(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, July 1933.)
Weird Tales, across incarnations, has been arguably the most important outlet for dark fantasy and horror in the American market for the past century now. Yes, it’s been that long. The first issue of Weird Tales is marked March 1923 and would have appeared on newsstands in February (I’m not splitting hairs), and while it wasn’t immediately impressive it would become the quintessential pulp horror magazine within a decade. Given the nature of my site and how important Weird Tales is, I thought it appropriate (not to mention a break away from tackling serials) to do a month-long tribute by reviewing entirely short stories from this magazine’s pages—but make no mistake, this is not an attempt to cover its incredibly wide-spanning history. What I’m doing rather is to cover the most famous period of Weird Tales: from the mid-1920s to the end of the 1930s.
In a way this is not so much a tribute to Weird Tales as to the man who, more than anyone, made it the legend it now is: Farnsworth Wright. Wright hopped on as editor with the November 1924 issue and stayed until failing health forced him to step down after the March 1940 issue; he died only a few months later. But in the decade and a half that Wright was editor there was a profound change in the magazine’s contents, as it went from focusing on unassuming ghost stories to encompassing a wider range of “weird” fiction, including but not limited to sword and sorcery, operatic science fiction, and of course, cosmic horror. Ghost stories remained a firm part of the magazine’s identity, but under Wright we saw several big forerunners to modern horror and fantasy, including H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, and indeed Weird Tales was the birthplace of both Conan the Barbarian and the Cthulhu Mythos.
Weird Tales was not that friendly to novellas unless they were serialized, and anyway I figured it’d be more accurate a representation to review all short stories this month, which also allows for a more diverse set of authors. We’ve got some famous ones here, but also some deep cuts that I’m very much interested in exploring.
Anyway, here are the short stories:
“The Stolen Body” by H. G. Wells. From the November 1925 issue. This is the first true reprint I’ll be reviewing for Remembrance. “The Stolen Body” was first published in the November 1898 issue of The Strand Magazine, but we’re reading it as it appeared in Weird Tales, and apparently Wright (or somebody) deemed it major enough to make it the cover story despite its reprint status. Wells is someone who needs no introduction, and this is a story from his peak era.
“The Canal” by Everil Worrell. From the December 1927 issue. Not much is known about this author, but her vampire story “The Canal” has been reprinted several times over the years, including as a “classic” reprint in Weird Tales itself. Lovecraft was apparently a big admirer of this one, and he also didn’t seem immediately aware that Worrell was a woman. There’s a later revised version with a different ending, but we’re reading its first magazine appearance.
“The Star-Stealers” by Edmond Hamilton. From the February 1929 issue. Hamilton had made his debut in Weird Tales, and he soon proved to be the most prolific contributor of “weird-scientific stories,” or ya know, just science fiction. “The Star-Stealers” is the second entry in the episodic Interstellar Patrol series, which while not often read now was an early exmaple of space opera, which Hamilton helped codify alongside E. E. Smith and Jack Williamson.
“The Black Stone” by Robert E. Howard. From the November 1931 issue. This has to be the fastest I’ve returned to an author for my site, since only last month I finished covering Howard’s Conan serial The People of the Black Circle. “The Black Stone,” however, is not sword and sorcery but cosmic horror, and it’s supposed to be one of the best old-school Lovecraftian narratives, on top of being one of the first examples of someone taking cues from Lovecraft’s work.
“The Dreams in the Witch-House” by H. P. Lovecraft. From the July 1933 issue. Speaking of which, it’d be impossible to do a Weird Tales tribute without covering its most famous contributor, although Lovecraft was certainly not that at the time. Wright and Lovecraft did not get along, with Wright rejecting At the Mountains of Madness and “The Shadow Out of Time.” Still, this is one of his more famous short stories, and it even got adapted for TV recently.
“The Black God’s Kiss” by C. L. Moore. From the October 1934 issue. The only reread of the bunch, and that’s because I honestly did not give this one the attention I should have when I encountered it a couple years ago. Moore is now more known for collaborating with her husband Henry Kuttner, but she started as one of the more popular authors in Weird Tales. “The Black God’s Kiss” is the first in the Jirel of Jory series, featuring the titular sword-and-sorcery heroine.
“Vulthoom” by Clark Ashton Smith. From the September 1935 issue. The literary sorcerer returns! Smith was, for a brief time, one of the most prolific contributors to Weird Tales, although he mostly retired from writing fiction by the time Wright left. “Vulthoom” is a “late” Smith story, and you can tell because it was one of only a few he put out in 1935. It’s also a comparitibely rare example of Smith doing SF, with the setting being not Earth but a haunted Mars.
“Strange Orchids” by Dorothy Quick. From the March 1937 issue. As with Worrell we don’t know much about Quick, and unlike “The Canal” this has not been reprinted so often. I do remember first seeing Quick’s name in Unknown, the magazine that for a brief time usurped Weird Tales, but she appeared more in the latter; she basically stopped writing fiction once the first incarnation of Weird Tales shut down. Probably the most obscure pick of the bunch.
“Roads” by Seabury Quinn. From the January 1938 issue. Quinn was the most popular author to appear in Weird Tales during the Wright era, and yet his reputation dwindled enough since his death that he later “won” the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award. The posthumous obscurity could be because a lot of what Quinn wrote was hackwork, but “Roads” is distinct for apparently being one of those pieces that Quinn wrote out of passion, being an earnestly told Christmas story.
I know Halloween was only like five months ago, but truth be told it’s always Halloween in my heart. If I could get away with just reading and reviewing spooky fiction I probably would; nothing warms my bones like a good horror yarn. The greatest hits from Weird Tales are still cited after nearly a century, but I suspect there are also deeper cuts (especially by female authors, as there would’ve been several) that are worth our attention. We have a healthy variety of authors and a good deal of diversity as to this magazine’s contents, ranging from the supernatural to the weird-scientific.
But enough buildup…
It’s time to venture into the eerie, the uncanny, and the WEIRD!
Do I really need to introduce you to Stephen King? Nah, I don’t. So this is not so much a cursory look at King’s life and works as my own personal experience with him, because I have to admit, I was slow to read King at all. A lot of people have probably read him in high school, but I didn’t read a single word of his until I was in college; that’s not a gloat or anything, that’s just the reality of the situation. Had I read King earlier I probably would’ve been more entranced. My first exposure to King was “The Gunslinger,” the short story that later became part of the novel of the same name, the first in his Dark Tower series. I remember basically nothing about it. But later I read Different Seasons, his novella collection (although I will die on the hill of arguing Apt Pupil and The Body are full novels), which was sort of a mixed experience but mostly positive, although honestly The Shawshank Redemption improves on its source material in several ways.
Then last year I read ‘Salem’s Lot, his second novel, and I was sort of impressed; I love the first half and while the second half is oddly not nearly as scary (it loses its foreboding tone once the vampire-hunting gets underway), I liked that too. Good novel, even if it proved to be ground zero for so many of King’s… well, let’s call them quirks. King has written a lot. Like a fuckton. Like it’s intimidating to see just how many novels he’s written, although his list of short works is more manageable. Point being, King inevitably repeats himself; he has a list of go-to tropes and plot devices, and probably even turns of phrase that he can resort to over and over. I don’t really blame him: Philip K. Dick had a set of formulae too. But it’s also easy to poke fun at King’s tendency to, for example, set a given story in his home state of Maine—although today’s tale is an exception.
Despite being labeled a horror author, King has at least dabbled in pretty much every genre you can think of, including some good ol’ science fiction. “The Jaunt” is one of his more famous short stories (admittedly his short stories are not nearly as famous as his novels and novellas), and it’s the most pronounced example of him combining SF with horror in that both genres about equally play off each other here.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the June 1981 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine. Because this is a King story from his prime era it’s very easy to find in print. The obvious choice is Skeleton Crew, which contains, among other things, The Mist. (I don’t know why I got The Mist as a standalone paperback, that was a waste of money. Actually several of King’s novellas have been resold as standalone paperbacks despite being only marginally cheaper than the collections they appear in.) The weird thing about “The Jaunt” is that it hasn’t been anthologized much; in four decades it’s been anthologized in English only a couple times.
Enhancing Image
Mark is taking his family for a business trip; in the old days they would’ve taken a ship to Mars, but with the Jaunt they can fall asleep and wake up at their destination in what feels like seconds. The Jaunt (with a capital J) is a revolutionary method of transportation that has made moving things and people between planets as easy as possible. Mark has Jaunted before but his wife Marilys and son Ricky and daughter Patty have not before. As they’re waiting to get a hit of sleeping gas (you have to be rendered unconscious before Jaunting), Mark passes the time and indulges his kids’ curiosity by telling them the story of how teleportation was invented; the kids would know little bits and pieces already, but Mark decides to tell them enough of the story, if not all the grisly details.
A few things to note before we get into that origin story…
King would’ve written “The Jaunt” circa 1980, or maybe earlier, and indeed this could not have been written any later than the early ’80s with how much it explicitly references OPEC and the oil crisis in the ’70s—a rather specific period in American history that the characters in this far-future setting treat like it was a recent and life-changing happening. I find this funny, because while the oil crisis no doubt impacted millions of Americans who were there to live through it, even people born, say, 1990 and later would have basically no context or sense of attachment with that period. The story shows its age by using what was then a recent time in history and overestimating how people in the future would relate to said time. Jaunting would be considered a monumental breakthrough in transportation regardless of when it was invented, but while King’s decision to date the story may seem superfluous, it does what most if not all science fiction sets out to do: not to predict the future but to comment on the present.
Also, if you’re a seasoned SF reader then you probably thought of jaunting (lower case l) as depicted in Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, which was by no means the first use of teleportation in SF but definitely had one of the most creative and influential uses. I figured, even before starting to read this one, that “The Jaunt” was harking to Bester’s novel, and that it would subvert our expectations about the mechanics of teleportation in some way since it’s clearly a horror story. Rather than let the reference go unspoken, though, King goes out of his way to let you know that he too manages to fit reading science fiction into his no doubt busy schedule. It’s one of those hat tips to fandom that makes me roll my eyes, but it also makes me wonder if “The Jaunt” would’ve gotten a Hugo nomination had it been published in an SF (and not horror) magazine.
Get this:
“Sometimes in college chemistry and physics they call it the Carew Process, but it’s really teleportation, and it was Carew himself—if you can believe the stories—who named it ‘the Jaunt.’ He was a science fiction reader, and there’s a story by a man named Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination it’s called, and this fellow Bester made up the word ‘jaunte’ for teleportation in it. Except in his book, you could Jaunt just by thinking about it, and we can’t really do that.”
Anyway, about Victor Carew. The Carew story is when “The Jaunt” starts to grab my attention and as far as I’m concerned it’s the good SF-horror story that, like one of those Russian toys, is nestled inside a less scary and more cliched story. Carew was a scientist who struggled to retain autonomy while under government surveillance, using a barn as a makeshift laboratory and, like Jeff Goldblum’s character in The Fly, using this space to work on teleportation. The good news is that he finds that inanimate objects can be teleported from Portal A to Portal B with no issues; this alone would’ve revolutionized transportation, being able to move cargo between whole planets without a human driver. But of course this is sort of a cautionary tale and Carew does something that sounds reasonable but which will prove to have very mixed results: teleporting living things.
Having experimented on himself partly (he “loses” two fingers), Carew wonders if something can go through Portal A wholesale and come out of Portal B unscathed. Now, rather than experiment on people, Carew does the sane thing and tests Jaunting on animals—more specifically white mice. The mice (King erroneously calls them rats at one point) unfortunattely don’t fare well with teleportation: they come out the other end seemingly unharmed, but every one them dies soon after Jaunting. What’s more interesting is that if a mouse is put through Portal A tail-first and only partly subjected to the Jaunt, such that their head is still on the side of Portal A, they’re fine; if they’re put in head-first, however, with their head at Portal B and their tail at Portal A, they die even if they’re not completely teleported. Clearly then the mice dying has something to do with vision—what they’re seeing at that point between Portal A and B.
“What the hell is in there?” Carew wonders. Indeed.
I was wondering if King would go in a body horror or cosmic horror direction with this, and turns out it’s a bit of both. The body horror stems from how teleportation, if done gradually, reveals the insides of anything being teleported, such that we’re able to see the organs of the mice as they’re put slowly through the portal. The effect is uncanny and King, admirably, doesn’t dwell on it for too long, since he has another trick up his sleeve—that being the cosmic aspect. You see, teleportation takes a tiney fraction of a second, but during that incredibly brief time the subjective time it takes to Jaunt is enormous, although Carew does not realize this immediately. After all, the mice, aside from acting dazed when they come out the other end, don’t show any physical signs of being on the brink of death. What, then, could be killing them? Doesn’t matter, at least to the government, because Jaunting works and it’s about to change everything.
The results of the announcement of the Jaunt—of working teleportation—on October 19th, 1988, was a hammerstroke of worldwide excitement and economic upheaval. On the world money markets, the battered old American dollar suddenly skyrocketed through the roof. People who had bought gold at eight hundred and six dollars an ounce suddenly found that a pound of gold would bring something less than twelve hundred dollars. In the year between the announcement of the Jaunt and the first working Jaunt-Stations in New York and L.A., the stock market climbed a little over two hundred points. The price of oil dropped only seventy cents a barrel, but by 1994, with Jaunt-Stations crisscrossing the U.S. at the pressure-points of seventy major cities, OPEC solidarity had been cracked, and the price of oil began to tumble. By 1998, with Stations in most free world cities and goods routinely Jaunted between Toyko [sic] and Paris, Paris and London, London and New York, New York and Berlin, oil had dropped to fourteen dollars a barrel. By 2006, when people at last began to use the Jaunt on a regular basis, the stock market had leveled off seven hundred points above its 1987 levels and oil was selling for six dollars a barrel.
By 2006, oil had become what it had been in 1906: a toy.
Again I’m amused that King made the invention of teleportation so close to what would’ve then been the present day. What is he trying to say here? Genuine question, although I have to think it has to do with what was then (and still is, really) a mad search not only for alternative energy sources but to make those sources commercially viable. Sadly he doesn’t go deeper into the socio-economic implications of Jaunting (I imagine truckers would be mad about being out of a job), but he does enough that we’re given a juicy slice of how society in the future could be changed radically. And hell, even if you consider the negatives, the environmental consequences (there don’t seem to be any drawbacks in this regard) alone would make Jaunting a godsend not just for most people but for life on Earth generally.
A shame about those who Jaunt while still awake…
There Be Spoilers Here
Turns out Jaunting does have a physical effect on people, and there’s a reason why Carew is not able to see that by testing on the white mice. Apparently Jaunting while awake (although not when asleep, weird) turns your hair white (assuming it’s not already) while also aging you massively—physically, with the hair, but especially mentally. I’m embarrassed actually that it took until mere minutes prior to my writing this that the reason why Carew doesn’t see a physical change in the mice is that their coats are already white. In fairness the mice having their coats unchanged is a detail that’s unusually subtle by King’s standards, and it makes me think about how much better “The Jaunt” could’ve been had he put more of that storytelling discipline into action. I know I may sound unfairly harsh to the most popular horror author of all time, but King really does have moments where he’s able to push himself to the realm of true artistry, something higher than workmanlike technique; sometimes he really doesn’t, though.
(My favorite King short story is still “The Reach,” which is an unusually low-key outing for him, though that paid off with a World Fantasy Award win. It’s refined and effective as both a ghost story and simply as a work of fiction, and if you want prime King then I’d say that’s an example.)
So now we’re at the end. The time has come for Mark and his family to Jaunt to Mars; they get the gas and at first everything seems fine when they arrive at the other end. The only thing is that Ricky, being a dumbass, intentionally held his breath during the gassing and stayed conscious during the Jaunt, with predictably horrific results. Like with other people who supposedly stayed conscious during the Jaunt he comes out the other end with his hair snow-white, only this time, rather than being dazed like the mice, Ricky is laughing mad to the point of clawing his own eyes out while he cackles. Presumably Ricky will not live long, and to say this trip for the family proves traumatic would be an understatement.
A few questions:
Since the Jaunt has been proved to be potentially deadly, and in a dramatic fashion at that, you’d think there’d be more safety measures. I get that if “The Cold Equations” can work in spite of how implausible its situation is then so can “The Jaunt,” but with the former I get the feeling (well actually we know this from correspondence between John W. Campbell and author Tom Godwin) that the decision to forego measures that would’ve saved the girl in that story was deliberate, whereas in “The Jaunt” it feels like a way for King to sneak in a scary ending.
If all it takes for someone to stay awake during the Jaunt is so just hold their breath when being gassed, shouldn’t there be more cases like this? We’re given the impression that surely no one would be stupid enough to do that, given that Ricky is shown to be only a mildly stupid child, shouldn’t there be more cases of children dying from the Jaunt? I know that sounds morbid, but surely it’s no more morbid than quite a bit of what King’s written over the years.
Come to think of it, how come the attendants didn’t notice that Ricky wasn’t inhailing the gas? Couldn’t they tell? Shouldn’t there be some kind of backup measure to make sure that someone is unconscious before Jaunting? You have a two-step authentication process to check your damn bank statements on your phone, there should probably be something extra here. Not that the story as a whole doesn’t work, but the ending specifically would not be allowed to happen if even rudimentary safety measures were in place.
Children should probably not be allowed to Jaunt, right? It sounds like too much of a safety hazard. I know the obvious counter-argument would be that children are allowed in cars all the time and cars kill far more people in a year than sharks and airplane accidents combined (by like a lot), but there are also measures in place to try to minimize car fatalities. Granted, when “The Jaunt” was being written cars were far less safe than now and some people even today are reckless enough to cheat around using seatbelts. Still, the red tape for a Jaunting accident involving a child would be tremendous.
Anyway, even if I ignored the leap in logic, it’s too over the top for me to find scary. Ricky, a character whom we’ve gotten to know very little up to this point, does something monumentally stupid so that we can get a shocker ending. You could argue that it justifies the frame narrative, since otherwise the story just ends once Mark is done telling the story within the story, but I’d retort by saying that at least if the frame narrative is gonna be here at all then an ambiguous and moody ending would do better. We already had some body horror earlier that was creative and restrained enough that King left a good deal to the imagination. Personally I think we could’ve done without the frame narrative entirely; it’s not like Mark and his family are more compelling voices than Carew, and I was far more gripped by the substance of the story that’s being framed than how it was being framed.
A Step Farther Out
Kinda mixed on this one. There’s a pretty interesting SF-horror narrative nestled within a rather pointless frame narrative that not only verges on cornball but has a twist so obvious that it can be seen from orbit. It wouldn’t take too much to reframe the narrative in a documentary-like fashion, like Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Dunwich Horror,” wherein we’re like witnesses to a series of realistic but supernatural events. Unfortunately that requires a degree of restraint that King fails to practice here, and the result is ultimately too overblown for me to be genuinely spooked by. On the bright side, it’s memorable! King is aware that readers, even in 1981, are well aware of teleportation as a genre chestnut and tries admirably to subvert our expectations regarding this technology. That he’s able to conjure something menacing out of tech that, realistically, would change society for the better, is a sign of talent. It’s just a shame that the execution renders the story not all that scary, and also maybe too self-conscious.
(Cover by Robert Gibson Jones. Fantastic Adventures, July 1950.)
Who Goes There?
This is it. The last Fritz Leiber review I’ll be writing for a long while. I’m about tuckered out at this point, but thankfully we’re ending this month on somewhat of a high note. I like Leiber quite a bit, and his range is impressive, but even with that said, this is not the sort of thing I’d normally do with an author. I’m not even sure I’ll do it again, ever, but it’s been a neat experiment! Most importantly, going through so many of his works in such a span of time has made me appreciate Leiber’s versatility more, the things that make him tick, as well as become more aware of his few limitations. That Leiber continued to produce great work for so long, despite some obstacles, is a testament to his skill and especially his creative restlessness. Despite debuting in 1939, alongside Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, Leiber did three decades later what those peers of his could not: remain contemporary. His longevity and his versatility across several genres are remarkable, and much of his material still reads as perfectly modern.
You’re All Alone was part of a big revival for Leiber, having reinvigorated himself around 1950 after half a decade of low productivity and struggling to publish what little he wrote. Despite being published around the same time as SF classics like “Coming Attraction” and “A Pail of Air,” though, You’re All Alone‘s origins go back much farther, with themes and a tone that fall much more in line with Leiber’s horror fiction from the early ’40s. ISFDB provides an unusually lengthy note on the short novel’s gestation, but beware that this is a secondary source and the couple of typos left in tell me it’s not as thoroughly edited an entry as it should be. Basically, Leiber started working on You’re All Alone in 1943, right after finishing Conjure Wife and Gather, Darkness!, with the intention of submitting it to Unknown. Unfortunately, Unknown kicked the bucket midway through the year and Leiber was left without a suitable market for his fantasy-horror tale. It wasn’t until Fantastic Adventures, under the new editorship of Howard Brown (who also took over Amazing Stories), became a more prominent fantasy outlet in 1950 that Leiber’s novel would see publication.
Now, there are two versions of this novel: there’s the shorter magazine version under the title of You’re All Alone, and then there’s the longer book version titled The Sinful Ones (what a trashy, inferior title). The latter was initially published in 1953 with changes were made without Leiber’s consent, and it was “spiced up” considering books had looser censorship standards than the magazines. This strikes me as funny because the magazine version is already lurid enough, for reasons I’ll get into, and that while I haven’t read The Sinful Ones yet I feel like teetering more on the eroticism would simply be too much. Clocking in at 40,000 words (according to the contents page, and I can believe that estimate), You’re All Alone is too long to be considered a typical SFF novella (normally we’d be talking 20,000 to 30,000 words), and thus I’m reviewing it as a “complete novel,” even though it’s technically an abridged text.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the July 1950 issue of Fantastic Adventures, which is on the Archive. Pretty striking cover, huh? It does a good job of letting you in on this being a little horrifying, a little paranoid, but also, judging from the woman’s torn clothing, a little sexually charged as well. Oh, there’s a dog in the novel, and it’s big and ruthless enough to rip out a man’s throat, but it’s not nearly that big. Unusually for a complete novel, You’re All Alone saw magazine publication more than once, appearing again in the November 1966 issue of Fantastic, which you can also find here. It’s been reprinted in both its magazine form and as The Sinful Ones, which can get confusing; there’s a paperback of The Sinful Ones from Wildside Press, and there’s a combo paperback with You’re All Alone and C. G. Gilford’s The Liquid Man, also a Fantastic Adventures complete novel. Your best bet is to just bite the bullet and read it online, since neither version has been published often, and unfortunately even the shorter version is too long to be anthologized.
Enhancing Image
Carr Mackay is just your average thirty-something in a lot of ways. He’s got a nice job at a Chicago employment office, he’s attractive enough but not model material, he has a sexy if also demanding girlfriend, and he doesn’t have any major hangups to speak of. Unfortunately for Carr, whose life prior to the story’s beginning seemed to be simple, he’s about to get a real kick in the pants in the form of a girl (said to be college age, don’t think about it too hard) who will both make and break his world. What follows is a trip into a nightmare world, a novel-length chase sequence, and perhaps most perplexing of all, a bit of a love story.
We meet Jane, who comes in presumably for job opportunities but who, judging from her nervous demeanor, is here for something else. She notices something off about Carr, but she won’t say what it is, at least not in public. Carr himself notices that a tall blonde woman is spying on both of them, or at least that’s what it looks like. Jane tells Carr to act like everything’s normal, but she’s not doing a good job at such an act and all of this is confusing for Carr, who is now finding out that there’s somsrthing “different” with him, something which separates him from everyone else. When Jane leaves, the tall blonde, apropos of nothing, slaps her, but Jane does not react; she doesn’t so much as flinch, just ignoring the slap and walking out. Do the two know each other? How come nobody in the office reacted to this? The opening scene is uncanny, and it’s also from this early point that Leiber injects a bit of social commentary into the equation.
No one said anything, no one did anything, no one even looked up, at least not obviously, though everyone in the office must have heard the slap if they hadn’t seen it. But with the universal middle-class reluctance, Carr thought, to recognize that nasty things happened in the worlds they pretended not to notice.
You’re All Alone is a Chicago narrative through and through, and it’s pretty far from a flattering depiction of the city. Of course, this could be just about any city. For such an urbanite, Leiber consistently made out cityscapes to be nightmarish, oppressive, artless, unappealing, specifically in his horror fiction. While it was published years afterward, You’re All Alone has more in common with his early stories “Smoke Ghost” and “The Hound” (see my review of the latter here) than with other works of his published during that time. There is no science-fictional basis for what happens to Carr; he, the average guy, is plopped by the hand of God from “our” world into something else entirely, as if someone had flipped a switch in the universe. One second his girlfriend Marcia and his coworker Tom act like their usual selves and the next they start acting strange, like they too had been suddenly put into a different universe, only they act unaware of it.
One moment everything’s normal, the next it’s all backwards. That’s what falling in love is like, you know, only here it’s a bit more foreboding. Who can he trust? He supposes it would have to be Jane, but she hesitates to explain herself, only to say that she and Carr ought to trust each other, that the people Carr knows are not entirely who they seem to be, and that the tall blonde is someone to be avoided at all costs. This would be sort of a demented meet cute if not for the fact that Carr is already taken, though he won’t be like that for long. First Tom introduces him to someone who does not exist (possiblly Jane is supposed to be in that place, but Tom is talking to thin air), and later when Carr meets up with Marcia she talks to him, but not quite. Again Marcia is talking to thin air, but it’s like she’s talking to a Carr who is not where she thinks he is, like Carr has gone invisible and there’s another alternate version of him that’s supposed to be in his place.
What the hell’s going on here? Carr has his theories, as to why people he knows are suddenly ignoring him or acting like he’s somewhere he’s not, as to why Jane has singled him out. And surprisingly, in the midst of his theorizing, he more or less figures out what the deal is, although it’s hard to explain, all the more so because there’s no why given. Basically, Tom and Marcia and the others are not the people who are acting weird, but in fact it’s Carr and Jane (along with the tall blonde) who are acting out of order. The tall blonde is named Hackman, and she’s part of a trio of people who, like Carr and Jane, have stepped out of the “normal” world and entered a level of existence where normal people can’t touch them.
The “normal” world of You’re All Alone is predetermined, with everything on a set path, with an unwritten script that everyone is supposed to follow. The people of this world may look alive, but they’re basically robots (not literally but metaphorically) who exist to serve what is predetermined. There are, however, exceptions… people who have broken from the script, who have become truly alive in the sense that they’re able to think and make decisions that go against the greater reality. The weird part is that the robots don’t react to when the “free” people break from the script; they just keep going like nothing has changed, reacting to the ghosts of the people they assume to be following along. The result is that the “free” people are free to do whatever they want, albeit they have to contend with other people who have gone off-script, some of which I’ll get into in the spoilers section.
(Interior illustration by Henry Sharp.)
The question is, how do you inject physical conflict into a story where the leads are unable to be hurt by 99.9% of people in the world? Well, suppose you had a secret, and a possibly dangerous one at that; then suppose there was a small group of people that knew this secret of yours, and conversely you would know their secret. You would become secret sharers, which means you could form a bond over your shared knowledge, or…
Carr and Janes are faced with danger from more than one direction. On the one end you have the trio of Hackman, Wilson, and Dris, plus their dog (yes, the dog on the cover and in the interior art, although it’s nowhere near that size) and on the other they face an even more mysterious threat: a gang of four men in black hats, who seem to scare the aforementioned trio just as much as our leads. Then there’s a wild card in the form of Jane’s ally, or at least the closest she has to one, a fellow “free” person whose name we never learn, only described as a small man with glasses. How trustworthy is he? How do we deal with these villains? Stay tuned.
There Be Spoilers Here
This is a novel full of thrills, not just of the horror variety but also incorporating some thrills of the romantic/sexual kind. Not a surprising development, but as Carr and Jane try to evade the fiends which haunt the city streets, they also grow closer together, and the result is kind of a love story. Romance is not something often practice in old-timey SFF, and even more rarely does it work; while I wouldn’t put the romance between Carr and Jane on a Shakespearean pedestal, it’s a more earnest effort than what most authors of the time would’ve given us. The problem with writing romance in the world of old-timey SFF is that presumably there would have to be some chemistry between a male lead and a female lead, and the latter specifically is an issue because most authors were not keen on writing a female lead as more than just a satellite love interest.
Jane is not as thoroughly characterized as some later Leiber leading ladies (try saying that three times fast), but she’s certainly not a trophy with legs existing only as a reward for Carr. Unlike the average leading lady in SFF from this time, Jane also has some real baggage; her home life sucks (she has basically none to speak of, on account of going off-script), she constantly lives in fear, and she has some major trust issues—with Carr as well as the small man with the glasses. Unlike most other examples from this period, Jane is not a perfect do-gooder or a total shrew but a believably flawed person, and ultimately Carr accepts her anyway, which I think is pretty sweet. Really ahead of his time, that Leiber.
Speaking of being out of the norm, there’s this common assumption that American life in the ’50s (You’re All Alone was written in the ’40s, but you’ll get what I mean) was puritanical, basically devoid of depictions and discussions of sex outside of the bedroom. You didn’t read about it, and you didn’t watch it, and you certainly didn’t talk about it. I’m thinking of Pleasantville, which is a good movie, but it’s also often misunderstood to be a parody of ’50s American suburban life when it’s actually parodying ’50s American suburban life as depicted in ’50s American television. The truth is that people seventy years ago were about as horny then as they are now—which is to say they were pretty fucking horny, it’s just that they didn’t have as many outlets for expression. A good deal of pulp fiction illustrations from this period shows scantily clad or tastefully nude women, either in a state of distress or of joy.
Why do you think the book version of this novel is called The Sinful Ones? To make it sound more lurid for the book market, sure, but it’s also not entirely inaccurate. Carr, Jane, the small man with the glasses, and others of their kind are indeed the sinful ones, the ones who have broken from societal norms on account of breaking of the big machine, and well, if you had the ability to get away with, say, being a peeping tom without consequence, you may very well do that. A “free” person in the world of the novel wouldn’t use that ability to rob a bank or get away with murder (although the latter, as we see, is certainly an option), but rather for something even pettier: to get their rocks off. Sexuality defines so many of the motivations and actions among the characters that the novel would cease to function without it; even the “wholesome” romance between Carr and Jane is tinged strongly with sexual tension.
In one of the most memorable scenes in the novel, Carr and Jane are out on one of their “dates” and they stop at a club, except they don’t take part in Chicago’s night life so much as have their fun apart from it. At one point Jane does a strip tease for Carr where everyone can see them, except nobody notices past maybe a split-second of disruption, like a glitch in the Matrix. It’s provocative, but it also captures intimacy between lovers in a public space that I’ve rarely seen in fiction. It’s like you’re both caught in a bubble and suddenly you turn into a couple of exhibitionists. Why should you care if people watch? There really is nobody else.
Jane looked at Carr and let her slip drop. Tears stung Carr’s eyes. Her breasts seemed far more beautiful than flesh should be.
And then there was, not a reaction on the part of the crowd, but the ghost of one. A momentary silence fell on Goldie’s Casablanca. Even the fat man’s glib phrases slackened and faded, like a phonograph record running down. His pudgy hands hung between chords. While the frozen gestures and expressions of the people at the tables all hinted at words halted on the brink of utterance. And it seemed to Carr, as he stared at Jane, that heads and eyes turned toward the platform, but only sluggishly and with difficulty, as if, dead, they felt a faint, fleeting ripple of life.
And although his mind was hazy with liquor, Carr knew that Jane was showing herself to him alone, that the robot audience were like cattle who turn to look toward a sound, experience some brief sluggish glow of consciousness, and go back to their mindless cud-chewing.
The eventual two-way confrontation with Hackman, Wilson, and Dris (and let’s not forget the dog!) and the gang of four (who are implied, going by their names, to be mafia members) is also inevitable; thus I don’t feel the need to dig deep into that. I was expecting thrills and chills with You’re All Alone, a robust and fast-moving plot with Leiber’s reliable level of prose, but what I was not expecting was sheer grime and sleaziness of the setting to not only be as present as it was but also to inform the plot to such an extent. Sex and violence are like border towns in neighboring countries, techically separated but only a stone’s throw apart. Leiber knew all about sex, violence, and alienation, and he respected the audience enough to let them in on this dark knowledge. For “pulp trash” in 1950 to do this? It’s likelier than you think. In hindsight the version of You’re All Alone that we now have would probably not have gotten printed in Unknown, a magazine which for all its virtues was a “classier” and more chaste establishment.
The ending is hopeful, if also too abrupt for my tastes, yet there’s still this sense of danger lurking around every corner, as if the dog that had been stalking Carr and Jane for much the novel was only a taste of future terrors. The total lack of an epilogue (the novel ends at exactly the same time the action ends) hints at a lack of real closure. Our leads can escape normal everyday life, but they can’t escape the shadows of the city, nor can they even hope to return to normality. It’s the story of star-crossed lovers who find, for both better and worse, that they are not alone.
A Step Farther Out
Leiber wasn’t much of a novelist, despite the two Hugo wins (plus a Retro Hugo) in that category, but unlike Destiny Times Three, which was short and felt like it could’ve been longer, You’re All Alone is short and yet feels like it wouldn’t really benefit from expansion. The cast is small, the plot is simple when you get down to it, yet this baby is dripping with atmosphere; the Chicago skyline is oppressive, the alleys and clubs no refuge from the lurking terror of suffocation. I’m not surprised Leiber had started working on it in the early ’40s, since it has more in common with his horror fiction and even the moodier Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories from that period. Leiber started out as a fantasist, but he was especially a practitioner of horror—a student of Lovecraft who quickly outpaced his teacher. You’re All Alone, published during Leiber’s return as a masterful science-fictionist, feels like the climax of his horror phase, being his last major venture in the genre for at least a decade. It might be the strongest argument for Leiber as the most important innovator in urban fantasy (and horror) in the days before Neil Gaiman, which may sound like a niche compliment, but it really isn’t.
Well, that’s it! I might do something like this again late next year, but this has been exhausting, if somewhat enlightening. Leiber is one of the few old-timey SFF authors who can be read voraciously in a variety of modes, and if there’s anything I’ve learned it’s that such a marathon is unwise for even an author as varied as him. I’ll be posting this on the last day of 2022, and if you’re reading this in the future (which yeah, 99% likelihood you will be) you’ll have at least something of an idea as to how 2023 is going. Is it better? did things somehow get worse? Regardless, I’m looking forward to getting back on a regular schedule with a roundtable of authors, jumping across decades and discovering (and rediscovering) several quite different voices. Much as I like to pay tribute to an author I respect very much, the thrill of discovery is so much greater…
By 1969, Fritz Leiber had been in the game for thirty years (a long time, mind you), and yet unlike most of his contemporaries he had not started to rest on his laurels, or, even worse, embarrass himself in front of his peers. Isaac Asimov became known as a pop scientist, releasing the occasional short story but mostly spending his time on articles and science books. Robert Heinlein went silent after The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and when he returned he seemed to have lost his magic touch (imagine waiting four years for a new Heinlein novel and you get I Will Fear No Evil). Theodore Sturgeon was mostly not writing at this point, although he was gaining himself some major Trek cred and he would soon return to the magazines with fresh material. Clifford Simak was pumping out about one novel a year, but the late ’60s were not exactly peak years for him. Yet Leiber not only remained productive but played nicely with the New Wave kids, fitting in with authors a generation younger than him; even at this relatively late stage of his career he remained restless.
“Ship of Shadows” was written specially for Leiber’s F&SF tribute issue, and as should probably be expected of a special author tribute story it goes just a bit farther than the average Leiber yarn. Whereas Leiber tends to jump between SF, fantasy, and horror with his fiction, “Ship of Shadows” dabbles in all three genres, though it can ultimately be considered science fiction for reasons I’ll get to much later. On the one hand this is a perfect recipe for disaster, or at least a muddled story, but the hodgepodge of genres paid off, as it won the Hugo for Best Novella. It’s also a reread for me, but it’s been a couple years, and as it turns out I remembered even less of “Ship of Shadows” than I thought I did—which is not necessarily a mark against it!
Placing Coordinates
First published in the July 1969 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. Incidentally this is one of those old F&SF issues I actually have a physical copy of, which is cool. Being a Hugo winner, “Ship of Shadows” has been reprinted quite a few times over the years, first in World’s Best Science Fiction: 1970 (confusingly covering fiction from 1969), edited by Terry Carr and Donald Wollheim. Naturally it would also appear in The Hugo Winners, Volume Three; it was supposed to appear in the previous volume, but Isaac Asimov, by his own admission, had somehow forgotten to include it. We also have the Leiber collection Ship of Shadows, very creatively named no doubt. If you’re an avid collector then there’s Masters of Science Fiction: Fritz Leiber from Centipede Press, although I do wanna warn you that a copy of this pristine hardcover will run you in the hundreds of dollars. Sadly it looks like there aren’t any reprints in paperback or hardcover that are currently available new, but on the bright side you have a lot of second-hand options.
Enhancing Image
Spar is an elderly (or at the very least decrepit) member of Windrush, some kind of ship that may or may not be the world entire. It’s amazing that Spar is able to accomplish anything given that a) he’s half-blind, and b) he’s a raging alcoholic. Indeed we start with Spar nursing himself through a hangover, which compounds his already poor eyesight, but quickly things “improve” when he comes across a talking cat—yeah, a talking cat, and it’s not a hallucination. The cat, to be named Kim, is clearly intelligent, and while there are “witches” on the ship who have cats as their familiars, Kim seems to be acting on his own. The two bond and start a sort of business relationship, with Spar providing Kim with a home and Kim providing him a service as rat catcher. Meanwhile Spar works at the Bat Rack (I sense a Halloween theme going on here) as a bartender’s assistant; said bartender is Keeper (get it? like barkeep? but also his brother’s keeper…?), who gives Spar something to do while also trying to not have him waste away on booze.
Know how you shouldn’t get high on your own supply? Same goes for drink, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure Spar is an addict.
A few things to note about the Bat Rack and the people who frequent it. Much of the novella’s action happens in or around this bar, which gives the story a vaguely theatrical tingue, what with there being only a few locations of note. The characters also have tangled personal and professional relationships, and it might be easiest to understand them as if in the context of a film noir, and why not, the setting and the character archetypes fit the bill well enough. Spar is our nominal hero who, much like the typical film noir protagonist, is knee-deep in his vices, with Keeper as the straight man. Suzy is a barfly who has a bit of a maybe-maybe-not going on with Spar, being much less the femme fatale than the film noir protagonist single obligatory lady friend, if he even has one. There’s Kim, the humorous and callous sidekick who arguably functions as the id to Spar’s ego. Then there’s the Big Bad™ of the story (not a spoiler, trust me), Crown, who is all but said to be the local pimp, as well as a big deal at the Bat Rack.
Oh, and then there’s Doc—the sage.
Regardless of where we actually are, we’re almost certainly not on Earth; for one thing, the method of timekeeping in Windrush is different. “Workday, Loafday, Playday, Sleepday. Ten days make a terranth, twelve terranths make a sunth, twelve sunths make a starth, and so on, to the end of time,” so says Spar. There’s a four-day cycle, ten days in the equivalent of a week, and so on, although this doesn’t help with understanding the setting so much as it helps give the impression that the setting itself is not totally understandable. Not much is explained in at least the first half of “Ship of Shadows,” partly because Spar, being our POV character, doesn’t know a whole lot himself, but also partly because his ability to comprehend his surroundings is hampered by his blindness. While everything being described as a “blur” got repretitive for me, I get that there are only so many words you can use to convey the fuzziness and lack of depth of poor eyesight.
Windrush is a curious setting for what swerves between fantasy, horror, and SF, as the descriptions of the ship’s interior very much imply that the story, on the whole, falls into that last genre. What complicates matters is that aside from the “normal” people aboard Windrush, there are also apparently witches, vampires, and even zombies, although tellingly these creatures of the night are not confronted directly (unless I’m missing something); for example we hear a good deal about witches, but we never see a witch or see witchcraft performed. The closest we get to witchcraft is actually medical science, plain and simple, and nobody aside from Doc understands how modern (or I guess it’d be considered futuristic) medicine works. Doc, whom Spar comes to with hopes of restoring his eyesight and even giving him a new pair of teeth, is the real hero of the story if anything, but since he’s a supporting character we’re not always sure what he’s up to.
Doc, who is maybe not the oldest (although he would be up there) but certainly the wisest of the cast, is also seemingly the only one aware that there was life prior to the current dynamic in Windrush. More than anything he represents the standards of our civilization, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence either that Doc, being the only truly civilized man on a ship full of barbarians, has a little black bag that amounts to the story’s MacGuffin. Little black bag? A doctor’s bag that can do anything? Does this sound a little but like the equally sought-after MacGuffin of C. M. Kornbluth’s “The Little Black Bag”? Similarly there’s a tinge of pessimism about humanity’s future, and how Doc’s equipment is the ony thing keeping what’s left of humanity from teetering off a cliff. Take Doc’s response to Spar’s request for new eyes and teeth, which is as bitter as it is solemn:
After what seemed a long while, Doc said in a dreamy, sorrowful voice, “In the Old Days, that would have been easy. They’d perfected eye transplants. They could regenerate cranial nerves, and sometimes restore scanning power to an injured cerebrum. While transplanting tooth buds from a stillborn was intern’s play. But now… Oh, I might be able to do what you ask in an uncomfortable, antique, inorganic fashion, but…” He broke off on a note that spoke of the misery of life and the uselessness of all effort.
Leiber was not only aware of Kornbluth but was close contemporaries with him, although the two have starkly different worldviews. Doc’s little black bag, and generally the narrative of how it will take a select few “smart” people to prevent humanity from blowing itself up, are definitely in keeping with Kornbluth’s writing, but let’s not kid ourselves; this is merely paying homage to a fellow great writer, rather than pastiche. For the most part “Ship of Shadows” reads like Leiber—not exactly classic Leiber, as it is grimier and bloodier than his early ’50s standouts, but it has the theatrics, the inventiveness, and the sense of wit one can expect from him. Had Kornbluth not already been dead for a whole decade he may have written a New Wave piece not too dissimilar from “Ship of Shadows.” Just beware that this is Leiber in an unusually dark vein (though not without a snarky sense of humor) by his standards.
F&SF used to (I guess they still do it, but we’ve only gotten one of these since 2002) dedicate special issues to authors deemed important in the field, especially authors who have contributed immensely to F&SF, with Leiber of course being one of the authors to receive this treatment. The tribute story, written specially for the issue, tends to be a novella, though not always, and typically you can expect the author indulge in as many of their fetishes (in the non-sexual meaning of the word) as possible while also, ideally, delivering a fine read. Eventually I’ll review Poul Anderson’s “The Queen of Air and Darkness,” which also won a Hugo, and that novella is, for good or ill depending on your biases, very Anderson-y; similarly “Ship of Shadows” is up there with the most Leiber-y of works, and as a result of that it’s a bit muddled but also highly entertaining. It also has the advantage of being, like much of Leiber’s best work, pretty compact all things considered; it’s a novella, sure, but only maybe 20,000 words in length, and Leiber gets a lot of mileage by the gallon with this one.
There Be Spoilers Here
The big twist of “Ship of Shadows” is that it’s a generation ship story. Now, that may sound rather niche, but the generation ship story was, at least for a time, a pretty crowded subgenre (if it can even be called a subgenre) of SF. If you’ve read, say, Heinlein’s “Universe” or Brian Aldiss’s Non-Stop then you know there are certain tropes to expect here. The thing about generation ships is that they sound cool on paper but realistically would run into a number of problems that are likely to jeopardize the whole operation, of which I would say the big three are: 1. the passengers or the crew commit mutiny and overthrow the ones in charge, 2. enough time passes that, depending on the sophistication of the ship’s design, the passengers might even forget that they’re on a spaceship, and 3. some illness or virus breaks out that, once it spreads, nobody on the ship is able to stop it, so we’d be looking at death or something not quite as bad. “Ship of Shadows” manages to tick all three boxes, because Leiber is going one step beyond with this one.
Whatever crew seems to be left on Windrush is clearly in charge of shit anymore, I suspect because they’ve tried to isolate themselves from the mostly ill passengers. Speaking of which, the passengers have almost entirely succumbed to the Lethean rickettsia, known colloquially as Styx ricks, with Doc the only person onboard who has the equipment and the know-how to treat symptoms; why then Doc and Keeper, who are demonstrably more rational, should give the reigns to Spar at the end is beyond me, but apparently it’s due to Spar’s position as the closest the drama has to an innocent soul. Awkward and unearned sex scene (well, implied sex scene) with Suzy aside, of course.
The novella’s climax is pretty over the top, almost reaching the levels of Titus Andronicus with how gruesome it is, although it must be said it lacks the camp factor of that infamous play. Not only are Crown and Ensign Drake disposed of in bloody fashion, but Suzy, who up to this point has been the only sympathetic female character of any substance, gets it maybe the bloodiest of all; there’s being fridged, and then there’s being fed unceremoniously into a meat grinder. Given Leiber’s history of quasi-pacifism, and how violence is often treated in his fiction (i.e., as something to be avoided), the brutality of “Ship of Shadows” further reinforces this notion that Leiber is pulling out all the stops—for both good and bad. Mostly good, but I was reminded rather uncomfortably that “Ship of Shadows” is one of those Leiber stories where he unintentionally comes off as much more of a woman hater than he really was.
Qualms aside, the ending is still one of those classic eureka moments, typical yes but often satisfying in a generation ship story where the characters realize that the universe is unfathomably bigger than their metal coffin. No wonder then that the twist is what I remembered more than anything (aside from Kim and the generally ghoulish atmosphere) from my first reading. Leiber loves his Halloween shit and he knows how to do the monster mash. That the ghoulish apperitions seemingly haunting Windrush are human drug addicts is maybe a little anticlimactic, but as another entry in Leiber’s continuing interest in the nature of addiction (especially alcoholism, which the man himself was prone to) it makes sense allegorically.
A Step Farther Out
I have to admit I’m a sucker for stories set on ships. Not a fan of actually being on ships, but stories about ships? Aw hell yeah. No wonder I like Melville and Conrad. A ship is the perfect setting to invoke paranoia, loneliness, nightmarish visions, a sense of isolation, all this negative shit that would be bad for the characters but good for us as readers. “Ship of Shadows” starts out as murky, intentionally so what with Spar’s eyesight, almost masquerading as fantasy before revealing itself to be SF in the second half, unfortunately sort of petering out at the very end. What makes “Ship of Shadows” so memorable is that while it would not be surprising if someone in their thirties wrote it, it’s a good deal more surprising that Leiber was pushing sixty at the time. There’s a bit of New Wave, a bit of satirical fantasy in the Unknown tradition, and a bit of that trademark Leiber quirkiness; the only thing it’s seriously missing is his thing for chess. It’s also a contender for Leiber’s most violent story, although your mileage may vary with regards to his treatment of his female characters (admittedly more brutal than the norm for him). In 1969, thirty years into his career (almost to the month), he was still searching for new avenues.
Our favorite authors don’t always come to us at such a young age; it happens a lot, but not all the time. No doubt I still would’ve fallen head over heels for Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut had I discovered them in college instead of high school. But some discoveries take longer than one would think. Given how they are such kindred spirits, it’s startling to know that H. P. Lovecraft did not start reading William Hope Hodgson until fairly late in life. Despite his connection (for both better and worse) with Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp did not start reading the tales of Conan until long after he had started writing fantasy of his own. And similarly, I had not read so much as a word of Fritz Leiber until I was in my early twenties; mind you I had only turned 27 this month. All this despite Leiber, regardless of the genre he tackles, quickly becoming one of my favorites.
It’s hard for me to remember now what my first Leiber story was: it had to be either “Gonna Roll the Bones,” by virtue of its appearance in Dangerous Visions (ed. Harlan Ellison), or it was his 1950 story “Coming Attraction,” which appeared in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume One (ed. Robert Silverberg). The former is a somewhat nightmarish fantasy, an allegory for addiction which explicitly tackles gambling but more implicitly alcoholism (there’s a good deal of overlap between gambling and heavy drinking) while the latter is a grimy post-nuclear fable that would become emblematic of material published in Galaxy Science Fiction. Indeed “Coming Attraction” saw print in one of the very first issues of Galaxy, and for the next few years Leiber and that newfangled magazine would have quite the fruitful relationship—see his equally classic post-apocalypse story “A Pail of Air.” It was during that productive period of 1950 to 1953 that Leiber really showed himself to be a top-tier science-fictionist, although labeling him as just that would be doing him a disservice.
Fritz Leiber was born on Christmas Eve, 1910, in Chicago, which for decades was his home turf, though he would adopt San Fransisco in the third act of his life. In the first years of his career as a writer he often went by the byline of Fritz Leiber, Jr., to differentiate himself from his old man, who was then known as a Shakespearean actor. Fritz, the son, started out as an actor like his father, both on the stage and even nabbing some small roles on the big screen, but he realized that acting was not in his future, despite his physical stature and his voice which carried enough weight for two men. Listen to his speech, “Monsters and Monster Lovers” (which was also printed in Fantastic), delivered at Pacificon II, and you can easily detect an alternate timeline where Leiber starred in Universal horror movies, like an American Boris Karloff. His background as a thespian would even inspire some of his fiction; his Hugo-winning novel The Big Time reads like it was meant for the stage.
Leiber would not debut officially in the field until 1939, at the age of 28, but he was already prepping his pen for a few years at that point. His first genre story, “Two Sought Adventure,” published in the August 1939 issue of Unknown, introduced not only Leiber to the SFF magazine world but also his most lasting creation, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. It’s worth noting, though, that while “Two Sought Adventure” was the first story published to feature everyone’s favorite barbarian-thief duo, it was not the first written. Leiber had apparently written “Adept’s Gambit” in 1936 (as far as I can tell the novella was more or less in its final form here), but it would not be published until the collection Night’s Black Agents came out in 1947—a whole decade later. Leiber’s struggle to get his work (more specifically his fantasy) published was a speed bump that would appear several times throughout his career, less aimed at Leiber in particular and more indicative of fantasy’s precarious place in the mid-20th century.
(Night’s Black Agents. Cover by Ronald Clyne. Arkham House, 1947.)
One of the few sympathetic voices to fantasy in the ’40s and ’50s was Arkham House, founded by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei with the mission statement of preserving the works of Lovecraft via book publication, though certain contemporary authors were also picked up. It’s no coincidence that Leiber got his early horror and fantasy collected alongside the likes of Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Ray Bradbury; not only was he was a practitioner of weird fiction, but he was even correspondents with Lovecraft toward the end of the latter’s life. No doubt Lovecraft had a profound impact on Leiber, but what’s curious is that you probably wouldn’t guess this from reading the fiction collected in Night’s Black Agents. Early horror outings like “The Automatic Pistol,” “Smoke Ghost,” and “The Hound” (the last of which I reviewed recently) don’t have a cosmic flavor so much as an urban one. These stories are not about bookish introverts who stumble upon eldritch terrors, but average city slickers who confront classic supernatural forces as transplanted to 20th century cityscapes.
In “The Automatic Pistol” we have a weapon which on the surface looks like any other gun (say, a Colt 1911), but which turns out to maybe have a mind of its own; in “Smoke Ghost” we have a classic ghost narrative, but the specter itself seems to represent something which can only be possible in a world shaken by the industrial revolution; in “The Hound” we have one of the most classic of monsters—the werewolf—but as a stand-in for the oppressiveness of skyscrapers and apartment complexes. This trend would continue with Leiber’s debut novel, Conjure Wife, published as a complete novel in Unknown in 1943, this time taking witchcraft and applying a few twists to it, first by replacing the typical Puritan settlement with a 20th century college campus and second by giving witches a different kind of role in society. The result is darkly comedic, if also problematic given our current understanding of gender roles (mind you that it would be a fatal error to take Conjure Wife too seriously or too literally). Being a landmark in fantasy literature, not to mention being a pretty enjoyable read to this day, Conjure Wife justifiably won Leiber a Retro Hugo for Best Novel, beating out his second novel and his first science fiction novel.
Leiber’s second and third novels, Gather, Darkness! and Destiny Times Three, are SF, with the latter capping off the first phase of his career. From the outset, Leiber wasn’t really a science-fictionist, but far more convincingly a fantasist; his best work from that first phase is mostly not his science fiction, which he didn’t write a lot of anyway. Whereas Leiber’s fantasy and horror felt basically fully formed (although obviously it would mature) from the beginning, the same cannot be said of his SF. Destiny Times Three, for instance, reads very much like A. E. van Vogt pastiche; it lacks the trademarks (namely his sense of humor) that so often define Leiber’s fantasy, especially his Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories. Leiber would do a much better job at writing convincing (not to mention compelling) SF when he started contributing to the magazines frequently again in 1950—a level of crafstmanship he would retain, albeit somewhat sporadically (he would either write prolifically or nothing at all), for the rest of his career.
It could be during the aforementioned period of 1950 to 1953 that Leiber became a master of SF more out of necessity than anything; he had a strong incentive to take on the role of science-fictionist, as while the SF magazine market was booming during these years, things were not looking so good for fantasy and horror. Unknown went under in ’43, Weird Tales (or rather its first incarnation) was on its last legs, and there wasn’t much new blood to go around for magazine fantasy or horror. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser themselves were basically put on ice, not appearing at all between “The Seven Black Priests” in 1953 and “Lean Times in Lankhmar” in 1959. On the bright side, it was during this period that we got some of Leiber’s most famous and most anthologized short SF, including “Coming Attraction,” “A Pail of Air,” “The Moon Is Green,” and “A Bad Day for Sales.” Leiber becoming Guest of Honor at the 1951 Worldcon (it was Nolacon I) was very much earned, and his formidable level of quality in the early ’50s must’ve almost made him seem like a new man to the SFF readership.
When Leiber returned, after a short hiatus, in the late ’50s, he not only revived Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser but devised a new SF series: the Change War cycle of stories. It’s this point, from 1957 to about 1970, that could be considered Leiber’s finest era. Aside from winning a slew of awards, perhaps the most passionate (certainly the most unique) acknowledgement of Leiber’s talent and importance would have to be the November 1959 issue of Fantastic, which not only printed “Lean Times in Lankhmar” but had all of its fiction pieces be by Leiber himself, as a tribute to the man. Fantastic had debuted in 1952, but it was only under the new editorship of Cele Goldsmith in 1958 that it became arguably the best fantasy-leaning magazine on the market; more importantly in Leiber’s case, it became a safe haven for fiction of his which he could not have reasonably submitted elsewhere. At least one Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story a year would see print in Fantastic, until Goldsmith stepped down in the 1965, whereafter the series would be put on another (albeit briefer) hiatus.
(Cover by Morris Scott Dollens. Fantastic, November 1959.)
The ’60s were a pretty good time to be Fritz Leiber; after all, he had, seemingly for the first time in his career, options. If he wanted to write a Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story or some miscellaneous adventure fantasy then he could send it to Fantastic; if he wanted to write more “high-brow” fantasy, something more urban or literary, then he could send it to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; if he wanted to write SF there were several magazines waiting in the wings, including Galaxy, Worlds of If, and Amazing Stories. “How come Analog didn’t get brought up?” I’m not exactly sure when this happened, but it looks like Leiber abandoned what was then Astounding Science Fiction after 1950, presumably because he found editor John W. Campbell’s pushing of Dianetics, along with his increasing conservatism, alienating. Minus that, the field was open! It was also the most prolific Leiber was as a novelist since the ’40s, with five novels published in the ’60s, though it must be said that Leiber was never much of a novelist; he was more impressive as a practitioner of the short story.
With “Ship of Shadows” (written specially for an F&SF tribute issue) and “Ill Met in Lankhmar” in 1969 and 1970 respectively, Leiber became the first author to win the Hugo for Best Novella twice in a row.
You may have noticed that Leiber has been in the game for a long time at this point. 1939 saw the debuts of Leiber, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, and A. E. van Vogt, and by 1970 Leiber was (with the possible exception of Sturgeon) the only writer from that class to still be producing work strong enough that the word “legacy” need not be applied to him. While the New Wave was rocking the scene and plenty of writers in their twenties and thirties were pushing the field forward, Leiber continued to play impeccably with writers a generation younger than him. He won two more Hugos in the ’70s, as well as winning the newfangled World Fantasy Award three times that decade—all for stories which, while maybe not the very best he ever wrote, demonstrated a persistence of vision. Whereas Asimov and Heinlein, two of the most important voices in the history of American SFF, were resting on their laurels at this point, Leiber took the ’70s as an opportunity to return to and refine what he had started out with: urban fantasy and horror.
His final novel, Our Lady of Darkness, was published in 1977, and it was his first major venture into urban fantasy since his 1950 novel You’re All Alone (review forthcoming) while also acting as a sort of bookend to Conjure Wife. Leiber did not retire at this point, as he continued to write short fiction, albeit not as prolifically, for several more years; but it did represent the last hurrah for what had been a remarkably consistent and yet adventurous career, despite the setbacks. He was given the Gandalf Grand Master Award in 1975 (the second person to receive it—Tolkien was the first, naturally) and the following year he was given the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, both acknowledging his enormous contributions as a fantasist. In 1981 he was made an SFWA Grand Master. Even with all this recognition, however, Leiber continued to elude mainstream notice, not becoming a pop scientist like Asimov or getting mainstream book deals like Heinlein; he was a star in SFF fandom, but outside of it he remained obscure.
It could be that Leiber never gained mainstream popularity because he didn’t seem to have a “brand” about him. The closest to a constant Leiber had throughout the half-century of his career would be Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, but they never picked up traction like Howard’s Conan did; of course, Conan is now more treated as an icon than a character, and thus he is often misunderstood, never mind that Howard didn’t live to reap the benefits. Whereas Howard and Lovecraft are treated as “types,” as writers who are bound by their obsessions, Leiber is not so easy to categorize, his restlessness and spontaneity being used against him. It could be that Leiber’s lack of drive as a novelist (as novels sell more than short story collections) relegated him to being “merely” an exceptional writer at short lengths. Many writers who excel at the short form tried and often failed to jump to novel-writing when it became clear what the market favored, and while Leiber never sold himself out in this manner, he also, as a result, became (and remains so) hard to find outside of used bookstores.
Given that he was a better writer, line for line, than most if not all of his contemporaries (he and Sturgeon might be the only “Golden Age” authors whose works remain a joy to read simply as literature), and given that he possessed a vision which only aged, rather than withered or shattered, with the years, Fritz Leiber’s continued lack of appreciation among genre readers (especially younger readers) is nothing short of scandalous. His prime lasted not a few years, but a few decades.
(Cover by Richard Bennett. Weird Tales, November 1942.)
Who Goes There?
Fritz Leiber has a curious relationship with the pulp horror scene of the ’30s; he started in earnest in 1939, but he was already prepping for his writing career, and he was in contact with some pretty major figures, including none other than H. P. Lovecraft. Leiber’s correspondence with Lovecraft in the last year or so of the latter’s life had a pretty immense impact on the younger author, and actually I remember Leiber quoting Lovecraft a couple times in the first installment of Destiny Times Three. Unlike though, say, Robert Bloch, whose first stories were straight Lovecraft pastiches, Leiber found his own voice (or at least enough) right away with his first professional genre publication. Still, the legacy of Lovecraft stayed with Leiber, especially in his horror, which sometimes approaches the cosmic but which more often stays rooted in known reality. A key innovation of Leiber’s as a horror writer crossbreeding old terrors with what was then a newfangled modernity, no doubt influencing what we’d now call urban fantasy.
“The Hound” was published about a year after what is arguably Leiber’s most importan horror story, if not his best: “Smoke Ghost.” Genre historian Mike Ashley called “Smoke Ghost” “arguably the first seriously modern ghost story,” in that it’s a ghost story which is unique to the post-industrial urban setting; it’s not something that could’ve been written prior to the industrial revolution. What “Smoke Ghost” did for ghosts “The Hound” sets out to do similarly for werewolves, and indeed the two feel like companion pieces—being Leiber’s first real attempts at modernizing these old chestnuts of horror.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the November 1942 issue of Weird Tales, which is on the Archive. It was soon reprinted in the Leiber collection Night’s Black Agents from Argham House, complete with a handsome-ass cover by Ronald Clyne. It’s been anthologized several times over the decades, although I’m not sure how many of them you can get new. While Masters of the Weird: Fritz Leiber looks to be a fetching collector’s item, it’s just that—a collector’s item. And before you ask, unfortunately no, “The Hound” was not included in the Ballantin collection The Best of Fritz Leiber, although given the breadth of his output it’s no surprise if several major short stories did not make the cut. The most viable option, if you don’t wanna prowl through used bookstores, is the collection Horrible Imaginings, although find it at your own risk, as it’s from—you fucking guessed it—Open Road Media. I swear these bastards exist just to give all the authors I like mediocre paperbacks with the intent on further burying their legacies.
Enhancing Image
You won’t be getting much in the way of plot synopsis here, mostly because “The Hound” might be the shortest short story I’ve reviewed thus far, and it’s also not densely told in terms of its plot, although it is dense in its imagery and its ability to invoke eeriness. It’s clear to me that Leiber wanted to capture a certain exquisite vibe more so than he wanted to tell a conventional werewolf story. Good for him!
Our “hero” of the day is David Lashley, although there’s nothing really heroic about him; he’s a put-upon young man with a job he doesn’t seem particularly fond of. At first I thought David was supposed to be younger, since he’s shown at the start to still be living with his parents, but actually it looks like he’s a good thirty years old. David’s parents are elderly now and he has to take care of them, both in physically looking after them and also paying the bills with his job. If this sounds a little like Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” that’s because it might be an homage, although I’m not sure if Leiber had read Kafka at this point; he probably did, considering his involvement with the so-called Lovecraft Circle and all that, and also because “The Hound” as a whole has a remarkable Kafkaesque vibe about it. I’m using “Kafkaesque” in the correct sense of the word here, because the short story touches on themes prevalent in Kafka’s work, such as alienation, both from one’s own family and society at large.
And then there’s the city. David has been having nightmares about a red-eyed monster, like a dog but not quite, stalking him for years now, and he’s reached a breaking point; there has to be something to these nightmares of his. Of course what David is really afraid of is not some werewolf which might gnaw on his bones in the middle of the night, but something much bigger than even the biggest dog: the city—urbanity. I said before that “Smoke Ghost,” that revolutionary story from the pages of Unknown, transplanted the ghost to the modern landscape—quite literaally, with the ghost being a personification of the factories, the garbage in the streets, the put-puttering of automobiles, of modernity. The potential threat of the werewolf unnerves David on its own, but what really gets to him is the werewolf as only the beginning—the first bite—of a vastly larger creature. We’re back to Kafka again, with the city as villain.
Take this early passage, which juxtaposes (and Leiber does it quite subtly here) the threat of the werewolf with David’s position as a “modern” man, a man of the city:
David Lashley clenched his hands in his overcoat pockets and asked himself how it was possible for a grown man to be so suddenly overwhelmed by a fear from childhood. Yet in the same instant he knew with terrible certainty that this was no childhood fear, this thing that had pursued him up the years, growing ever more vast and menacing, until, like the demon wolf Fenris at Ragnorak [sic], its gaping jaws scraped heaven and earth, seeking to open wider. This thing that had dogged his footsteps, sometimes so far behind that he forgot its existence, but now so close that he could almost feel its cold sick breath on his neck. Werewolves? He had read up on such things at the library, fingering dusty books in uneasy fascination, but what he had read made them seem innocuous and without significance—dead superstitions—in comparison with this thing that was part and parcel of the great sprawling cities and chaotic peoples of the twentieth century, so much a part that he, David Lashley, winced at the endlessly varying howls and growls of traffic and industry—sound sat once animal and mechanical; shrank back with a start from the sight of headlights at night—those dazzling, unwinking eyes; trembled uncontrollably if he heard the scuffling of rats in an alley or caught sight in the evenings of the shadowy forms of lean mongrel dogs looking for food in vacant lots.
Think about it, “the endlessly varying howls and growls of traffic and industry.” Can I take a moment to gush about how a good a writer, sentence-by-sentence, Leiber is? At his best he becomes genuinely poetic, and (this is a hot take) I’d say he comes much closer to marrying sheer terror with the beauty of the English language than Lovecraft. The two men were only a generation apart, but Leiber still reads as modern (if occasionally pulpy) while Lovecraft reads like he’s from a totally different era—which he was, I suppose. Much of my joy in reading “The Hound,” even when not much was actually happening on the pages (which is a lot of it), came from the way in which Leiber wrote (almost sculpted, like he was carving a swan out of a giant cube of ice) about the dark world surrounding Our Hero™. That David’s paranoia feels rather unprompted is beside the point, although admittedly it does feel like we’ve been thrown into the middle of a larger narrative; there’s a lot about David we don’t get to know.
Well, we know a few things: we know David resents caring for his parents, we know he likes but is unable to settle down with this one woman he’s good with (Kafka again), and we know he wants to get the fuck out of the city but is unable to articulate this desire himself. He also has a friend, Tom Goodsell (which sounds like symbolism but probably isn’t), who has some rather odd things to say about werewolves and the supernatural in general when asked about them. In-story, Tom’s half-joking proposition about the evolution of the supernatural in relation to civilization probably didn’t help David’s paranoia, but on a meta level he summarizes Leiber’s mission statement pretty well. In short, the haunted castle narratives of the pre-Victorian era are no longer compatible with the “modern” conception of the supernatural, because between 1792 and 1942 we got, among other things, Darwinian evolution. The automobile. The airplane. And pretty soon, nuclear weapons.
Even the psychologically adept ghost stories of Henry James would struggle in the face of modernity, and God knows they would struggle even more in the wake of the atomic bomb. If our understanding of the nature changes then our understanding of the supernatural must also change. You might not agree with that statement; God knows there’s always a market for an old-fashioned vampire novel that barely treads beyond the ground mapped out by Dracula. But Leiber is making a grander statement here, not just about how we write about the supernatural has the evolve, but also that horror writing much evolve as well. The dude respected Lovecraft a great deal, and worked to preserve his legacy, but he also acknowledged that we (anyone who wants to become a practitioner of horror) has to, at some point, move beyong Lovecraft—into uncharted waters.
Consider this, from Tom:
I’ll tell you how it works out, Dave. We begin by denying all the old haunts and superstitions. Why shouldn’t we? They belong to the era of cottage and castle. They can’t take root in the new environment. Science goes materialistic, proving that there isn’t anything in the universe except tiny bundles of energy. As if, for that matter, a tiny bundle of energy mightn’t mean—anything.”
In part it reads like an essay on what a modern horror story should be, and there’s definitely a criticism towards “The Hound” that it reads almost more like what Leiber thinks a good horror story ought to read like than a good horror story on its own; in that sense it doesn’t hold up as well as “Smoke Ghost,” which is considerably more gripping as a narrative by comparison. And yet, Leiber probably figured (correctly) that it would be better to discuss what he thinks horror ought to become by way of demonstration rather than to lecture the read about it straight up. Also because presumably more people would read it as a short story than as an essay, but that’s neither here nor there. Another advantage is that with fiction Leiber is allowing himself to go full blast on describing David’s mindset, the setting around him, the way he doesn’t vividly describe the ghostly werewolf that’s stalking him, all that. It’s hard for this man to write a bad sentence.
There Be Spoilers Here
I’m not a fan of the ending. When David finally confronts the hound, I do appreciate that Leiber refrains from describing the creature much, partly because the scene is so darkly lit (a blackout occurs in the climax) and partly because Leiber at least knows that the unseen is much scarier than the seen. Even so, the ending commits the sin of having David saved by way of deus ex machina, albeit a mundane one in a vacuum: it’s just some guy with a flashlight, whose name and even face are unknown. It’s also, I have to admit, a little corny. When David asks if the rescuer had seen the hound himself, he replies with:
“Wolf? Hound?” The voice from behind the flashlight was hideously shaken. “It was nothing like that. God, I never believed in such things. But now—” Then the voice spoke out with awful certainty and conviction. “It was— It was something from the factories of hell.”
The dialogue up to this point had admirably stayed away from the typical oh-ye-gods Weird Tales brand of horror dialogue, and the omnicient narrator even pokes fun at the melodrama of it early on, but I suppose Leiber couldn’t help himself at the very end.
Now is a good time to explain why I like werewolf stories so much. I suppose it’s the inherent duality of the thing; a werewolf, by definition of its name, might not necessarily turn into a person, but it will always transform into something. There’s always the possibility of transformation with werewolves. A vampire will always be a vampire, whether they want to be or not, but a werewolf implies duality. In the case of “The Hound,” the werewolf and the city are all but said to be two sides of the same coin—that duality right there, the beast and the civilized. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Leiber started the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series, about two adventurers who would rather travel abroad than settle down in urbanity, around the same time he wrote “Smoke Ghost” and “The Hound.” He was a bit of a cosmopolitan, but I can’t help but find Leiber’s ambivalence toward urbanity palpable.
A Step Farther Out
Earlier I said that “The Hound” is like a companion to Leiber’s earlier horror story, “Smoke Ghost,” and while I think that’s true I also think “The Hound” got published in what was then the lesser magazine because it’s somewhat less refined than its older brother. While his fears are justified, David’s fear of the wolf feels inexplicable at first, almost like it’s more a product of his psyche (which itself is not in the best shape) than a flesh-and-blood creature. Even with a story this short, Leiber strings together only but the bare bones of a plot, with a few characters thrown in who appear once and then never show up again. The ending is oddly unsatisfying, but then at least it wasn’t quite as predictable as I was anticipating. And yet, something must be said of how eerie and prescient Leiber’s vision is, not to mention how poetic his descriptions can get. He doesn’t tell a narrative or give us insight into our lead character so much as he presents a colorful metaphor for what happens when—to cop E. M. Forster’s sentiment—the machine stops.
Leiber would return to urban horror again, perhaps most famously with his debut novel Conjure Wife, but it didn’t take long for him to move to greener pastures. Or hell, for him to dip his toes in every other subgenre of horror and fantasy.
(Cover artist uncredited. Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1950.)
Who Goes There?
James Blish is one of the defining practitioners of ’50s SF, although his legacy is sort of a mixed bag and he has not retained nearly the level of popularity of, say, Isaac Asimov or Ray Bradbury. Like Asimov, Blish spent his formative years as part of the Futurians, a left-leaning New York-based fan group (although Blish’s politics were much murkier). Thus, Blish hung out with the likes of Frederik Pohl, Judith Merril, Donald Wollheim, and C. M. Kornbluth. The Futurians would have an incalculably large impact on the history of the field, and like Kornbluth and others, Blish got his professional start in the early ’40s writing for Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories. Also like Kornbluth, Blish would go on hiatus during America’s involvement in World War II, and would not return until the tail end of the ’40s, by this point having metamorphized into his “mature” phase.
1950 was an especially important year for Blish, as he started his epic Cities in Flight series with the novelette “Okie,” in the April 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. That same month (although technically it would’ve been a month prior) we got “There Shall Be No Darkness,” one of the most notable SF-horror efforts of its era. The story was considered major enough (or at least fit enough for adaptation, and I would agree on that) to be made into a film, titled The Beast Must Die. But whereas as the source material is more concerned with rationalizing lycanthropy in scientific terms (it is, as I’ll explain, totally SF and not fantasy), the film looks to be more of a straight murder mystery. The Beast Must Die remains the only film adaptation of Blish’s work, which is a big shame because something like “A Work of Art” or “Surface Tension” could work great as a short film—maybe in the next season of Love, Death & Robots?
Little bit of trivia: Blish’s A Case of Conscience is so far (assuming they bring back the Retro Hugos) the only story to have won the Hugo twice, as the novel version won the Best Novel Hugo in 1959 while the novella version (which from what I’ve heard is the first third of the novel) won the Retro Hugo for Best Novella. This is also if we’re not counting Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, which won both a special series Hugo and a couple Retro Hugos.
Placing Coordinates
First appeared in the April 1950 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories, which is on the Archive. Was later reprinted in the January 1969 issue of Magazine of Horror, also on the Archive. Unless you have a real phobia of two-columned writing (in which case you should not be reading old-fashioned SFF magazines like yours truly), it’s pretty easy to find online. Ah, but those book reprints! Because “There Shall Be No Darkness” is a somewhat famous story we have some options here. Firstly there’s A Treasury of Modern Fantasy by Terry Carr and Martin H. Greenberg; as I said in my review of C. L. Moore’s “Daemon,” this and Masters of Fantasy are the same anthology. There’s also The Fantasy Hall of Fame, edited by Robert Silverberg, which seems to have a pretty loose conception of “fantasy” but whose contents are nonetheless of exceptional quality.
For single-author collections we have some good ones. If you’re a collector then I would suggest The Best of James Blish, as part of the Ballantine/Del Rey Best Of series from the ’70s and ’80s; these babies are old but gold, and their covers all range from good to excellent, making them fine collectors’ items. More recent, and even being in print, is Works of Art, which strives to be a more comprehensive collection of Blish’s short fiction. It’s a fancy hardcover from NESFA Press and it’s reasonably affordable (if you consider $30 to be reasonable). This is definitely one of that more reprinted stories I’ve reviewed thus far.
Enhancing Image
We start at a house party, the people therein being functionally the entire cast; there are something like eight or nine people at the party, but only six of them are plot-crucial, so I’ll focus on those. We’ve got Paul Foote, Jan Jarmoskowski, Doris Gilmore, Chris Lundgren, and Tom and Caroline Newcliffe, the host and hostess respectively. Tom and Caroline are filthy rich, and it’s not a coincidence that all the guests have to do with the arts and sciences—Painter being a painter, Jan and Doris being pianists (Doris actually being a former student of Jan’s, though they’re only seven years apart in age), and Chris being a psychiatrist as well as the story’s resident Mr. Exposition. Paul is the protagonist by virtue of the fact that he’s the POV character for most of it (I say most, put a pin in that one), since he’s not much of a hero; he’s more or less an ordinary guy who thinks, right from the beginning, that there’s something suspicious going on at the party.
There was another person in the room but Foote could not tell who it was. When he turned his unfocused eyes to count, his mind went back on him and he never managed to reach a total. But somehow there was the impression of another presence that had not been of the party before.
Jarmoskowski was not the presence. He had been there before. But he had something to do with it. There was an eighth presence now and it had something to do with Jarmoskowski.
What was it?
What is off about Jan, exactly? For one, his index and middle fingers are the same length, which admittedly is a little weird. Paul also notes that throughout dinner, Jan keeps stratching the palms of his hands (which also look unusually hairy), and, perhaps most telling, his canines are more pronounced than one would expect. If you’re in a werewolf story and you’re aware that you’re in a werewolf story, these all sound like very obvious signs that the person is a werewolf, but Paul is working off a hunch here—a hunch he acts on when he thinks the time is right. Unfortunately for Paul, he does something you’re very much not supposed to do in a horror story: confront the person who is probably (i.e., almost certainly) the killer by himself. I’m not sure what compelled Paul to do all this in the first place, as it’s not implied that he believed in werewolves before all this, though we soon find out that a certain other character knows a lot more than he lets on.
When Paul interrogates Jan, silver knife in hand (it has to be silver), we get what is very much not a twist but which feels like it could be one in another writer’s hands, which is Jan’s transformation. From what I’ve heard, The Beast Must Die tries really hard to save the werewolf reveal until the third act, but in “There Shall Be No Darkness,” there is no such stalling; we get a confirmation of Jan’s lycanthropy less than a third into the story, and frankly, it was telegraphed pretty strongly in advance. If you’re looking for a straight murder mystery, you’ll be let down, but Blish is clearly going for something else here. This is not, contrary to my initial expectations, a rehash of John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?” The reveal of Jan as the werewolf is not what the story is about; rather, the reveal of the werewolf serves as only the beginning of what makes this story so interesting: its science-fictional rationalization for lycanthropy.
Normally we would waist a lot of time with Paul trying to convince the other guests that there’s a werewolf on the property, but not so! Doris happened to catch a glimpse of Jan in his wolf form, mistaking him at first for one of the mansion’s dogs, though Jan is a big black wolf with red eyes. It’s a cool design, and it’s no surprise that Virgil Finlay would use it as inspiration for his badass interior art—ya know, the thing that convinced me to pick up this story in the first place. Finlay sure can get it.
Now, about how lycanthropy works in this story, because while it is inventive, and Blish’s attempt is an ambitious one, he can’t make it work 100%. Firstly, lycanthropy is treated basically like a physical illness with psychological ramifications, like a combination of tuberculosis and epilepsy. Like with TB back in ye olden times, someone with lycanthropy is rendered an outcast, even if the people casting them out can’t quite articulate what’s wrong with them. There is a truckload of technobabble Blish employs to make it sound like it makes sense, but basically a lycanthrope is able to manipulate organic matter to such an extent that they’re able to morph into animals whose skeletal structures are similar enough—at will! Hence, a lycanthrope can change into a wolf. This even extends to their clothes, assuming the clothes are made of organic material like cotton or what have you.
A lot of questions are raised with regards to how lycanthropy works here, and while Blish doesn’t answer all these questions, the mechanics behind lycanthropy are surprisingly not the most far-fetched thing in this story. But we’ll get to that in the spoilers section. Point being, werewolves are a bit different in “There Shall Be No Darkness,” but there are consistencies that will strike horror veterans as familiar; for one, Paul was right to confront Jan with a silver weapon, as lycanthropes are in fact weak to silver. They’re also weak to wolfsbane (called wolfbane in-story) and related plants, which was actually what made Jan scratch himself and act irritable—he was having an allergic reaction to the plants around the mansion.
We get all this information from Chris Lundgren, who, on top of being an apparently highly respected psychiatrist, is also experienced in dealing with lycanthropes. It’s not surprising, then, that he’s the first to believe Paul’s claim that Jan is a werewolf; what is surprising is that despite having known Jan for some time, Chris remained unaware of his lycanthropy while Paul, the average dude, had his suspicions. Regardless, without Chris the story would be standard horror as opposed to horror-tinged sicnec eifction, which is certainly unique; rarely is a story’s genre dependant on a single character. None of these characters is written with too much depth, and like I said, Chris is Mr. Exposition, but it says something of Blish’s vision and storytelling prowess that things remain very much engaging.
The question then becomes one of how to deal with Jan. Silver would work great, but the only silver Our Heroes™ have that could be used for weaponry is knives and candlesticks. They try melting some of the silver to make homegrown bullets, since the Newcliffes are hunters and have some guns to go around, but these prove to be woefully inaccurate, never mind possibly dangerous to the shooter. Ambushing Jan would be incredibly unlikely, due to his agility, so a hand-to-paw fight would probably not end well. Not helping matters is a snow storm which eventually turns into a blizzard, essentially trapping everyone on the property while Jan is on the prowl. “Why doesn’t he just go off somewhere and never be seen again?” Well, the explanation is a weird one: basically, Jan specifically has Doris in mind for his next victim, or at the very least is drawn to her, since during the first stretch of the story he imagined a pentagram on her hand which marked her. The obsession with the pentagram apparently last seven days, which is why Jan doesn’t escape right away.
Blish is very fond of putting science and religion in the boxing ring and seeing who wins, and while it certainly doesn’t go as in-depth as A Case of Conscience, there’s a bit of science-versus-religion with “There Shall Be No Darkness.” It’s all but said that Jan is a Christian, and a particularly superstitious one at that. According to Chris the vision of the pentagram is a hallucination lycanthropes have might compell them to unleash beastly violence (hence my earlier comparison to epilepsy, what with afflicted people having visions because of their seizures), but Jan probably believes the pentagram carries real metaphysical weight. Indeed, the larger effort to understand a mythical creature like the werewolf in scientific terms seems to be Blish trying to reconcile science with supernatural forces.
There Be Spoilers Here
What to do about the silver bullet problem? You’ll never guess. I said before that the Newcliffes are a rich couple, but what happens strains suspension of disbelief so hard that it actually put ths werewolf technobabble in perspective. Tom Newcliffe orders a shipment of guns and silver bullets to be FLOWN IN OVERNIGHT, DURING A SNOW STORM. This would be hard enough to take if the story was set in modern times and Tom had an Amazon Prime account, never mind the cartoon shit that we get here. Perhaps more than anything else, this passage tells me that Blish could’ve had a masterpiece on his hands if he had so much as gone through one more rewrite; alas, this was the ’50s (or more accurately the late ’40s) and people writing for the pulps were not inclined to revise too much.
I wanna take this moment to talk about where and when “There Shall Be No Darkness” was published, because I think it explains the story’s unique but unrefined nature. Thrilling Wonder Stories was, along with its sister magazine Startling Stories, a second-rate SFF magazine in an era when Astounding was king; there was no question that Campbell’s magazine paid the most and had the most prestigious image. Which is not to say there weren’t alternatives! Albeit not many, especially for a horror tale like Blish’s. Weird Tales was still going, and you could argue “There Shall Be No Darkness” is what could’ve been called a “weird-scientific” tale, but it’s totally possible that Weird Tales paid an even lower rate at this point than Thrilling Wonder Stories. I wouldn’t know off the top of my head. It almost certainly would not have appealed to Campbell, whose tastes were starting to narrow, and who very soon would unleash a cataclysm upon the field: Dianetics.
Maybe it was for the best that Blish’s story ended up where it did.
A lot happens in “There Shall Be No Darkness,” much of it best experienced without having the whole thing spelled out, so I won’t delve too much here. It’s a long and complex story; ISFDB erroneously cites it as a novella, when really it comes out to about thirty book pages, but that mistake says something about its density. I’ll zero in on the climax, which I think actually leans closer to tragedy than horror. Following the deaths of a couple characters, and with Jan nowhere to be seen, Paul contemplates what might happen if Jan were to escape off the property and spread the disease of lycanthropy far and wide (lycanthropy being an infectious disease, not unlike our modern conception of zombies). We arrive at perhaps the most Blish-esque passage, which seems to forecast one of Blish’s chief concerns during his mature phase: mankind’s metaphysical place in the universe.
Maybe God is on the side of the werewolves.
The blasphemy of an exhausted mind. Yet he could not put it from him. Suppose Jarmoskowski should conquer his compulsion and lie out of sight until the seven days were over. Then he could disappear. It was a big country. It would not be necessary for him to kill all his victims—just those he actually needed for food. But he could nip a good many. Every other one, say.
And from wherever he lived the circle of lycanthropy would grow and widen and engulf—
Maybe God had decided that proper humans had made a mess of running the world, had decided to give the nosferatu, the undead, a chance at it. Perhaps the human race was on the threshold of that darkness into which he had looked throughout last night.
But Jan comes back—to Doris. Perhaps he hasn’t killed her yet because he loves her, and she’s had a crush on him for years; if not for the current circumstances, they might be perfect for each other. Like something out of the book of Genesis, Jan tempts Doris by making her an offer, and a pretty simple one: he bites her, “infects” her with his disease, and they run off together, two lycanthropes who will have nothing except each other. Despite what Paul suspects, lycanthropy is a genetic dead end; it can only be spread via infection, and lycanthropes, no matter where they go, will be treated as pariahs. Could two lycanthropes also breed in order to continue this pseudo-species? Probably. Blish isn’t very clear on that, but then, oddly less so than the earlier Jack Williamson novella “Darker Than You Think,” “There Shall Be No Darkness” is not really concerned with sex. Regardless, lycanthropy sounds like a fine recipe for succumbing to madness, then death.
Paul, who we’re told has a habit of eavesdropping, uses his habit for good this time when he stops by Doris’s room and catches the two talking, and… well, you can get what happens next. Not that Jan seems to mind dying too much; for him it would either be that or living an impossible dream with Doris. Think living day after day as a werewolf would be cool? Think again! Of course, it seems like in werwolf media a person’s life expectancy whittles down to a fraction of what it would normally be if they become a werewolf; if authorities or werwolf hunters don’t get them then their own inevitable self-loathing will. Damn near every werewolf narrative I can think of is ultimately a tragic one, in the sense that we get a grim end that comes about because of a combination of circumstances and the main character’s flaws. In the context of the story, lycanthropy may as well be a terminal illness, and Jan no longer wants to be treated—he just wants it to end.
A Step Farther Out
I would highly recommend “There Shall Be No Darkness,” even though I think it’s obviously flawed in parts. A problem I’ve often encountered with Blish (except for “A Work of Art,” which I think is a masterpiece) is that his prose does not quite match up with the breadth of his ideas. You could make that criticism with a lot of old-timey SFF authors, especially guys like Philip K. Dick and A. E. van Vogt whose raw prose does not do justice to what they’re writing about, but Blish was heavily inspired by the modernists of all people! He was a big fan of James Joyce! He thought Joyce’s “The Dead” was the best short story ever written. Clearly he wanted to be like Joyce, or at least a D. H. Lawrence, but like most SFF writers (especially from that period), Blish was not a poet; he did not have a delicate ear for the English language. I say all this because “There Shall Be No Darkness” is a very good story that feels like it could’ve been a truly great story, and in that it feels both deeply satisfying and disappointing at the same time.
Well, that’s spooky month for you. Despite the fact that I’ve covered three vampire stories this month, I have to admit I’m more fond of werewolves; it’s just a shame that there don’t seem to be as many werewolf stories as vampire stories. I can think of several reprint anthologies wholly dedicated to vampire stories, but werewolves don’t get that much love. If you’re looking for some vintage but inventive werewolf action, then today’s story will almost certainly do the trick. I’m quite fond of it.
The story of Jane Rice is one of the more quietly tragic in the history of fantasy and horror fiction—but not because of her personal life. Actually, Rice seemed a pretty well-adjusted woman, and it’s not like her career took a nosedive on the part of some grave career error; she did not, for instance, get wrapped up in Dianetics or something like that. Rather, Rice’s career as a writer was forever hampered by the fact that historically speaking, the magazines have been a poor market for fantasy; there just has never been that much demand for fantasy in the magazines. When John W. Campbell launched Unknown, Astounding‘s fantasy-leaning sister magazine, in 1939, he went out of his way to publish fantasy that was a lot more than just occult horror and heroic fantasy, like in Weird Tales; its scope was far more ambitious. Rice made her debut in Unknown in 1940, and a good third or so of her total output would be published in this magazine, in the span of just three years, despite her career spanning more than half a century.
And no, she’s not to be confused with Anne Rice, nor are they related in any way, although you may be tempted to confuse one with the other!
Rice’s fiction (from what I’ve read of it anyway) is unique, even among the Unknown stable of writers, for its often rural locales, being inspired by Rice’s Kentucky upbringing, and for a mean streak that would almost make Flannery O’Connor blush (almost!). Her werewolf story, “The Refugee,” appeared in that magazine’s final issue, and has been (rightly) reprinted quite a few times over the years. Unfortunately, Unknown‘s sales were never high, despite being issue-for-issue stronger than Astounding, and when Street & Smith, the publisher for both, pulled the plug on the former because of wartime paper rationing (Astounding itself barely survived World War II), several stories which had been purchased were left stranded. At least one, Anthony Boucher’s “We Print the Truth,” would see print in Astounding, but what would’ve been Rice’s debut novel, Lucy, not only did not get published, but it got lost in Street & Smith’s files; it’s been lost media for nearly eighty years. The loss must’ve been devastating, and except for a spat of short stories in the ’80s, Rice would never be nearly this productive again.
Placing Coordinates
“The Idol of the Flies” was first published in the June 1942 issue of Unknown, which is on the Archive. The weird thing about this one is that there aren’t any reprints that are in print, and only some are reasonably cheap; you’d actually be better off finding the older sources. Perhaps the anthology of most interest here is Witches’ Brew: Horror and Supernatural Stories by Women, edited by Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini. Another curious anthology reprint is Children of Wonder: 21 Remarkable and Fantastic Tales, edited by William Tenn of all people, with Rice’s story appropriately falling under the section called “Terror in the Nursery.” There’s also the single comprehensive collection of Rice’s short fiction, The Idol of the Flies and Other Stories, but unfortunately it’s a collector’s item; the copies I see on eBay go for over a hundred bucks, which even for me is ridiculous.
Enhancing Image
Pruitt is seemingly a normal boy, except for the fact that he’s an orphan, now living with his spinster aunt and having a private tutor. Pruitt’s parents died… somehow, and now the boy mostly goes off and does his own thing: in his case this “case” tends to involve torture of some kind. A sadistic kid might bully his little sister, or pull the legs off a bug one but one, but Pruitt’s brand of sadism is amplified by him seemingly having the power to order flies to do his bidding. Dozens of them. Hundreds of them. And his tutor, Ms. Bittner, is deathly afraid of flies. Personally I find flies to be way more annoying than scary, but to each their own.
Most of the fantasy published in Unknown is not horror, but “The Idol of the Flies” most certainly is; if the stuff with the flies doesn’t creep you out enough, then Pruitt doing things any normal child can do almost certainly will. Not only does he pull epic pranks on the adults in the house, but he also bullies a local man with severe scoliosis (or something like that), physically tormenting him to the point where I actually wondered if Pruitt might kill him. Oh, and if that’s not enough for ya, read about what Pruitt does with a toad and twig—or maybe don’t, it’s not for the faint of heart. What makes these things so disturbing is that you don’t need anything supernatural in order to make them possible, and indeed much of the story reads like non-supernatural horror. How does the whole controlling-flies thing figure into it, though? Because of course something fantastical has to be going on, and there has to be an explanation for how Pruitt is able to use all these flies for his schemes.
The interior artwork for the story (which I’ll get into more in the spoilers section) shows Pruitt with an idol he’s made out of coal tar and which resembles a fly. Where did Pruitt get the idea to do this? I don’t remember us being given a clear answer on that, but that doesn’t matter too much. You might think he’s an incarnation of the devil like it’s The Omen or something, but I’ll just say right now it’s not that. It would be one thing if Pruitt was a demon in a human’s skin, but he’s just a normal-ass child; he does what he does because he loves nothing more than to hurt others, as if he were a child’s innate desire to destroy taken to its logical extreme. I suppose he’s like the kid from Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life,” though God help us if he had reality-warping powers.
We don’t get much of a line into Pruitt’s mindset, but when we do, it’s pretty ugly. He comes off like a Flannery O’Connor character in that rural grotesque way, though this was published several years prior to O’Connor’s first story. I’m sure O’Connor never read a Rice story in her life, but I can’t help but feel like there’s a connection…
Pruitt scuffed his shoe on the stone steps and wished he had an air rifle. He would ask for one on his birthday. He would ask for a lot of impossible things first and then—pitifully—say, “Well, then, could I just have a little old air rifle?” Aunt would fall for that. She was as dumb as his mother had been. Dumber. His mother had been “simple” dumb, which was pretty bad—going in, as she had, for treacly bedtime stories and lap sitting. Aunt was “sick” dumb, which was very dumb indeed. “Sick” dumb people always looked at the “bright side.” They were the dumbest of all. They were push-overs, “sick” dumb people were. Easy, little old push-overs.
Come to think of it, one of the few things that gives me the creeps is one of tried-and-true staples of horror: creepy children. Maybe it’s because someone young like me probably has anxiety about the prospect of parenthood, or maybe it’s because it feels so unnatural for a child, who after all has experienced so little of the world, to do things that are so heinous, or maybe it’s just because human children are the least adorable children in the world (consider that a baby crocodile is cuter than a human child) and they just suck, but creepy children will almost always get me to some extent. Pruitt is exceptional, even in the pantheon of bastard fictional children (let’s not forget Village of the Damned while we’re at it), in he seems to do everything of his own volition; it’s not like he’s brainwashed or being controlled by a demonic overlord, although that is a possibility. Thankfully, for how dastardly her pint-sized villain protagonist is, Rice has something just as dastardly in mind for her creation.
There Be Spoilers Here
So we’ve had animal abuse and Pruitt ruthlessly bullying a disabled man, but just how evil is he? He hasn’t actually killed another person, has he? He’s like six or seven years old, he can’t be that bad! Well…
We’ve heard before that Pruitt is an orphan, now living with his late dad’s sister, his parents appearently killed in an accident—which, as it turns out, was no accident. Pruitt’s been a little shit to his aunt and tutor, and also basically everyone else, up to this point, but we’ve not quite plumbed the depths of his sadism until now, in this tangential but horribly revealing passage wherein he reminisces (pretty happily, mind you) on the death of his parents—or more accurately, how he killed them:
This was the way he felt when he knew his father and mother were going to die. He had known it with a sort of clear, glittering lucidity—standing there in the white Bermuda sunlight, waving good-by to them. He had seen the plumy feather on his mother’s hat, the sprigged organdy dress, his father’s pointed mustache and his slender, artist’s hands grasping the driving reins. He had seen the gleaming harness, the high-spirited shake of the horse’s head, its stamping foot. His father wouldn’t have a horse that wasn’t high-spirited. Ginger had been its name. He had seen the bobbing fringe on the carriage top and the pin in the right rear wheel—the pin that he had diligently and with patient perseverance, worked loose with the screwdriver out of his toy tool chest. He had seen them roll away, down the drive, out through the wrought-iron gates. He had wondered if they would turn over when they rounded the bend and what sort of a crash they would make. They had turned over but he hadn’t heard the crash. He had been in the house eating the icing off the cake.
I was expecting, at some point, for there to be a reveal that Pruitt is the way he is because he’s possessed by some demon or supernatural power, but no, it seems he’s been this way for as long as he was able to conceive of such horrid acts. I think what’s scary about all this is that while they are extremely rare, children (especially as young as Pruitt) who are so malicious do exist in the real world—only they don’t worship an idol made of coal tar. It’s also disquieting how (like a real child) Pruitt uses his youth and presumed innocence as a weapon, playing puppydog with other people so as to deflect blame; sure, they think, he might be a bit of a rascal, but ultimately he’s just a child! Except that children are perfectly capable of doing horrible things—they’re just too ignorant to know better.
If I do have a problem with this story, it’s that the climax is rather abrupt, though I suppose it’s easy enough to anticipate if you know your demonology. The twist is also pretty strongly alluded to in the story’s interior artwork, courtesy of Kolliker.
What happens when you deal with the devil for your fly-manipulating powers? Eventually the devil comes to collect. He’s called Beelzebub here, which, ya know, lord of the flies and all that, though the story’s title seems to refer to both Beelzebub and the coal tar idol Pruitt uses. Anyway, despite his single-digit age, Puitt gets sent to HELL, which is pretty epic. Normally I’d be disturbed by such an outcome, but Puitt is shown to be such an irredeemably evil creature that in the context of a story’s world where the devil (and presumably God) exists, maybe it’s best to kick this kid off the top of the highest mountain.
While I take issue with how the climax is paced, I find the ending immensely satisfying. How often does a child in a story (particularly of this vintage) get killed off, and on top of that said child is also the protagonist! Truth be told, it would’ve been too dark if Pruitt had gotten away with everything, so as weird as it is to this, it’s fitting that Rice give him the fire-and-brimstone treatment. I also think it may be too on-the-nose for Bittner, in the final scene, to be reading a textbook entry on Beelzebub (perhaps in worry that readers might not get who “Asmodeus” is), but the dramatic irony of her being unaware of Pruitt’s fate is also satisfying. If what we’ve been reading prior to the climax was discomforting, watching this little shit doing all these things and not get punished for it, then the ending is worthy compensation.
A Step Farther Out
Did not think one of the oldest stories covered this month would also be the scariest, but I’m gonna say “The Idol of the Flies” is thoroughly disquieting. Ironically the demonic climax might be the least scary part of the whole ordeal, if only because the protagonist is devilish enough on his own. Pruitt has to be one of the most evil children in literature, and he’s arguably the most evil main character we’ve come across—yes, even more than Kornbluth’s Mindworm, which is more amoral than sadistic. Just letting you know that if you haven’t read it already, expect some animal torture and abuse of the disabled; this thing doesn’t mess around, all the more remarkable given its vintage. I can’t say I’m totally surprised, though, as the quality of the average Unknown story is much higher than average; really I would say the average Unknown story beats out the average Astounding story nine times out of ten. Rice showed herself to be a master of horror in the making, and it’s a shame that because of Unknown‘s premature death and the loss of her debut novel made her career as a fantasist screetch to a halt.
If you’re looking for a horror story about how children are vicious little monsters just in time for Halloween, boy do I have a recommendation!
(Cover by Jim Warren. Twilight Zone Magazine, April 1981.)
Who Goes There?
Where to start with Harlan Ellison? He resented being called a science fiction writer, but in his defense, he wrote a lot more than just SF; he was one of the most important and most productive writers of genre fiction from the second half of the 20th century. SF, fantasy, horror, things not so easily categorized? Ellison did it. He got his start in the ’50s as a middling young author along the lines of Robert Silverberg at the start of his career, but the ’60s saw a profiund step up for him as he began refining his craft, not only putting out award-winners like “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” but also writing for shows like Star Trek and The Outer Limits. Of course, things are not nearly as simple as that. Ellison’s involvement with Star Trek proved a fiasco, and when he was not being unprofessional (his degree of procrastination was legendary) as a writer, he was being a thorn in a lot of people’s sides as a fandom personality.
Perhaps the most memorable controversy with Ellison, for me, is his inability to finish (or seemingly even to start) what was to be the concluding entry in a trilogy of anthologies, The Last Dangerous Visions. Dangerous Visions was a landmark original anthology, as was its sequel (said to be superior at least in some ways), Again, Dangerous Visions, both edited by Ellison, but Ellison’s lack of initiative with working on TLDV (which was announced in 1972 but never published) has spawned many justifiably vitriolic reactions. While some stories that were sold to Ellison have since been published elswhere, the majority of the stories submitted for TLDV have yet, after all these decades, to be released to the public in any capacity. With Ellison’s death in 2018, followed by his late wife Susan’s in 2020, not only will we never get TLDV as Ellison envisioned it, but it looks like the Ellison estate has been thrown in disarray recently.
With all this said, and taking all of Ellison’s shortcomings as a writer (not to mention as a person) into account, he’s still one of the Big Names™ of short fiction in modern times, not just in SFF but outside of it. “Grail,” as I’ll elaborate on shortly, is a good example of Ellison’s vigorousness as a storyteller, as well as someone who (I say this in a good way) wears his emotions on his sleeve.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the April 1981 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine, which is on the Archive and which also happens to be that magazine’s inaugural issue. Twilight Zone Magazine is exactly the kind of publication that would get some TLC on my blog, as it’s a bit quirky, a bit out of left field, and most importantly, it didn’t last that long. Oh, TZM did fairly well, and for the first half of its existence it was edited by T. E. D. Klein (this is like if you gave Thomas Ligotti a horror magazine), who while not the most prolific of authors proved quite the reliable editor. Unfortunately, despite some high-quality fiction and fancy packaging, and despite its numbers never tanking, TZM did not quite survive the ’80s. Another story I recgonized from this issue is George R. R. Martin’s “Remembering Melody,” which I will absolutely get around to reading/reviewing… at some point.
Where else to find “Grail”? There are Ellison stories which have been reprinted many times (frankly too many times), but “Grail” is not one of them—not helped by the fact that, for some reason, it has become considerably harder to find Ellison books in the wild in recent years. I don’t know what happened. It looks like even the most essential Ellison collection have gone out of print; you can find them on the second-hand market, but you won’t find new editions, and even used copies are inexplicably harder to acquire. Still, there are a few options. “Grail” was reprinted in the Ellison collection Stalking the Nightmare, which is very much out of print but thankfully is not hard to find used. If you like Ellison like I do then you may be interested in The Essential Ellison, which is a massive volume that collects short fiction and essays and which comes in two distinct editions. The older edition is easier to find, but it’s still something of a collector’s item.
Enhancing Image
Christopher Caperton (which sounds like a name someone made up) is a shy kid who grows up desperate to seek adventure, and seek it he does. From the time he’s a child and for the rest of his life, Chris is deeply concerned with one question: What is love? Baby don’t hurt me Not just familial love or even romantic love, but True Love, that most elusive of abstractions. What does it look like? Does it have a face? Is it possible for Chris to find The One? Despite his life experiences, and despite reading the works of every author under the sun on subject of love, he’s no closer to finding True Love. As an aside, I find it funny that apparently John Cheever knows even less about love than our protagonist, as I’m not sure if Cheever’s turbulent personal life and bisexuality were public knowledge in 1981 (probably was for the former but not the latter). Speaking of which, queerness doesn’t really come up in-story; it’s alluded to, but the narrator makes it very clear to us that Chris is, to paraphrase the protagonist of Silverberg’s Dying Inside, drearily heterosexual. Oh well.
As a young man Chris finds himself in Vietnam in the late ’60s running drugs with a woman named Siri, who is not as normal as she seems. The two become lovers as well as partners in crime, and when all is said and done this is probably the happiest relationship Chris ever has; unfortunately it doesn’t last long. A random artillery strike kills Siri, but before she dies, she spends an impressively long amount of time explaining to Chris this artifact that’s supposed to represent True Love, an artifact which Siri had been looking for for years but had sort of given up on recently. She didn’t find True Love, but she found the next best thing. Siri is an interesting character because she’s one of those story figures who doesn’t get much screentime (or pagetime?) but whose plot relevance is immense; in this case she’s the one who basically kicks the plot into gear and sends Chris on his quest. Of course her dying words do not just encompass “This thing exists, now go get it,” as she also gives Chris some very specific and very unusual instructions.
More on that in a minute.
Something I wanna say right now is that when I picked “Grail” as part of my spooky short story lineup for review, I was under the impression that it would be straight horror. Not so! There’s a bit of horror, primarily having to do with a certain character, but overall it much more reads as an adventure narrative with a philosophical bent. Still, it’s spooky enough to serve as the first cover story for Twilight Zone Magazine, and more importantly, it’s good enough a story to earn that position. I can’t properly explain it, but the vigor that’s apparent in Ellison’s writing makes even his lists (and there are a few times where he basically just lists things in “Grail”) engaging to read. You could theoretically write a 300-page novel with “Grail” as a blueprint and the novel would not feel stretched thin, but Ellison zeros in on only the most relevant of info, resulting in what almost feels more like a compressed novel than a short story.
In my review of C. M. Kornbluth’s “The Mindworm” I noted Kornbluth’s use of compression and how he was able to cram a lot of history and worldbuilding into a tight space, and Ellison does basically the same thing here—only maybe even more impressively. Get this, the bulk of the artifact’s history as Siri understood it:
Between 1914 and 1932 the object—while never described—turned up three times: once in the possession of a White Russian nobleman in Sevastopol, twice in the possession of a Dutch aircraft designer, and finally in the possession of a Chicago mobster reputed to have been the man who gunned down Dion O’Banion in his flower shop at 738 North State Street.
In 1932 a man visiting New York for the opening of the Radio City Music Hall just after Christmas reported to the police who found him lying in an alley on West 51st Street just below Fifth Avenue that he had been mugged and robbed of “the most important and beautiful thing in the world.” He was taken to Bellevue Hospital, but no matter how diligently he was interrogated, he would not describe the stolen article.
In 1934 it was reputed to be in the private art collection of the German architect Walter Gropius; after Gropius’s self-imposed exile from Nazi Germany it was reputed to have passed into the personal collection of Hermann Goering, 1937; in 1941 it was said to be housed with Schweitzer in French Equatorial Africa; in 1946 it was found to be one of the few items not left by Henry Ford at his death to the Ford Foundation.
Its whereabouts were unknown between 1946 and February of 1968. But Siri told Chris, her final love, that there was one sure, dangerous way of finding it. The way she had used originally to learn the hand-to-hand passage of the artifact that was True Love from the Palace of Minos to its present unknown resting place.
So now we get to the spooky character in “Grail,” which is the minor demon Surgat. Siri left instructions so that Chris could not only summon Surgat (supposedly a demon who can pick any lock) but also stay protected from the demon’s treachery. Because a demon doesn’t want to help you, it’s more like a form of indentured servitude. There’s a bit of a deal-with-the-devil narrative here, although it’s more a case of two people who clearly hate each other’s guts but are forced to work together. The first time Chris summons Surgat he’s naturally unnerved about the whole thing (How often does one get to draw pentagrams and summon demons?), but given the very recent death of Siri and everything that’s happened this marks the start of his evolution into a badass. Surgat opens the trove that contains Siri’s most secret things, having to do with her search for the artifact, but before he fucks off he takes Siri’s body as a… treat.
The implications are a wee bit concerning.
From here on out, Chris is on his own. The man who started out as a bit of a wimp is now on a quest to find True Love, and if there’s one thing he’ll do anything for, it’s love. It’s at this point that we get a few time skips (remember what I said about the compressed novel thing), jumping from the late ’60s through the ’70s as Chris wanders the globe, “a nameless, stateless person, someone out of a Graham Grene suspense novel.” Again I’m taken back by how Ellison is able to squeeze so much in here, making years pass by in mere words without making us feel like we’re missing out on too much. It helps, too, that while Chris is not the most complex of characters, his mission, his want, is deeply relatable, and we’re given enough context about his life to see why this would be so important to him.
There Be Spoilers Here
Even more than a decade of searching, Chris has tracked the artifact to what seems to be its most recent resting place, in the hands of some super-rich mogul (I don’t think we even get his name), who also happens to be on his deathbed. The mogul has the artifact locked behind a ridiculously convoluted security system (it would make Mission: Impossible look like a documentary), but this doesn’t stop Chris from summoning Surgat again and revealing the artifact anyway. The artifact, which is indeed a grail, reveals in its liquid the face of True Love, but it’s not what Chris has been expecting all these years. The final twist of the story is subtle, yet deeply tragic, and shows Ellison twisting the knife that he’s just thrust into us; he’s very good at that.
This is not the very end, technically, but it’s enough:
He looked down into the loving cup that was True Love and in the silver liquid swirling there he saw the face of True Love. For an instant it was his mother, then it was Miss O’Hara, then it was poor Jean Kettner, then it was Briony Catling, then it was Helen Gahagan, then it was Marta Toren, then it was the girl to whom he had lost his virginity, then it was one woman after another he had known, then it was Siri—but was Siri no longer than any of the others—then it was his wife, then it was the face of the achingly beautiful bride on the cover of Esquire, and then it resolved finally into the most unforgettable face he had ever seen. And it stayed.
It was no face he recognized.
Years later, when he was near death, Christopher Caperton wrote the answer to the search for True Love in his journal. He wrote it simply, as a quotation from the Japanese poet Tanaka Katsumi.
What he wrote was this:
“I know that my true friend will appear after my death, and my sweetheart died before I was born.”
I’m gonna keep it real with you: I thought this was devastating. Ellison has done sadistic endings many times before, his protagonists sometimes being defeated outright or achieving a sort of Pyrrhic victory, but “Grail” mixes that sadism with a genuine tragedy. When I say “tragedy” I mean it in the proper sense of the word, which is to say Chris, due to a combination of circumstances and his own flaws, fails nobly. When people call something tragic they simply mean to say something bad has happened (don’t worry, I do this a lot too), as opposed to what it really means, but Ellison understands real tragedy. These are words coming from a man who, due in part to his own personality flaws, had loved and lost over and over. His famous novella, “A Boy and His Dog,” perfectly captures Ellison’s brand of wounded-dog misogyny (that’s right, it is a misogynistic story, but it’s a psychologically arresting story specifically because of its apparent distrust of women), but “Grail” achieves a similar effect without the blatant woman-hating.
I can believe that “Grail” is a middle-career piece from Ellison, because I don’t think the Ellison who wrote “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” the Ellison who was younger and not as adjusted to his fame, could have written it. This story, and especially this ending, reads to me as by someone who still has a lot of fire in his belly but who also has been in the game long enough to pair that fire with real craftsmanship and insight. Even “The Deathbird,” which might still be my favorite Ellison story, and which still reads as totally experimental, does not distill its disquieting effect as succinctly as “Grail” does. This story made me feel something.
A Step Farther Out
I was shocked to find that “Grail” is only ten pages long; mind you, this is in TZM, which is not only two-columned but has frustratingly small type. What impresses me is that Ellison is able to tell what is basically a man’s whole life story in that span, and it doesn’t feel rushed or like we’re missing important information. Like sure, it’s compressed, the whole thing is an exercise in compression, but it’s a fully developed tale of one man’s search for the impossible. Chris starts out as a socially awkward nobody before tragedy sends him on a path to becoming a globe-trotting badass, but at the cost of something he can’t put his finger on. The question of finding true love is an ages-old but still deeply relevant one for most people, including myself, and personifying it as something akin to the Holy Grail is probably not new either, but it’s how Ellison gives it its own history, its own sense of weight, that makes the ending tragic. Indeed the ending would be an existential nightmare, were it not so sad and relatable.
I was expecting something more horror-centric, but I can’t say I was disappointed with what I got. Ellison is, if nothing else, an emotionally potent writer (sometimes to the point of edgy tedium), and “Grail” is an example of the mature Ellison flexing his muscles. On the one hand I’m a little surprised it didn’t get more awards attention (though it was up for the coveted Balrog Award), and also that it hasn’t been reprinted more often. Oh sure, “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” can be reprinted literally a hundred times, but an objectively better and more layered story like “Grail” is apparently deemed a minor work by virtue of its lack of exposure. Well I’m gonna change that! Maybe not “change,” but I do wanna tell more people about this one; I think it’s a bit of a hidden gem.
Lisa Tuttle came about in the early ’70s, as part of a new generation of horror authors, though unlike Stephen King and Anne Rice, who would build their reputations as novelists, Tuttle devoted much more energy to her short fiction. She debuted professionally when she hadn’t quite turned twenty yet, and despite having only put out a couple short stories (none of which were up for awards), she would share the second John W. Campbell Astounding Award for Best New Writer with Spider Robinson (the only time so far that this award resulted in a tie). She also won a Nebula for her 1981 story “The Bone Flute,” under controversial circumtances (not because of Tuttle herself but because of a certain fellow nominee, it’s a bit of a story), but her most lauded (and probably most popular) work was done in collaboration. In the ’70s and early ’80s Tuttle worked with George R. R. Martin on what would become something of a fix-up novel, Windhaven, based on two earlier novellas, both of which were Hugo and Nebula nominees.
While Tuttle’s involvement with SFF has been long-running, she seems to be first and foremost a practicioner of horror, especially of the supernatural variety. Due to changes in the market, with how horror novels have thoroughly superseded horror short stories (in influence, if not in quality) for the past four decades, Tuttle’s short fiction has gone relatively underexamined. Even so, her dedication to the genre has not wavered; for the past half-century she has kept the faith.
Tuttle celebrated her 70th birthday last month.
Placing Coordinates
First published in the June 1977 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. “The Horse Lord” has three notable reprints, two of them being single-author collections: first we have A Nest of Nightmares, which collected Tuttle’s horror fiction up to about the mid-’80s, and it’s still in print! We also have a real collector’s item, Stranger in the House: The Collected Supernatural Short Fiction, Volume One, which is a limited edition hardcover and which will cost you a pretty penny if you can even find the damn thing. For anthology sluts like myself we have a meaty volume edited by Stephen Jones, confusingly published under three titles, The Mammoth Book of Terror, The Anthology of Horror Stories, and The Giant Book of Horror. Out of print, but it’s easy to find used.
Enhancing Image
Marilyn and Derek are both writers who have, along with their five kids (partly from Derek’s previous marriage and partly from a tragedy involving a relative), moved to a farm in upstate New York that one of Derek’s ancestors owned once upon a time. I don’t know why horror authors tend to have writers be their protagonists. What’re they trying to tell us? (I’m half-joking, don’t kill me!) The place is a shithole, but supposedly the rural and secluded atmosphere will help with the couple’s writing (they write separately, it’s sadly not a Kuttner-Moore situation). Despite being responsible for getting us to the farm in the first place, and despite it also having been owned by an ancestor of his, Derek is not the protagonist—actually he barely registers as more than a footnote, all things considered. Marilyn is our POV character, which is probably for the best since she’s the one most reluctant about living in this maybe-haunted locale and therefore the one most likely to generate conflict.
“The Horse Lord” is a haunted house story, except it’s not the house itself that’s haunted—it’s the horse stable, which hasn’t been used in many years. The ancestor who had owned the farm in the late 19th century, James Hoskins, was apparently killed by Indians, along with his wife, while his daughter went missing and was never found. Does this sound like the start of The Searchers to anyone? I also find it funny that Kelly, the oldest of the children, is a horse girl, because let’s face it, nothing good ever happens with horse girls. The very first thing we’re told about Kelly is that she loves horses and my first thought was, “This does not bode well for the parents.” I wasn’t wrong, but I’ll get into that in the spoilers section.
The farm would be shrouded in mystery, but luckily (or unluckily) for Marilyn there’s a series of a memoirs written by one of Derek’s uncles about his family history, and there are dusty hardcover copies of these memoirs right in the house. How convenient! The memoirs, which are of course biased, speculate that Hoskins and his wife had been killed by Indians, but if Hoskins’s own words are anything to go by it was not the local indians that got him; maybe it was the spirit which lurked on that plot of land, the genius loci (a phrase I’ve grown fond of very recently) that has had dibs on it for a pretty long time. Hoskins does not take the Indians’ advice, and admittedly if you were in his position you would probably not listen to them either, though probably more from a sense of modern materialism (or lack of superstition) than because your homie Jesus got your back.
Get this:
“The land I have won is of great value, at least to a poor, wandering remnant of Indians. Two braves came to the house yesterday, and my dear wife was nearly in tears at their tales of powerful magic and vengeful spirits inhabiting this land.
“Go, they said, for this is a great spirit, as old as the rocks, and your God cannot protect you. This land is not good for people of any race. A spirit (whose name may not be pronounced) set his mark upon this land when the earth was still new. This land is cursed—and more of the same, on and on until I lost patience with them and told them to be off before I made powerful magic with my old Betsy.
“Tho’ my wife trembled, my little daughter proved fiercer than her Ma, swearing she would chop up that pagan spirit and have it for her supper—which made me roar with laughter, and the Indians to shake their heads as they hurried away.”
“The Horse Lord” indulges in a trope I’m not terribly fond of, and while I assume Tuttle means well, I expected a bit better: it’s the Wise Indians Who Know Better™ trope. It’s especially conspicuous here because Hoskins has no legitimate reason to believe the locals, since they don’t back up anything they say with hard evidence—indeed, it comes off more as several layers of hearsay. Even so, despite being a materialist herself, Marilyn is discomforted by the farm’s history, by the grisly and mysterious deaths of Derek’s ancestors, and by the possibility that something otherworldly owns the abandoned horse stable—something which, if disturbed, might just fuck everyone’s shit up. But since the stable is locked and since surely no one wants to enter it, things will be fine this time, right? Marilyn is a rational and educated person, even if she’s frazzled by the fact that she has to look after five kids, something she did not even imagine until recently.
But will history repeat itself? Let’s see…
There Be Spoilers Here
I appreciate that the stable is not haunted because it was built on an Indian burial ground or something; no, it’s haunted by something else. Marilyn reads more about the doomed James Hoskins and finds that he had been warned by the Wise Indians Who Know Better™ about the genius loci that owns this very particular spot of land, and in typical stupid white man fashion he failed to listen. I feel like even by the ’70s the whole Indian burial ground thing must’ve become a worn-out cliché (which did not stop people from continuing to use it, mind you), so I appreciate the subversion, even if it still relies on writing Indian characters as more symbols of wisdom than actual flesh-and-blood people.
The children have been acting weird lately. As Marilyn becomes more paranoid at the prospect of the horse stable being haunted for realz, she’s not helped when she and Derek find a peculiar chalk drawing in the now-opened stable. Get a load of this:
It was not a horse. After examining it more closely, Marilyn wondered how she could have thought it was the depiction of a wild, rearing stallion. Horses have hooves, not three-pronged talons, and they don’t have such a feline snake of a tail. The proportions of the body were wrong, too, once she looked more carefully.
Derek crouched and ran his fingers along the outline of the beast. It had been done in chalk, but it was much more than just a drawing. Lines must have been deeply scored in the earth, and the narrow trough then filled with some pounded white dust.
Do the adults take the drawing of the horse-like creature as a warning and get the hell out? No, of course not. So you have an idea as to what happens next. Of course, since Our Heroes™ don’t have any horses themselves, the thing that happened to James Hoskins can’t happen to them too, right? Well sort of, no. The story has a twist up its sleeve at the very end, and I have to admit it’s… a little silly. The children, who have started gravitating towards this genius loci which rules over the stable, are then possessed by it, despite not being “animals.” Except according to the story’s logic, or at least something Marilyn speculates right before her presumed demise, children are animals! Very scary. I mean normal children are scary enough, imagine possessed children that (inexplicably) now have super-strength. Not to toot my own horn, or to give the wrong impression, but I would’ve beaten the shit out of those kids easy. Like realistically, fuck them kids. It asks too many logistical questions for me, but I do think the ending have a haunting quality about it, not unlike a similar story I’ll bring up in a moment.
The ending makes me think about the story’s strongest theme, especially for someone like me who’s in his mid-20s, which is the fear of parenthood. Tuttle herself must’ve only been 23 or 24 when she wrote “The Horse Lord,” and right from the beginning there’s Marilyn as the put-upon young woman who suddenly finds herself the mother of five. Things only get worse from there! Like something out of a Shirley Jackson story, the children are depicted as being, at best, sort of distant from their parents, and more often as acting as if they live in another dimension—and it’s not a nice dimension. But whereas Jackson seemed to write about the nightmare world of being a parent from day to day (her child characters often being demons in human skin), there’s more the fear of becoming a parent in “The Horse Lord.” Yeah, I think I can do without raising kids for a long time.
A Step Farther Out
There came a point when I was getting a sense of déjà vu with “The Horse Lord,” and I think I know why now: this is basically a ghostly rendition of “Zero Hour” by Ray Bradbury. Ya know, children unwittingly bringing doom to their parents and all that. Structurally it also hits the same beats as Bradbury’s story, using the same chess board but with different pieces. I do think, in Tuttle’s defense, there’s a lot more to chew on thematically with “The Horse Lord,” even if I am deeply weary with the whole Wise Indians Who Know Better™ trope. I suppose I had an experience here similar to another horror story I’ve read recently: “Pig Blood Blues” by Clive Barker. I love me some Barker, but I would not consider “Pig Blood Blues” to be his finest hour by any means, mostly because I struggle to find a spooky farm animal scary. Spooky, sure, and “The Horse Lord” has a good amount of spookiness, but it’s not as scary as it could be.
I admire Tuttle juggling a few themes here, though, in the span of just a dozen pages. We’ve got American colonialism, the mistreatment of indigenous peoples, mistreatment of the environment, reconciling one’s attempts at artistry with one’s personal life, fear of parenthood, a few of these now being old chestnuts for modern horror but which were comparitively fresh at the time. I’m interested in reading more of Tuttle’s solo work, but I also wanna catch her at a later, more mature stage.
Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance 