Tag: karl edward wagner

Short Story Review: “In the Pines” by Karl Edward Wagner

October 10th, 2024

(Cover by Don Davis. F&SF, August 1973.)

Who Goes There?

Karl Edward Wagner was born in 1945 and died in 1994, after many years of heavy drinking. He was one of the unsung heroes of both horror and heroic fantasy writing, being one of the most talented successors to Robert E. Howard. He was not a very prolific writer; his last novel, Killer, came out in 1985, co-written with fellow weird writer (and military SF pioneer) David Drake. I could go on a bit more, but I’ll let Wagner speak for himself, as he says in his introduction to today’s story:

I got into this game too late to write for Weird Tales. […] Started writing around 1960, finally got to the point where I was spending more energy writing and reading in the sf/fantasy genre than I was giving to my medical studies (at the university of North Carolina). Encouraged by a couple book sales, I broke away to write full-time. Friends have called my approach “acid gothic.” Maybe so—this story is gothic or schizophrenic as you see it.

“In the Pines” is indeed a gothic horror story without the castle, being in one way an old-fashioned ghost story but with touches that only someone of Wagner’s disposition could add. It’s a morality tale about alcoholism, forgiveness (or lack of it), and misogyny, so there’s a fair bit to unpack here. This was, as far as I can tell, Wagner’s only appearance in F&SF. He mostly stuck to fanzines and semi-pros.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the August 1973 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories (ed. Richard Dalby), Summer Chills: Strangers in Strange Lands (ed. Stephen Jones), and the Wagner collections In a Lonely Place and Karl Edward Wagner: Masters of the Weird Tale.

Enhancing Image

Gerry and his wife Janet are on vacation, or rather a retreat, having ventured to a cabin in the woods (it wasn’t as stereotypical in horror writing then) called The Crow’s Nest, “a typical mountain cabin from the early ’20s, days when this had been a major resort area.” Neither wants to say it, but their marriage is on the skids, a year after Janet had gotten into a car accident with their son in the passenger seat. The young boy had not survived. With the death of his son and subsequent loss of his job, Gerry’s life seems to be tumbling downhill in slow-motion, not helped by Janet’s self-pitying attitude. Neither of them has gotten passed their little family tragedy, but maybe a change of scenery will do the trick. (It won’t.) Immediately we’re greet with what would’ve been a familiar premise even in the early ’70s, although it must be said that there’s a reason this premise continues to be done in some variation to this day. I do have to wonder if Stephen King read “In the Pines” back in the day, as he probably did. The similarities between “In the Pines” and The Shining are a bit hard to ignore with hindsight, what with a couple moving to a secluded resort location in the wake of something involving the child son causing a rift in the family dynamic (although, of course, Danny in The Shining is very much alive) and the husband struggling with alcoholism. Gerry, like his creator, drinks too much, although it doesn’t occur to him until deeper into the story that this is a bad idea. And of course there’s gonna be a ghost at work, as there should be.

I should probably also mention that yes, the title is a reference to a very old and well-known folk song, nonetheless one whose title is not consistent and whose author is unknown. Sometimes it’s called “In the Pines,” or “My Girl,” or as fans of Nirvana would know it, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.” It’s a fittingly eerie tune, about a jealous lover, and it and Wagner both evoke a kind of rustic disquiet—a sort of redneck horror, if you will. In his introduction Wagner says his horror has been called acid gothic, but in the case of “In the Pines” it’d be more accurate to call it Southern gothic, or rural gothic. The hallucinatory aspect is downplayed here; it’s certainly more grounded to reality than another Wagner horror story I’ve read, “Endless Night,” which borders on being a prose poem. “In the Pines” is much more psychological, as befits the gothic tradition, and truth be told the supernatural element is, for my money, the least interesting and most problematic part of it. But we’ll get to that soon. Gerry is very much an anti-hero, and we’re stuck with him; the best thing that can be said about him is that he is a genuinely lonely person. If Gerry and Janet could have an honest conversation, or even separate amicably, things probably would work out for each of them—but then we wouldn’t have a story. The plot kicks in proper when Gerry finds a portrait, which in itself is not special (the cabin has several), except for the woman who was painted. The woman depicted seems to be from the ’20s, but the portrait was done in 1951, the woman seemingly being named “Renee” and the painter being one “E. Pittman.” Here we have three very different periods in time (the early ’20s, the early ’50s, and presumably the early ’70s) colliding in a way Gerry could not have expected, but perhaps against his better judgment he becomes obsessed with the portrait, and especially the woman.

This is a ghost story, but like most ghost stories it’s also a mystery of sorts, with Gerry retracing historical steps, doing some digging and finding out what had happened to Renee and Pittman. He asks a local shopkeeper about The Crow’s Nest, and the man says the cabin is not haunted but “unlucky.” Back in the ’20s Renee’s husband had caught her with another man and had presumably killed her, the problem being nobody ever found the body. Doesn’t matter. Not long after Renee’s disappearance both the husband and boyfriend died, under rather odd circumstances, the husband in a horrific car accident that basically decapitated him while the boyfriend got mauled by a bear while in the woods one night. Supposedly. In both cases there was a strangely little amount of blood involved for how gruesome the deaths were, as if someone had sucked out much of the blood from these men’s bodies. Pittman himself would commit suicide years later, in The Crow’s Nest, not long after having done Renee’s portrait, having apparently cut his own throat—the only problem being that his throat had been torn open, not cut. This last detail goes over Gerry’s head. What does become clear to him is that Pittman had seen Renee’s ghost, as he notes in his final diary entries, and by this point Gerry has already seen Renee in the cabin for the first time, although at first he thinks it’s just some optical trickery from having gazed at her portrait for too long. It’s ambiguous at first as to whether there is a ghost at work (think about how we usually never see Henry James’s ghosts, for example), but it soon becomes apparent that The Crow’s Nest is super-fucking-haunted. Not that this helps much, as Gerry only becomes more obsessed and his marriage deterioates.

Ostensibly the malign force here is Renee, who seemed to have killed both her husband and secret lover from beyond the grave, as well as Pittman despite the artist never having earned her scorn as far as we know, but the real (or at least more believable) villain is Gerry’s alcoholism. He goes through Scotch almost like it’s water over the course of the story, to the point where by the end he realizes he’s about to run out of it well in advance of when they’re supposed to leave the cabin. He realizes that he has fallen out of love with Janet, but is unwilling or unable to say anything civil that could lead to them separating peacefully. Then again, is the drinking the one thing keeping him back from voicing his discontent, or is it the main thing driving their marriage into the dirt? “This Scotch was the only thing that held their marriage together—made this situation tolerable.” So he thinks. But Gerry is a pretty unreliable protagonist. He’s also obviously not thinking clearly, because if he was then he would’ve either stopped fussing about the portrait or had the two of them leave the cabin early. Horror stories tend to be implicitly conservative in the sense that a message shared among many of them is that there are things we’re better off not knowing. Lovecraft did this to perfection in his best stories, but it’s a notion that’s very much pre-Lovecraft, indeed going back to the original wave of gothic literature. Wagner knows his horror history, even calling out Oliver Onions’s “The Beckoning Fair One” at one point, so he knows he’s working with some basic ideas of the genre. It’s the intensity, both the psychological intensity and the overbearing atmosphere of the pines, of the story that really drives it. And, it must be said, Wagner can be a bit of a poet; not all of his lines are bangers, but he’s a more graceful stylist than most.

There Be Spoilers Here

The problem I have with the mystery surrounding Renee is the implication that while sure, she may be an evil ghost now, she was also a real piece of work when she was alive. Gerry consults an elderly local priest, who in turn tells him to drop the whole thing, on account of Renee having been quite a bitch in life and only getting worse after she died. Gerry’s growing resentment of Janet and objectification of Renee (he claims to be falling in love with her despite the fact that she’s dead and also the fact that they’ve only talked in Gerry’s dreams so far) are clearly byproducts of an unspoken and unacknowledged misogyny in Gerry, but this is undercut by Renee being a malicious temptress, a trope that would’ve been old and a little regressive even in 1973. In a drunken haze Gerry wishes death on Janet, and Renee obliges, before taking Gerry for herself—to the grave. It’s a classic downer of an ending, in which the “hero” has doomed himself and everyone close to him, through hubris, through curiosity, and in this case an affliction called alcoholism that has gone untreated. You could say this was all a warning to the curious (sorry, M. R. James), and while it is a bit predictable, it’s still quite affecting in its grimness. It’s hard to not wonder if Wagner saw some of himself in Gerry and was fearful that, as Gerry had succumbed to his drinking, Wagner might succumb to his.

A Step Farther Out

Not my favorite Wagner horror yarn—not even the best one I’ve read recently, which would be the nigh-perfect “Where the Summer Ends.” But “In the Pines” is early Wagner, one of a small deluge of stories he got published in 1973/1974, and he would’ve only been 25 or 26 when he wrote it. Of course, one has to remember that while the skeleton of this story would’ve been nothing new, even at the time, it’s how Wagner puts his own unique touches on it, making a fine addition to a very old family lineage of ghost stories. He would go on to write more impressive tales of terror, but “In the Pines” was one of the first.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: October 2024

October 1st, 2024
(Cover by David Palladini. F&SF, April 1977.)

Let’s talk about horror.

Everyone has their preferences when it comes to genre, which makes sense; there are only so many hours in the day, and time plus one’s temperament equals a preference for literature that seeks to entrance, excite, and/or titillate. We also like to be scared sometimes, or at the very least uneased. I’ll be honest with you, when someone tells me they simply have no appetite for horror I’m tempted to give them the side-eye. As far as my own genre preferences go I would put horror only behind science fiction—and not by much. The key difference is that I can enjoy SF at really any length, whereas I very much believe horror is at its best at short story and novella lengths, which is an old-school belief not least because the novel has dominated horror since at least the ’80s.

The conventional narrative (and I do think this is more or less accurate) is that prior to the ’70s, horror had at most fleeting moments of mainstream recognition. There were exceptions, but they were exceptions that proved the rule. Maybe ever few years you got a horror novel that reached bestseller status. But then, in the ’70s, what had been a once-in-a-blue-moon thing became something of a trend, arguably started when William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist and Richard Matheson’s Hell House both came out in 1971. In the film world the influx of horror can be explained by the advent of the MPAA rating system combined with independent studios like New World Pictures pumping out exploitation cinema by the truckload, but in the literary world the rise of horror is harder to explain—except for one thing. Stephen King had been writing since the late ’60s, but his debut novel Carrie became a bestseller when it was published in 1974, and the crazy part is that noy only did King (a snotty 26-year-old at the time) gain overnight success, he managed to sustain it with more hits. The meteor shower that was King in the ’70s brought a change to horror that it had not seen before, and frankly will probably never see again. Many writers (some of whom are more elegant than King) would hop on the horror bandwagon, but none can be said to have reached King’s level.

While the horror novel was in, the short story was not so much. For most of the ’70s The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction was the only genre magazine to publish horror with any regularity. Magazine of Horror did mostly reprints, and by 1972 was no more, while Weird Tales had a brief revival in the early ’70s, only to go dormant again. So it was up to F&SF to pick up the slack. For the magazine’s 75th anniversary, and in covering short stories from the ’70s, we’ll be focusing more on horror, dark fantasy, and spooky science fiction. These are mostly the usual suspects when it comes to horror, but there are one or two surprises.

For the short stories:
1. “Longtooth” by Edgar Pangborn. From the January 1970 issue. One of the most criminally overlooked SF writers of the ’50s through the ’70s, Pangborn wrote some pretty touching fiction that went against the rather hard-headed norm of the times. He would spend the last decade or so of his life on a post-apocalyptic continuity, but “Longtooth” is both a standalone and detour into horror.
2. “The Smell of Death” by Dennis Etchison. From the October 1971 issue. Etchison started writing in the ’60s, but he gained more prominence in the following decade as the horror boom for film and novels had kind of a trickle-down effect. He would also later become acclaimed as an editor, on top of writing, winning the World Fantasy Award multiple times for his horror-centered anthologies.
3. “In the Pines” by Karl Edward Wagner. From the August 1973 issue. Wagner debuted in 1970 and would remain a mainstay of horror and heroic fantasy until his untimely death in 1994. Last time we read Wagner it was one of his Kane stories, but “In the Pines” is an early example of his mastery of scares. I believe this also marks his only appearance in the pages of F&SF.
4. “The Same Dog” by Robert Aickman. From the December 1974 issue. Aickman has a reputation as a writer’s writer, with good reason, being your favorite horror writer’s favorite horror writer. He debuted in the early ’50s but remained a hidden gem in the UK until the ’70s. Aickman would appear in F&SF several times throughout this decade, with “The Same Dog” being an original publication.
5. “The Ghastly Priest Doth Reign” by Manly Wade Wellman. From the March 1975 issue. Wellman remained a presence in American fantasy writing for six decades, and especially in the latter half worked to evoke the rural mysteries of his adopted home state of North Carolina. For better or worse Wellman’s most authentic fiction is distinctly Southern in flavor, this story being one example.
6. “My Boat” by Joanna Russ. From the January 1976 issue. Known much more for her SF and criticism, a fair amount of Russ’s fiction (especially early on) was horror, such that even some of her SF oozes with a certain existential dread. She even wrote a few stories set in the Cthulhu Mythos, of which “My Boat” is one. I suspect this will be a Lovecraft pastiche with a Russ-type twist or two.
7. “Manatee Gal Ain’t You Coming Out Tonight” by Avram Davidson. From the April 1977 issue. This will be the first time we’ll be reading a story by one of F&SF‘s editors. Davidson was already a respected writer when he took over F&SF for a few years in the early ’60s, injecting the magazine with eccentricity. This story is actually the second in an episodic series starring Jack Limekiller.
8. “Hear Me Now, My Sweet Abbey Rose” by Charles L. Grant. From the March 1978 issue. Grant got his start in the ’60s and would soon become one of the moodier and more experimental horror writers of the following decade, winning awards for his efforts. Truth be told, I’ve not been keen on the Grant I’ve read, but as I’ve said before, I’m usually open to giving authors another chance.
9. “Red as Blood” by Tanith Lee. From the July 1979 issue. This is the third consecutive time Lee’s appearing on my October slate, although this won’t be the case next year for reasons I’ll give… in due time. But for now it’s safe to say I’ve warmed up to Lee, gradually, and can see how for decades she was a mainstay of horror and dark fantasy. “Red As Blood” marked her first appearance in F&SF.
Won’t you read with me?
Short Story Review: “Two Suns Setting” by Karl Edward Wagner

April 20th, 2024

(Cover by Steve Hickman. Fantastic, May 1976.)

Who Goes There?

Karl Edward Wagner is one of those recent discoveries for me who sadly I’ve not been able to read a lot more of as of yet, because his works are not exactly easy to find. Wagner is (I’ve been told) arguably the best of the generation of writers to hop on the sword-and-sorcery revival of the late ’60s and early ’70s. He debuted in 1970 with the novel Darkness Weaves with Many Shades…, which was also the first to star his nigh-immortal anti-hero Kane, seemingly based on the Cain of the Bible. In an interview for the fanzine Dagon, Wagner had this to say on his biggest contribution to heroic fantasy:

The idea of Kane came from all the villains that I saw as heroes, derived from reading books, comics and watching movies: the bad gunfighter who would get shot down, who was really faster than the good guy. Good always had to win so I thought I’d write about a villain who always wins. Villains always had to be either like Fu Manchu, or intensely intelligent super scientific geniuses, but they couldn’t really break somebody in half, or else they were big hulking creatures like Rondo Hatton. So I thought what happens if you got the super intelligent villain who could break somebody in half if he wanted to? That’s how Kane came about. He was a villain who was going to win at the end and be smart enough to control the situation when things got bad. If he had to mow down sixty other people he could handle that, that is if he didn’t summon up something supernatural in the process. I thought let’s do something totally all out, and that’s Kane.

“Two Suns Setting” is one of the more notable Kane stories, and even won Wagner his second British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story; the first was for his Lovecraftian horror story (and his most famous story overall) “Sticks.” This also marked Wagner’s first and only appearance in Fantastic, which is weird because you’d think Wagner and Fantastic in the ’70s, when it had become the most high-profile outlet for heroic fantasy, would make a perfect pair. Wagner mostly stuck to fanzines and semi-pros for his stories, which might explain why he’s not as widely read as he should be: few people would’ve been able to read his stuff at the time, but the few who did thought it A+ material. (The fact that he also died young, from severe alcoholism, no doubt helped doom him to obscurity.) He’s probably known more nowadays for his horror stories, which are also highly regarded and which have been reprinted more often than his Kane stories.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the May 1976 issue of Fantastic, which is on the Archive. It was then reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 3 (ed. Lin Carter) and the Wagner collections Night Winds and Midnight Sun: The Complete Stories of Kane.

Enhancing Image

Normally I don’t talk about the quality of a story’s title, but I really like how this one both sets the tone and expectations for the reader. We can infer that the second sun in the title is a metaphorical one—perhaps a person’s life. We immediately get the sense that there will likely be a death in the narrative, but unlike most deaths in heroic fantasy tales which happen to side characters and mooks, this one will be more bitter, more funereal. Since Kane is a recurring protagonist who has something close to immortality we can guess ahead of time that Our Anti-Hero™ will make it out fine—whoever happens to be with him, not so sure. Anyway, about that special power. Obviously there’s a wish-fulfillment element with Kane aging extremely slowly, to the point of living for centuries whilst barely showing any change, but he can be killed. Kane committed some horrible crime in the past, possibly the killing of his brother although this is not told explicitly, that cursed him with a mark, so that passersby would know him by appearance. Even at this early stage in man’s history (the time of Genesis, when it seemed giants and other mythical beings roamed the earth), he has become infamous. At the beginning of the story he had just left Carsultyal, the first great human city, partly because of said infamy and partly out of boredom.

The spirit of discovery, of renaissance that had drawn him to Carsultyal in its earliest years was burned out now, so that boredom, his nemesis, had overtaken Kane once more. To be sure, he had been restless, his thoughts drawn more and more to the world beyond Carsultyal—lands yet to know the presence of man. But that he returned to his pathless wandering without much forethought could be judged in that Kane had left the city with little more than a few supplies, a double handful of gold coins, a fast horse, and a sword of tempered Carsultyal steel.

So Kane traverses the desert, without a clear destination in mind, aside from the immediate need to find food and water; his supplies are running low. Thankfully he comes across a fellow traveler who has set up camp—a giant named Dwasslir. Eighteen feet tall, the giant is cooking an entire mountain goat for himself. “Kane had seen, had spoken with giants in the course of his wanderings, although in recent decades they were seldom encountered.” Indeed, so Dwassllir admits, his race is surely but slowly dwindling—not for any particular reason it seems but, so Dwassllir suspects, the giants, being a race much older than man, have become collectively weary. Humans, still very young, have already built cities and encroached on nature’s domain, bringing civilization into the world. The giants don’t have cities, or much in the way of civilization, but as Dwassllir argues they are accustomed to living off the fat o’ the land; they don’t need civilization. Humans, being small and rather flimsy compared to their much bigger cousins, use civilization as a “crutch,” as the friendly giant says. Kane, who believes wholly in the glory of man despite being cursed, has found a philosophical opponent in the giant.

Even a giant who lives outside man’s domain and who presumably doesn’t have fast internet knows who Kane is simply by looking at him, which proves to be a bit of a problem for the latter. The two strike up something of a friendship, or at least friendly companionship as one would want while traveling, but Kane a) knows that if he pisses the giant off that the big guy could crush his skull with his bare hands like a musclebound bitch could crush a watermelon with her thighs, and b) is intrigued by a certain treasure Dwassllir mentions that he is in search of: the crown of King Brotemllain, an ancient giant ruler. “Although our wars and our kings are all past now, I believe that resurrection of this legendary symbol might unlock some of the old energy and vitality of my people,” says Dwassllir. He has long been in search of the king’s tomb, and thinks he is finally on the verge of holding this no-doubt valuable treasure in his hands—assuming Brotemllain’s tomb has not already been stripped clean by raiders. But then a royal giant’s burial place would have its own unique traps, different from what one would find in tomb built for humans.

The first half or so of the story has no action to speak of, and yet if I had to pick which is my favorite I would say it’s this one. I’m biased, and not given to action scenes much, but it helps also that Wagner is a deeply moody writer, showing a mastery of atmosphere that I had only been able to see in his horror writing prior to this, my first Kane story. I mean this as a compliment when I say “Two Suns Setting” could work as a stage production, since there are only two locations (the desert and later the tomb), two human actors (surely a very tall and muscly actor could convey Dwassllir’s enormity compared to Kane), and while there is some action that we’ll get to in a minute, this is primarily a character- and dialogue-driven narrative. It’s a kind of Socratic dialogue in which the philosophical problem of what constitutes achievement for a civilization is raised, with Kane believing the giants, having very little to show for their troubles in human terms, are a race that will be forgotten once they’ve died out, while Dwassllir thinks his people were once glorious and indeed still have the capacity for glory, despite the humans overtaking them. As if to prove this, Dwassllir will take Brotemllain’s crown, with Kane bearing witness to this moment of glory. It’s possible the giant will not even try selling the crown, but would rather keep it as a memento.

There Be Spoilers Here

Having found the tomb, the companions come pretty close to getting the crown, only for some of the architecture to give way (the tomb is old enough apparently that the stonework has become infirm), with the human and giant becoming separated. Interesting little moment leading up to this is that Kane contemplates murdering Dwassllir and taking the crown for himself, although this thought seems to vanish as suddenly as it had entered his mind. This is a startling passage, and it would be considered an out-of-character moment if not for the reader’s foreknowledge that Kane is capable of committing such a horrific deed and for such a petty reason as this. He’s a bit more of an anti-hero than Conan, who happily partakes in criminal activities but who usually tries to not take the life of innocents, whereas Kane, whether out of pragmatism or a bad mood, could stab an ally of his in the back. Right after this we’re confronted with the “monsters” of the story, as the rockslide has made a gaping hole or “aperture” to the world below. It seems the tomb was built on top of a vast underworld, where creatures live without any sunlight and having for some reason grown to enormous sizes—perhaps befitting a tomb of the giants. (By the way, people meme up Blighttown a lot, but Tomb of the Giants is a contender for the worst area in Dark Souls.) We have rats “the size of jackals,” along with something much more threatening in the form of a massive (and mostly blind) saber-toothed cat.

Kane, at first facing the big kitty alone, would surely have been toast if not for the cat having very poor eyesight, made worse by being unaccustomed to sunlight. Dwassllir comes in for the rescue, and it’s here that we get our obligatory climactic battle, man against beast, giant against giant. The fight itself is particularly badass, but more importantly for me, it clearly means something to one of the combatants. Dwassllir is literally fighting for his life, and so he can get his hands on the crown, but symbolically he’s also fighting this saber-tooth to prove a point to Kane—that the giants, in their prime, fought beasts like these and came out victorious. Even as he’s taking some pretty serious damage, by the end of it being mortally wounded, the giant still comes out seeming like a noble figure, as if he were the deserving successor to the throne on which Brotemllain’s skeleton sits. After crushing the cat’s ribcage and turning its head all the way around in what almost seems like a wrestling maneuver, Dwassllir goes to take what’s his. It’s unclear if this is due to the fact that Dwassllir is clearly dying or if he really was moved by the fight, but while Kane is perfectly capable of taking the crown for himself, he decides to hand it to the giant; he has earned it. It’s a bittersweet ending, made even more so by Kane wondering at the very end of Dwassllir, being already of a dwindling species, is maybe the last remnant of the “age of heroes.” Maybe this marks the end of an era.

A Step Farther Out

It’s almost deceptive in its simplicity. I think what I really liked about “Two Suns Setting,” aside from the beauty of Wagner’s language (especially in the first half of the story), is that it functions perfectly as a short story. It does what Edgar Allan Poe thought a good short story should do, which is provide the reader with a singular experience that’s transformative and yet which can be easily read in one sitting. Despite only taking about an hour or two to read, we come out of the experience feeling like something in the air or in ourselves has changed somehow. It’s essentially a two-act (the first in the desert, the second in the tomb) play starring two guys who not so much act as individuals as represent different states of existential dread. The action is engrossing (a rarity for me, mind you) because Wagner has set up the emotional and thematic stakes in advance, so that we understand the meaning behind the climactic fight beyond the mere physicality of it. And of course anything that gives me the itch to play Dark Souls again must be doing something right.

See you next time.
Things Beyond: April 2024

April 1st, 2024
(Cover by Frank Kelly Freas. Analog, December 1972.)

As has unfortunately become commonplace, there have been a few deaths in the family. Christopher Priest and Brian Stableford died in February and Vernor Vinge little over a week ago. This last one hit me by far the hardest. Obviously there are some people I’m not mentioning, but unfortunately unless I really wanted to I can’t cover everyone. There’s too much. The past month or so has been rough for me. I had a nasty fall a few weeks ago and I seem to have acquired mild PTSD from it. Half of my face got messed up and I ended up spending some time in the ER. Obviously I’m doing better now. Yet somehow I don’t feel totally “right.”

Hopefully some good (or at least interesting) fiction will help me! We have a nice mix: two SF novellas, plus two SF short stories, two fantasy, and two horror. Or at least these stories seem to fit predominantly into those genres; obviously they’re not mutually exclusive.

For the novellas:
1. “A Woman’s Liberation” by Ursula K. Le Guin. From the July 1995 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. One of the most universally beloved of all SFF writers, Le Guin started relatively late but would enjoy a very long and acclaimed career. She’s one of the few authors to enjoy about equal reverence for both her SF and fantasy. Her Hainish Cycle, especially The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, might constitute her best and most important work overall. “A Woman’s Liberation” is set in the same universe as those novels, and is a loose sequel to “Forgiveness Day” and “A Man of the People.”
2. “Palely Loitering” by Christopher Priest. From the January 1979 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. British Science Fiction Award winner for Best Short Fiction. Priest died in February, after a career spanning more than half a century. His 1974 novel Inverted World is something of a cult classic. His 1995 novel The Prestige was turned into a movie by Christopher Nolan. ISFDB classifies “Palely Loitering” as a novelette, but at about forty pages in F&SF I suspect it counts as a novella. It got a Hugo nomination for Best Novelette but placed third in the Locus poll for Best Novella.
For the short stories:
1. “The Hounds of Tindalos” by Frank Belknap Long. From the March 1929 issue of Weird Tales. Long had a ridiculously long (ha) career, spanning from the 1920s to his death in 1994. He was a close friend of H. P. Lovecraft and the two seemed to take inspiration from each other, with “The Hounds of Tindalos” being one of the first Cthulhu Mythos stories not written by Lovecraft.
2. “Traps” by F. Paul Wilson. From the Summer 1987 issue of Night Cry. A doctor by day and a bestselling author by night, Wilson is the only person to have earned both the Bram Stoker and Prometheus Award for Lifetime Achievement. He likes to hop between science fiction and horror, with the two not being mutually exclusive. “Traps” itself was a Stoker nominee for Best Short Story.
3. “The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death” by Ellen Kushner. From the September 1991 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Kushner got started in the ’80s writing Choose Your Own Adventure books before turning to proper fantasy literature and even radio. This story is set in the same universe as her novel Swordspoint but, as far as I can tell, is not a sequel.
4. “Two Suns Setting” by Karl Edward Wagner. From the May 1976 issue of Fantastic. British Fantasy Award winner for Best Short Story. Wagner was a devotee of both horror and sword-and-sorcery fantasy. His Kane series very much follows in Robert E. Howard’s footsteps, but Wagner at his best was a genuine poet as well. “Two Suns Setting” was his first (and I think only) appearance in Fantastic.
5. “Original Sin” by Vernor Vinge. From the December 1972 issue of Analog Science Fiction. Despite debuting in 1965 and remaining active until about half a decade ago, Vinge’s output is fairly small; but, given the five Hugo wins, he certainly did something right. “Original Sin” is one of Vinge’s more obscure stories, but I went with it on the recommendation of a certain colleague.
6. “The Growth of the House of Usher” by Brian Stableford. From the Summer 1988 issue of Interzone. Stableford passed away in February after a very long and winding career. (Incidentally Priest, Vinge, and Stableford all debuted within a few years of each other.) He was a prolific translator of French SF and contributed to the SF Encyclopedia, on top of a massive amount of fiction.
Won’t you read with me?