(Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Analog, December 1972.)
As has unfortunately become commonplace, there have been a few deaths in the family. Christopher Priest and Brian Stableford died in February and Vernor Vinge little over a week ago. This last one hit me by far the hardest. Obviously there are some people I’m not mentioning, but unfortunately unless I really wanted to I can’t cover everyone. There’s too much. The past month or so has been rough for me. I had a nasty fall a few weeks ago and I seem to have acquired mild PTSD from it. Half of my face got messed up and I ended up spending some time in the ER. Obviously I’m doing better now. Yet somehow I don’t feel totally “right.”
Hopefully some good (or at least interesting) fiction will help me! We have a nice mix: two SF novellas, plus two SF short stories, two fantasy, and two horror. Or at least these stories seem to fit predominantly into those genres; obviously they’re not mutually exclusive.
For the novellas:
“A Woman’s Liberation” by Ursula K. Le Guin. From the July 1995 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. One of the most universally beloved of all SFF writers, Le Guin started relatively late but would enjoy a very long and acclaimed career. She’s one of the few authors to enjoy about equal reverence for both her SF and fantasy. Her Hainish Cycle, especially The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, might constitute her best and most important work overall. “A Woman’s Liberation” is set in the same universe as those novels, and is a loose sequel to “Forgiveness Day” and “A Man of the People.”
“Palely Loitering” by Christopher Priest. From the January 1979 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. British Science Fiction Award winner for Best Short Fiction. Priest died in February, after a career spanning more than half a century. His 1974 novel Inverted World is something of a cult classic. His 1995 novel The Prestige was turned into a movie by Christopher Nolan. ISFDB classifies “Palely Loitering” as a novelette, but at about forty pages in F&SF I suspect it counts as a novella. It got a Hugo nomination for Best Novelette but placed third in the Locus poll for Best Novella.
For the short stories:
“The Hounds of Tindalos” by Frank Belknap Long. From the March 1929 issue of Weird Tales. Long had a ridiculously long (ha) career, spanning from the 1920s to his death in 1994. He was a close friend of H. P. Lovecraft and the two seemed to take inspiration from each other, with “The Hounds of Tindalos” being one of the first Cthulhu Mythos stories not written by Lovecraft.
“Traps” by F. Paul Wilson. From the Summer 1987 issue of Night Cry. A doctor by day and a bestselling author by night, Wilson is the only person to have earned both the Bram Stoker and Prometheus Award for Lifetime Achievement. He likes to hop between science fiction and horror, with the two not being mutually exclusive. “Traps” itself was a Stoker nominee for Best Short Story.
“The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death” by Ellen Kushner. From the September 1991 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Kushner got started in the ’80s writing Choose Your Own Adventure books before turning to proper fantasy literature and even radio. This story is set in the same universe as her novel Swordspoint but, as far as I can tell, is not a sequel.
“Two Suns Setting” by Karl Edward Wagner. From the May 1976 issue of Fantastic. British Fantasy Award winner for Best Short Story. Wagner was a devotee of both horror and sword-and-sorcery fantasy. His Kane series very much follows in Robert E. Howard’s footsteps, but Wagner at his best was a genuine poet as well. “Two Suns Setting” was his first (and I think only) appearance in Fantastic.
“Original Sin” by Vernor Vinge. From the December 1972 issue of Analog Science Fiction. Despite debuting in 1965 and remaining active until about half a decade ago, Vinge’s output is fairly small; but, given the five Hugo wins, he certainly did something right. “Original Sin” is one of Vinge’s more obscure stories, but I went with it on the recommendation of a certain colleague.
“The Growth of the House of Usher” by Brian Stableford. From the Summer 1988 issue of Interzone. Stableford passed away in February after a very long and winding career. (Incidentally Priest, Vinge, and Stableford all debuted within a few years of each other.) He was a prolific translator of French SF and contributed to the SF Encyclopedia, on top of a massive amount of fiction.
Charles Beaumont was one of a generation of SFF writers who may have started out in the pulps, but who quickly adopted a style that allowed them to enter the slicks—possibly even attract mainstream attention. Beaumont debuted in the January 1951 issue of Amazing Stories with “‘The Devil, You Say?’,” which he would much later adapt into one of the more iconic episodes of The Twilight Zone, for which he was a prolific contributor. Like Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson, Beaumont played fast and loose with genre conventions, but ultimately one could consider him a horror writer. It should come as no surprise that he would write a few scripts for Roger Corman movies, including an adaptation of his own novel (his only solo novel, sadly), The Intruder. In the ’50s and early ’60s he was one of the best short story writers, and his list of classic stories (“Perchance to Dream,” “The Jungle,” “The Howling Man,” etc.) is impressive.
No doubt Beaumont would’ve kept going, maybe even made his big break as a screenwriter, had a horrific illness (likely a combination of Alzheimer’s and Pick’s disease) not eaten away at his brain in the last few years of his life. He apparently looked and acted like a man who was pushing ninety when he died in 1967, at 38 years old. Beaumont’s early death is surely one of the more tragic losses in the field’s history, made worse because he stopped writing right before the New Wave kicked in. But today’s story, “Free Dirt,” shows a young and hungry Beaumont, arguably at the height of his powers as a short story craftsman. Here we’re presented with a ruthless and ironic horror yarn in the allegorical mode.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the May 1955 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It has since been reprinted in The Graveyard Reader (ed. Groff Conklin), The Best Horror Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (ed. Edward L. Ferman and Anne Jordan), and now can be found pretty easily in the Beaumont collection Perchance to Dream: Selected Stories.
Enhancing Image
Mr. Aorta (what an odd name) is a scoundrel. I don’t mean in the sense that he chases after women or loves gambling, but that Mr. Aorta is a cheapskate to the point where he’ll dupe other people into not making him pay for anything. Beaumont set out to write a thoroughly detestable protagonist, but he had a challenge on his hands: making someone utterly loathsome without also making him a rapist or murderer. Now, Mr. Aorta is a thief, but being a thief doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person; rather it’s his devotion to cheating other people out of their dues that makes him a shithead. He sees thievery as like a craft. Consider how he has gotten not having to pay train fare down to a science: “Get in the middle of the crowd, look bewildered, inconspicuous, search your pockets earnestly, the while edging from the vision of the conductor—then, take a far seat and read a newspaper.” He doesn’t seem to have a job, instead living off all but picking other people’s pockets, even going so far as to impersonate a homeless man and ask for change whilst having his own house. You have to admit, this is rather monstrous behavior, and Beaumont does a great job at setting up his loathsome character for failure.
We know Mr. Aorta is greedy by his actions, but also by how he looks: he is described as grotesquely fat. I’m not even sure if this counts as a negative criticism, but I wanted to acknowledge it, since obesity has been used for centuries as shorthand for a few different meanings, though they are by no means exclusive. It depends on context, of course. More often an obese person is framed as being greedy and/or glutenous, especially with a penchant for overeating; more abstractly it can symbolize the infinite wealth-seeking of capitalist industry (when we talk about “fat cats” we’re talking about fat guys in fancy suits chomping cigars). More optimistically it can symbolize happiness or contentedness: Santa Claus is always depicted as rotund and the Buddha is sometimes depicted as quite massive, despite the historic Buddha certainly not having those proportions. In Beaumont’s story, Mr. Aorta is a miser in the truest sense of the word; he is the gold-hoarding dragon on top of the mountain; he is the penny-pinching capitalist taken to almost an unrealistic extreme. I wanna say this kind of fat-shaming is a product of the story’s age, but sadly you and I know fat-shaming continues to be almost a universal quirk of human behavior; even leftists, who really should know better, are not immune to it.
So how does Mr. Aorta get his just desserts? Because even from Anthony Boucher’s introduction we’re told that this is the story of a man who has, let’s say a deeply flawed worldview (that everything not nailed down belongs to him implicitly), and that this man is about to learn a very hard lesson. In that sense “Free Dirt” is nigh impossible to spoil, because both the author and editor allude to the protagonist’s comeuppance at the start. How does Mr. Aorta come to pick up mounds of free (cemetery) dirt by the truckload and what could possibly compel him? Obviously it’s the word on the sign: free. “What is the meaning, the essence of free? Why, something for nothing. And, as has been pointed out, to get something for nothing was Mr. Aorta’s chiefest pleasure in this mortal life.” Mr. Aorta borrows his neighbor Mr. Santucci’s (he has a first name, but I’m omitting it for the sake of consistency) truck and periodically dumps the free dirt in his backyard, where he intends to grow a garden with it. Think of all that free, furtive soil, never mind that it came from a cemetery, pay no mind to that. If this was a realistic story nothing untoward would happen to Mr. Aorta, but because he has the misfortune of living inside a supernatural allegory, he’s about to find out—too late—that he has made a grievous error.
There Be Spoilers Here
The garden scheme works—until it doesn’t. The free dirt bears Mr. Aorta vegetables until it stops, until the garden starts to degenerate. Desperate, he goes from taking cemetery dirt that was on offer to straight-up grave-digging—not graverobbing, but taking soil from dug but unoccupied graves in that cemetery. Little does he know he’s also digging his own grave. One night, in the backyard, his garden having been obliterated, he sees a solitary reminder of what his scheme was supposed to produce. “A white fronded thing, a plant, perhaps only a flower; but there, certainly, and all that was left.” He reaches for the flower, but soon finds himself at the bottom of a pit, just deep enough (and Mr. Aorta being physically weak enough) that he can’t quite get out of it. The comes the kicker: God has his vengeance. The flower, just out of his reach, now resembles “a hand, a big human hand, waxy and stiff and attached to the earth.” Then the dirt starts being piled on him. It’s a nasty way to go, being buried alive, but it’s about to get weirder.
Enough time has passed without word from Mr. Aorta that Mr. Santucci becomes concerned, despite not being exactly fond of the man. He turns out to not be in his garden where we would expect, but in his dining room—dead. Mr. Santucci and his wife think he had simply eaten until his stomach ruptured, but the autopsy finds that Mr. Aorta’s stomach is filled—several pounds’ worth, maybe—with dirt. How could he have eaten that much dirt, or indeed more than a little of it? The idea of choking on dirt is horrifying enough. But then if he died in the garden like we were led to believe then how did he get back inside his house? These are troubling questions and Beaumont’s not giving us the answers. “He tried to get rid of the idea, but when the doctors found Mr. Aorta’s stomach to contain many pounds of dirt—and nothing else—Mr. Santucci slept badly, for almost a week.” Clearly we’re not supposed to expect a realistic or plausible answer, but simply to accept that the dirt is somehow cursed and that God (or some other power not to be toyed with) has reaked vengeance on Mr. Aorta. It’s an allegory—a fairy tale about a man being undone by his own greed.
A Step Farther Out
It’s been a few days since I had read this story (bit of a long explanation), so the visceral discomfort I felt with the ending has since softened. With that said, its effectiveness is undeniable. The style is indicative of slick fiction of the ’50s, and in that sense it shows its age, but with a bit of finesse it could feasibly be published today. Beaumont seemed preoccupied with the inner darkness of man, whether it be greed or the inability to connect with one’s brethren, and “Free Dirt” is a succinct example of Beaumont as a moralist—not the good-tempered Sunday school teacher but the righteous vengeance of the Old Testament God.
Robert Graves was, like Ernest Hemingway and J. R. R. Tolkien, is a writer whose subject matter of choice is inexptricably linked with having survived the horrors of World War I. His wartime experiences would more or less shape his career as a writer, resulting most tangibly in his first commercial success, his memoir Good-Bye to All That. Also like Hemingway, Graves was a hot mess: his first marriage was a disaster, and he had an intense homosexual relationship (he was a messy bisexual like yours truly) in his youth that did not end well. Then there was the PTSD from his time in the war, which no doubt strained things. He was involved in a sort of love triangle, between his first wife and fellow writer Laura Riding, in the ’20s when he and Riding were still early in their careers. Incidentally (or maybe not), Graves would write “The Shout” during a rather fraught period in his relationsip with Riding. Be sure to put a pin in that one.
Graves considered himself an Artist™, someone who was genuinely interested in the classics, and unlike the vast majority of writers he achieved real commercial success. Good-Bye to All That was popular, but I, Claudius and its sequel Claudius the God became major bestsellers that are still talked about and considered some of the best fiction of the 20th century. Undertandable! These two novels are great, and they are what convinced me to read “The Shout,” which is easily the most famous out of Graves’s relatively small body of short fiction. It even got adapted into a film of the same name, which is decent but which I think loses much of the story’s psychological density; or rather much got lost in translation.
Placing Coordinates
“The Shout” was first published in 1929 as a chapbook. It was reprinted in the April 1952 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It has the unusual honor of appearing in F&SF twice, the second time being in the May 1959 issue, which you can find here. Prior to its first F&SF appearance it saw book publication in the Graves collection Occupation: Writer. It’s been anthologized quite a few times over the years, but seems to have gone scarce recently.
Enhancing Image
An unnamed narrator visits an asylum and has a chat with Charles Crossley, who we’re told is highly intelligent but has one or two delusions. Immediately we know something is up because Crossley thinks he was arrested for the murders of three people, and as we find much later on he recounts these happening; but apparently they didn’t. Or did they? The other delusion, “which is more humorous,” is that he thinks his soul has been broken into four pieces. How did this happen? How did he get thrown into a mental hospital? Crossley is all too happy to tell us, and about a certain couple who, not coincidentally, the narrator is friends with. In fact all three partiers know each other. Most of the story is Crossley’s monologuing to the narrator, and this is important to remember because Graves is gonna play some tricks on us. Unreliable narrators get brought up constantly in literature classes, and Crossley is a good example.
Through Crossley’s narration we’re introduced to Richard and Rachel, and right away I was weirded out a bit because Rachel is my therapist’s name. Anyway, they’re pretty comfortable with each other, married in sort of the European sense (they admit having crushes on other people, but never actually commit adultery), to the point where they discuss their dreams with each other regularly. The latest one is a doozy, not least because somehow they both the same dream at the same time. “We not only live together and talk together and sleep together, but it seems we now even dream together,” Richard says wistfully, although the dream will turn out to be foreboding. A man with a black handkerchief wanders the sand dunes on the outskirts of town, and this man turns out to be Crossley in the waking world. Richard and Crossley meet after church one day and, after tormenting some kids, Crossley wedges his way into the couple’s lives. He’s charming, and yet also uncanny. He claims to have spent eighteen years in the Australian outback, hanging out with the indigenous population, and in that time learning a few tricks—the biggest of these being a “terror shout.” One degree of it will drive you mad, another will kill you.
Crossley claims to have used the shout before, but Richard is skeptical. Rachel, not so much. In a sense you’ve seen this plot before: strange outsider reeks havoc on the lives of an unassming middle-upper class family, no doubt the author saying something about class or sexuality or whatever. If you’ve seen Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem, or more recently Saltburn, you can guess the trajectory of the plot—only you would still be wrong to a degree. I think the love triangle aspect, in which Crossley inevitably cucks Richard and keeps Rachel to himself (though she later claims she was just joshing), is the least interesting part of it, it does make sense when you consider Graves’s chaotic love life at the time. He admitted to seeing himself as Richard in the triangle, with Laura Riding presumably being the inspiration for Crossley. Curious that the woman in the real-world equation is replaced with a man. The tension between Richard and Crossley is certainly not what you would think of as between two straight men, although maybe I’m projecting Graves’s queerness here. Richard’s interest in getting a demonstration of Crossley’s shout could be thought of as like a man propositioning another man for a sexual act. Richard surviving the shout (he puts wax in his ears ahead of time, unbeknownst to Crossley) marks the turning point of the story, but it also serves as a point of no return—as if Richard and Crossley have had sex by some strange proxy, and indeed it’s here that the story becomes hard to decipher.
So about the stones. There are stones scattered across the sand dunes, which Richard finds may not just be ordinary stones. Following the shout, he picks up a stone and it’s like his mind is suddenly filled with information he couldn’t possibly have known before. “He began to think about shoemaking, a trade of which he had known nothing, but now every trick was familiar to him.” He tosses the stone out of fright and just like that, his knowledge of shoemaking leaves him. Things get even weirder when he later talks with the town shoemaker and the other man recalls the sensation of having been thrown suddenly by some unseen force. If what Richard suspect is right then every person in town is connected with a stone in the sand dunes, as if each person’s soul were not in their own body but kept away in these inanimate objects. This means Richard and Rachel have their own stones that their souls are linked to, and maybe the same can be said of Crossley. This reads as insane, if taken literally, but remember that Crossley is now telling us this as someone whose stone has been broken into pieces. The stone breaking could be a metaphor for severe mental trauma, which Graves would know a thing or two about. I know a few people whose personalities have fractured from PTSD, and when understood that way Crossley’s case does not seem as outlandish. But still, it’s surreal.
There Be Spoilers Here
Cucking Richard is good a good idea, especially if he finds the stone your soul is connected to. Crossley loses his mind and is promptly arrested for having killed three people in Australia—only we know he wasn’t arrested. At the asylum, Crossley suddenly loses it again and threatens to use the shout when a doctor detains him—and then something very weird happens. A storm kicks up and the narrator narrowly survives what seems to be a burst of lightning that touches down, killing both Crossley and the doctor. It’s unclear if the shout is what killed the doctor or the lightning bolt, since he’s found with his fingers in his ears. Did Crossley somehow conjure lightning or was it a hell of a coincidence? But then we get to the weirdest part. The narrator meets up with Richard and Rachel (the real couple, divorced from Crossley’s perspective), and they react with horror to the doctor dying (they knew him) but barely react to Crossley dying. They claim to have met him only once, casually, as he was putting on a magic show. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Crossley did not have intimate knowledge of the couple like he claimed to have.
Normally this would be where such a story would end, but Graves gives us one last little mindfuck of a line that I’ve been thinking about since then. Rachel says that Richard didn’t like Crossley’s magic show, and Richard (again, the real Richard) says, “‘No, I couldn’t stand the way he looked at you all the time.” Last line of the story and we’re left with a lingering quetion or two. How much was Crossley making up? Did more happen between the three of them than the couple at the end are letting on? Is Richard more prone to jealousy than Crossley made him out to be? Certainly it would be insecure of him to be hung up on how a stage magician looked at his wife. It’s impossible to say because we don’t meet the real Richard and Rachel until the very end and they only have a couple lines; at the same time those lines are telling. Crossley claimed Rachel visited him at the asylum but at the end the two don’t seem to have ever met him past the one time, unless we take Richard’s “all the time” remark to imply it wasn’t just the one time—that they really were intimate with each other. It’s intentionally confusing, and obviously that won’t sit well with all readers, but I’m a sucker for this kind of literary mind game.
A Step Farther Out
On the one hand I’m not sure how effective this story is as horror. The shout itself is not exactly scary (it’s even less scary in the movie, but that might a problem of trying to do it justice visually), and the supernatural element is more confusing than frightening. On the other hand, I’ve thought a lot about this story over the past few days. From a literary perspective, when trying to take in all the ambiguities (not to mention observations on mental illness) Graves packed into such a small space, it’s almost a masterpiece. I think it’s fascinating. It’s a good example of F&SF reprinting material by mainstream authors that fit in with the magazine’s MO.
Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas wanted to start a fantasy magazine in the mid-’40s, but couldn’t get it greenlit until the decade was about to end. They both were perfectly qualified for such an endeavor, at a time when the SFF magazine boom was still a year or two off: Boucher was an accomplished author and book reviewer while McComas had just co-edited what was, at the time, the definitive SF anthology with Adventures in Time and Space. According to Lawrence E. Spivak’s (F&SF‘s initial publisher) introduction in the inaugural issue, The Magazine of Fantasy would try to encompass the whole breadth of fantasy, “from the thrilling to the chilling, from the comic to the cosmic,” providing a safe haven for what must’ve at the time seemed like the endangered species that was short fantasy fiction. Unlike Weird Tales, which leaned towards horror, and Unknown, which leaned towards the comedic, The Magazine of Fantasy would take a jack-of-all-trades approach with what material was accepted.
Of course, It would only stay “just” a fantasy magazine for the first issue. From the Winter-Spring 1950 issue onward it would be the magazine we now know and love, incorporating SF and fantasy of almost every flavor. But just because the editors caved and hopped on the SF bandwagon doesn’t mean F&SF was any less unique than before; on the contrary, it remained the only SFF magazine of its kind in the ’50s, and even today it stands out as arguably the most progressive outlet in the field thanks to the efforts of current editor Sheree Renée Thomas. Indeed for most of its life F&SF has had a left-leaning mindset, with Boucher and McComas making it clear from day one that they would go out of their way to encourage women who were trying to make it in what was up to that point a thoroughly male-dominated market. When it came time for picking what stories by which authors I should cover this month, it would’ve been easy to have an entirely all-women lineup, given contributors to F&SF in the Boucher/McComas years: Zenna Henderson, Rosel George Brown, Miriam Allen deFord, Mildred Clingerman, Judith Merril, and the list keeps going.
F&SF turns 75 this year; it is the second oldest SFF magazine still active, only behind Analog Science Fiction. Whereas Analog intentionally appeals to an older and more hard-nosed sect of genre readership, however, F&SF is remarkable for its ability to change its colors chameleon-like with the times, and even being ahead of its time on occasion. It would be a fool’s errand to cover fiction from the whole span of F&SF‘s existence, so I decided to devote March, July, and October to the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s respectively. As such, for this month, we’re looking at a small sample of what was published during the Boucher/McComas years, then during Boucher’s solo tenure, and finally the beginning of a short but very fruitful period with Robert P. Mills’s editorship. Something that really made F&SF stand above its contemporaries was its sense of dignity, being a digest with artsy and at times abstract covers that managed to snag authors from outside the genre SFF market. You have Shirley Jackson, who was definitely a genre author but who very rarely went outside the “slick” markets; and you have Robert Graves, who was totally outside the field but who would appear (with reprints) a few times in F&SF. I think I’ve said enough now; let’s get to it.
For the short stories:
“The Listening Child” by Margaret St. Clair. From the December 1950 issue. I covered St. Clair not long ago, although if I’m being honest I was in the midst of a horrible time in my life (long story), and thus I think she deserves another go now that I’m (for the moment) in a healthier state of mind. “The Listening Child” was the first published under St. Clair’s “Idris Seabright” pseudonym.
“The Shout” by Robert Graves. From the April 1952 issue. First published in 1929. The early years of F&SF were defined in part by its reprints, so I felt obligated to pick one. It helps that I had read I, Claudius and Claudius the God recently and loved them. “The Shout” sees Graves going for supernatural horror, published the same year as his star-making memoir Good-Bye to All That.
“The Silken-Swift” by Theodore Sturgeon. From the November 1953 issue. Sturgeon is one of my favorite writers; in terms of the short story I think he rivals Hemingway and Cheever. Nobody in the field at the time had a bigger heart, and impressively he hopped between SF, fantasy, and horror. “The Silken-Swift” is from Sturgeon during his peak era, and is also said to be one of his own favorites.
“Mousetrap” by Andre Norton. From the June 1954 issue. Readers of a certain age will tell you they got into SF by reading Heinlein’s juveniles, Norton’s, or both. Norton is one of the most prolific writers in the field’s history, with her Witch World series alone taking up a whole shelf or two. Strange thing is she wrote relatively little short fiction, and even less of it appeared in the magazines.
“Free Dirt” by Charles Beaumont. From the May 1955 issue. Beaumont was one of the best horror and fantasy writers of the ’50s and early ’60s, and would’ve kept at it had he not died of a horrific brain disease at 38. He was the third most prolific writer on The Twilight Zone, behind Richard Matheson and, of course, Rod Serling. He also had a movie review column in F&SF around this time.
“Steel” by Richard Matheson. From the May 1956 issue. Speaking of which, Matheson is a personal favorite of mine, and unlike Beaumont he did live (indeed a very long time) to see some degree of mainstream recognition. He’ll always be most famous for I Am Legend, but I’ll always think of him first as a short story writer and screenwriter. “Steel” was itself turned into a Twilight Zone episode.
“MS. Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie” by C. M. Kornbluth. From the July 1957 issue. Like Beaumont, Kornbluth died way too young, but he also got a lot of work done in the short time he had. He’s most known for The Space Merchants, written with Frederik Pohl, but for my money he was a better short story writer than novelist. This was one of the last stories of his published in his lifetime.
“The Omen” by Shirley Jackson. From the March 1958 issue. Jackson is one of those authors who needs no introduction. She’s one of the most famous American horror writers, and one of the few prior to the ’70s to find success with horror novels more specifically. Sadly she didn’t live to take advantage of the ’70s horror boom. “The Omen” is pretty obscure for Jackson, likely because it’s not horror.
“Day at the Beach” by Carol Emshwiller. From the August 1959 issue. Wife of artist and filmmaker Ed Emshwiller, Carol is just as talented as her husband, proving early on she had a knack for the short story. She started in the ’50s and kept writing until her death in 2019. In a case of creatives in a relationship supporting each other, Ed sometimes did art for Carol’s stories, as is the case here.
I think I struck enough of a balance between SF and fantasy with this roster. It’s very tempting to focus only on the SF part of F&SF, but fantasy of various flavors (except sword-and-sorcery, which Boucher and McComas were weirdly deaf to) has always played a part in the magazine, especially in those early years. Short stories, as opposed to novellas and serials, defined F&SF at the outset, so it also happens to make sense we’re reading nothing but short stories this month.
I’ve covered David Drake before, with his dinosaur time travel novella “Time Safari,” and while I wasn’t a fan of that story it did succeed in making me curious about Drake’s work. Sadly Drake passed away in the interim, and what struck me about people’s reactions to this was that Drake was a pretty uncontroversial figure despite being a pioneering writer of military SF, never mind a heavy contributor to the Baen stable. He was maybe (I’m not sure, truth be told) on the conservative side, but he wasn’t a raging bigot and he didn’t seem to have crackpot theories about the environment or the government or what have you. Reading his introductions to some of his stories, he seemed to like someone who understood the human cost of war from first-hand experience. He took a break from writing at the start of his career to see action in Vietnam and he was candid about how this experience had given him PTSD and how he’d cope with it for decades. We lost a good man with David Drake, that much is certain.
Of course, Drake didn’t just write military SF—far from it. He at least dabbled in nearly everything, and if anything he seemed to think of himself as a horror writer first and foremost, despite that not being what he’s most known for. “The Automatic Rifleman” is a creepy yarn, although less haunted-house horror and more a look into man’s capacity for evil. Because it’s never been anthologized I had basically no clue what it even was going in, but in hindsight I should’ve taken the title (it’s a reference) as a clue. It’s also SF, although how it’s SF is not revealed to us until the very end. I won’t bury the lead here, so I’ll say now I liked this one quite a bit more than “Time Safari,” although as we’ll see, and as Drake will admit freely, he did take some notes from one of the masters of the field.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the Fall 1980 issue of Destinies, which is on the Archive. It’s never been anthologized, but has been reprinted in a few Drake collections, incidentally all being his horror-themed collections. There’s From the Heart of Darkness, Balefires, and then Night & Demons, which from what I can tell is just Balefires but bigger. The latter two (not sure about the first) come with lengthy introductions by Drake for each story. A few stories from these collections are available to read on Baen’s site free of charge, although “The Automatic Rifleman” is not one of them.
Enhancing Image
A trio, Kerr, Davidson, and Penske, arrive at a secluded apartment for a certain man they’re supposed to need for a certain job. Kerr is an idealist, Davidson is a bitch, and Penske is a pessimist. The other party, Coster, is a strange man with an even stranger-looking rifle that’s supposed to be his weapon of choice; their mutual contact didn’t say much about him, but he’s apparently a gifted marksman. The job is simple: assassination. The target is the prime minister of Japan, who is touring the US for the sake of business. (Incidentally this story anticipates the racist tendency in some ’80s SF to depict Japan as a threat to American economic and technological supremacy.) Kerr, the brains behind the operation, has rather vague politics but seems to fall somewhere on the left; certainly his disdain for environmental destriction in the name of business has an anti-capitalist bent. (I think Drake makes a bit too much of a point that Kerr is an “affluent” black American, with a suit and everything.) Whether or not Coster agrees with Kerr’s views doesn’t matter: he’s getting paid to do a job.
On November 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald took position in the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, as John F. Kennedy was passing through as part of a motorcade. Oswald fired three shots with a bolt-action rifle, wounding the governor of Texas and killing Kennedy, scoring a shot through the throat plus a headshot. He was a former Marine.
Something sneaky “The Automatic Rifleman” does is that it makes you unsure if anything even fantastical is gonna happen, because for a long while it holds its cards close to its chest and plays out like a realistic crime thriller. There is, however, a creeping sense that something beyond normal human experience might be at work. Penske is the weapons expert of the trio, set to be the second gunman in the assassination in case Coster fumbles, and he can’t figure out what kind of gun Coster’s is supposed to be; it looks like a modified M14 carbine but Penske can’t be sure and Coster’s not telling. At one point he asks Coster how he got the rifle and Coster replies with, “You’d better hope you never learn.” We never do learn exactly how Coster got his rifle, but we can infer he didn’t buy it at a gun store. Certainly Coster doesn’t treat his rifle like how a normal person (with training) would handle a firearm; he basically always has it with him, even when he goes to bed. It could just be that Coster has a screw loose: he does, after all, claim to have killed both John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, with this rifle, and he’s implied to be some kind of racist. He makes the trio uneasy, but he’s also an unnaturally good sharpshooter.
On August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman killed his wife and mother before taking a sniper rifer to the clock tower of the University of Texas at Austin, killing three people in the campus’s main building before killing another eleven from the clock tower. He kept shooting for an hour and a half before authorities killed him. He was a former Marine.
Penske is the one in the trio who doubts Coster’s skills, so they travel to a farm owned by a contact of theirs that would serve as a firing range. Coster proves to be as good a shot as he claims to be, but he also acts rather strangely around firearms—like he’s not used to being around them, despite never being without his rifle. Afterwards Penske even claims he saw Coster close his eyes shut while firing his rifle, as if jarred by the very use of his weapon. He can’t put his finger on how this is possible, but Penske supposes Coster is not a veteran, or has military training at all, yet is able to hit bottles with pin-point accuracy, even with his eyes closed. It’s like handling the rifle gives him the ability to shoot like a pro, like how the whimpiest person on the planet can be made threatening with a good guard dog. “Or a witch cat,” Penske says rather pointedly. He’s scarily close to being right. Coster is sort of like a foil to Penske, in that they’re both pessimists who think themselves good at what they do, namely killing; yet while Penske is an imperfect but skilled shooter, there is something seriously wrong with Coster. He has a strange philosophy about the nature of man, that man of some kind of werebeast, “part flesh, part metal,” conjoined with his technology.
On April 4, 1968, James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King in the face with a hunting rifle while the latter stood on the balcony of his motel room. King died about an hour later. Ray was a convicted criminal and was already on the run from authorities when he crossed paths with King in Memphis. He had military training but was apparently a poor soldier, and several sources, including King’s family, doubt he was the shooter.
Have I mentioned this story is dark? Its eeriness has only increased with time, which is partly why I think it’s due to be included in some themed anthology in the future. It’s a story whose potency only heightens as American life becomes more submerged in everyday violence. Assassinations, lynchings, police brutality, white supremacists ramming their cars into crowds of protesters, people bringing guns into schools. We know that, regardless of individual or systemic problems, these are the result of human malice, and Drake knows this too. In his introduction he says “The Automatic Rifleman” is horror, but also escapist, because it posits that man’s evils are not the result of man’s own doing. “The story posits the notion that things are in their present state because some external force is working to make them bad; in other words, the world’s problems are not the result of mankind’s own actions.” It actually reminds me of the movie Sorcerer, and how director William Friedkin said he picked that title because he wanted to evoke the sense that the horrors of human existence are the machinations of some unseen force. The sorcerer is purely metaphorical, and in the case of Friedkin’s movie the sorcerer is capitalism; but the external evil lurking in Drake’s story turns out to be a lot more tangible.
There Be Spoilers Here
It’s the day of the assassination, and Penske and Coster have set up camp while the prime minister is making his way through a parade. The “good” news is Coster’s aim is true, and within seconds the prime minister lies dead or dying, “his spine shattered by two bullets,” while security people surround him in vain. (Reminder that this was published about six months before the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan.) The bad news, for our Anti-Heroess™ at least, is that in trying to escape the scene (they were on a high-level floor), Coster takes a serious fall and is unable to get up; and Penske knows carrying Coster would likely result in both of them getting caught. Coster, in self-defence, takes aim at Penske when it becomes clear what’s about to be done, but his rifle refuses to fire—the safety refuses to turn off. We don’t see it, but it’s implied Penske knifes Coster to death, and we can infer this because afterwards he now has the rifle. Have I mentioned this story takes a bleak view of humanity? I hope you didn’t go into this expecting to sympathize with any of the characters. I know Drake said it’s meant to be escapist, but I keep thinking of real-world horrors while reading it. Can’t tell if this counts as good or bad writing.
On July 8, 2022, Tetsuya Yamagami shot former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in the chest with a double-barreled shotgun the former had constructed in the comfort of his own home. Abe died five hours later. Yamagami had military training, and a series of family tragedies plus Abe’s cult connections drove him to plot Abe’s murder.
You may be wondering just what is SFnal about this story, and if you’ve been paying attention you probably guessed: the rifle is alive. Specifically the rifle is an alien, descended from “metal creatures who glittered and shifted their forms and raised triumphant cities to the skies.” The rifle is basically a parasite that communicates telepathically with its host, like Sauron’s ring, and Penske has taken Coster’s place as the new Gollum. We learn all this in the last few paragraphs of the story, and for my money I think Drake could’ve done a slightly more convincing job had he opted for fantasy and made the rifle a supernatural thing; but then there weren’t many outlets for short fantasy in 1980. Science fiction it is, then! Drake freely admits to have taken inspiration from Fritz Leiber’s “The Automatic Pistol,” which honestly is a connection I should’ve made from the start given I had read that story. I think I prefer Drake’s rendition, granted that “The Automatic Pistol” was a very early Leiber story and that later Leiber would write more gracefully than Drake. You could call it a sort of remake, but I like to think of it more as a variation on a theme. Leiber wrote his story seemingly in reaction to Chicago gang violence in the ’20s and ’30s while Drake was reacting to shootings and assassinations in the ’60s.
A Step Farther Out
A good story can be similar to an older story, by design, and get away with it if it adds something new to the equation, which I think this does. There’s the Leiber influence, with perhaps some Sturgeon (specifically “Killdozer!”) in there as well, but it’s still very much David Drake’s story. The SFnal element is a little arbitrary, in that it could have just easily been explained in supernatural terms, but as a machine fable in the mode of Kipling it’s still effective. This all raises a question, though: If “The Automatic Rifleman” was a then-modernized riff on “The Automatic Pistol,” then what story would take the same basic premise and apply it to the current era? And has such a story already been written?
(Clark Ashton Smith, as sketched in the October 1930 issue of Wonder Stories. Artist uncredited.)
It’s the first editorial of the year, and yeah, I know it’s a bit late to be seeing this. Clark Ashton Smith’s birthday is January 13, so a couple days ago. He was born in 1893 in California, and he would more or less live there for the rest of his life. He never ventured too far, and in the ’20s and ’30s he would care for his ailing parents, hence his turning to writing fiction. So the story goes. Smith never gave interviews, and we still don’t have a biography of him, but we do have copious letters he wrote to H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and others. With only one serious rival (whom I’ll get to), Smith was, for my money, the best line-for-line writer to appear in Weird Tales during its 1930s heyday; and he appeared in that magazine A LOT. Despite being formidable in both quality and quantity, though, Smith is somewhat forgotten today unless you’re a weird fiction enthusiast; certainly he lacks the mainstream recognition of Lovecraft and Howard. You’d be hard-pressed to find Clark Ashton Smith studies in academia and you’d be as hard-pressed to find Clark Ashton Smith fanclubs.
How Smith’s reputation failed to pick up a posthumous second wind like what happened with Lovecraft and Howard is a mystery that has a few clues, but after all it might not even be a mystery. Certainly Smith becoming semi-obscure by the time of his death is the same fate that befalls most authors—those, anyway, who garnered any reputation in the first place. It’s the singing quality of his prose and the striking power of his writing that makes this fate seem unjust, though. This dissonance between his deserving recognition and not getting said recognition was solidified by Smith “winning” the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award in 2015, an award reserved for authors whom the folks at Readercon believe to be worthy of recovering from the dust piles of history. Even Lovecraft agrees with me and the Readercon people: he singles out Smith as one living master of weird fiction in his seminal essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” It’s funny, because in some ways Lovecraft and Smith were very different, the former zeroing in on a rather niche subgenre of horror while the latter was content to hop across genres if it meant an extra paycheck.
Going back to the beginning, Smith tarted out as a poet; as a teenager he caught the attention of some notable personalities in the local California literary scene, even running into Ambrose Bierce. Smith was an autodidact who accrued an enormous amount of knowledge and even learned a couple extra languages from being a voracious reader. He would read encyclopedias and dictionaries front to back. He read seemingly everything he could get his hands on. Even without a proper education, Smith would come to have a much larger vocabulary than the vast majority of people who read his stories in the pulps, hence his (in)famous prose style. Smith dabbled in short fiction during his early days as a poet, but it was not until the late ’20s that he went full steam ahead on writing short fiction. Smith wrote something like a hundred short stories between 1929 and 1934—enough for a lifetime, compressed into five years. All told, Smith put out more fiction than Lovecraft (who, incidentally, did not write a whole lot during that same period), and he probably matched Howard in productivity for a short time there. He appeared in ten out of twelve issues of Weird Tales in 1934 alone, making him an almost omnipresent force.
Unlike Lovecraft, who turned up his nose at anything he deemed less dignified than Weird Tales (he was apparently cross when August Derleth sold At the Mountains of Madness to Astounding Science Fiction), Smith was not so picky; he would sell to Weird Tales the most, but he also appeared in Wonder Stories, the short-lived Strange Tales, and even Astounding. Of course, given how much he was writing, Smith could not afford to sell to only one outlet. And unlike Lovecraft, who didn’t seem to think of some of his work as science fiction, and Howard, who straight up never wrote science fiction, Smith was fine with playing into the recently founded pulp SF market, hence his appearing in Wonder Stories almost as often as Weird Tales. Smith had created several series, although it would be more accurate to call them settings: Zothique (a far-future wasteland which anticipates Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth), Hyperborea (a prehistoric Earth not dissimilar from Howard’s fantasies), and Averoigne (an alternate medieval France that has been infested with vampires, ghouls, and the like) are the big ones. When not setting his fiction on some fantastically altered Earth, Smith sometimes resorts to picking Mars or some other planet as the venue.
It’s worth mentioning, of course, that while Smith did play to the expectations of pulp readers for the sake of a paycheck, he did not do much to dumb down his language even with his most uncharacteristic work, which must’ve come as a shock to many at the time. The reality is that even many of the “classic” SF stories of the ’30s are semi-literate; they had other redeeming qualities, but you did not go to such fiction expecting to enjoy the prose for its own sake. Those who complain about the lack of literary flashiness in pre-New Wave SF writing would scarely survive a bout with SF as published in the pulps circa 1934. Read a randomly picked Smith story, on the other hand, and you’ll notice two things: you’ll find at least one word you do not recognize, and you’ll probably get swept up in the rhythm of Smith’s style. I’m a highly colloquial writer as opposed to a poetic one, so rather than try to lecture on what makes Smith’s prose different, I’ll simply provide a couple examples. The first is from the most recent story of his I’ve reviewed, “The Door to Saturn.” The wizard Eibon has used a magical door, courtesy of the god Zhothaqquah, to escape a pack of zealots, and upon entering Saturn (Cykranosh) encounters a strange creature:
He turned to see what manner of creature had flung the shadow. This being, he perceived, was not easy to classify, with its ludicrously short legs, its exceedingly elongated arms, and its round, sleepy-looking head that was pendulous from a spherical body, as if it were turning a somnambulistic somersault. But after he had studied it a while and had noted its furriness and somnolent expression, he began to see a vague though inverted likeness to the god Zhothaqquah. And remembering how Zhothaqquah had said that the form assumed by himself on Earth was not altogether that which he had worn in Cykranosh, Eibon now wondered if this entity was not one of Zhothaqquah’s relatives.
The second example is not from a story I’ve reviewed, but one I had read over a year ago which helped make me a Smith fan. This is from “The Dark Eidolon,” one of Smith’s best and most bombastic stories—a real scorcher of a tale, a dark fantasy epic in miniature. The wizard Namirrha, having accrued an unspeakable amount of power in his decades-long quest for revenge, has summoned the literal horses of the apocalypse to decimate the city of Ummaos, reveling in the destruction even as it will likely cost him his own life in the process:
Like a many-turreted storm they came, and it seemed that the world sank gulfward, tilting beneath the weight. Still as a man enchanted into marble, Zotulla stood and beheld the ruining that was wrought on his empire. And closer drew the gigantic stallions, racing with inconceivable speed, and louder was the thundering of their footfalls, that now began to blot the green fields and fruited orchards lying for many miles to the west of Ummaos. And the shadow of the stallions climbed like an evil gloom of eclipse, till it covered Ummaos; and looking up, the emperor saw their eyes halfway between earth and zenith, like baleful suns that glare down from soaring cumuli.
This shit is EPIC.
I wish I had something more sophisticated to say, but Smith’s work at its best conveys a sense of scale and a dark majesty in the span of twenty to forty pages that most novels fail to match up with, let alone other short fantasy stories of the time. Robert E. Howard was unlikely to use “somnolent” and almost certainly never used “somnambulistic,” let alone in combination with “somersault,” achieving the effect Smith pulled here. Lovecraft was also one to pull obscure words out of his ass, but he also never wrote a story featuring (among other things) a revenging sorcerer, an army of giant skeletons, and horses the size of skyscrapers which trample a whole city underfoot; and this is all in the same story! I’m just saying, read “The Dark Eidolon,” it kicks ass. You could say Smith dared to kick ass in a way Lovecraft had no interest in, and which Howard could only match via a different school of writing, that being the propulsion of action writing. Howard thrilled us with tales of musclebound men fighting demons and giant snakes, rescuing damsels and the like, but Smith thrilled us with his use of language. Reading a lumbering Smith paragraph, with its parenthetical asides and protracted sentences chain-linked with semi-colons, peppered with words you might not have ever seen before but whose meaning you can gather from context, can be like reading an incantation in a forbidden spell book. If Howard was a literary swordsman, then Smith was a literary sorcerer.
(Cover by H. W. Wesso. Strange Tales, October 1932.)
There is, of course, at least one writer in Weird Tales in the ’30s who I think matched Smith on almost the same wavelength: C. L. Moore. Being nearly twenty years Smith’s junior, Moore was very young when she hit the scene in 1933, but her first professional story, “Shambleau,” was an immediate success, and in just a couple years Moore garnered a reputation as a sort of prose poet, never mind a writer of immense depth. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry is one of the most memorable old-school sword-and-sorcery characters (she should by all rights be as influential as Conan, but sadly she is not), probably a bigger achievement than any of Smith’s characters individually (although Eibon and Maal Dweb are very fun and dastardly sorcerers), and despite her youth she could at times go toe-to-toe with Smith’s poetic strength. Imagine being a Weird Tales reader circa 1934 and seeing both Moore and Smith’s names in an issue’s table of contents. Both of these writers, for the rather brief time they were direct contemporaries, must surely have expanded the language of many readers, and by extension their minds. Moore is another writer who deserves to be popular with modern readers and for some reason is not; but that is a story for a later date.
Aside from being pessimists with a penchant for penning brooding passages, Smith and Moore were also both more open go writing about sex their most of their contemporaries—I don’t mean sex as a source of titillation, but as it pertains to human psychology. Lovecraft was probably asexual, and so avoided the topic when he could, and Howard, while he did sometimes write about erotic love (never mind his attempts at titillating the reader), was not given to jealousy, forbidden lust, and other psychosexual matters. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry experiences a crisis of conscience when she realizes (after she has killed him out of vengeance) that she is profoundly attracted to the man who had sexually assaulted her. Smith’s characters likewise are at times met with these conflicts between mind and flesh. Jealousy and temptation are especially common. I’ve noticed, after reading enough of his fiction, that Smith was fond of using flowers as symbols for two things at the same time: an ideal and tempting beauty, and a horrific malice which lurks under said beauty. For example, in his story “Vulthoom” (review here), the protagonists are met with an eldritch being in the Martian underground who, seemingly in an effort to tempt Our Heroes™ over to its side, takes on the appearance of an androgynous beauty within a massive flower. Much like Smith himself, who was a notorious womanizer (he only married after his sixtieth birthday), characters in Smith’s writing think about sexual attraction, and this thinking-about-sex plays into their psychologies.
Why did Smith never pierce the mainstream consciousness? There are a few reasons for this. For one, the fact that he never wrote a novel in adulthood (he did write one as a teenager, but it was only published decades after his death and I don’t know anyone who cares to read it), does hurt him, as it would anybody. Unfortunately novels have always sold far more than short stories; you’ll find many stories of SFF writers in the ’50s who take up novel-writing in an effort to make that extra cash. Even Howard, who died so young, wrote a novel with The Hour of the Dragon. Another is that while Lovecraft and Howard were very good at writing a certain type of story, Smith is harder to pin down—that is to say it’s harder to come up with a single “encapsulating” Smith story to hand off to some newcomer. Someone curious about Lovecraft would do well to start with “Dagon” or “The Rats in the Walls,” but an unaccustomed reader might find the sheer awesomness of “The Dark Eidolon” or “The Maze of the Enchanter” off-putting. Even when compared to Lovecraft, who by no means was a slacker in the language complexity department, Smith’s prose is positively purple. The truth is that Smith is at his best when his language is at its most pyrotechnic; an “easy-to-read” Smith story is a relatively boring one. Lastly, Smith was not exactly an innovator, nor did he write extensively on the history of weird fiction; as such he was neither a pioneer nor chronicler of the form.
As you know, Smith’s output slowed to a trickle after 1934; once his parents died he no longer had the financial strain that had pushed him to try writing for a living. He could be coaxed to write a short story now and again thereafter, and strictly from a modern perspective it might seem like he actually wrote a decent amount after 1934. He always remained a poet. Being restless as an artist, he would also take to sculpting and illustrating, although his reputation stands on his prose and poetry. Smith died in 1961, having outlived some of his contemporaries by a good margin, but in the context of weird fiction and American fantasy it’s easy to think he had “died” around the same time as Lovecraft and Howard. Much like how Moore’s story as a writer basically came to an end with the death of her first husband, Henry Kuttner, Smith’s winding-down as a writer of some of the darkest and gnarliest (and at times funniest) fantasy can be said to coincide with Weird Tales‘s subtle decline towards the end of the 1930s. Many writers have tried (and a few have even succeeded) to sound like the next H. P. Lovecraft, but I don’t know anyone who has tried to sound like the next Clark Ashton Smith. Maybe he was a sorcerer without an apprentice.
Happy New Year, ya screwheads. I said last month I would be taking a year off from covering serials, which means the field has very much opened up for tackling short fiction. The schedule I keep has changed in a sense, except not really; the only difference is that the spots that would normally be held for serial installments are now for short stories. So we’re looking at six or seven short stories a month, which if you ask me is for the best. There are so many short stories across the long history of the biz that I couldn’t stay content with only three or four a month. Think about how much ground there is to cover. Thus we have two novellas and seven short stories for this month, with as many authors being pulled.
There is one other thing I wanna mention, since it will be affecting what I cover for this year. As you know, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is celebrating its 75th anniversary; it had premiered way back in 1949, and was initially called The Magazine of Fantasy. F&SF is such a prestigious outlet, with such a long history and with so much good material gathered in its pages over the decades, that a year-long tribute is in order. The question I then had tumbling around in my head was: How do I go about this? The solution I came to was twofold: first, as with last year, I’ll be covering all short stories in March, July, and October, only this time it will be all fiction from F&SF‘s pages; and the second is that outside of those months I’ll be covering two pieces (a short story and novella, or two of either) from F&SF each month. For example, you may notice we have two novellas from F&SF for January, which I think is a fine idea.
How March, July, and October will work is that I’ll be covering the first thirty years of F&SF across these months, so one decade for each. I’ll be grabbing stories from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s respectively, with the ’70s—falling on October—leaning more towards spooky stuff. F&SF‘s history is so rich that I won’t be able to give an adequate impression of its contents across 75 years, even with the methods I’ve created.
Lastly, in more solemn news, I’ll be reviewing works this month by some notable authors who sadly passed away recently. Michael F. Flynn died in September last year; Michael Bishop died in November; and David Drake died only last month. I’ve tackled Drake before, but while I wasn’t exactly a fan of “Time Safari” I did say I was curious to read more of his work. These are writers who are well-respected in the community and whom sadly I had read very little of when they were alive. If we’re to do right by the dead then we can’t afford to forget them.
For the novellas:
“Project Nursemaid” by Judith Merril. From the October 1955 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She became known as an important critic and editor, but she started out as a member of the Futurians. Her story “That Only a Mother” is probably one of the most frequently reprinted classic SF stories, to the point that it’s now a little overexposed. I have to admit that aside from being force-fed “That Only a Mother” across multiple anthologies I’ve not read any of Merril’s other fiction, but I’m about to correct that!
“The Samurai and the Willows” by Michael Bishop. From the February 1976 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Placed first in that year’s Locus poll for Best Novella. Speaking of writers I’ve been meaning to read more of, Bishop’s been on my radar for a minute now, but prior to his death I had only read a couple of his short stories. As with some other works of his, Bishop would revise “The Samurai and the Willows” extensively many years after the fact, but we’re reading it as it had originally appeared in F&SF.
For the short stories:
“Inertia” by Nancy Kress. From the January 1990 issue of Analog Science Fiction. I’ve covered Kress before, and while it’s always tempting to go for one of her novellas (given her fondness for that mode), I opted for something different—both in length and where the story was published. Kress has been a regular at Asimov’s for years, but “Inertia” is a rare appearance from her in Analog.
“Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night” by Algis Budrys. From the December 1961 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. In some ways diametrically opposed to Judith Merril as a critic, and with as vicious an intellect, Budrys started as one of ’50s SF’s most promising writers. After a decade of heated activity he would turn away from fiction for the most part to focus on criticism and editing.
“Apartness” by Vernor Vinge. From the June 1965 issue of New Worlds. Vinge is one of the most important living SF writers, although sadly he retired from writing fiction about a decade ago. Despite being in some ways a prototypical Analog-type writer, Vinge made his debut in the Moorcock-run New Worlds with this story here. He would’ve been all of 19 years old when he wrote “Apartness.”
“House of Dreams” by Michael F. Flynn. From the October-November 1997 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winner. I actually live one town over from Flynn, but sadly we never got to meet. “House of Dreams” is a rare case of Flynn appearing outside of Analog, and despite the Sturgeon win it has apparently never been reprinted in English, which is weird.
“The Valley Was Still” by Manly Wade Wellman. From the August 1939 issue of Weird Tales. Wellman started out during the Gernsback years, and was one of the few SFF authors of that era to maintain his street cred after Campbell took over Astounding—if only because he was more of a fantasy writer. I picked this one for the nerdy reason that it became the basis for a Twilight Zone episode.
“The Automatic Rifleman” by David Drake. From the Fall 1980 issue of Destinies. (Yes I’m still counting Destinies and its ilk as magazines.) David Drake was one of the codifying writers of military SF, but his range was a lot wider than that, having also written sword-and-sorcery fantasy and horror, on top of work that’s not so easy to classify. The following story seems to be an exercise in terror.
“The Agony of the Leaves” by Evelyn E. Smith. From the July 1954 issue of Beyond Fantasy Fiction. I only discovered this one as part of a very recent SF anthology edited by a certain colleague, and I’m pretty sure it’s not SF. As with too many female SFF writers in the ’50s, Smith moved away from the short fiction market once new avenues opened up; after 1960 she mostly stuck to novels.
In the “canon” of great horror writers, you come across the same names: Lovecraft, Poe, King, and so on. This is a canon that has not, as far as I can tell, changed fundamentally in the past two decades; but then one can say that’s only the case if we’re talking horror at novel length. Since the market for horror novels exploded in the ’70s, there’s been the odd side effect that those who tapped that market then largely remain the faces of horror literature. When it comes to short fiction, though, the genre has been ever growing, ever evolving, if also blocked off from mainstream appeal in such a mode. (Novels sell far more than short stories, and sadly always will.) One of the modern masters of the short horror story is Thomas Ligotti, who has deliberately avoided writing a horror novel, as he believes (I think rightly) that the horrific strikes best in short bursts.
Ligotti debuted back in the early ’80s and picked up quite a bit of atttention from horror connoisseurs with his first collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer. The stories contained therein were eerie and often disturbing, but by way of implication rather than on-page violence. In a way his style can be said to complement Clive Barker’s, who also hit the horror scene around the same time; but whereas Barker tapped into the gruesome potential of the human body, Ligotti begs us to avert our gaze. Overtly a student of Lovecraft, Ligotti’s writing at its best captures a perverted wonderment—an awe of outside forces that compels more than it frights. “The Last Feast of Harlequin” itself is apparently set in the Cthulhu mythos, and fans of Lovecraft will find it in some ways familiar.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the April 1990 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It’s since been reprinted fairly often, first in the Ligotti collections Grimscribe, The Nightmare Factory, and The Shadow at the Bottom of the World, and then a ton of anthology appearances. There’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fourth Annual Collection (ed. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling), Best New Horror 2 (ed. Ramsey Campbell and Stephen Jones), American Gothic Tales (ed. Joyce Carol Oates), and perhaps biggest of all, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now (ed. Peter Straub).
Enhancing Image
This is not a story to read if you hate clowns.
The unnamed narrator is an anthropologist who specializes in the study of clowns across different cultural contexts; this is in no small part due to the narrator having a real soft spot for clowns himself, to the point of thinking of himself as one. “To me the title of Clown has always carried connotations of a noble sort. I was an adroit jester, strangely enough, and had always taken pride in the skills I worked so diligently to develop.” This is foreshadowing for how he will get involved in the—let’s not say conflict, but the spectacle of the story. Hungry for events involving clowns, preferably off the beaten path, the narrator is informed by a colleague that there’s a town in the Midwest, Mirocaw, which has a yearly “Fool’s Feast” with clowns as part of the main attraction. We’re never told what state Mirocaw is in, nor are we even told when the story takes place; you might assume it’s set in “modern day,” i.e., the 1980s, but the narrator’s mannered style of narrating suggets a more antiquated period. Maybe. It’s ambiguous.
Having arrived in Mirocaw, the narrator asks for directions and some info on the town’s culture, first an old man who promptly ignores him and then an older woman who is of some help but who also says some rather ominous things about the festival. There are a few oddities. For one, the festival is set to take place form December 19 to the 21st, coinciding with the leadup to Christmas, which the narrator points out as being weirdly timed since the Fool’s Feast has seemingly nothing to do with Christmas. “It’s just tradition,” the woman says. Despite the supposed age of the festival, the narrator is only able to find one scholarly article on the proceedings—one which happens to be written by a former professor of his, Raymond Thoss. Thoss was a real eccentric who had inspired the narrator to pursue his studies in his own way, but who had seemingly vanished without a trace some twenty years ago, having wanted to write a book on the town but never finishing it. The narrator gets to thinking, however, that the old man who had ignored him earlier may be Thoss, who, if this turns out to be the case, has been living in Mirocaw for the past two decades.
Slowly but surely we get a buildup of mystery, helped by the fact that Ligotti’s is being willfully obtuse about some details. Apparently not wanting to date his story, the only impressions of time that we’re given are the date of the festival, and the time span of twenty years, something which shows up, eerily, more than once. Thoss disappeared twenty years ago, but around that same time there was another disappearance in Mirocaw. Every year, around Christmastime, there’s at least one suicide in town, with a nearby lake being a popular location. Elizabeth Beadle, wife of hotel owner Samuel Beadle, had vanished twenty years ago; she’s presumed to have been a suicide, but her body was never found. The narrator, not long after reading about this bit of town lore, encounters Sarah, Elizabeth’s daughter (likely barely out of her teens), who bares a striking resemblance with her mother. For my money this is the most effective scene in the story, it being a Vertigo-esque moment of time seemingly having repeated itself, and it alludes to something else that will be a repeat of a past horror.
Since we’re this far in I may as well elaborate on a few points. The first is that Ligotti plays into phobias of clowns, worms, and Midwesterners here, and I have to say that, at least as an adult, I don’t find those first two to be scary. I was interested in the mystery surrounding the origins of the festival, Thoss’s disappearance, and the connection that Elizabeth and Sarah might have with the town’s traditions, but I was not put off by the clown imagery. Of course the inhabitants of Mirocaw themselves, whom the narrator describes as ” the probable descendants in a direct line from some enterprising pack of New Englanders of the past century” are uncanny by virtue of their behavior and how they’re disconnected from the rest of civilization. If Ligotti does anything really well here it’s to evoke a sense of isolation, in which we’re cut off from the world, from humanity, and even from our own sense of time. The narrator himself is a bit of an uncanny figure, being someone without any social life outside of academia, seemingly without normal human interests, who thinks himself a jester without a court.
Another thing, and this is important: “The Last Feast of Harlequin” is long as shit. It’s not a narrative you’d think would be this long, because while there is a bit of a plot, there’s virtually no conflict, nor are there characters in the conventional sense. I’ve read that Ligotti had written the first draft for this story back at the beginning of his career, when he was trying to figure out his own voice as a writer, and while he had revised it drastically over the years there’s still the germ of a Lovecraft pastiche, including one or two of Lovecraft’s shortcomings—namely his tendency to use three words when one would do the trick. Now you may be thinking, “Brian (you handsome devil), how can you praise Clark Ashton Smith’s immense verbosity but treat Lovecraft’s similar style as hit-or-miss?” For one, Smith was the better poet, by a considerable margin; nobody writing weird fiction at that time evoked the weird through sheer language like he did, except maybe C. L. Moore on a good day. Another thing is that Smith’s protagonits tend to be active players in their stories—explorers, warriors, sorcerers, thieves—while Lovecraft’s protagonists tend to be bookish observers.
The narrator for “The Last Feast of Harlequin” is very much an observer in the Lovecraft mode: he sees things happen, and may inquire about these happenings, but his actions are more or less negligible. I’ll explain more in the spoilers section, but even when the narrator decides to act, his actions fail to alter the series of events he has stumbled upon. Frankly I tend to find such protagonists boring. It doesn’t help that, in keeping with the Lovecraft influence, the narrator is verbose but often not poetic, which only makes sense since he’s an academic. Having gone through academia, and as someone who hopes to attend graduate school in a couple years or so, I can say that academics, by and large, are terrible writers who have no ear for the English language. Ligotti is a much better writer than the man narrating his story, such that he’s able to sneak in some effective allusions, an example being when the narrator enters a shabby diner and sees a bunch of people coming out “in a wormlike mass.” Which brings us to…
There Be Spoilers Here
The day of the festival has come, and the narrator has decided to play a part in the festivities. Being a clown himself, he tries to look the part, modeling his makeup after Edvard Munch’s The Scream. He joins a gathering of people in the streets and follows them down a down cavern, which itself leads to an underground lair, where a part of the festival is to take place. It’s here that the narrator, who had seen Thoss a couple times before but had not been able to confirm these suspicions, finally realizes that not only has Thoss been living in Mirocaw for the past twenty years, but has long since taken a hands-on approach with the festivities. This is another case of history repeating itself: both men came to the town to observe an obcure cultural event, only to become active participants—”going native,” to use an old saying. Of course, Thoss is not a cult leader but merely playing into a tradition that is possibly a couple centuries old at this point.
Now, you may notice that so far nothing supernatural has happened. There have been some strange happening, but nothing that strictly defies the laws of nature. It’s here that we’re treated to a grotessque transformation scene (I don’t know if I like that the cover for this issue illustrates this or not), in which the gatherers at the sacrifice (for that’s what it turns out to be) transform into monstrous worms with gaping mouths. “Individual members of the congregation would gaze emptily—caught for a moment in a frozen trance—and then collapse to the floor to begin the sickening metamorphosis.” They gather around the woman on the alter—Sarah Beadle, probably lying on the same slab as her mother did twenty years prior. They probably devour her, but we don’t see it; the narrator, naturally in horror, runs out of the tunnel, Thoss and his people allowing him to escape. At the very end we’re told that Thoss let the narrator go because, according to Thoss, “He is one of us. […] He was always one of us.”
I’m indifferent to the climax. It could be that I had read a Cthulhu mythos story not too long ago that had a similar structure, with even a similar climactic event, but it was handled in a very different way; I am of course referring to Robert E. Howard’s “The Black Stone” (review here). While he was not as refined a wordsmith as Ligotti or even Lovecraft, I think Howard managed to beat both at the cosmic horror game in that instance, and with less than half this story’s word count. When I got to the end of “The Last Feast of Harlequin” I felt like I had eaten a meal at a very fine independently owned restaurant that was clearly made with love and which had just the right amount of seasoning—but the portions were all wrong. I came out of it feeling weirdly undernourished.
A Step Farther Out
I had conflicting feelings while reading this one. I didn’t find anything blatantly wrong with it, and yet I was left feeling unfulfilled. Part of it is the length: this is a long novelette clocking in 15,000 words or so, and I don’t think that length is justified. Another is that I was hoping, deep down, that the climax would be more than what it ended up being. This is a story that evokes intrigue well, but then fails to provide a satisfying payoff, the answer we’re given being not only too easy but one that’s been done before. “The Last Feast of Harlequin” is one of Ligotti’s longest stories, and it was also his pro zine debut (having only appeared in semi-pros up to that point), so for some readerss this was their introduction to Ligotti’s talents. Having read a few of his stories beforehand, I’m aware that he’s done better—that he can be more chilling and idiosyncratic than this.
(Cover art by Evan Singer. Weird Tales, March 1954.)
Who Goes There?
One of the unsung heroes of ’50s SFF, Margaret St. Clair got her start in the latter half of the ’40s and spent the next fifteen years writing short fiction at a mile a minute. Unfortunately by the ’60s she turned mostly to writing novels, and not very prolifically at that. Still, St. Clair’s best short fiction still reads as fresh, ferocious, subversive, witty, and rather concise today. I tackled her urban fantasy story “The Goddess on the Street Corner” a few months ago, so it hasn’t been very long since our last encounter. St. Clair is no stranger to weird fiction and today’s story, “Brenda,” is definitely a weird story. I was surprised to learn that while it didn’t get turned into a Twilight Zone episode, it did become a segment of Night Gallery. Is it horror, as one would expect of source material for a show that’s mainly horror-themed? Hmmmm. I’ll try to explain in the body of this review, because I’m not totally sure what to make of the story.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the March 1954 issue of Weird Tales, which is on the Archive. It was then reprinted in the anthology Twisted (ed. Groff Conklin) and later Rod Serling’s Night Gallery Reader (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Carol Serling, Charles G. Waugh). Then there are the St. Clair collections The Best of Margaret St. Clair and The Hole in the Moon and Other Tales; thankfully the latter is recent and still in print.
Enhancing Image
Brenda is a preteen living on an island… somewhere. It’s implied to be a tourist attraction, what with the mentioning of summer people, but it’s unclear if this is off the coast of, say, New England, or the British Isles. It’s a small island with an even smaller population, with only six families currently staying. Everybody knows each other, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that Brenda feels alienated from other kids. We’re not told exactly what’s wrong with her; she seems, on the face of it, like a normal girl (although in the Night Gallery adaptation she’s coded as having some kind of mental didability), but we’ll soon learn that Brenda does not take to strange or dangerous situations like other girls.
While playing by herself in the forest one day she comes across a strange man—one who is probably not entirely human. The man doesn’t have any lines, but just going by how he’s described it’s easy to get that he’s the “weird” element of the story.
He was not a tramp, he was not one of the summer people. Brenda knew at once that he was not like any other man she had ever seen. His skin was not black, or brown, but of an inky grayness; his body was blobbish and irregular, as if it had been shaped out of the clots of soap and grease that stop up kitchen sinks. He held a dead bird in one crude hand. The rotten smell was welling out from him.
A sludgy humanoid creature with a strong rotten smell. Where he came from is never given. If not for a later event it’s easy to think the man is merely a figment of Brenda’s imagination, and for the story’s purposes he might well be. What’s unusual, though, is that Brenda isn’t threatened by this creature—not really. She runs away, sure, but more like she’s playing a game than if she was in mortal peril. She then tricks the creature into falling into a deep quarry, whose purpose itself is a mystery and whose deliberate lack of explanation might be the only “scary” moment in the story; otherwise this is a rather whimsical narrative.
St. Clair can say a lot with few words, but I have to admit this is the most abstract story of hers I’ve read thus far. We don’t know where we are, we don’t get much about Brenda’s backstory and nothing that would explain her behavior, and not helping things is that the third-person narrative is totally divorced from Brenda’s state of mind. The result is that we’re only able to understand what’s going on through action and dialogue, with Brenda’s train of thought being locked off for the reader. This makes it hard to rationalize the strange relationship she takes on with the sludgy creature, whom she seems to think of as both like a sideshow attraction and a kindred spirit—something to mock but also relate with.
There Be Spoilers Here
The creature eventually gets out of the quarry and the men of the island (all five of them) band together to get it back in the pit; what’s curious is that they don’t kill it, but instead entrap it and build up a mound of stones around it. “The men of Moss Island must have worked hard all day to pile up so much rock.” Even curiouser: the creature doesn’t die—not even after being stuck under that mound for a year. We discover this following a one-year time skip, wherein Brenda matures into a teen girl and becomes a lot more charismatic, although still a troublemaker and what we would call an odd duck.
The blurb at the start of the story says something about “waiting to be born,” and it’s a phrase Brenda uses at the end when reuniting with the creature, a mound of rock between them but the creature’s presence still being discernible. I don’t know what the fuck this phrase means. It has to do something with coming of age, but I’m not sure what the connection between Brenda and the creature is supposed to be. The fantastical element at the heart of this story blurs rather than illumines what should be a straightforward tale about a girl coming to maturity. Please let me know in the comments if I’m a dumb piece of shit who couldn’t understand this story’s subtext.
A Step Farther Out
Between the time I started this review and finishing it I decided to check out the Night Gallery segment that adapted this story, out of curiosity. Was not good, would not recommend. It’s a reasonably faithful adaptation but the acting is atrocious, and even at 25 minutes it’s a bit overlong. More importantly, I thought the story being translated to visuals would make the central theme more clear, but that was not the case. “Brenda” is a coming-of-age narrative, that much is obvious, but the symbolism of the sludgy creature and the phrase “waiting to be born” is surprisingly obtuse. It’s also a weird tale that I would not describe as horror. St. Clair can be a chameleon when it comes to genre but I have to admit this one went over my head; if only I could figure out what she was up to.
Suzee McKee Charnas is an example of how a bad first run-in with a good writer can turn you off from them unfairly. I had read Charnas’s Hugo-winning story “Boobs” about a year ago and hated it; not that it was a bad story exactly, it was well done, but I was too repulsed by its gore and its implications even as a horror connoisseur. I say it’s unfair, because my second try with her proved much more promising. Unfortunately Charnas didn’t write too much despite her career spanning five decades, and she’s one of those writers who started out as a novelist before trying her hand at short fiction. “The Ancient Mind at Work” was Charnas’s first short story, but she already had two novels in print by then, and this story itself would become the prologue for her 1980 episodic novel The Vampire Tapestry. Yes, this is a story about vampirism—but it’s also science fiction.
Now, as a site specializing in reviewing fantastical fiction published in the genre magazines (like what James Blish did back in the day), I am cheating slightly here, because Omni was not strictly speaking a genre magazine; it was firstly a science magazine, mostly filled with science articles, interviews, and artwork. The fiction only made up a fraction of Omni‘s wordage, but it’s what people remember today because the fiction (and it was always SF or fantasy) was of unusually high quality. Omni produced a disproportionate number of award-winning and -nominated stories, although “The Ancient Mind at Work” is not one of those.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the February 1979 issue of Omni, which is on the Archive. I don’t recommend downloading the PDF since the already barely legible text is horribly compressed. Crazy that this magazine had a peak circulation of over a million considering reading it was so physically uncomfortable as to irritate my scoliosis. “The Ancient Mind at Work” was reprinted on its own in Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, Ninth Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois), Fantasy Annual III (ed. Terry Carr), and The Fourth Book of Omni Science Fiction (ed. Ellen Datlow). It hasn’t been in print as a standalone since 1985, but of course you can find it as the first part of The Vampire Tapestry, which does seem to be in print.
Enhancing Image
Katje is, as she calls herself jokingly, “an old woman of fifty, more gray than blond, with lines and bones in the face,” a Dutch South African who moved to America some years ago for the sake of love. Unfortunately her hussband, who was college faculty, died, leaving Katje a widow and taking on a job as housekeeper for the campus. Having not worked when she was married, it’s safe to say Katje is not a fan of her current position in life; she went from being a respected farmer’s daughter in the old country to practically the bottom of the food chain. She doesn’t really have any friends, only begrudgingly hanging around one Miss Donelly, and Jackson, the local maintenance guy. Then there’s Dr. Weyland, a silver-haired fox of a professor who studies sleep, drives around in a fancy car, is perhaps the most eligible bachelor on campus, and has probably never said a word to Katje before—which only gives her more reason to wonder about him.
I was debating with myself as to what I should consider spoilers for this story, since the “twist” here is something the reader would already know if going into the novel it became a part of; as such I’m gonna give away upfront that Weyland is not a normal man, but a vampire. It’s something Katje suspects (or maybe she just wants to believe) from the outset, but it doesn’t get confirmed outright until the climax. Still, with hindsight this can’t really be called a twist since even a cursory glance at The Vampire Tapestry shows that a) Weyland is the vampire of the title, and b) he’s the main recurring character—the connecting tissue of that novel. Of course, Katje doesn’t have any solid evidence for thinking Weyland is a vampire; she sees the professor come out of his lab one night with a younger man who looks deeply weary and thinks the younger man is one of Weyland’s victims. We know that Katje is right, but as far as she knows she could just be a bored widow who fantasizes about a professor who’s notorious for his looks and solitude.
A few things to say about Katje, because she’s not your normal horror protagonist, or at least she doesn’t read like one now. I’m not sure if this is just something Charnas does (I’ve only read two of her stories so who can say), but she has a knack for writing really unpleasant viewpoint characters. Katje is an anti-heroine: she doessn’t do anything heroic, she doesn’t really think about other people’s problems, she’s prideful, she’s needlessly cynical, and she’s more than a little racist. Any interaction between a white woman and black man (and vice versa) is going to have some undertone about it, and the interactions between Katje and Jackson are especially uncomfortable; and since we’re given insight into Katje’s thoughts we know she feels oddly resentful about having to treat black Americans as equals. This is a character flaw that really struck me at first, and indeed if Stephen King had been given the same plot outline I think he would’ve scrubbed off Katje’s racism, or at least made it more obvious that she’s in the wrong. Katje is unpleasant, but she’s realistically unpleasant, and Charnas doesn’t excuse her, whereas a writer less keen on moral greyness would.
Anyway, for all her faults, Katje is sort of pitiful, and she feelss a weird sort of pity for Weyland as well, at least on the assumption that he’s a however-many-centuries-old vampire, the ancient mind of the title. Both are solitary figures who intentionally keep their distance from other people, albeit for different reasons as it turns out. Katje is an immigrant and Weyland is probably a thousand miles from where he started. There’s a really good line in here about alienation: “One did not have to sleep half a century to lose one’s world these days; one had only to grow older.” Some really good lines in this story, but this one stood out to me. It’s especially effective, never mind new for its time, because we don’t often get genre stories about women who are middle-aged or older. As for their connection, it could be that Katje sees Weyland as a kindred spirit, or at the very least a distraction from the dull everydayness of her life, and indeed she does eventually admit to herself that she’s doing all this before her life is a hollow shell.
Now, The Vampire Tapestry is sometimes cited as a fantasy novel and it made the Locus poll for Best Fantasy Novel, but unless there’s a development later in that novel that contradicts me I’m gonna call it science fiction. Going back to James Blish for a moment, his story “There Shall Be No Darkness” (review here) took on the enormous task of justifying lycanthropy in scientific terms, intentionally devoid of the supernatural. Charnas does a similar thing with “The Ancient Mind at Work,” at least if we’re to take Weyland’s indirect explanation for vampirism at face value. There’s this lengthy scene where Katje sits in for one of Weyland’s lectures, and there’s this huge digression where the professor humors his students about vampirism—presumably explaining his own vampirism in the process. Vampires, so Weyland says, would not be ghostly creatures of the night, but humanoids who are closely related to homo sapiens but who have followed a different evolutionary line. There would be very few vampires, but they would be apex predators, since after all, they feed on man and the most dangerous game is man. Here, the vampire would not conflict with Darwinian evolution.
There’s also some fun ribbing of vampire cliches. Why should a vampire be allergic to garlic of all things? Why should a vampire be weak to holy symbols? Why feed on humans specifically? Never mind that this takes place in a world where people are very familiar with such cliches. Just as Blish’s story takes place in a world where people have seen The Wolf Man, Charnas’s is one where people have read Dracula and even I Am Legend. (I have to think it’s set in the ’70s, since there are little things like a woman wearing a “save the whales” shirt that would’ve been very much in vogue then.) Katje, given her background, seems like she belongs in 1900 and not circa 1975, which made me unsure of the story’s modernity at first, but it makes sense since she’s a woman profoundly out of step with her time and place. This is a uniquely modern narrative that could not have been written prior to—let’s say 1940 at the earliest, because it hinges on both a public acceptance of Darwinian evolution and a public awareness of vampire cliches. Combine all this with Charnas’s implicit but thorny feminism and you have something that still reads as modern.
There Be Spoilers Here
This one is a bit hard to spoil, huh?
The big question for me was if Katje survives her encounter with Weyland (because the two meeting face to face was inevitable), and thankfully she does. What’s interesting is that even if she became one of Weyland’s victims, she might’ve survived, at least according to the man himself. (A remorseless vampire is probably not the most reliable source, but Weyland is also something even spookier than a vampire: an academic.) Luckily for Katje she had a piece on her (there have been sexual assaults and even a murder around campus as of late), and while she doesn’t kill Weyland (it’s ambiguous in the story itself if he lives or not, but we know he lives because of The Vampire Tapestry and all that), she does fuck him up a good deal. As it turns out, vampires that are basically humans with super-long lifespans and a thirst for blood handle bullets about as well as the average human. It’s a fun subversion. But will Katje return at some point in the novel, or is this the end of her story? She finds something like closure by the end, or at least realizes that maybe she should count more on the people in her life, so I’m fine if we never hear from her again.
A Step Farther Out
As a standalone narrative, ignoring its greater context, “The Ancient Mind at Work” is a gripping and psychologically dense SF-horror story that feels like a cat-and-mouse game par excellence; as an advertisement for The Vampire Tapestry it’s perhaps even more effective. I was tempted to order a copy as soon I had finished this story. Weyland being a vampire is so heavily telegraphed that it arguably doesn’t count as a twist, and indeed it’s not a twist but the very premise of the novel, but despite that I was still on edge because Katje is such a fully realized and flawed character. Charnas proves here that a mythical creature like the vampire can still be threatening when given a dose of 20th century rationalism.
