Soul Cages & Batting Cages

How Life Imitates the World Series by Thomas Boswell (1976-1981; collected 1982): Thomas Boswell became one of our two or three greatest regular chroniclers of baseball in the mid-1970s when he was about 30 and has continued as such ever since. He manages something extraordinarily rare in sports writing -- a mix of the poetic and the carefully observed normative. 

He's also extremely but unfussily literate in these essays, most of them stories and columns for the Washington Post. And while he's a poetic fellow, he's also statistically inclined. One of the stories included herein has Boswell introduce one of the first new baseball stats in years at the time, Total Average, as a better indicator of baseball hitting greatness than the batting average, on-base percentage, or slugging percentage.

As these essays were written in the late 1970's and early 1980's, they at times shine a light on a baseball world that's still dominated by players that include Reggie Jackson and Pete Rose, and managers that include Earl Weaver. These and others are profiled sympathetically but occasionally critically by Boswell. So, too, owners, innovators, Cuban baseball, the enigmatic Steve Carlton, Boswell's own history in baseball, the vanishing adult hard-ball leagues which are being supplanted by softball leagues, the care and feeding of baseball bats, and many other topics. Boswell's style is a joy to read, and his subject matter never disappoints in the general or the specific. Highly recommended.

The Wild Night Company: Irish Tales of Terror (1971): edited by Peter Haining, containing the following stories: 

A Wild Night in Galway (1959) by Ray Bradbury
'Hell Fire' [Section of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)] by James Joyce
Julia Cahill's Curse (1903) by George Moore
Legends of Witches, Fairies and Leprechauns (1919) by Lady Wilde
Teig O'Kane and the Corpse (1918) by Traditional
The Banshee's Warning (1862) by Charlotte Riddell
The Canterville Ghost (1887) by Oscar Wilde 
The Coonian Ghost (1970) by Shane Leslie
The Crucifixion of the Outcast (1897) by William Butler Yeats
The Dead Smile (1899) by F. Marion Crawford
The Fairies' Revenge (1970) by Sinead de Valera
The Friendly Demon (1726) by Daniel Defoe
The Haunted Spinney (1904) by Elliott O'Donnell
The House Among the Laurels (1910) by William Hope Hodgson
The Legend of Finn M'Coul (1830) by William Carleton
The Man from Kilsheelan (1923) by A. E. Coppard
The Man Wolf (1970) by Giraldus Cambrensis
The Moon-Bog (1926) by H. P. Lovecraft
The Parracide's Tale (1820) [Section of Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)] by Charles Maturin 
The Soul Cages (1825) by Thomas Crofton Croker
Wicked Captain Walshawe of Wauling (1864) by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Witch Wood (1947) by Lord Dunsany

One of those many Peter Haining-edited anthologies with a fundamental problem in the title. These are tales by or about the Irish. Many feature the supernatural, though not all. But there's not a whole lot of terror involved. Throw that false claim away and enjoy instead a pretty enjoyable mixture of folk tales, excerpts from novels, and short stories.

Haining certainly gets bonus marks for including the terrifically horrifying sermon from James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and a grimly jocular section from Charles Maturin's seminal 19th-century Gothic Melmoth the Wanderer. And if you know the Sting song "The Soul Cages," you'll be intrigued to discover a much less sinister Irish version of the story from folklore, recorded in the early 19th century, that nonetheless still involves the souls of dead sailors kept in lobster traps by a supernatural being. But it won't be "magical wine" that knocks the creature for a loop -- it will be Irish poteen. Oh, go look it up. I'll wait.

The anthology ranges from folklore to genre writers to the famous literary elite and back again. I can criticize Haining for his odd choices in titling, but I can't criticize his range as an anthologist or his enthusiasm as an essayist introducing the tales. The drollness of the Ray Bradbury story that concludes the anthology is something to behold. I'm pretty sure no other ostensive horror anthology selection has so hilariously undercut a brief spate of terror with the revelation that the story serves up as its epiphanic (or is it anti-epiphanic?) moment about just what a wild night in Galway entails. Recommended.

The Stately Boobs of Ireland

Playmates by J.N. Williamson (1982): J.N. Williamson is a nice story -- a writer whose published career began in his late 40's with what soon seemed to be about ten horror novels a year. I assume some of them may have been written years or even decades earlier, but he may just have been incredibly prolific. Until now, I'd never actually read one of his novels. 

Playmates alternates between crazy, purple-prose badness and long stretches of tedium which, if you're like me, you'll skim like crazy. Set in Catholic Ireland, it's a horror story about Fairies and an old family secret. Intentionally or not, it also veers into anti-feminism in its choice of who dies and who lives, among other things.

Only a minor character who seems to have been intended for more, based on his lengthy introduction, is remotely sympathetic to anyone who's not a dink. We instead get a couple of selfish men, a fantasy woman for all those who dream of a wife who's delighted to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, and a callous and horrible child. One roots for everyone to die. Spoiler alert: one does not get what one wishes.

This is the sort of horror novel in which many terrible murders happen in a small town and no one outside that town takes any interest. Why should they? The people inside the town barely seem to notice. People do stupid things again and again. A child's fatness is short-hand for why he should die (and he does). Two young lovers die because of course they do.

Stylistically, Williamson throws some terrific howlers at us. The hills of Ireland are like many breasts being caressed by many hands. A naked woman's giant breasts remind our aroused protagonist of two scoops of ice cream with a cherry on top of each. Of course he marries her. Maybe he has an ice-cream fetish.

The greatest pleasure of the novel comes late in the game, with the revelation of the family secret that's been hinted at throughout the novel. It's a revelation so astonishingly unconnected to anything that's come before, and so ridiculous in its visual description and in its workings, that it helps end the novel on a high note of complete goofiness. 

The old SCTV show once did a skit called O. Henry Playhouse in which every story, regardless of its setting or content, ended with someone being killed by a tiger. Williamson's revelation of what's in the locked room of family secrets is at that level of unconnected shock value. Except that a tiger is straightforward. What's in the room makes about as much sense as The Devil's Coat-rack.

The fairies are pretty stereotypical when they show up. They're amoral and occasionally murderous. Hidey-ho. They also can't be fought in any meaningful way in the book's fantasy universe, so there's really not much point to any confrontation with them. In a move which gilds this awful novel with an extra layer of unearned pretension, every chapter ends with a lengthy quotation about fairy-riddled Ireland from writers that include Yeats and Colin Wilson. Got to use that research. Not recommended.