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Second Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois), Best Science Fiction of the Year 14 (ed. Terry Carr), The New Hugo Winners (ed. Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg), Foundations of Fear (ed. David G. Hartwell), The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer), The Big Book of Science Fiction (ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer), and of course the Butler collection Bloodchild and Other Stories. Really it’s hard to not have at least one copy of this story on hand if you’re a serious SF reader.
Enhancing Image
I said before that “Bloodchild” is a “pregnant man” story (there were more of those being written back then than you would think), but it’s also a coming-of-age story, about Gan, our narrator, recalling a moment in his life that made him cross the shadow-line from adolescence to adulthood. This is a story about the loss of one’s innocence, which means it’s also about trauma. Gan and the rest of his family are Terran settlers who have come to a planet already host to at least one intelligent race, and now they’re stuck on “the Preserve,” with T’Gatoi, an elder of said intelligent race, being their local symapthizer. The Tlic, a somewhat mammalian but also insectoid (they have more than two arms and lay eggs) race, are the ones in control here. Historically, on Earth, there’s a nasty tendency for the colonizing force to overwhelm and then assimilate the indigenous populace, but this is not always so; in her afterword, Butler explains that she modeled the relations between the Terrans and Tlic off British colonialism in India. The humans here are thoroughly outnumbered and outmatched by their alien hosts, and unlike their real-world counterparts it seems like the Tlic can easily kill or drive out the settlers any day if they wanted to. The two parties thus have reached an agreement wherein the settlers are allowed a swath of land while also serving a specific use for the aliens.
The Tlic are some of the more interesting aliens in SF, in that they meet John W. Campbell’s criteria for an intelligent alien that could think as well as a human but not quite like a human. They’re big, at least as big as adult humans, and live considerably longer, with the nutrients from sterile eggs apparently contributing to slowed aging. They also have no issue with slavery, since they buy and sell Terrans, and back in the day they even split up Terran families for this purpose. (Does this remind you of anything?) They and the Terrans are biologically compatible enough that the latter can serve as hosts for Tlic eggs, which… more on that in a second. In her afterword Butler writes that she had taken inspiration for the Tlic when she was doing research for what eventually became her Xenogenesis trilogy. She looked into the workings of the botfly, which as you might know already is a bug found in the Amazon that lays its eggs in living hosts. The larvae, once ready, break out of the host’s skin, which for humans is a gross but by no means fatal business—unless there’s an infection. The Tlic similarly lay their eggs in living hosts, except it’s much worse here, since whatever has the misfortune of carrying Tlic eggs will die in gory fashion when those eggs hatch. The one gripe I have with how Butler conceived her aliens is that while they’re based on the botfly, it’s not a 1:1 comparison, and there are a few unanswered questions. The botfly is an insect, only yay big, and only lives for a few days, while the Tlic are the size of humans, and live for several decades at a time as opposed to days. How such a species would survive without completely ravaging the ecosystem, I’m not sure.
(Of course, given that humans have been ravaging Earth’s ecosystems for decades, it’s possible that our own species will not survive in the long run, or that much of life on Earth will die before us.)
In a sense the Tlic reflect a certain type of human endeavor, while the human settlers are put in the place of put-upon immigrants or enslaved peoples. Butler looks at the minority of whites living in British India, or indeed South Africa, and wonders what would happen if the tables were turned and the white minority were to be subject to the “colonized” populace’s whims. This is oversimplifying things a great deal, but it does make you wonder how it is that Dutch and British whites could make up not even 10% of South Africa’s population, yet to this day own the vast majority of the land there. Typically a minority demographic is beholden to the whims and prejudices of the majority, hence, despite some progress being made, nearly 30% of the population in the US being beholden to the 72% that’s white. So Gan, despite being part of a colonizing force, is not the one in control. In fact he is next in line in his family for carrying a nice batch of eggs, which makes today’s “delivery” quite the learning experience. Bram Lomas, an adult man, has been made pregnant with Tlic eggs, and the operation to get them out of him before they can kill him is most unpleasant. The delivery, which takes up the middle portion of “Bloodchild,” is undoubtedly the most memorable part, being pretty graphic but also serving a purpose in Gan’s character arc. I’m not gonna quote a whole passage from this section of the story, because I don’t hate you that much, but it’s a lot. It’s also worth mentioning that while a more conventional story might have the delivery as the big climax, Butler makes it so that it’s over and done with by the time we’re in the last third. After all, the delivery is not the point of the whole thing, but rather how the experience sparks an epiphany for Gan.
There Be Spoilers Here
The way this works is that delivering larvae for a human might be fatal if there’s a surrogate willing to take the fall. Doesn’t necessarily have to be a live body to receive the larvae. T’Gatoi gives Gan the thankless job of having to go out and kill one of the livestock, one that must be of suitable size, although he’s never done such a thing before and taking a knife to one of the “achti” (some native animal) would be risky. He opts to take a different kind of risk and gets out the gun that’s been hidden in the family home. Guns were outlawed among the settlers decades ago, but as with real-world countries with strict gun laws, one occasionally does find itself inside. After killing the achti and witnessing the finale of the delivery, Gan is understandably shaken by the whole thing, especially since he’s due to go through the same ordeal himself in the future. The final scene is a confrontation between Gan and T’Gatoi in which the former threatens to kill himself, in order to force his sister to be the one in the family to “give birth.” Ultimately he changes his mind and decides to take up the responsibility, but we’re not sure if his pregnancy has already happened by the time he’s relating this story to us or if it’s still off in the future. It’s a rather abrupt ending, which I’m not sure is exactly a negative criticism, but it kinda took me off-guard to have suddenly reached the end on this rereading. This is a setting you could certainly build a whole novel out of, but Butler is content to keep is contained within a single short story.
A Step Farther Out
Sometimes when I read something for this site, I groan with the realization that I won’t have much to write about, usually when it’s something that’s middle-of-the-road. (Unfortunately there is a lot of middle-of-the-road fiction in the SFF magazines, probably way more even than straight-up bad fiction.) On the one hand, “Bloodchild” is a reread for me, but my memory of it was pretty dim; at the same time I knew going in that there would be quite a bit to talk about, but then this is often the case with Butler. It’s not a personal favorite of mine, because it is, by design, a pretty unpleasant read, but it’s a very well-constructed story. I wish Butler wrote more short fiction, but I’m also not surprised that she didn’t.
(Cover by Len de Lessio. Twilight Zone Magazine, October 1986.)
Who Goes There?
Robert McCammon made his debut in 1978, but didn’t really come to prominence until the latter half of the ’80s, in what was a meteor shower of both novels and short fiction. His longest and most ambitious novel up to that point, 1987’s Swan Song, won him a Stoker, and the next half-decade or so saw a turnout of one novel every year, each one being very well-received. At the beginning, McCammon’s work was decidedly horror, of the Southern Gothic variety (he was born and raised in Alabama), crossed with that rather nostalgic-whimsical style Stephen King became famous for. This mixing of influences arguably reached its climax with Boy’s Life in 1991, which is only nominally horror while at the same time being a mish-mash of several genres. By the time Gone South was published a year later, McCammon had become disillusioned with the horror publishing industry and quit the scene for about a decade, which no doubt hurt his chances at having long-term success, but from his perspective it was a necessary move. “Yellowjacket Summer” is simple, maybe a little too straightforward, but it shows McCammon during a time when he was compulsively writing spooky fiction by the mile. There’s some King in there, undeniably, but also a strong touch of the rural South that’s totally McCammon.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the October 1986 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine. The only notable reprint is in the McCammon collection Blue World and Other Stories, which is in print.
Enhancing Image
Right away something is kinda off with how McCammon tells this story, and it took me a day’s reflection to figure out exactly what it was: it’s the fact that we have a third-person limited narrator who switches perspectives between characters on a dime and without scene breaks. This is a problem for some people with a novel, but with a short story it’s pretty much a deal-breaker as far as technique goes. We’re in Georgia, in the middle of nowhere at some gas station, with a boy named Toby, who (the introductory blurb basically tells us) has a nasty trick up his sleeve. We soon switch perspectives to a family coming by the gas station where Toby’s at: Carla, the mom, plus her two kids, Joe and Trish. Perspective jumps to Carla, then Joe, then back again, all without a pause in the action, which I found distracting. I cross-examined the TZ printing with how it appears in Blue World, because scene or even chapter breaks might be added or removed for a story between its original printing and elsewhere; but no, I guess this is really how McCammon intended the story to be understood. I know this might come off as overemphasizing a certain flaw, but I do think it seriously gets in the way of what is otherwise a perfectly competent horror yarn about what it’s like to be stuck on the side of the road without cell cervice.
Anyway, what McCammon does do well here is evoke a certain time and place, which I’d already figured from reading Boy’s Life. What Stephen King does for New England, McCammon does for the Bible belt. Consider this description of the gas station: “The ancient-looking gas station, its roof covered with kudzu and its bricks bleached yellow by a hundred summer suns, was a beautiful sight, especially since the Voyager’s tank was getting way too low for comfort.” Ignore that obviously the gas station could not have been around for literally a hundred years, it’s the idea that counts. Now, when the family gets there Joe has to go pretty bad, and when you gotta go you gotta go. Right from the beginning we get the impression that Toby is kind of a bastard, but it’s the scene in the bathroom with Joe that we get our first real taste of Toby’s telepathic power over bees—yellowjackets, specifically. Why he has this power or how he got it, don’t know. This is not a story about the why or the how, and it’s not even a story that’s really “about” anything, other than the visceral horror of being confronted with one mean kid and an endless horde of bees. This is not a fun thing to read about, of course, especially if you’re allergic to bee stings. Thankfully Joe survives the encounter, but unfortunately this is just the beginning of the family’s troubles as they move from the gas station (not being able to get gas there), to a nearby cafe, which happens to be eerily deserted.
McCammon doesn’t strike me as someone who’s into giving incisive social commentary (Consider that Swan Song, a novel clocking in at over 800 pages, has a message that boils down to: “Nuclear war is bad.” Well of course it’s bad, Robert.), but if “Yellowjack Summer” is “about” anything, it’s about the maggot-gnawed husk that is rural America, or what used to be the American frontier. In Georgia we have Atlanta as the beacon of what we think of as civilizatuion, but there are pockets in this state (among others) that seem have been frozen solid decades ago, or gotten quietly left behind by the rest of the country. This story takes place in Capshaw, which is a town, but not much of one. Capshaw is one of many places in America which the country at large has long pushed under the kitchen rug, like some old bread crumbs one can’t be bothered to vacuum up.
Consider this:
The town was quiet except for the distant cawing of a crow. It amazed Carla that such a primitive-looking place should exist just seven or eight miles off the main highway. In an age of interstates and rapid travel, it was easy to forget that little hamlets like this still stood on the back roads—and Carla felt like kicking herself in the butt for getting them into this mess.
I should probably take a moment to bring up an obvious influence for this story, which is Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life.” Had McCammon read the original story as well as seen the Twilight Zone adaptation? Probably. It’s a rock-solid premise: What is a child suddenly got telepathic powers and bent a small town to his will? Toby doesn’t have the world-shattering capabilities of Anthony, but he’s older and more actively sadistic. It becomes clear that one reason why Capshaw is a mostly deserted town is because of Toby, and the few people remaining are too scared to leave. Emma, a rather gaunt woman who works at the cafe, has reached her breaking point by the time Carla arrives, which results in a pretty tense scene. I just wish I cared more. Maybe it’s because of the constantly shifting perspective and the underdeveloped setting, but I found it hard to get invested, even if McCammon has an eye for pacing and this is a smooth read.
There Be Spoilers Here
The good news is that while the yellowjackets do sting a lot, and the chances of getting to real civilization in a van that’s running on E are low, it turns out that evil children are not immune to getting run over with a fucking car. Good to see that child murder wins the day.
A Step Farther Out
Sorry I didn’t have much to say about this one, but sometimes that’s just how it is. I feel like I may have been a bit harsh toward McCammon, but I think it may have to do with his being stronger as a novelist than with short stories. I could be wrong, of course, and it’s possible that “Yellowjacket Summer,” which anyway hasn’t been reprinted much, may just be a relatively weak entry in his vast oeuvre.
Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 