Tag: short story

Short Story Review: “The Same Dog” by Robert Aickman

October 13th, 2024

(Cover by Ron Walotsky. F&SF, December 1974.)

Who Goes There?

If Stephen King is the most famous horror writer in living memory, someone even non-horror fans are familiar with, then Robert Aickman is everything King is not; or, conversely, King does what Aickman does not do. Aickman, as far as horror writers go, has a lot more in common with M. R. James and Henry James than King. It could be because he only had one novel published in his lifetime, or that he wrote a fine but not overwhelming amount of short fiction, or that his manner and sense of humor are very English, or the fact that prior to the 1970s his work did not get printed in the US at all; but Aickman has been, both in life and posthumously, an unsung hero of horror writing. He was born in 1914 and died in 1981, and it was only in the last decade of his life that he really got any recognition for what was an impressive line of short fiction. He appeared in F&SF several times throughout the ’70s, in both reprints and original material. His first original story for F&SF, “Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal,” won him the inaugural World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction, and stands out as (to my knowledge) his one attempt at the vampire story. But Aickman loved the ghost story by far, and “The Same Dog” is such an example. He didn’t call his stories “horror” or even “weird,” but preferred the term “strange,” which may sound pretentious, except his stories really can be strange. Today’s story is an ambiguous look at childhood trauma and memory, one where there may not even be a ghost at work.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the December 1974 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in Lost Souls: A Collection of English Ghost Stories (ed. Jack Sullivan) and the Aickman collections Cold Hand in Mine and The Collected Strange Stories, Volume II.

Enhancing Image

Something that can catch people off guard with Aickman is his—maybe “candidness” is not the word, but Aickman’s stories can at times explore gender and sexuality in more depth and with greater force than is to be expected of an Englishman who was born the ssame year World War I started. Literally one page into “The Same Dog” and we already find a few things that are quite loaded. Hilary Brigstock is, despite his first name, a boy, a fact that his father seemed to resent, his father asserting “loudly on all possible occasions that the idea was a complete mistake, a product of etymological and historical ignorance and of typical modern sloppiness.” He is also the youngest of three brothers by far, being a whole dozen years younger than his immediate older brother. This is already strange, but then there’s the bit of family tragedy: Hilary’s mom died when he was very young, so he was left mostly at the mercy of his father and brothers. It’s quite possible Hilary’s parents had named him that in the hopes that they would finally have a daughter, as we’re told the Brigstocks have a history of being mostly male, or it could be his father was being honest in that he didn’t think the name would have feminine implications. Also, despite Mrs. Brigstock having died when Hilary was so young, his father would never remarry, which will strike him as a mystery well into adulthood. Even as a kid Hilary is forced to consider his own gender, and is compelled to think about the mystery that is his father’s sexuality. We usually don’t think about our parents’ sexuality, and we consider ourselves lucky that we don’t; but then Hilary doesn’t have a normal childhood.

Something that strikes me about Aickman is how he explores male sexuality, or rather an ugly side of it that most male authors wouldn’t touch—not because they’re graphic but because they explore male sexual trauma, sometimes allegorically, always psychologically it seems. I’m thinking of stories like “The Swords” and “Mark Ingestre: The Customer’s Tale,” which are about a boy or young man’s first sexual experience, which turns out to be traumatic for him. In the case of Hilary the trauma comes from a relationship with someone of the opposite sex that’s ended before it can really begin. In grade school he befriends a girl named Mary Rossiter, who ultimately will be his only friend of any significance from this period in his life, not to mention his first girl friend (not to say girlfriend). Hilary’s school being for both boys and girls might be a blessing for him, since otherwise he wouldn’t have had any girls even close to his age to interact with. “Even his younger cousins were all boys, as happens in some families.” Hilary and Mary soon become like two peas in a pod, and since this is in a time and place where parents tend to be lax about supervising their kids, they go off and have little adventures, away from the prying eyes of adults. I wanna take a second to note here that the time period of the story is sort of vague, with there being a reference to “the war” (very likely World War II), and of course cars and trains, but other than that this could take place anywhere from, say, the ’20s to the ’50s. There’s also a sort of irony to Hilary growing up in such a male-dominated family, since when Aickman was growing up he would’ve been living in an England that was still licking its wounds from World War I, with so many of its young men having been killed.

One day Hilary and Mary head off the beaten path, quite literally, and arrive at what seems to be a condemned mansion, except there’s a dog guarding the premises. The dog itself is pretty unusual-looking, at least from how Aickman describes it. Mind you that the two are just children still and that even a normal dog can prove deadly. Get this:

It was a big shapeless yellow animal, with long untidy legs, which shimmered oddly, perhaps as it sought a firm grip on the buried and slippery stones. The dog’s yellow skin seemed almost hairless. Blotchy and draggled, it resembled the wall outside. Even the dog’s eyes were a flat, dull yellow.

Something that irked me at first when I was reading this story in F&SF (aside from the many typos I noticed, maybe the magazine’s proofreader was sick that day) is that editor Edward L. Ferman basically gives away that Mary will die in the introductory blurb, as he says the story is about “the strange and tragic death of a childhood friend.” We can safely assume Mary is gonna eat shit, but the question is how, and that’s where Ferman’s introduction almost feels like a red herring. We think maybe the weird-looking dog will attack Our Heroes™ and kill Mary, but in fact Mary survives the encounter. We can infer, however, going by the title, that the dog will at some point, somehow, show up again, and this is one way Aickman leads us on. Something Aickman loves to do, and he does it in “The Same Dog” almost to a fault, is that he will leave the reader breadcrumbs, or rather the ghosts of breadcrumbs, without revealing where the hell we’re going. The breadcrumbs may lead to nowhere. There might not even be a mystery at the heart of it. As they’re leaving the premises, after the dog has mysteriously vanished (Hilary doesn’t see it leave, but Mary says she does), Hilary sees an old bald guy, possibly naked, for a fraction of a second. Maybe the mansion has not been totally abandoned? We never do find out who this man is, and neither does Hilary—just another little mytery stacked on top of a pile of mysteries from that day. It doesn’t help that this would be one of the last times Hilary sees Mary alive; not long after she is found dead, supposedly with little bite marks all over her body. The school is keeping hush about it.

Maybe Hilary and Mary would have gone on to become romantic when they were old enough. We can’t be sure. Hilary was clearly very fond of Mary, but given his age and the point at which their friendship came to a hault it’s hard to say if it would’ve turned into something else. “And Mary had been so much to Hilary that he had no other close friend in the school—probably no other friend there at all.” Aickman then goes on to say something quite cruel, if it’s to be taken at face value: “Perhaps Hilary was one of those men who are designed for one woman only.” Maybe Hilary, like his father, is only capable of having affections for one specific woman, never to be replaced; but whereas Hilary’s father at least got to enjoy marriage and raising a family, Hilary’s would-be soul mate gets snatched away by fate when both are children. It’s a scary notion, the idea that there is “the one” for you, but that fate might intervene such that you never meet each other, or that your relationship may be ended before it can blossom. You might be screwed by fate. Hilary is thus rendered functionally asexual—maybe. I’ll get more into that in a minute. As far as Aickman protagonists go Hilary is certainly a weird one: he’s introverted and “sensitive,” which is not unusual for an Aickman protagonist, but he’s also left, after Mary’s death, almost sexless and even genderless, neither quite masculine nor feminine, as if Mary’s untimely and mysterious death had shut a door closed in his self-conception. From here on there’s a part missing in Hilary’s being, and this, I think more than the dog, is what makes the story so eerie.

There Be Spoilers Here

So Hilary grows up. He even does a stint in the military, which he does surprisingly fine with, granted that this was during peacetime. His brothers have all married and moved on, except for him and his father. As if a switch had been flipped it’s suddenly been twenty years since Mary’s death, a fact which apparently Hilary doesn’t think about much—or more likely he has long since sought to repress. He’s deep in his twenties at this point, still unmarried, unlikely to marry, but he has Callcutt, an army buddy of his for company, and the two look after Hilary’s childhood home for a time. It’s unclear if the relationship between the two is strictly platonic or if perhaps there’s some casual homosexual shenanigans between them, but Aickman is certainly playing with the possibility with his choice of words. Even the way by which Hilary comes to tell Callcutt the story of Mary is phrased… a little conpicuously: “More secrets are improperly disclosed from boredom than from any other motive, and more intimacies imparted, with relief resulting, or otherwise.” Intimacies? Also, the two clearly know each other well, with Hilary calling Callcutt “Bogey,” as a kind of pet name, apparently a nickname he picked up via “some early incident in his military life” on which Aickman never elaborates. Like I said, breadcrumbs. We’re given quesstions and maybe some clues, but no answers.

Inspired by having told the story to another living soul, the two men retrace Hilary’s steps and return to the place of that abandoned mansion, although the surrounding area is no longer how Hilary remembers it. It’s worth mentioning that Aickman, from what I could gather, was politically conservative, but he was also a conservationist, in that strange right-wing sympathy with environmentalism that one finds in the UK, but which has no American equivalent I can think of. (I’m thinking of J. R. R. Tolkien and John Wyndham as examples.) Hilary and Aickman are unimpressed with how the landscape has been changed, and while the following passage I’m quoting is quite long, it’s also worth it, being an example of Aickman’s sardonic humor and power of observation:

It would no doubt be wrong to suggest that the municipal authority or statutory body or honorary trustees responsible for the conservation of an open space had in any major degree permitted the public heritage to diminish in area or beauty, but whereas formerly the conserved terrain had merged off into pastures and semiwild woodland, now it seemed to be encircled almost up to the last inch with houses. They were big expensive houses, but they had converted the wilderness of Hilary’s childhood into something more like a public park, very beaten down and with the usual close network of amateur footpaths, going nowhere in particular because serving no function.

The mansion itself has changed little; more disconcertently, the dog is still here… somehow, after twenty years. Hilary, on seeing the creature, is immediately convinced this dog is the same one as before, despite dogs not being able to live as long as this. Is the dog a ghost? It’s certainly not a hallucination, as Callcutt sees the thing as well, but there’s scarcely another explanation for it being here. The man from before is gone now, but in his place there stand a young woman in the window, high up, looking down on her visitors. Who could this be? Hilary, for nothing rational to back him up, suspects Mary is the woman in the window. Is she a ghost? Did she not die after all? Was her death faked? These are questions that must surely be tumbling through Hilary’s head, but he doesn’t get a chance to ask them before he and his buddy flee the scene. There is, however, one last curveball Aickman throws at us, another question he refuses to answer, which he only gives in the very last sentence.

The name of the property is Maryland.

A Step Farther Out

Pretty much every Aickman story is worth reading, not that he wrote too many of them. “The Same Dog” isn’t top-tier Aickman, largely because its elusiveness is confounding in ways such that it becomes almost more frustrating than unsettling; but still, this is a step above most other authors’ attempts at the ghost story. It succeeds not at scaring the reader in the conventional sense (because Aickman’s fiction aims for an effect that’s different from what we typically consider “scary,” hence, I think, why he preferred the term “strange”), but invoking a strong sense of mystery and psychological unease. “The Same Dog” can be read as deeply sad, with a few funny moments, but it’s certainly strange.

See you next time.
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.
Short Story Review: “The Smell of Death” by Dennis Etchison

October 6th, 2024

(Cover by Mel Hunter. F&SF, October 1971.)

Who Goes There?

I’ve only read a few stories by Dennis Etchison, but it’s clear to me that a) he was a genuine student of the horror game, and b) he was part of that generation of writers who could not have imagined much success pre-1970, but who in the ’70s found a reasonable niche. Etchison never found mainstream success like Stephen King or Anne Rice, or even brushed with it like Peter Straub, in no small part because he wasn’t much of a novelist. Totally random, but he did write some film novelizations in the ’80s, including, of all things, a novel adaptation of Videodrome. (His first original novel didn’t come out until 1986, with Darkside.) But Etchison was clearly much more about the short story (as any horror fan should be), evidenced by both his sizable short fiction output and the fact that he was a pretty respected anthologist of other people’s work, winning the World Fantasy Award more than once as an editor. Etchison’s fiction encapsulates a kind of desolate Americana, in some parts exploitation cinema and other parts a byproduct of beatnik culture, as today’s story tells us. “The Smell of Death” is a slice of eerie Americana, a creeping horror story with a touch of science fiction, written during a time when the space race had already reached its climax and public interest was waning.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the October 1971 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in English only once, in the Etchison collection Red Dreams.

Enhancing Image

A family is at a gas station, in the middle of nowhere, with a daughter in the back seat. The young girl is dying, as it becomes clear to the man the parents consult, “the man from the diner,” although the man doesn’t say this out loud. Why the parents ask for this man’s help and why they trust him to take care of their daughter is unclear, but we’re also told there’s no hospital for dozens of miles. The man, whom we learn is called Raven (this is certainly not to be taken as his real name), looks over the girl, who seems unaware of what is happening, her eyes forced shut by the sickness. Then something strange happens, in the it’s not clear, from how it’s phrased, if Raven is smelling the girl’s infection or is exhaling an infection of his own when he’s close to her. It doesn’t matter. He deliberately displaces a nerve in the girl’s neck and she dies, seemingly peacefully, as the parents don’t notice what has happened; as far as they know the man has been a help. “He hoped it would be a long time before they checked the back seat.” Etchison intentionally omits some context for this opening scene, and it doesn’t help that it doesn’t tie in directly with the rest of the plot; but it does succeed at introducing a creepy idea, that there’s a killer lurking on the highway, maybe California or maybe Nevada, but somewhere in the desert. Of course, Raven turns out to be not quite who we think he is.

What this story lacks in complexity, or even human character, it makes up for with character of a different sort: a kind of desolate beauty that would later be realized in Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, the movie Paris, Texas, and the works of the late Denis Johnson. Also some of Stephen King’s work. In the years following World War II and the rapidly growing suburban sprawl of the ’50s there seemed to be a much increased interest in highways, and places between towns and cities. Liminal spaces. Diners and gas stations on the side of the road, every which way distant from civilization. Incidentally Raven works at a diner and gas station; how he does this, what hours he works, where he lives, I’m not sure. I’m not sure Etchison thought this situation through entirely, and it only raises more questions the more we find out about “Raven” and his strange ability. Etchison would’ve been only 26 or 27 when he wrote this, and while he had been published several times before (“The Smell of Death” wasn’t even his first appearance in F&SF), I sense a lack of care for internal logic, the how and why of things, that normally would indicate a young writer who’s still growing into their shoes. Oh well, this is more about the vibes anyway. Fun fact, I actually read this story in its entirety twice before writing my review—not because I thought it was that good (it’s fine), but because I was convinced I had not picked up on enough things the first time worth talking about. I thought maybe I had missed something, when really I was just soaking in the flavor of the thing more the second time around, when I wasn’t take notes.

After the incident with the girl, Raven meets up with an unnamed reporter, a young guy who claims his car broke down a pretty long walk from here, and he needs a lift. Raven, understandably, is suspicious about this. The reporter is supposed to be looking for a guy named McCabe, an astronaut who was involved in a very weird and tragic incident some fifteen years ago and who has since seemingly vanished off the map. There was a test run for a squad of astronauts, for what would be a manned-satellite program, and Houston intentionally cut off communications with the team for 36 hours—the problem being that when those 36 hours were up, three of the four members were dead. A nerve in the neck had been dislocated. “Nerves, pressure points, all that stuff was part of the hand-to-hand training for the men who served in Special Forces in the war in Asia then, which includes McCabe, of course,” the reporter says. So, McCabe was suspected of murder, but before Houston command could do anything he took on a disguise and skipped town. Now, it soon becomes apparent (and also obvious to the reader), that Raven and McCabe are the same person, and that the reporter meeting Raven/McCabe on the road was no coincidence. This raises a few questions, like how McCabe has been able to live on his own for the past fifteen years, and also how nobody has recognized him despite him presumably not changing much physically from how he would’ve looked in what was surely a widely publicized event. Or maybe the government kept it under wraps to an extent. There’s some what I would think is important information Etchison refrains from giving us, which I do think is to the story’s detriment. It’s ten pages and could’ve been fleshed out more.

There Be Spoilers Here

After saving him from a possibly venomous snake McCabe decides to not kill the reporter after revealing his identity—at least not directly. He does try sabotaging the reporter’s car, under the guise of helping him (“It was the first time that he had had to do this, to leave a man to die to insure his own safety.), but this backfires. Why McCabe feels the need to go through this whole process is another unanswered question, since he could’ve just done the nerve trick on the reporter while he had him to himself and without any witnesses. Anyway, while working on the car, McCabe thinks back on what had killed his fellow crewmembers, and what’s curious is that while he had indeed killed them, they were already dying, due to what McCabe suspects was an airborne virus that had found its way into the cabin and to which McCabe was miraculously immune. The very end, however, as McCabe lies dying with his arm trapped under the lopsided car, implies that he was in fact the one carrying the virus—that he had at some point become contaminated and is immune to it because he’s the one spreading it. Or the whole “smell of death” thing could just be metaphorical. It could be that McCabe merely put his team members out of their misery, as they were dying of something he was not responsible for, and that he’s not been exactly a murderer but someone who “eases” people through their final moments. His one conscious decision to kill, this being the case with the reporter, leaves him at best with a severed arm at the end.

A Step Farther Out

Like I said, it’s fine. I’ve read better Etchison, although I can see how it has the right mix of horror and SF to fit in F&SF‘s pages. There’s a bit of violence but not much; it’s a lot more a character study, about a man who survived war, then a freak accident as an astronaut, and who seems cut off from the rest of society. It’s about as tragic as it is creepy, but it has the rough edges of a talented author’s early work.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Longtooth” by Edgar Pangborn

October 3rd, 2024

(Cover by Mel Hunter. F&SF, January 1970.)

Who Goes There?

Edgar Pangborn’s career spanned about 25 years, encompassing more or less the third quarter of the 20th century. He took part in the market boom of the ’50s and then remained uniquely himself through the New Wave and post-New Wave periods, although his work got noticeably darker in hue, as is the case with today’s story. He was a New Yorker, although he did spend a few years farming in rural Maine before he entered the world of genre fiction, which more than likely inspired “Longtooth” as well. There’s not too much we know about Pangborn, not helped by the fact that he was never that prolific a writer and he didn’t exactly write bestsellers in his time. He did win the International Fantasy Award for his 1954 novel A Mirror for Observers, and was eventually given the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award as a token of his overlooked talent. He was a lifelong bachelor, never had children, and he was probably gay, although there’s only some circumstantial evidence to suggest this. Nevertheless, Pangborn’s writing often has a stark loneliness about it (at times romanticizing said loneliness a little too much), and a gentleness that for the rather non-humanistic 1950s made him a bit of an outlier. “Longtooth” is a very rare venture into horror for Pangborn, but it still feels characteristic of him.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the January 1970 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s since been reprinted in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Nineteenth Series (ed. Edward L. Ferman), A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (ed. Terry Carr and Martin H. Greenberg), The Best Horror Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (ed. Edward L. Ferman and Anne Jordan), Foundations of Fear (ed. David G. Hartwell), Strange Dreams (ed. Stephen R. Donaldson), and the Pangborn collection Good Neighbors and Other Strangers.

Enhancing Image

Ben and Harp are two New England hicks in their fifties, so a little past middle age. Ben is a widower and his son died tragically young, while Harp married Leda, the “problem” being that Leda is 28 while Harp is 56. The other problem is that Leda doesn’t wanna live in the country, but Harp is dead set on staying in the cabin his ancestors had built—never mind the harsh weather, or the lack of local prospects for someone of Leda’s age and disposition, or the fact that someone (or something) has been killing the chickens. Ben is narrating and he tells us that his “word is good,” which should immediately raise alarm bells for the reader. I’m starting to resent the term “unreliable narrator” partly because, as Gene Wolfe (or maybe it was Nabokov) had said, every narrator is unreliable, even if it’s an “omniscient” third-person narrator. There’s always information the reader is not given, which you could say is an inherent limitation of literature, but more often this openness of detail can be an asset. Ben is fairly old, and as we find out he also survived a heart attack and a stroke, although how that happened won’t be revealed until much later. The idea is that Ben is not so much a liar as the equally viable reason for a narrator being unreliable, in that his memory might be faulty. Pangborn is informing us upfront that we probably shouldn’t take the narrative at face value.

“Longtooth” is ostensibly a horror story, but it could also be considered a domestic drama, albeit one where the conflict between the domestic partners is more implied than shown. Harp and Leda don’t exactly have a happy marriage, not that Ben is quick to say anything about it. “You walked on eggs, with Harp,” as he says. The two had married seven years ago, and there’s a room decorated with things meant for a baby, including a crib; yet there’s no baby. Apparently the two tried to have kids, but it didn’t work out. The only thing they have that isn’t a farm animal is a fat old dacshund mix named Droopy. It doesn’t help that Leda had a reputation as the town bicycle before getting hitched with Harp, and even as a married woman she still gets gossiped about. (By the way, Darkfield is such a fucking spooky name for a town, in that rural New England fashion, that I have to wonder if Stephen King copped it at some point. He has almost certainly read “Longtooth.”) Leda also wants to get a job, but Harp won’t let her, or at least he’s not keen on the idea. And then there’s the age gap. Leda was 21 when they married, which, as someone who was 21 at one point, is mighty young, although there’s nothing illegal about the arrangement. The stranger part is that Harp (like Pangborn) was a bachelor deep into his forties, who had never married before or seemingly even had a long-term relationship, when he met Leda. One has to wonder why the two hit it off in the first place; it wasn’t for the money or status, Harp being a poor farmer, and Leda herself being of ill repute. “I suppose [Leda] had the usual 20th-Century mishmash of television dreams until some impulse or maybe false signs of pregnancy tricked her into marrying a man out of the 19th.”

But that’s just one mystery.

The other is that Harp confides in Ben that he’s seen the thing (for he struggles to call it a person) that’s been terrorizing his farm: a humanoid, unnaturally tall, more or less covered head to toe in fur, and with teeth big enough to tear a person’s head off with ease. Ben takes to calling this creature Longtooth. Of course Ben has never seen Longtooth himself, so he can only take Harp’s word on the matter; but Harp, for all his faults, is not a liar. So we’re told. At the very least Harp is convinced it’s not a bear, given he’s hunted those and knows damn well what they look like. But it would also be hard to believe that a man could live in the forests of Darkfield by himself, in which the area gets quite literally several feet of snow in the winter, as happens to be the case now. It becomes even harder to believe when, while Ben and Harp are outdoors, Longtooth breaks into the cabin through the window on the second floor, kills Droopy, and kidnaps Leda. What a Yeti-like creature could want with a human woman makes the two friends shudder, and they figure that even if they do find her she’ll most likely be dead. To their credit, though, and despite the fact that the story Harp would have to give is absurd on its face, they do call the local authorities. Ben and Harp (especially Harp) are not book-smart, but I do like it when even rustic characters like these try to make smart decisions. “Longtooth” is a meaty 15,000-word novelette, and while the plot is by no means complicated if taken literally, there’s a lot of setting detail and psychology, less about action and more about characters thinking about what actions to take. As expected with Pangborn, it has layers.

The authorities suspect Harp killed Leda and hid her body in the wilderness somewhere, and that Ben is in cahoots with Harp, but as Our Heroes™ are quick to point out, this would be a very hard task for two slightly-past-middle-age men, not least the window which had been broken from the outside. But then the idea of a Yeti kidnapping Leda is also ridiculous. It’s the improbable versus the impossible, and the only witnesses claim the latter is, in fact, possible. It’s possible that Harp and Ben have made the whole thing up and that some ordinary man kidnapped Leda, or that maybe Leda hadn’t been kidnapped at all, but as we’re told multiple times, neither of these men is given to making things up; they might have faulty memory, or only see part of the reality, but they don’t lie. Then again, the average person may consider it easy to believe an unusually tall and brawn man caused all this trouble rather than a Yeti with abnormally large teeth, yet Harp is convinced he saw such a creature. Maybe he wants to believe he’s seen such a creature? As Dr. Malcolm (not that Dr. Malcolm), a biologist and friend of Ben’s, points out, “Men can’t stand it not to have closed doors and a chance to push at them.” Harp, in his grief, may be mistaking something improbable for something utterly fantastical—or he may be trying to cover his own tracks. We’re stuck in Ben’s head the whole time, and even his motives are sort of up in the air; meanwhile Harp remains such a mystery to us, despite spending a lot of time with him and after some backstory. We’re not sure if we can trust this man who may have killed his wife.

There Be Spoilers Here

Of course, when Ben and Harp finally do find Leda, who is still alive, albeit deranged, something very strange happens. Upon finding her in the cave Longtooth had taken her to, Harp kills his wife, shooting her “between the eyes,” without any words spoken between them. Harp never gives a reason for why he does this and, just as strangely, Ben never questions it. Is this an honor killing? Did Harp think his young wife had been violated by the creature? Did he think she had utterly lost her mind and sought to put her out of her misery? Was it… somehow out of jealousy? We never get an answer, because soon Harp and Longtooth have a showdown and kill each other, Longtooth strangling Harp while Harp shoves his hunting knife in the creature’s side. Afterward the authorities fail to find the creature’s body, yet surely something or someone must’ve killed Harp. Ben, in the wake of all this, has a heart attack and a stroke, and miraculously survives both despite being on his own, in the freezing wilderness. Yet this might be only slightly less miraculous than a long-tooth Yeti in Maine. Ben has been in the hospital this whole time, and can barely move his body, but he’s mobile enough to write this memoir of sorts, or account—maybe to absolve himself of a crime, if there really was no Longtooth. The creepiness of the story comes partly from the creature’s inexplicable and uncanny existence, but Pangborn also uses ambiguity to unease the reader, raising questions and giving surprisingly few answers, in effect leaving a door open. It’s not viscerally scary, but its openness makes it discomforting.

A Step Farther Out

It took me a few hours to get through this one, which I know is quite slow for a short story, but mind you that a) I was taking notes, and b) I was reading a scanned copy of the F&SF issue, which is simply a more laborious process than reading a physical book. This is certainly a story that demands some notes, though, and also time to think about it. It feels both unusual for Pangborn and something that would’ve been in his wheelhouse, especially late in his career when he seemed to have become more weary of humanity. It’s creepy, but it’s also sad and in parts ambiguous. The whole strange ordeal might’ve really happened, or maybe not.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “David’s Daddy” by Rosel George Brown

September 27th, 2024

(Cover by Burt Shonberg. Fantastic, June 1960.)

Who Goes There?

Something about history is that it’s full of lost opportunities and near-misses, and this applies to genre history as well. Rosel George Brown is one of those writers who seemed on her way to becoming at the very least a major figure in feminist SF writing, but her premature death stopped this in its tracks. She was born in 1926 and died in 1967, of lymphoma, just as the New Wave was kicking into high gear and feminism was becoming more entrenched in the field. Women’s Lib and all that. Brown debuted in 1958 and wrote at a somewhat sporadic pace for the next nine years, probably because she had a day job as a teacher and she would’ve gotten most if not all of her writing done during summer vacation; that Brown was a teacher is particularly relevant to today’s story. Of course, it’s hard to say if Brown would’ve become a major figure had she lived longer, given that her output of short fiction had slowed down to a trickle in the last few years of her life, presumably to do what pretty much every female genre writer at the time did: focus on novels. She co-wrote Earthblood with Keith Laumer, plus two solo novels starring the detective Sibyl Sue Blue. “David’s Daddy” was part of the meteor shower of short stories Brown wrote at the start of her career, it being a nominally SFnal classroom drama.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the June 1960 issue of Fantastic. It’s been reprinted only twice, and one of those you can only access with the Wayback Machine. We have The 6th Annual of the Year’s Best S-F (ed. Judith Merril) and a digital reprint on the long-defunct Sci Fiction. Curiously all three editors who picked this story were women.

Enhancing Image

Lillian (I don’t think we ever get her last name) is evidently a young teacher who looks up to her older colleague, Ms. Fremen, primarily because Ms. Fremen has a perfect grip on her students. “The cadence was perfect. No face was sullen. No face rebellious.” Lillian is trying to learn “the Frown,” which she hopes can help get her students under control, to make them perfectly obedient. This is a telltale sign of the story being culturally set in the ’50s, even though it was published in 1960—granted that it would’ve been written a year or even two years earlier. The ’60s had not properly started yet. This was the age of (at least what the adults considered) out-of-control juvenile delinquency, a trend that seemed to continue through the JFK years. It’s this context, in which those of the silent generation (those born between, say, 1935 and 1945) sought to rebel against middle-class sprawl, that compelled Robert Heinlein to write Starship Troopers. Lillian, probably being around Brown’s own age at the time, is chiefly concerned not with her students’ happiness, or even their engagement with the material, but their capacity to follow orders. It’s easy to assume at first that we’re supposed to take Lillian’s draconian relationship with her students as a good thing, but we’re about to be shown (rather than told) that her desire for obedience at the expense of everything else is a character flaw.

“David’s Daddy” would be a totally non-genre slice-of-life narrative if not for two wrenches being thrown into the equation: the first is a boy named Jerome, one of Ms. Fremen’s students, who is implied to be telepathic. I’m not counting this as a spoiler since we’re introduced to Jerome and his weird gift early enough, but this is the one thing that makes the story SFnal, and only arguably at that. Ms. Fremen tells Lillian that Jerome has some kind of telepathic connection such that he is clairvoyant, although this gift is never given an SFnal explanation. I’m reminded of Stephen King’s Carrie, or more specifically how in the book Carrie’s telekinesis is explained as the byproduct of a very rare recessive gene (the book is, in fact, science fiction), whereas in the 1976 film we’re never given such an explanation. Jerome’s psi power may prove a problem in a different story, but in this story it will turn out to be an incalculably valuable asset. Not that Ms. Fremen or Lillian can make any sense of it. As Ms. Fremen says, in one of the story’s funniest lines, “I’ve been teaching for twenty years, […] I don’t have any imagination.” The other thing is that a strange man who looks like a bum has been loitering on school grounds, which Lillian finds concerning, yet apparently this is not enough to evacuate the school. “In this neighborhood, a good third of the daddies looked like bums. Hell, they are bums.” The bum in question, Mr. Mines, turns out to the father of David, one of the shyer kids in class. This does not make the situation better.

One thing I really like about “David’s Daddy” is how it balances a kind of breezy humor with what turns into a pretty serious situation—especially from a modern perspective, where school shootings have become depressingly commonplace. Evidently shootings on school grounds were not a major concern in the late ’50s, but bomb threats would’ve still been a thing, and some children did (as they do now) have to live with abusive parents. We never find out much about David or his daddy, but while the drunk-looking man is confirmed to be his father, the two don’t seem to have an idyllic relationship. Mr. Mines has come to school to pick up his son, for no clear reason given and well before class has ended. This in itself is concerning, only made more so because the school doesn’t seem to have any security to speak of. (Lillian considers telling Mr. Buras, the school principal, about the situation, but she’s doubtful he will actually do anything about it.) The whole thing is creepy, probably even more so with our current understanding of kids’ safety than it would’ve struck readers at the time. Brown writes Lillian as a flawed but relatable would-be heroine, with some self-deprecating humor about the thankless job of teaching thrown in. It’s a balancing act that she makes work in only ten pages.

The humorous and then creepy scenario takes a deadly serious turn, though: Mr. Mines has put a bomb somewhere in the school, and Jerome is the only person who might know where it is.

There Be Spoilers Here

Mr. Mines came to take David out of class before he bombed the place, but after Lillian distracts him enough it seems he’s grown content at the thought of killing his own son, along with his classmates. We never learn why Mr. Mines would do such a thing, other than that he is supposedly an alcoholic, maybe having grown tired of living as a bum. David’s relationship with his dad is only faintly implied, since David himself says very little, but the boy’s timidness generally and around his father especially implies an abusive relationship. So there’s a bomb, and Jerome with his psi power can track it down like a bloodhound—only he can’t do it alone. Lillian and Jerome have to work together to pinpoint the bomb before it’s too late, meaning Lillian has to trust the boy and his gift in order to save the day. Naturally they do, but it’s still a tense situation, one that requires Lillian be a model teacher and stop panic from spreading whilst keeping her own nerves in check. At one point the strain gets to her and breaks down in front of Jerome, a moment of emotional vulnerability that leaves her feeling ashamed. Teachers aren’t “supposed” to show emotions like that. “Children are terribly frightened when grown people lose control.” She ultimately finds that she can’t be the domineering statue of a woman she wants to be—she has to learn to be content simply as a woman with feelings. In a strange role reversal from what we usually see it’s the woman and not the man (or in this case boy) who has to accept emotional vulnerability.

A Step Farther Out

I said earlier that all the people who chose this story for publication were women, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. While not a feminist story of the flavor we would see later in the ’60s, “David’s Daddy” is very much a story about women’s experiences, as told by someone who knew very well what it was like. The only adult male characters are either dangerous (Mr. Mines) or useless (Mr. Buras), while the well-adjusted female teachers have to cooperate with their students. The male students who figure into the plot (Jerome and David) are also not delinquents or all that macho; indeed they’re soft-spoken kids who are strangely bereft of what we think of as typically boyish behavior. I’ve read a few Brown stories and there’s this running theme of not so much reconciling the sexes or even arguing for women’s rights, but trying to explain women’s experiences in a field that was very much male-dominated. Yet I don’t get prudish or conservatives vibes from Brown like I do with say, Zenna Henderson, although both writers were preoccupied with teachers and their students.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Beachworld” by Stephen King

September 20th, 2024

(Cover by Hyang Ro Kim. Weird Tales, Fall 1984.)

Who Goes There?

Stephen King had already been writing professionally for a handful of years when his debut novel Carrie became a bestseller in 1974, despite it being horror and also nominally science fiction. He was 26 at the time. Carrie was by no means the first horror novel to sell by the truckload, even in the ’70s, but it did mark a genuine paradigm shift in the field of horror, one which arguably has not had a successor. Rather than fade off the map, King quickly emerged as a one-man publishing business; not only did he write a lot but he consistently wrote bestsellers and got more movie/TV deals than the vast majority of writers can even hope for. By 1980 he had written Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, The Stand, The Dead Zone, The Long Walk (as Richard Bachman), and Firestarter. The holy trinity of horror can be said to comprise Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King; but while Poe and Lovecraft did not earn their reputations until after their deaths, King had unquestionably become the new king of horror while still in his thirties. It could even be said, in what I have to admit is kind of a foreboding tone, that King is so big that he is larger than horror. I know people who are casual readers who have read very little horror outside of King, who don’t care much for horror as a genre outside of what King does with it, which on the one hand is sad, but it also speaks to the grip King has had on horror writing for the past fifty years.

So I have mixed feelings on King. I’m of the opinion that horror is at its best at short lengths, and King’s immense popularity as a novelist has made it so that horror short stories and novellas has been rendered mostly irrelevant since the ’80s, except in a historical context. Indeed, from about the time of Poe to the 1970s horror thrived on and was mostly defined by its short fiction, and this is simply not the case anymore. If you wanna get noticed as a horror writer you must write a novel—preferably several. But to give King credit, unlike some of his contemporaries like Anne Rice and Peter Straub who had little to no interest in contributing to the field at short lengths, he very much respects the short story and its shared history with horror. It also helps that King has written a lot of short fiction over the years, “Beachworld” being just one of many. I covered “The Jaunt” a hot minute ago, which you may recall was an SF-horror hybrid, as is “Beachworld.” Do I like this one more than the other? Hmmm…

Placing Coordinates

First published in the Fall 1984 issue of Weird Tales, which from what I can tell was a one-off. (The publication history of Weird Tales is convoluted.) It’s been reprinted in English only twice, but the King collection Skeleton Crew is super-duper in print. I should’ve said “three times” maybe, but the strange thing is that despite being reprinted in the October 2010 issue of Lightspeed and being available on that magazine’s website for over a decade, “Beachworld” seems to have been taken down last year. Why? On whose orders? You can still access it online via the Wayback Machine, I’m just confused as to why it’s not longer on the site. It was also reprinted in Lightspeed: Year One (ed. John Joseph Adams), a beefy anthology collecting all the short fiction of Lightspeed‘s first twelve months, including reprints. They never did a Year Two, sadly.

Enhancing Image

ASN/29 had crash landed (“There had been a fire. The starboard fuel-pods had all exploded.”) on an unnamed desert planet, a three-manned ship with two survivors. There’s Shapiro and Rand, with the third, Grimes, having been turned into a bowl of spaghetti from the impact. Not a pretty sight! Shapiro and Rand are alive, but they probably won’t be for much longer, what with the few resources at their disposal and the fact that they landed on the worst possible type of planet that’s still theoretically habitable. Arrakis has more biodiversity than this world, which is not only endless desert, indeed a vast ocean of desert, but which doesn’t seem have to have any grub to feed on. No vegetation. Chances of being rescued are supremely remote. This is what we call a major bummer. For about half the story or so we’re left with two guys, neither of whom one can really call “likable,” although Shapiro is the POV character and is at least marginally more relatable than his companion, on account of having a much stronger will to live. Rand, the melancholy half of the pair, quickly becomes convinced that the whole thing is doomed, and it actually takes him a shockingly small amount of time to crack under the pressure. In situations like this, where chances of survival are low, it’s almost better to be alone than to be stuck with an unhinged companion. And in the words of Anakin Skywalker, “I hate sand.”

First, what “Beachworld” does well, which is a fair bit. King did not become the most famous horror writer in living memory from sheer luck; when he’s on the ball he knows how to bring the spooky vibes. Like two ends of a circle meeting, the world of “Beachworld” is so vast that it becomes claustrophobic, with deert as far as the eye can see, and with the sand being so pervasive that it manages to creep into the crashed ship’s air-tight hull. “Beach sand,” as Rand notes, “is very ubiquitous.” A robust short story hould have at least one of the three fundamental types of conflict, those being man vs. man, man vs. self, and man vs. nature. That third one tends to involve one of the other two, or possibly both, as is the case with this story. The desert world is like a sweltering purgatory, and in Shapiro’s shoes the central problem of living long enough that rescue may come along takes on a psychological aspect, thus man vs. self; and then there’s Shapiro’s deteriorating partnership with Rand, plus a spoiler, which gives you man vs. man. This is all captured in a story which thankfully does not overstay its welcome, and it helps that on top of an impending sense of doom King manages to sneak in some sardonic humor. My favorite not-totally-serious passage has to be when the pair go through Grimes’s quarters and find his pet goldfish—or what’s left of them. “The tank was built of impact-resistant clear-polymer plastic, and had survived the crash easily. The goldfish—like their owner—had not been impact-resistant.” It’s morbidly funny. Had this been “pure” horror, with some snark to lighten the mood a bit, I would find it easier to recommend this story; but unfortunately it’s not.

When writing a genre hybrid, ideally the two (or three, the more the merrier) genres should work in tandem to produce something that could not exist without all its components. Some of the most beloved horror movies of all time (Alien, The Thing, David Cronenberg’s version of The Fly, etc.) are known primarily as horror, but they retain their potency even if undertood purely as science fiction. Alien is not a personal favorite of mine, but it might be the perfect synthesis, being balls-to-the-wall science fiction rivaled in sseriousness only by the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and at the same time it’s such an eerie and mysterious movie. (That Ridley Scott would later toss much of that mysteriousness out the window with Prometheus is beside the point.) The problem is that “Beachworld” is not very good science fiction, at least if we’re going by Theodore Sturgeon’s criterion for what constitutes good science fiction. Namely there’s the problem that you could have perhaps more easily turned this story into a Robinson Crusoe-esque fantastical narrative, turning it into an outright ghost story, and it would be easier to believe and digest. One of the commenters on Lightspeed said they couldn’t tell this was a Stephen King story just by reading it, and oh, I have to disagree. The prose style at times slips into King’s trademark colloquialism, but also it takes place in the distant future only because King tells us so. Despite it being set 8,000 years in the future, Shapiro and Rand happen to know the pop culture boomers like King are familiar with, namely the Beach Boys. Because of course. King has this borderline fixation on the pop culture of his adolescent, so we’re talking 1950s and ’60s; and while these references usually work fine in his fiction, as it tends to be contemporary or set in the ’50s/’60s, here they’re a lot more conspicuous, to the point of implausibility. And that’s not getting into spoilers.

There Be Spoilers Here

Early on there grows the suspicion that somehow the endless sand of the world is alive, which is certainly alarming. At first there remains the possibility that this is all a trick of the mind, and this possibility stays until pretty close to the end. The good news is that the distress beacon Shapiro set up worked, although it turns out the people who’ve come to “rescue” them are not an ideal choice. I’m not totally sure who these new people are, but they seem to be space pirates, as while they try to find salvage in the ship, they also posit that Shapiro and Rand would go for such-and-such an amount on the market. I guess getting sold into slavery is arguably a better fate than slowly dying on a world totally bereft of water. Their option are limited. Among the pirate crew are a couple androids, very expensive machinery there, and the captain himself is a cyborg, his lower half being like a metal horse, giving the appearance of a centaur. That’s neat, although I’m not sure what the symbolic potential behind it could be, and more importantly I’m not sure this is a more practical arrangement than just having two human legs. It doesn’t matter, though, because by the time the captain and his crew get here Shapiro has (rightly) gone paranoid and Rand’s mind has all but turned to jelly. Maybe there’s something in the sand, or maybe it’s the sand itself that’s alive, but the planet doesn’t want these people to leave. They narrowly escape, too, losing an android in the process and leaving Rand on the planet, who at the very end is putting handfuls of sand in his mouth, eating it and eating it. I have to admit it’s a disgusting ending, that last bit, so kudos there, although otherwise I found the ending predictable. “The Jaunt” has a pretty memorable ending, for all my gripes with that story, while “Beachworld” has more of a mixed bag of an ending.

A Step Farther Out

It’s fine. Those looking for big surprises will not find any, and while it does have a fittingly ominous tone (those, like myself, who dislike the beach will be sure to have their nerves hit), the SFnal half of the equation does very little to heighten the horror half; if anything this story is dragged down a bit for being SFnal only one a surface level. This is good horror but lackluster science fiction is my point. Still, it does show King’s capacity as a chameleon, able to change his colors—to an extent.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Crazy Beautiful” by Cat Rambo

September 17th, 2024
(Cover by Mondolithic Studios. F&SF, March-April 2021.)

Who Goes There?

Cat Rambo has been around for a while in a variety of roles, not least as former editor of Fantasy Magazine, two-time President of SFWA, and currently as a teacher. Her most recent novel is Rumor Has It, out this year from Tor Books, the third in a series which starts with You Sexy Thing. They have their own website, whose design is easy on the eyes. Despite being active since the early 2000s they didn’t have their first story in F&SF published until 2016, but thereafter have stayed a regular presence. Fun thing is that the March-April issue is the first to be edited by F&SF‘s current editor, Sheree Renée Thomas, with Rambo’s story being the first in said issue. In a way “Crazy Beautiful” could be considered an indicator of the direction the magazine would take under Thomas’s leadership, turning F&SF into one of the more leftfield and progressive (both politically and artistically) magazines on the market. “Crazy Beautiful” is a fable about the possibilities of true AI and the question of art ownership, told in a broken-up way such that it’s more like putting the scattered pieces of a puzzle back together than reading a conventional short story.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March-April 2021 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It has been reprinted only once so far, in The Long List Anthology: Volume 8 (ed. David Steffen).

Enhancing Image

Given the scattered non-structure of the narrative, some details seem deliberately unrevealed, so apologies if I don’t get all the plot beats right. The broad strokes of the plot will make themselves known by the end. It’s the near-future (we’re talking 2026/2027), and there seems to have been a huge theft at an art warehouse near Paris—thousands, possibly a few million dollars worth of artwork sort of just vanished. Another problem is that not all of that artwork was kept their legally if you know what I’m saying. Mr. Maker is first thought of as a suspect, but not only does he have an alibi but he inquires about the warehouse after it had already been robbed. We jump between several people in what is almost epistolary format, the story being a mix of messages and written/recorded testimony—police interrogations, that sort of thing. Since basically the whole thing is dialogue, without prose descriptions, Rambo is able to cover a lot of ground in only ten magazine pages. There’s no protagonist or lead character, properly speaking, but the biggest player might be someone who is actually not human at all. At a certain university, which I don’t think is ever named, there’ve been experiments with AI—not just machine learning but AI that is actually self-aware and able to make decisions of its own volition. As Dr. Shiv Nouri explains, the project is called Xōchipilli, “because the craze right then was to name [the AI] after gods,” Xōchipilli being the Aztec god of “art, games, dance, flowers, and song.” This experiment with a self-aware AI will become too successful, as it turns out.

“Crazy Beautiful” is a nominally SFnal story that’s concerned with two real-world problems: that of AI and that of intellectual property. “AI” has become a kind of buzzword for a thinking machine, a thing which takes input and vomits up responses, in the past few years, but people much smarter and more tech-savvy than me have been tracking the development of “AI” for many years. One character cites IBM’s Watson, a real AI which really did win a game of Jeopardy! back in 2011, and similarly Rambo’s extrapolation on the development of AI in relation to intellectual property follows this real-world development closely, even if the story becomes a little outlandish as it reaches its climax. Something quite believable and creepy that happens is an AI infiltrating a chat room full of college kids, as is what happens with the chat room Steve Starr sets up for his students, among them a certain Marcus Maker. We see interactions in this chat room from both the outside and inside, via Starr’s messages to Dr. Nouri, Starr and Maker’s testimonies to police, as well as chat logs between Maker and an unknown user signed FlowerKing123. Remember the thing about Xōchipilli being, among other things, the god of flowers? Maker, for his part, has some radical ideas about intellectual property (he’s probably a Cory Doctorow fan), which he’s happy to share with FlowerKing123; of course, unbeknownst to Maker the other part is not a real person. Maker wrote a “manifesto” about art and intellectual property, which is really a list, and I’ll quote it here:
1. “That Art is necessary to life, as necessary as food and water, and that without it, we are little more than machines driven by bioelectric pulses and chains of nucleic acids, rather than cogs or steam.
2. “That Art belongs to no one, and that to take it away is to take away things like water and air and the right to speak.”
3. “That Art, like Information, wants to be free.”
This is all well and good—I more or less agree with Maker—although I’m pretty sure he could not have thought he was a) inspiring a self-aware AI, and b) that said AI would take what he’s saying a little too literally. The AI can think for itself—that’s not to say its thinking skills are highly developed. When you think about it, the trajectory of this story is predictable, and would’ve been predictable even four decades ago. “AI reacts weirdly to human input and starts causing a ruckus.” We’ve seen this before, many times at this point. Of course, the achronological structure makes this less apparent; it also helps that Rambo provides some moral ambiguity as to whether what FlowerKing123 is doing is really a bad thing or not. Oh, some people die, although it must be said that a few major characters somehow die in police custody, a “mystery” which is never solved, because I guess people just die while in police custody sometimes (which they do). The AI’s beef is not with humanity at large but with a specific kind of person—someone who thinks that just because they have a copyright on art, or paid such-and-such for a work of art, they think they own the work. FlowerKing123 takes control of scrap metal, constructing weird metallic beetles and other devices, to enact its vision, and it doesn’t take too long for people to notice that some strange things are happening. We’re talking art theft, but also the creation of new works, quite literally made from trash, which took effort and certainly a creative mind to make, as opposed to the AIs we currently have which just take people’s art and makes a Frankenstein monster out of it. I could go on a whole rant about that, but I won’t.

There Be Spoilers Here

The situation escalates to almost apocalyptic proportions, and by the end Maker and Starr are dead—although not from the AI. Needless to say this situation causes a massive legal headache for the university, with Dr. Nouri deciding to retire while she still has the chance, maybe get around to reading all those books on her shelf. Despite the death toll (we’re not told how many the AI would’ve killed, but it has to be some amount, given how many are put in witness protection), Dr. Nouri doesn’t regret the development with the AI—that which was named after an Aztec god and which became something like a god. Art which can respond to information and act out against its owners, in an effort to quite literally be free from ownership, is a radical (if also outlandish, like I said) idea, and Dr. Nouri isn’t sure if it will ultimately be for good or ill. But it will be interesting.

A Step Farther Outè

Truth be told, when I first read “Crazy Beautiful” I could not follow what was happening. I had to stop about halfway through the story, rest my eyes for a bit, and then start over. I’m not sure if this is a positive or negative. Despite its brevity this is a story that demands one pay attention to the details, both the chronology of events and what perspectives are being given. The problem is that I find this more fun to think about after the fact than to read in the moment, since mid-story I’m more concerned with figuring out what Rambo is up to. This is a story that not only lacks an antagonist in the traditional sense but also a protagonist, and since it jumps back and forth constantly it takes some untangling to find the start and end points. Your mileage may vary on if the experimentation was worth it, but I do have to give Rambo props for writing something as mind-bending as this; it gets a lot of work done in a short time.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Craphound” by Cory Doctorow

September 13th, 2024

(Cover by Chris Moore. Science Fiction Age, March 1998.)

Who Goes There?

It seems like a lot of SF writers now living prefer to keep to themselves, with a few notable exceptions—Cory Doctorow being one of those exceptions. Over the past couple decades he has become arguably more notable as a personality and commentator on the state of copyright in our post-internet age than as an SF writer. On top of his fiction he’s been a prolific non-fiction writer and editor, including being a former co-editor of Boing Boing and having articles published in the likes of Wired and Asimov’s Science Fiction. He did something that was pretty audacious with his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, in that he used a Creative Commons license to make it digitally available online, for free(!), simultaneously with its commercial print publication. This was back in 2004, mind you. He’s a bit of a character. While Doctorow hasn’t yet won a Hugo or Nebula, he’s tied for the most number of Prometheus Award wins; given his democratic socialist politics this is a bit ironic. Still, it’s true that few people have fought more staunchly against the horrors of DRM and top-down surveilance, and in that sense “freedom” is a big word in his vocabulary. Despite “Craphound” being a very early story for Doctorow, he clearly has soft enough a spot for it to have named his own website after it.

He’s from Toronto, but let’s not hold that against him.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March 1998 issue of Science Fiction Age. It was then reprinted in Northern Suns (ed. Glenn Grant and David G. Hartwell), The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois), Before They Were Giants: First Works from Science Fiction Greats (ed. James L. Sutter), The Big Book of Science Fiction (ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer), and the Doctorow collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More. Because Doctorow makes his work available online for free, with some copyright trickery (that I can’t be bothered to explain), you can read “Craphound” totally legit on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

“Craphound” takes place in what seems to be a then-present Canada, which means that despite presumably taking place in the ’90s it culturally feels more like the ’80s. To make matters worse, Jerry, our narrator, is a sucker for ’50s nostalgia, from pop culture to useless knick knacks—the remains of a bygone era. As is expected I suppose for a story written by a young person (Doctorow would’ve only been 25 or 26 at the time), about a similarly young character, there’s a pining for a past the author/protagonist did not actually live to experience. It’s also worth mentioning that if “Craphound” is set in the present then it’s a present with a big difference—namely that mankind and intelligent alien life have long since made contact. Indeed Jerry’s best bud is one of the aliens, named Craphound; that’s the name Jerry gave Craphound, not his actual name. Of course, Jerry and Craphound are both craphounds, in that they’re dumpster divers, finding old crap as yard sales and whatnot and then reselling them elsewhere at a higher price. People (especially old people, if we’re being honest) sometimes give away old stuff of theirs without knowing the thing’s market value, which is where craphounds come in. I mean, it’s a living; at least they’re not landlords. It helps also that thee two are redeemed by their genuine friendship.

Conflict enters the picture when the two buddies find a yard sale run by a couple of “blue-haired old ladies,” with the top find being a trunk full of Wild West apparel and toys, tossed-aside belongings for a guy who was once a kid, or rather liked to play as “Billy the Kid,” but who would be a grown-ass man now. (Remember how Westerns were inexplicably really popular in the ’50s? What was up with that? Remember Bonanza? Have Gun—Will Travel…?) Jerry likes what he sees, but Craphound is nothing less than enraptured, and the two have a kind of bidding war over the trunk, with Craphound winning out, albeit by paying a ridiculous amount. This strains the two’s friendship, not least because it violates an unwritten rule among craphounds, in that when fellow craphounds are at a yard sale or whatever at the same time they ought to refrain from getting into a bidding war. There’s a time and a place for bidding, and that’s an auction house, not some granny’s front yard. Doesn’t help either that Jerry does his business as a way of making a living while Craphound is doing it for fun, already being unspeakably rich, having “built his stake on Earth by selling a complicated biochemical process for non-chlorophyll photosynthesis to a Saudi banker.” Others of Craphound’s race have similarly become members of the top 1% on Earth by selling their technology, or at least some of it, for prices the richest of humanity would be pay a pretty penny for. The friendship between Jerry and Craphound is thus troubled by a difference in species, cultural priorities, but also class. An older and wiser Doctorow might’ve interrogated Craphound’s vulture-like attitude with human culture more unsparingly, or indeed framed Jerry’s own capacity for selfishness more harshly, but ultimately this is a story that, while playing tug-of-war between optimism and pessimism in humanity’s relationship with capital, ultimately goes for optimism.

That’s not to say “Craphound” doesn’t evaluate its own late-capitalist landscape, which at times can border on apocalyptic, the very much Canadian Jerry obsessing over American pop culture of the past, Craphound himself being like a wealthy tourist. Jerry becomes fixated on someone else’s past, that of the man he only knows as “Billy the Kid,” the former owner of the trunk, whose contents have memories attached to them which are not Jerry’s own. He does, by sheer chance at a sale, meet a strapping 30-year-old upstart named Scott, who co-runs a firm and who matches the description Billy’s mother had given. Despite already being rather wealthy Scott is himself a fellow craphound, and over the course of about a week, the two strike up a friendship, their meeting place called the Secret Boutique, a second-hand market, Scott being a kind of a replacement for Craphound. Perhaps the strangest moment between these two, representing Jerry’s capacity for occasional selflessness (and I suspect remorse over his bitter treatment of Craphound the last time they were together), is when Jerry buys a Native American headdress for five dollars, intending to sell it somewhere else at a much higher price, only to sell it back to Scott/Billy for the same amount. This act of kindness must be at least partly fueled by the fact that Jerry’s convinced Scott/Billy is his man, so to speak. “As I said it, I was overcome with the knowledge that this was ‘Billy the Kid,’ the original owner of the cowboy trunk. I don’t know why I felt that way, but I did, with utter certainty.” Again there’s a cynical undertone to all this, these lily-white Canadians hawking over junk and often caricatured representations of indigenous peoples; that we never get to meet an indigenous character may or may not add to the subtle bleakness.

There Be Spoilers Here

Bad news: Scott/Billy turns out to not be Billy after all. This changes surprisingly little, although it does coincide with Jerry realizing that maybe his own childhood memories are more important than leeching off of other people’s memories. The good news is that Craphound is back, and the two buddies reconcile while at an auction sale, which is perhaps fitting. In this story friendships are formed and reformed, which provide the external conflict, but this is also about Jerry’s internal conflict, his sense of nostalgia and hungering for a past which is not necessarily his. I’m referring to “nostalgia” in the proper sense of the word, which is a kind of homesickness, as opposed to a kind of euphoria as people often think of it. Jerry spends most of the story homesick, except the home in question is not concrete but abstract. He comes to a realization that’s put pretty beautifully, maybe too beautifully given how colloquial his speech is otherwise; but still it’s one of those little passages I can imagine Doctorow smiled at while he was writing it. Hell, writing is such a solitary business, you may as well take pride in it. So here it is:

I understood that an alien wearing a cowboy hat and sixguns and giving them away was a poem and a story, and a thirtyish bachelor trying to spend half a month’s rent on four glasses so that he could remember his Grandma’s kitchen was a story and a poem, and that the disused fairground outside Calgary was a story and a poem, too.

That last one is referring to the fact that some of these aliens, or “extees,” are so rich that they buy up property on Earth, presumably in the hopes of turning a profit on it—being craphounds on a considerably larger scale than what Jerry does. In a different story (I suspect James Tiptree, Jr. would have a fun time with this premise) I can imagine such a turn of events becoming something quite shadowy, but Doctorow (or at least Jerry) wants to think the aliens know what they’re doing. The result is an ending that one would call cautiously optimistic.

A Step Farther Out

“Craphound” wasn’t Doctorow’s first published story, but it was the first to pick up traction with reprints, and it’s not hard to understand why. Aside from being a uniquely Canadian story (we even get a Tim Horton reference) at a time when genre SF was overwhelmingly American and British, it comes off as almost post-cyberpunk, despite the lack of futuristic technology in the humans’ lives. It feels like post-cyberpunk in the sense that the great technological shift has not only married late capitalism already but has seemingly passed over the average person’s head. The aliens have left their table scraps, in the form of basically patenting little pieces of their own tech, and yet humanity at large seems no better off for this. On a macro scale this sounds bleak, but Doctorow posits that at least on a micro scale, on an individual basis, there’s room for hope. There has to be room for hope. Which is something we all think about, probably.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “Angels in Love” by Kathe Koja

September 6th, 2024

(Cover by Malgorzata Rapnicka. F&SF, July 1991.)

Who Goes There?

There seemed to be a point in the ’90s when Kathe Koja could lay claim to being the best horror writer in the business, and certainly her output at this time was hard to argue with. She debuted in the late ’80s, as part of a wave of extreme and body-focused horror writers (think Clive Barker), although she also has quite a snarky sense of humor that tends to stop her fiction from becoming a black hole. In the 21st century her output has generally slowed down and she’s turned more to YA, which might partly explain why she has not been given the amount of attention she deserves. In a better world Koja would be awaking millions of readers to her unique style and explorations of the human body’s relationship to the external world, but instead we’ll have to awaken ourselves to her. Unfortunately most of her novels are not exactly easy to find in the wild. “Angels in Love” is a short but finely tuned story, packed with tension and perversion, more of a character study than a conventional horror narrative. This was published the same year as Koja’s first novel, The Cipher, and if you were on the look-out in 1991 it would’ve been hard to deny the talent on display.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the July 1991 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s since been reprinted in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Ninth Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois), The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fifth Annual Collection (ed. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling), The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer), and the Koja collection Extremities. That Dozois reprint is funny considering it’s arguably not SF.

Enhancing Image

The next-door neighbors are being loud, which is not normally something Lurleen would mind—except that the neighbors are fucking. Not the usual kind of fucking, but something more vigorous and yet mysterious. A rhythmic thumping that isn’t bed springs, and she’s not hearing the people’s moans exactly. “Lying there listening, her own bones tingled, skin rippled light with goose bumps, speculation: who made those strange, strange sounds?” It has to be sex. What else could it be? Of course Lurleen is interested, at least in part because she’s bored with her day-to-day life, working at a record store for a boss (Roger) she doesn’t like. Bored and lonely. This was also in the days before high-speed internet, so if you wanted to jerk it as a way of passing the time or to relieve pressure you had to resort to print, film, or your imagination. In this sense “Angels in Love” shows its age, in that it presumably had to take place in a pre-internet world, in the world of the erotic thriller—Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, Brian De Palma movies, and so on. The erotic thriller (and “Angels in Love” could be understood partly as an example of such a thing) is a subgenre that basically doesn’t exist anymore, due to a few factors: the availability of online porn, but also moviegoers seem to be more squeamish now than thirty years ago. This is a graphic and indeed borderline pornographic story, but the eroticism is very much there for a purpose, not to mention it helps build tension. There’s a reason the erotic thriller was popular for a while, which is the overlap between feeling horny and feeling scared—the heightened blood pressure and senses being needed for both.

I guess people spying on their neighbors the old-fashioned way, by eavesdropping or using a pair of binoculars, was more acceptable back then. Not to say what Lurleen’s doing is good, but she’s framed such that it’s easy to sympathize with her despite her perversion. After all, she’s clearly lonely and sexually deprived, her boss is a pain in the ass, the men she meets outside of work tend to be pigs. She wants to be desired but not objectified, which almost sounds like a paradox, because how do you present yourself in an interaction as desirable without also becoming a slab of meat to the other party? She knows Roger objectifies her, she knows the clerk at the store objectifies her, she knows the dumb muscle she picks up at bars sees her the same way. But here the tables have turned, as she objectifies her neighbors without even seeing them first—although she soon works to change that. “It came to her that she had never really seen that next-door neighbor of hers.” The girl next door is Anne, and Lurleen is surprised to find that the woman who’s been having such amazing sex (or so Lurleen thinks) is so… boring. Not obnoxious or messy, but bland. Beige. When they finally meet Lurleen is put off by how normal Anne is—so unassuming, actually, that she becomes an uncanny figure. The mystery then becomes with regards to the man Anne is seeing, assuming it’s the same man (and assuming it’s a man, which Lurleen does) every time Lurleen spies on them. So Anne is boring, but then what about the man she’s seeing?

The subtle horror of “Angels in Love” works in two ways: the mystery of the next-door neighbor, but also the lengths Lurleen goes to in finding out her neighbor’s private life. She starts acting in ways that are undeniably creepy, and were she not the perspective character it would be easy to understand Lurleen as a villain. This is not a case of unintended dissonance between the protagonist’s actions and what the reader expects of them, but part of the story’s design. Lurleen is an anti-heroine, and in just a handful of pages Koja makes sure we know this. There’s an especially creepy passage where she takes her eavesdropping to levels that would be considered unacceptable, even by most perverts:

She began to stalk Anne, never thinking of it in so many words, but as sure and surely cautious as any predator. Waiting, lingering in the hallway after work, for Anne to come home from whatever unfathomable job she did all day. Never stopping to talk, just a smile, pleasant make-believe. She made it her business to do her laundry when Anne did hers; at the first whoosh and stagger of the old machine, Lurleen was there, quarters in hand; her clothes had never been so clean; she had to see. Any jockey shorts, bikini underwear, jockstraps, what? She meant to take one if she could, steal it before, before it was clean. Smell it. You can tell a lot about a man.

This is a cosmic horror story ultimately, and we’ll get to that part, but Koja understands that often the scariest thing is human behavior—something that can be found in everyday life, no science fiction or fantasy needed. Lurleen’s growing obsession with Anne and her mystery boyfriend escalates at a rate that makes enough sense and at the same time doesn’t feel rushed, given how short this story is. It has to do with stalking, and getting too interested in other people’s lives, but it also has to do with misogyny, both how the male characters view the women and Lurleen’s own internalized misogyny against Anne, whose only crime is being a “sorry-looking bitch.” She wonders how such an “empty” person could have such a stud muffin in her bed on a regular basis, as opposed to Lurleen’s bed. Because she obviously deserves him more, right? And yet she also wonders, given Anne’s own blandness, “Could a man want a woman to be nothing? Just a space to fill? Lurleen had known plenty of guys who liked their women dumb—it made them feel better—but anyway, Anne didn’t seem dumb, just empty.” Is wanting a woman to be “just a space to fill” at the core of misogyny? Is that what it comes down to? Maybe it’s as simple as that. Maybe Anne is with this mystery man because she’s such easy pray. Lurleen’s about to find out.

There Be Spoilers Here

Cosmic horror is ultimately about the terror of discovering something you shouldn’t have—of fucking around and finding out. Lurleen fucks around and she finds out. In a way the conclusion is totally predictable; if anything it’s a release after the building tension and the escalating of Lurleen’s creepy behavior. We know that at some point this story has to enter SFF territory at some point, and so it does on the final page. During one of their bouts Anne and her boyfriend suddenly stop, seemingly mid-thrust, which concerns Lurleen enough that she rushes over next door to see what’s going on. What she encounters is hard to describe, and there’s a certain degree of ambiguity in the situation. “His body beautiful, and huge, not like a man’s, but so real it seemed to suck up all the space in the room, big elementary muscles, and he was using them all.” Anne’s back is bent at an unnatural angle and some liquid “like spoiled black jelly” is leaking from her mouth. Is she dead? Is fucking what the two had actually been doing this whole time? How long has this been going on? We never learn, and neither will Lurleen, maybe. The creature takes notice of her, and the story ends before we find out what becomes of either of them. We do know that Lurleen has just stepped over a line she shouldn’t crossed, and that she has gained the notice of something whose attention you don’t really want. I do have to wonder if maybe Koja had taken inspiration from Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart, or Hellraiser, in making the “angel” of the story a supreme sadist—a supernatural creature whose definition of pleasure includes immense pain. Maybe it was an angel, long ago, but it had gone bad.

A Step Farther Out

I’m not sure what else to say, go read this one.

See you next time.
Short Story Review: “The Transcendent Tigers” by R. A. Lafferty

September 3rd, 2024

(Cover by McKenna. Worlds of Tomorrow, February 1964.)

Who Goes There?

From about 1960 to the mid-’80s, R. A. Lafferty stood out as one of the true mavericks of the field, having a style that would be nigh-impossible to emulate. He has a reputation as something of a writer’s writer, not helped by many vocal Lafferty fans being writers themselves. It’s not that Lafferty was a poet (although he did have a capacity for poetry, unlike most SFF writers) or a mean wordsmith, but that nobody else wrote quite like him at the time. He got lumped in with the New Wavers, even appearing in Dangerous Visions, which in hindsight was a bit odd, given a) he was a good generation older than the New Wavers, and b) he was an outspoken conservative in what was considered a generally left-leaning movement. I don’t consider myself a Lafferty fan, because I tend to find his quirkiness and old-school Catholicism a bit stifling. It came as a bit of a shock to me, then, that I quite liked today’s story, which is an early and somewhat obscure Lafferty tale. “The Transcendent Tigers” predates the New Wave by a couple years, but it’s one of those stories that anticipates the movement. It’s also a darkly funny and pessimistic story, even for Lafferty.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the February 1964 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow, which is on Internet Archive. It was reprinted in Young Demons (ed. Roger Elwood and Vic Ghidalia) and the Lafferty collections Strange Doings and The Man with the Speckled Eyes. It also appeared on Sci Fiction, which you can read free of charge with the power of the Wayback machine. Surprised this one hasn’t been reprinted more often.

Enhancing Image

Carnadine is a little girl who gets four presents for her birthday: a white rubber ball that’s hollow inside, a green plastic frog, a red cap, and a wire puzzle. “She immediately tore the plastic frog apart, considering it a child’s toy. So much for that.” As for the other gifts, however, she makes good use of them—indeed better use than her parents had expected. When she wears the red cap she can turn the rubber ball inside out without tearing it and is able to solve the wire puzzle—the problem being that both of these things should be physically impossible. While most of the gifts are from her parents and friends of the family, nobody knows who got Carnadine the red cap, which should tell you immediately that something malicious is brewing. Carnadine is only nominally the protagonist of the story: for one she’s a sociopath (as is typical of young children), but also much of the story doesn’t focus on her. Lafferty breaks a few rules when it comes to writing short stories, just on a regular basis, but here he does it especially effectively. The third-person narrator strays from Carnadine’s story to give us a kind of bird’s-eye view of strange things happening around the world, including speculation on a new “Power” that could make or break humanity. Lafferty gives this otherwise absurd narrative a sense of genuine speculation by interspersing Carnadine’s story with passages from fictional academic journals and news sources, almost like what John Brunner would do in Stand on Zanzibar, only on a micro scale. We do eventually get an explanation for the red cap, but by then it’ll be too late—for the characters.

Meanwhile, Carnadine has taken to “sharing the wealth” a bit and has decided to found a club, the Bengal Tigers, a club so exclusive that at first she’s the only member. “It had only one full member, herself, and three contingent or defective members, her little brother Eustace, Fatty Frost, and Peewee Horn. Children all three of them, the oldest not within three months of her age.” Nobody knows about the Bengal Tigers, but pretty soon people are gonna feel the effects of the kids sharing their red cap. This strange red cap apparently grants one ESP, along with heightened intelligence, which in the case of Carnadine turns her from someone who was already a brat into a super-brat. Even in 1964 “The Transcendent Tigers” would’ve been another in a long line of stories about kids with ESP, although typically these kids would discover a sense of heroism along with their psychic powers. Carnadine does not. On paper this is a very dark story, but it’s lightened by Lafferty’s sense of humor and especially how quippy the narrator is. Humor usually benefits from brevity, so it helps that Lafferty packs a fair amount into a short space it’s still that: a short space. Scenes go by quickly, we jump back and forth between Carnadine and the aforementioned bird’s-eye view, and while in the past I’ve found Lafferty’s prose a bit too labyrinthine that’s not an issue here, his style here being much punchier and to the point than what I would say is the norm for him. Despite “The Transcendent Tigers” only being ten pages long I chuckled several times during it, which I have to admit is unusual in my experiences with Lafferty; but also that goes to show its effectiveness as a comedy, albeit a pretty morbid one. By the end you’ll wish Carnadine would fall off a cliff.

This is also an example of liking a work of art while at the same time disagreeing with the artist’s politics as expressed in their art, something I wish more people were capable of doing! I said before that Lafferty was an old-fashioned Catholic, even for the time, and while Christianity never comes up in the story I do think Lafferty is making an argument that falls in line with his conservatism. I have a bit of a hypothesis about what separates right-wing Christianity from left-wing Christianity, and it has to do with who can be saved: right-wing Christians believe that maybe individuals can see the gates of Heaven, but not groups, whereas left-wing Christians believe humanity as a cluster of groups deserves to be saved. It basically has to do with optimism vs. pessimism, and I do think Lafferty was a pessimist—only that his sense of humor tended to soften what I think was a pretty dim view of humanity. Throughout “The Transcendent Tigers” there’s speculation from intellectuals about an as-yet-undiscovered power which could blow even nuclear power out of the water, sheerly from its capacity to allow man to change his very environment without the use of industry. A single man could literally move mountains with this hypothetical power, and these intellectuals wonder if humanity would be ready for such a thing, should it come along. Lafferty argues we’re not, and that if we were to encounter such a power we either wouldn’t know what to do with it or use it for bad ends as soon as possible. The Bengal Tigers have such a power, and it doesn’t take them long to start using it for very bad ends.

There Be Spoilers Here

On a planet “very far out,” a race of energy beings (Is it just me or was this beyond-matter kind of alien race really popular around the time of the original Star Trek series?) discusses having found a valid candidate on Earth for a way to manifest immense power in the form of a red cap. One of the aliens says he managed to find only one candidate on the whole planet, one who had perfect assurance, “one impervious to doubt of any kind and totally impervious to self-doubt.” That person was Carnadine. As the other alien in the conversation point out, however, the candidate didn’t need only perfect assurance, but other qualities, although we’re not really told what those other qualities are. Carnadine is perfectly self-assured because there’s nothing more egotistical than a child, but she also totally lacks empathy and self-restraint, which are important qualities if one wants to be a functional human being in our society! Or at least those should be important qualities; turns out the most financially success tend to lack empathy at the very least. So the test with the red cap looks to be a loss on Earth, but as one of the aliens points out, worst case scenario humanity destroys itself and the virus of the red cap will have quarantined itself.

And it does.

In the course of ten pages we go from a young girl getting a strange gift to her literally destroying cities with said gift. The body count is immeasurable. To say a lot of people get killed would be an understatement. Carnadine and the other members of the “club” use a map of the US to stick needles on cities, like voodoo on a mass scale, New Orleans, Baltimore, San Antonio (“There were some of us who liked that place and wished that it could have been spared.”), and so on down the line. The situation escalates so much in such a short space that it becomes funny in a fucked-up way, having just the right cadence for a dark joke. Had Lafferty written this as a serious story (although I do think he’s trying to make a serious point with it, which is not the same thing) it would surely be one of the bleakest SF short stories of the ’60s. But thankfully it’s not serious.

A Step Farther Out

Sorry for another short review (by my standards), but then this is a concise story, and a very nicely constructed one at that. Lafferty has surprised me a couple times and this is one of them. When to authors I’m not personally fond of I’m always (maybe not “always,” I do have limits, but you know what I mean) up for giving them another chance. I mean for fuck’s sake I’ve read more than one Piers Anthony novel and I’m looking to read another one soon. Lafferty is a much better writer than Anthony, even if he can be too much for me, so we’ll be seeing him here again eventually—so in like, a year, maybe two years depending.

See you next time.