Tag: lisa tuttle

Novella Review: “The Storms of Windhaven” by Lisa Tuttle and George R. R. Martin

February 17th, 2024

(Cover by Jack Gaughan. Analog, May 1975.)

Who Goes There?

Lisa Tuttle and George R. R. Martin were baby-faced new writers, part of the post-New Wave era, and were even nominated for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer (Tuttle won) the same year. The two were lovers in the early ’70s, and while I haven’t looked into this, I’m pretty sure they were still together when they were writing “The Storms of Windhaven” (although they had broken up, and Martin was on his way to getting married, by the time it was published). This was probably the first thing of Tuttle’s a lot of people had read, and this might still be the case given the Martin connection; but these people would be in for a nasty surprise, since Tuttle’s writing is much more in touch with horror than SF. As for Martin, I need not elaborate, only to say that the Martin of the ’70s and ’80s is quite a different beast from one of the most famous authors in the world. I can’t call myself a Martin fan (because I’ve been unimpressed by what little I’ve read of A Song of Ice and Fire), but I do like most of his early stuff.

Tuttle and Martin came up with the Windhaven setting and apparently wanted to turn it into a novel, but only after they had written this first novella, which is a self-contained narrative. And why not? It would take almost five years for a follow-up to “The Storms of Windhaven.” This was pretty popular too, getting nominated for the Hugo and Nebula and placing first in that year’s Locus poll for Best Novella. I like it a good deal myself, for the worldbuilding more than the actual plot, and because it lacks some of Martin’s less savory habits. I have a theory or two about who wrote what, but I’ll get to that in a minute. And rest assured we’ll eventually tackle One-Wing, the much-anticipated sequel to this story.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the May 1975 issue of Analog Science Fiction, which is on Luminist. Unsurprisingly most of its reprints predate Windhaven. We’ve got The Best Science Fiction of the Year 5 (ed. Terry Carr) and The 1976 Annual World’s Best SF (ed. Arthur W. Saha and Donald Wollheim). Windhaven itself is still in print, for obvious reasons.

Enhancing Image

The plot itself is rather simple, but some context is needed. A sloppy reading of this story might make one think it’s fantasy, and certainly without some pieces of backstory it could be construed for fantasy. I myself barely noticed the origin of the humans of Windhaven on my first reading, along with a couple other things. Windhaven is a livable but not totally hospitable planet, mostly covered with water and prone to fierce gales and some pretty nasty local wildlife. The humans are descendants of space colonists, who had crash landed on the planet and could no longer use their spaceship; and apparently as a result the descendants have most lost touch with their far-future past, having descended into barbarism. There are basically two types of people: flyers and “land-bound.” The flyers have constructed their wings out of metal from the crashed spaceship, so needless to say it’s a precious resource; losing wings is considered just as bad, if not worse, than losing a human life. I’m putting this all up at the front since Tuttle and Martin sort of sneak in this context in breadcrumbs of exposition, which can be easily missed, although you don’t need it to understand the plot.

Anyway. Our Heroine™, Maris, is a skilled flyer; the problem is that she’s not “supposed” to be a flyer. She’s the daughter of a fisherman (long dead) who got adopted by Russ, who really is a flyer, although having lost the use of one of his hands he can no longer fly, and at the time he was seemingly sterile. “He and his wife had taken her in when it seemed that he would never father a child of his own to inherit the wings.” Luckily for Russ but unluckily for Maris, a child was eventually born. Coll is Russ’s son and, having turned thirteen, Coll has now come of age to inherit his father’s wings. But Russ had previously told Maris that she would inherit his wings! Conflict is now well underway. This is made worse by the fact that flyer laws state that wings can only be passed on to family members (unless the flyer has no next of kin or gives up their wings), preferably blood-related. The Landsman, a local authority, sympathizes with Maris’s wish to become a flyer, but rules are rules and Russ is a traditionalist. To make things even worse, Coll doesn’t really want to become a flyer; he would rather be a balladeer, like Barrion, a mutual friend of theirs and sort of a rebel.

Maris is a bit of a mixed bag as a character, because on the one hand she seems to be one-note: she wants to become a flyer and doesn’t seem to have any other serious aspirations. She has a boyfriend in Dorrel, a flyer himself, but we only see them together in a few scenes and it’s not a relationship that’s made that important. She doesn’t seem to have any hobbies, although in fairness she lives in a world without movies, TV, video games, or even common literature. But, to give some credit, she is driven, has a clear goal in mind, and is not objectified at any point. I suspect that Maris’s assertive characterization came mostly from Tuttle, although I can’t prove this. There’s a bit of steaminess with Maris and Dorrel, but it’s tasteful. Unfortunately one or two of the characters are not written as delicately. Russ is your typical boomer dad who doesn’t approve of his daughter’s wild ways, and he also happens to be very angsty about his disability. Obviously Russ wants to do the sports parent thing and recapture his glory days as a flyer vicariously by forcing his son, who is a square peg, into a round hole. Corm, a senior flyer and the closest the novella has to a villain, is almost a cartoon character, so zealous is he about keeping with tradition.

Unsubtle and at times problematic character writing would dog Martin for the rest of his career (some people will challenge me on this, but I think those people are wrong), but one thing Martin and Tuttle both had nailed down from very early in their careers is a sense of location. “The Storms of Windhaven” is not hard SF, but it is a vivid and plausible (assuming you’re not a stickler for details) planetary adventure that gives us a plot that, yes, could work perfectly fine in a fantasy context, but whose SFnal background gives credibility to this far-future society that has descended somewhat into barbarism. It makes sense that the survivors of a crashed spaceship would scatter over a ton of small islands, traveling by glider or boat, and having to rebuilt society from the ground up. It makes sense that a few centuries later the descendants would remember these original explorers through myth and song, and that lineage would become very important. Balladeers like Barrion would hold an important place in society because they are entertainers, for one, but also they chronicle history—and rewrite it, if need be. Barrion says he’d like to write songs depicting Maris as a virtuous rebel after all has been said and done, and he has the power to do this.

Ultimately this is a story about tradition vs. progress, or more specifically, how we should handle the past. It’s unsubtle; it’s even more unsubtle than the character writing, not that I disagree with Tuttle and Martin’s obvious pro-progress stance. Russ and Corm are bound to tradition, even to the point of making Maris’s life worse, and they need to be shown the error of their ways. This is also a story about racism and classism, by way of metaphor, because it’s pretty clear that a) the people of the different tribes don’t get along too well, and b) flyers and land-bound don’t like each other. Understandable: flyers are rather up their own asses about their wings. Our Heroine™, of course, has no bad intentions and doesn’t even know what those are. She does briefly consider killing Corm when the latter confiscates her wings, but she quickly turns this down, and that’s as dark as her character gets. I’m not really complaining—just pointing out how much of a girlboss Maris is. I don’t remember a great deal from One-Wing but I do remember it focuses a bit less on her, which I might appreciate on a reread. “The Storms of Windhaven” technically has a sequel hook, but it would still feel like a flesh-out world even if we never got a sequel.

There Be Spoilers Here

Maris steals back her wings from Corm, and there’s a chase. Despite being younger and not a “true” flyer, Maris proves to be a better flyer than Corm, which lets her escape his wrath for the moment but also results in her being put on trial before a council. The back end of this novella is weird for me because I totally forgot about the stealing part (despite it being crucial to the plot) and also remembered the trial taking up more of the story than it does. Memory is flexible, and often tells us things that aren’t quite true. I also realized, looking at my notes again, then I occasionally misspelled Corm as “Corn.” Imagine being hunted down by some conservative zealot named Corn. Anyway, the trial is technically to judge whether Maris be exiled from her hometown (or I guess home… rock?), but really it’s supposed to be a kangaroo court of humiliation, as Maris thinks:

Corm is a proud man; I injured his pride. He is a good flyer and I, a fisherman’s daughter, stole his wings and outflew him when he pursued me. Now, to regain his pride, he must humble me in some very public, very grand way. Getting the wings back would not be enough for him. No, everyone, every flyer, must be present to see me humbled and declared an outlaw.

At first everyone is against the notion that wings should be earned in some way rather than just inherited, but naturally Maris is able to convince enough of the council that what has been done for generations isn’t the only correct way to do things. “The Storms of Windhaven” is not some deep “literary” achievement but a well-crafted planetary adventure that wears its thesis and emotions on its sleeve. Its point is obvious, but entertaining to read (there’s not a dull moment here), so unsurprisingly it was quite popular with readers. It’s just a shame that Windhaven, like Dying of the Light and Tuf Voyaging, is doomed to semi-obscurity by virtue of not being the thing that made Martin one of our most famous living authors. Of course, it’s totally possible these books wouldn’t even be in print if not for Martin’s name being attached to them. It’s also a shame that Windhaven would be Martin’s last SF novel if we’re not counting Tuf Voyaging as a novel.

A Step Farther Out

Obvious sequel hook aside, this is a nicely self-contained story that theoretically could’ve stopped here; but it’s a good thing they didn’t. This is a masterclass in worldbuilding, and it’s impressive especially given how young both authors were at the time. It’s vivid, if also old-fashioned even for 1975. It could’ve been published thirty years earlier in Planet Stories, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s justifiably a classic piece of SF adventure writing. We will return to Windhaven, in One-Wing, which was serialized in Analog in 1980. For some reason I remember very little of One-Wing despite having read it not that long ago. Ominous…?

See you next time.
Things Beyond: February 2024

February 1st, 2024
(Cover by Edward Valigursky. Amazing Stories, May 1959.)

It’s February, and 29 days instead of the usual 28—not like that makes a difference for my review schedule. It’s the time of one of my least favorite holidays: Valentine’s Day. I just ignored it last year, but this time I figured I may as well have some fun with the timing of it. Originally I was gonna tackle all collaborative stories this month, as a gimmick. After all, it takes two to tango, and authors working together can sometimes bring out the best in each other. Indeed for the collaborations I decided to go for different types of collaborative relationship: mentor and apprentice (Brackett and Bradbury), siblings (the Strugatsky brothers), an emerging master and his idol (Ellison and van Vogt), young lovers (Tuttle and Martin), and an actual married couple (Kuttner and Moore). It’s a fun idea!

Unfortunately I did say “originally” because tragedy struck the field last month: we lost some our most talented writers. Within the span of a week Terry Bisson, Howard Waldrop, and Tom Purdom died. I was gonna wait until April to do this, but I realized that with the way things have been going we might lose a few more major talents in the interim. This may sound cynical, but I wanted to strike while the iron was hot. It also lets me not have to comb too hard for collaborative stories.

For the novellas:
1. “Lorelei of the Red Mist” by Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury. From the Summer 1946 issue of Planet Stories. The logical heir apparent to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Brackett’s influence on the planetary romance can’t be overlooked. I need not tell you about Bradbury. Despite being only five years his senior and debuting around the same time, Brackett acted as a mentor figure to Bradbury. It’s probably not a coincidence both were Planet Stories regulars in the late ’40s.
2. “The Storms of Windhaven” by Lisa Tuttle and George R. R. Martin. From the May 1975 issue of Analog Science Fiction. This is a reread, but you know how I feel about rereads. Tuttle is known for her horror, but she has also dabbled in SF, and I can guess how she contributed to the Windhaven stories. I don’t need to introduce Martin. They were lovers in the early ’70s, and were probably still together when they came up with the Windhaven setting.
For the short stories:
1. “The Human Operators” by Harlan Ellison and A. E. van Vogt. From the January 1971 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The first of the two Ellison collaborations, although it was actually the last released, its magazine publication being pretty much simultaneous with Partners in Wonder. Ellison thought the world of van Vogt, even bullying the SFWA into making him a Grand Master.
2. “First Fire” by Terry Bisson. From the September 1998 issue of Science Fiction Age. Bion has the unique honor of being the first author whose work I reviewed on this site, that being his legendary story “Bears Discover Fire.” Bisson started out as a novelist but is probably now more remembered for his short fiction, with short but densely packed stories like “macs” and “They’re Made Out of Meat.”
3. “What You Need” by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. From the October 1945 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Retro Hugo nominee for Best Short Story. It’s hard to overstate how great Kuttner and Moore were together in the ’40s, and also how prolific. My quest to cover as many Twilight Zone stories as I can continues, as “What You Need” was turned into a classic TZ episode of the same name.
4. “Initiative” by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. From the May 1959 issue of Amazing Stories. Translated by Harmon Rutley. The Strugatsky brothers were, aside from Yevgeny Zamyatin, the first Russian authors to leave an impression on American genre SF; mind you this was during the Cold War. Their novel Roadside Picnic is one of the most famous non-English SF novels, as well as the inspiration for Stalker.
5. “Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance?” by Howard Waldrop. From the August 1988 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Unlike Bisson, Waldrop seemed to think himself much more keen on short fiction, with only one solo novel being published and at least one more supposed to have been written but never seeing print. He’s probably most known for his seminal alternate history story “The Ugly Chickens.”
6. “Reduction in Arms” by Tom Purdom. From the August 1967 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Despite having debuted in the ’50s, Purdom was one of those writers who really came into his own in the ’60s, when the New Wave was in full bloom and the market for genre SF had become more permissive. Purdom remained active for over sixty years, and his absence is sorely felt.
Not much else to say. Next month, as I said not long ago, we’ll be covering all short stories, all from F&SF, and all from the ’50s. February is another roster of novellas and short stories, but with a twist.

Won’t you read with me?
Short Story Review: “The Horse Lord” by Lisa Tuttle

October 20th, 2022

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

Who Goes There?

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

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

Tuttle celebrated her 70th birthday last month.

Placing Coordinates

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

Enhancing Image

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

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

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

Get this:

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

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

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

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

But will history repeat itself? Let’s see…

There Be Spoilers Here

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Step Farther Out

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

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

See you next time.
Things Beyond: October 2022

October 1st, 2022
(Cover by Margaret Brundage. Weird Tales, June 1933.)

Halloween is getting close, and you know that means: a Halloween-appropriate story lineup! I feel no shame when I say I fucking love Halloween; it’s the only holiday I really get in the mood for. As such I figured I ought to do something special for October, not only picking more horror-centric stories but also changing my rotation method. Normally I would cycle short stories and novellas with serials, but something I’ve realized about horror (and you can say this is just my opinion) is that it works best in small doses. There wasn’t even much of a market for horror novels until the ’80s, and aside from Weird Tales there has, historically, not been much magazine space given to longer horror tales unless they’re reprints. As such, serials are OUT this month, and so are novellas, much as I love the things. Instead of getting only a few short stories and novellas we’re looking at nine short stories and novelettes, which is a considerable number!

For a while, when picking stories for my schedule, I had planned on including works by Lovecraft, Bradbury, and Stephen King, but decided at the last minute that I didn’t wanna deal with those who are unquestionably the most popular in the field; instead I went for deeper cuts, some by established horror authors, others by authors who are not normally associated with horror. I had almost included “Colony” by Philip K. Dick, but seeing as how I had already read it before and since I had come to the conclusion that I wanted all of these to be first reads, I ejected it. I’m sorry, Phil, I STILL LOVE YOU. This is also the first lineup where there are more female authors than male authors—that’s right, there are five women against four men! But to “compensate” we have the raw male chauvinism of James Blish and Harlan Ellison.

Now, as for the short stories…
1. “The Mindworm” by C. M. Kornbluth. Published in the December 1950 issue of Worlds Beyond. While not usually associated with horror, Kornbluth’s fiction tends to run in a morbid vein, being incredibly pessimistic and clearly disguted with the human condition. Despite dying at the horribly young age of 34, Kornbluth was both something of a prodigy (he started getting published professionally while still a teenager) and prolific at short lengths, especially from 1949 to his death in 1958. “The Mindworm” belongs to that streak of fiction, and is apparently a rare instance of Kornbluth writing straight horror.
2. “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” by Alyssa Wong. Published in the October 2015 issue of Nightmare Magazine. Wong is a young author in the field, and their body of work remains fairly small, but their interests are spread impressively wide and they’ve already gotten their fair share of accolades. On top of being a productive short story writer (no novel as of yet, though), Wong has also written for comic books and even video games, with Overwatch being their big credit in the latter medium. “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” won the Nebula as well as the World Fantasy Award.
3. “Bite-Me-Not or, Fleur de Feu” by Tanith Lee. Published in the October 1984 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Lee is (or was) a startlingly prolific author of mostly fantasy and horror, writing dozens of novels plus a small army of short stories. Her reputation is apparently quite high, but unfortunately I’ve not read anything by her before. I found out through someone on Twitter that she’s one of the very few authors in SFF history to have more than one magazine issue made in tribute to her, including but not limited to an issue the revived Weird Tales.
4. “Genius Loci” by Clark Ashton Smith. Published in the June 1933 issue of Weird Tales. Smith was, along with H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, one of the defining authors contributing to Weird Tales during its “classic” run. A poet first and foremost, Smith turned to writing short stories as a way of paying the bills, and during that brief time in the early to mid-1930s he gave Lovecraft a run for his money with both his lavish prose and his tales of cosmic speculation. Smith virtually stopped writing fiction by 1937, but his legacy very much lives on.
5. “Daemon” by C. L. Moore. Published in the October 1946 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries. Aside from the trio of Lovecraft, Howard, and Smith, no author defined the glory days of Weird Tales more than C. L. Moore, although unlike her aforementioned contemporaries she would move on to bigger and better things. Moore was, alongside her husband Henry Kuttner, one of the great masters of Golden Age SF, but “Daemon” sees her try her hand at horror and fantasy once again, at a time when the market for both genres had shrunk greatly.
6. “The Horse Lord” by Lisa Tuttle. Published in the June 1977 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Tuttle debuted in 1972 and immediately made some sort of impression with the SFF readership, being barely out of her teens when she tied with Spider Robinson for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. While she sometimes writes science fiction, most famously collaborating with George R. R. Martin, Tuttle’s home turf would remain feminist-tinged horror, and more often at short lengths.
7. “Grail” by Harlan Ellison. From the April 1981 issue of Twilight Zone Magazine. Ellison has to be onf of the most acclaimed and yet divisive personae in SFF history. When his career gained direction in the mid-’60s he seemingly catapulted from a second-rate hack to one of the biggest names in the field, eventually winning the Hugo, Nebula, Bram Stoker, and other awards. Much of Ellison’s fiction can be classified as horror, despite Ellison himself not being thought of as primarily a horror author, but “Grail” sees him in pure terror mode.
8. “The Idol of the Flies” by Jane Rice. Published in the June 1942 issue of Unknown. Rice is pretty obscure nowadays, which isn’t surprising considering she never had a novel published (she did write one, but for reasons I’ll get into it’s lost media) and her output became highly sporadic after Unknown shut down. A shame, because Rice was one of the more interesting young horror authors coming about at a time when there wasn’t much of a market for horror. “The Idol of the Flies” is considered major enough to have Rice’s single collection named after it.
9. “There Shall Be No Darkness” by James Blish. Published in the April 1950 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. Like Kornbluth, Blish was a member of the Futurians, a New York-based SF fan group that would prove unspeakably influential on the field, especially in the ’50s. Also like Kornbluth, Blish would die fairly young, albeit under different circumstances. 1950 saw the start of Blish’s iconic Cities in Flight series, but he also produced a curious SF-horror mashup with “There Shall Be No Darkness,” which supposedly explains werewolves in science-fictional terms.
As of late I’ve been struggling a bit to keep up the read/review schedule as my day job has gotten a bit more hectic lately (though my natural tendency toward procrastination doesn’t help things), but with all short stories this month it looks like I’ll get a breather for the moment. I’m in the mood for SPOOKY MONTH and I hope these stories won’t let me down.

Won’t you read with me?