House of Windows (2009) by John Langan

House of Windows by John Langan (2009): John Langan's first novel is terrific, an erudite ghost story informed by Langan's knowledge of the horror genre and by his experiences in academia. It's a first-person tale within a frame -- a perennial structure in horror. It's a novel of academia. And its main narrator would seem utterly persuasive if it weren't for brief, gem-like moments throughout her narration that seem to highlight a pronounced lack of self-knowledge. Or do they?

Over the course of two long nights, SUNY-Huguenot graduate student and sessional instructor Veronica Croydon tells the story of her husband's mysterious disappearance to a narrator who seems to be John Langan. She does so because Langan writes horror stories and thus may be a good choice to hear the tale. During the day between the two nights, Langan and his wife discuss the possibility that he may also have been chosen for his perceived gullibility when it comes to the supernatural.

Veronica's narrative voice is sharp, self-assured, and intermittently unsympathetic. She's a great creation. Overall, her story of the supernatural seems convincing. It's the sudden revelations of a pronounced lack of self-evaluation spotted throughout the text that raise the possibility that her narration is flawed or possibly confabulated in its entirety. But these moments are few and far between, and subtle enough in most cases to sneak by.

Langan's depiction of academic life rings utterly true to this former academic. Veronica reminds me of a handful of graduate students I've known without in any way being a stereotype. The 40-years-older, married professor she herself marries within about a year of starting her graduate studies is also familiar without being a type. But we learn of him (and everything inside the frame) only from Veronica's point-of-view. Do we trust her? Do we trust any first-person narrator? Do we trust any narrator at all?

I don't know. In general, the discontinuities in the narrative include moments in which Veronica engages in stereotypical gender constructions of the male while at other points bristling at such constructions being attached to the female. She denigrates Herman Melville for being a detail-obsessed windbag while occasionally relating such a list of minutiae that the narrative almost bogs down in soporific descriptions of making dinner or sitting in a living room. She may have become her near-future husband's favourite student in the space of one class, with their out-of-class socializing beginning immediately thereafter, but she doesn't believe in being familiar with her own students. The failure of the earlier marriage was all the fault of the first wife -- but we learn of the first wife only through Veronica's narration. Well, we learn almost everything only through Veronica's narration. And a story that details the tragically flawed relationships of at least two sets of fathers and sons -- as commented upon throughout by Veronica -- also features Veronica's distant, annoyed relationship with a mother with whom she goes years between conversations. 

The major characters filling out the novel's pas de quatre are Ted, Roger's 30ish son from his previous marriage, and the house the Croydons have lived in for decades, Belvedere House. It's an old house. And it's about to become haunted. Or something.

Langan's vision of the supernatural in this novel bridges a gap between the cosmic, impersonal, non-traditional horrors of the Lovecraftian and the more traditional wonders and terrors of a ghost story, with psychology hanging over all. It helps to have read Fritz Leiber's great Our Lady of Darkness before reading his novel, but one doesn't need to: Langan lays everything out that the reader needs to know. Knowledge of the Leiber novel enriches one's enjoyment of House of Windows, though. And it's a swell novel.

As is this novel. The horrors here are both gross and subtle, supernatural and strictly human. There may not have ever been a haunting. But whether or not there was, there's a story of a haunting and the haunted -- there's horror and sorrow. Highly recommended.

Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber (1977)

Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber (1977): The last of the prolific and long-lived Leiber's truly great horror-dark-fantasy novels, and for my money the best, Our Lady of Darkness plays with themes and concepts Leiber first explored nearly 40 years earlier in his seminal horror story "Smoke Ghost" (1940). 

In that dark and terrific story, we discover that the multiplying and expanding  urban landscapes of the 20th century breed their own peculiar types of ghosts, spirits, and perhaps even gods. In Our Lady of Darkness, we begin to learn just what sorts of entities may haunt the 20th century, and why, and to what ends. The list of writers who owe a debt to Leiber's concept includes such luminaries as Neil Gaiman, Joe R. Lansdale, Ramsey Campbell, and a veritable plethora of others.

Leiber's semi-autobiographical stand-in of a protagonist, writer Franz Westen, is a recovering alcoholic who lives in a somewhat odd, old apartment building in San Francisco in the late 1970's. Two books he purchased while in a near-blackout state several years earlier begin to occupy his mind: a bizarre Depression-era screed about the supernatural dangers posed by the existence of cities, and an unsigned journal from the same time period which Westen comes to believe belonged to (real) horror writer Clark Ashton Smith. 

Smith pretty much permanently moved to the country in the late 1930's, avoiding cities thereafter. Why? What did his brief friendship with the writer of the screed reveal? Looking out across San Francisco with his binoculars to the top of Corona Heights, a wooded hill in the middle of developed urban space, Westen sees a strange, brown figure capering and dancing -- and then taking notice of his attention.

And we're off. Leiber blends the real and the fictional into a fascinating mix of horror, dark comedy, and supernatural speculation. Jammed with enough material for a novel ten times its modest length, Our Lady of Darkness remains light on its feet throughout. Spiked with fine and occasionally shocking moments of horror, the novel nevertheless presents a protagonist who never stops trying to think his way through the bizarre events he's been dropped into because of these two books of (seemingly) accidental purchase.

Westen's friends in the hotel are also well-drawn, as is the libertine expert on the supernatural whom Westen turns to for information on San Francisco's occult past. Real-world figures that include H.P. Lovecraft, Jack London, and Ambrose Bierce are woven plausibly into the story, their fictions and their lives making the events of the novel seem more plausible in a completely loopy way with each passing page. Leiber's fictional occult speculations become more convincing than most of our world's real occult writings.

Leiber was one of the 20th century's most gifted cross-genre writers. He helped create the sword-and-sorcery genre with his wry and long-running Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser series, wrote piercingly good science fiction with his The Big Time, "A Pail of Air," and "Coming Attraction" (to name just three), and helped modernize horror in a way that still hasn't completely taken hold, as the current proliferation of all those tired vampires and werewolves continues to show. 

His theatrical background informed works that include "Four Ghosts in Hamlet," while his life-long fascination with chess gave us one of the two or three finest chess-horror pieces ever written, "Midnight by the Morphy Watch." That he could also do pitch-perfect homages to his old pen-pal H.P. Lovecraft or move seemingly effortlessly into post-modern strangeness while already in his 50's with stories that include "The Winter Flies" and "Gonna Roll the Bones" seems almost unfair to other writers. Our Lady of Darkness may be his finest novel -- in any case, it's one of no more than twenty or so of the finest novels ever gifted to the horror genre to call its own. Highly recommended.

Stephen Leacock, Sherlock Holmes, Boobies

The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: edited by John Joseph Adams (2009), containing the following stories:

The Doctor's Case (1987) by Stephen King;
The Horror of the Many Faces (2003) by Tim Lebbon;
The Case of the Bloodless Sock  (2001) by Anne Perry;
The Adventure of the Other Detective  (2001) by Bradley H. Sinor;
A Scandal in Montreal (2008) by Edward D. Hoch;
The Adventure of the Field Theorems (1995) by Vonda N. McIntyre;
The Adventure of the Death-Fetch (1994) by Darrell Schweitzer;
The Shocking Affair of the Dutch Steamship Friesland (2005) by Mary Robinette Kowal;
The Adventure of the Mummy's Curse (2006) by H. Paul Jeffers;
The Things That Shall Come Upon Them (2008) by Barbara Roden;
Murder to Music (1989)   by Anthony Burgess;
The Adventure of the Inertial Adjustor  (1997) by Stephen Baxter;
Mrs Hudson's Case (1997) by Laurie R. King;
The Singular Habits of Wasps (1994) by Geoffrey A. Landis;
The Affair of the 46th Birthday (2008) by Amy Myers;
The Specter of Tullyfane Abbey (2001) by Peter Tremayne;
The Vale of the White Horse (2003) by Sharyn McCrumb;
The Adventure of the Dorset Street Lodger (1995) by Michael Moorcock;
The Adventure of the Lost World (2004) by Dominic Green;
The Adventure of the Antiquarian's Niece (2003) by Barbara Hambly;
Dynamics of a Hanging (2005) by Tony Pi;
Merridew of Abominable Memory (2008)  by Chris Roberson;
Commonplaces (2008) by Naomi Novik;
The Adventure of the Pirates of Devil's Cape (2008) by Rob Rogers;
The Adventure of the Green Skull (2008) by Mark Valentine;
The Human Mystery (1999) by Tanith Lee;
A Study in Emerald (2003) by Neil Gaiman;
You See But You Do Not Observe (1995) by Robert J. Sawyer.

Hugely entertaining and lengthy anthology, mostly consisting of reprints, of Sherlock Holmes stories from the two decades previous to the anthology's publication. Many of the stories involve either science fiction or the supernatural, hence the 'improbable' part of the title. That itself riffs on Holmes' famous quotation, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, is the truth."

Some stories expand upon brief mentions of unchronicled cases in the original Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle ("Merridew of Abominable Memory" by Chris Roberson and "The Shocking Affair of the Dutch Steamship Friesland" by Mary Robinette Kowal both reference the original mention in their titles). Others pit Holmes against the supernatural ("The Horror of the Many Faces" by Tim Lebbon, "The Adventure of the Antiquarian's Niece" by Barbara Hambly, and "A Study in Emerald" (2003) by Neil Gaiman memorably riff on H.P. Lovecraft's brand of cosmic horror).

Writers also bounce Holmes off the works and characters of other writers ("The Things That Shall Come Upon Them" by Barbara Roden puts Holmes into a sequel of sorts to the classic M.R. James ghost story "Casting the Runes") or Doyle's own non-Holmesian works ("The Adventure of the Lost World" (2004) by Dominic Green). Mrs. Hudson and Doctor Watson get chances to solve crimes before Holmes does. Alternate worlds and science-fictional devices appear. Conan Doyle himself appears as a character. Holmes' childhood and college years are speculated upon, as is his family history. He even teams up with Stephen Leacock! In Canada!

There are a few duds here, but very few. One doesn't need to be a Holmes expert to enjoy the stories, and a concise history of Holmes included in the volume will aid those with too little knowledge of the World's First Consulting Detective. Highly recommended.


The Witchcraft Reader: edited by Peter Haining (1969) containing the following stories: Timothy (1966) by Keith Roberts; The Witch (1943) by A. E. van Vogt; The Warlock (1960) by Fritz Leiber; All the Devils in Hell  (1960) by John Brunner; From Shadowed Places (1960) by Richard Matheson; One Foot and the Grave (1949) by Theodore Sturgeon; Broomstick Ride (1957) by Robert Bloch; The Mad Wizards of Mars (1949) by Ray Bradbury.

Another of the voluminous Haining's fascinating anthologies. At his peak, he seemed to be releasing one of these a week. OK, he wasn't THAT prolific. Still, his selections are often immensely valuable because they're often way, way off the beaten path for this sort of thing.

The best character study here is John Brunner's  "All the Devils in Hell ." It's a marvelous exploration of a man in conflict with occult powers that ultimately can be opposed. Fritz Leiber's story puts a modern spin on witchcraft, while Robert Bloch's story deals with ancient witchcraft during a future era of interstellar travel. It's a solid little anthology. Also, there are naked boobies on the cover of the paperback. Huzzah! Recommended.

Night Monsters (1974) by Fritz Leiber

Night Monsters (1974) by Fritz Leiber containing the following stories: The Black Gondolier (1964); Midnight in the Mirror World (1964); I'm Looking for Jeff (1952); The Creature from Cleveland Depths (1962); The Oldest Soldier (1960); The Girl with the Hungry Eyes (1949); and A Bit of the Dark World (1962) .

Leiber was probably the best writer of all those science-fiction and fantasy writers who collectively formed the 'Golden Age' of science fiction (basically, the 1940's) and went on to continue to define the genre(s) in the 1950's and 1960's. Indeed, his cynical, often dystopic takes on the future in his 1950's and 1960's work make him more at home in the company of writers who came of age in those decades, when Leiber (born around 1910) was already middle-aged and older.

Leiber came from a theatre family, and while that isn't much of a factor here, it was in other stories. He also corresponded with H.P. Lovecraft in the 1930's. He wrote several Lovecraftian stories over the course of his career, some pastiches, some revisionist takes that explored what one could do with cosmic horror.

"The Black Gondolier" was written for an Arkham House anthology, and it pays homage to Lovecraft in structure (and concluding italics) while nonetheless situating the horror within Leiber's expert, long-time evocation of terrible horrors with new, modern incarnations and meanings. Here, that places a strange and creeping horror somewhere in or below California's Venice (Beach) in the early 1960's, that odd and rundown simulacrum of Italy's Venice, but with way more oil wells.

Leiber ranges far throughout this collection, which samples Leiber's dystopic, sarcastic science fiction ("The Creature of Cleveland Depths," which somehow manages to satirize the current culture of the Smartphone), and his grimy urban twists on traditional horror tropes (the Ghost in "I'm Looking for Jeff" and the Vampire in "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes").

We also get cosmic horror that seems closer to Algernon Blackwood in "A Bit of the Dark World," all of it occurring in the sun-drenched hills above Los Angeles, a sort of cosmic Noonday Devil. Leiber's affection for mathematical problems and chess manifest in the oddly moving ghost story "Midnight in the Mirror World." Finally, we visit the time-spanning, reality-changing war of his Changewar series in "The Oldest Soldier," as the war between the time-travelling groups known as the Snakes and the Spiders wanders into a neighbourhood bar.

In all, this is a fairly representative sample of the breadth and depth of Leiber's decades of writing, with only his seminal and the career-long influence on sword and sorcery fiction being truly neglected. Highly recommended.

Most Peculiar Mummy

Whispers (1977) edited by Stuart David Schiff, containing the following stories:

"Sticks" by Karl Edward Wagner: One of Wagner's four greatest stories, "Sticks" is a terrific piece of Cthulhu Mythology, with an absolutely riveting first half.

"The Barrow Troll" by David Drake: Typically tough-minded piece of revisionist historical fantasy from Drake.

"The Glove" by Fritz Leiber: Blackly humourous San Francisco-era piece from Leiber, set in a familiar apartment building for Leiber fans.

"The Closer of the Way" by Robert Bloch: Droll bit of meta-fiction from the creator of Psycho.

"Dark Winner" by William F. Nolan: Fascinating bit of Bradbury-tinged horror-nostalgia that would have been right at home on The Twilight Zone.

"Ladies in Waiting" by Hugh B. Cave: Solid haunted-house riff.

"White Moon Rising" by Dennis Etchison: A non-supernatural psychological thriller from Etchison. Stylistically precise, thematically mysterious.

"Graduation" by Richard Christian Matheson: Epistolary creep-out.

"Mirror, Mirror" by Ray Russell: Fun, minor piece.

The House of Cthulhu by Brian Lumley: Lovecraftian sword-and-sorcery.

"Antiquities" by John Crowley: Mummies wreak havoc in England in a most peculiar way.

"A Weather Report from the Top of the Stairs" by James Sallis and David Lunde: Adaptation of a famous Gahan Wilson cartoon ("And then we'll get him!") with two different endings.

"The Scallion Stone" by Basil A. Smith: A very M.R. Jamesian horror story from a writer who avoided publication until after his death.

"The Inglorious Rise of the Catsmeat Man" by Robin Smyth: Very much an Ambrose Bierce/Roald Dahl-like exercise in gross-out horror-comedy.

"The Pawnshop" by Charles E. Fritch: Entertaining deal-with-the-devil story.

"Le Miroir"by Robert Aickman: An even-more-ambiguous-than-usual story from the eternally ambiguous Aickman.

"The Willow Platform" by Joseph Payne Brennan: Nice bit of regional Maine Lovecraft-tinged cosmic horror in the backwoods.

"The Dakwa" by Manly Wade Wellman: The Southeast backwoods play host to a particularly gruesome Native-American monster.

"Goat" by David Campton: Really solid, evocative piece of particularly British small-town horror.

"The Chimney" by Ramsey Campbell: Award-winning story of childhood horrors that may or may not be real.

The first anthology of stories from Schiff's semi-prozine Whispers really almost bursts with heady goodness. In all: Highly recommended.

13 Steps Lead Down

13 Short Horror Novels: edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh (Collected 1987), containing the following stories:

"Jerusalem's Lot" (1978) by Stephen King: Fun riff by King on Lovecraft's horror stories, most obviously "The Rats in the Walls", told through a series of letters. Has nothing to do with 'Salem's Lot.

"The Parasite" (1894) by Arthur Conan Doyle: The creator of Sherlock Holmes indulges his love of the paranormal, specifically hypnotism, here. Boy, people thought hypnotism (or 'mesmerism') could do some crazy stuff in the 19th century. Here it allows for the telepathic takeover of other people's bodies!

"Fearful Rock" (1939) by Manly Wade Wellman: Excellent Civil War period piece from Wellman, as a patrol of Union soldiers finds itself confronted with supernatural evil.

"Sardonicus" (1961) by Ray Russell: Classic story from Russell is a blackly humourous character study written in a 19th-century epistolary style. Made into a movie called Mr. Sardonicus.

"Nightflyers" (1980) by George R. R. Martin: Once upon a time, the Game of Thrones creator was an excellent horror and science fiction writer. He combines the two here for a locked-room-in-space horror show. Made into a terrible movie of the same name.

"Horrible Imaginings" (1982) by Fritz Leiber: Weird, relatively late-career novella from the great Leiber riffs much more grimly on his years in San Francisco after his wife's death than similar works of the same period that include "The Ghost Light" and Our Lady of Darkness. Not great, but spellbinding nonetheless, with a completely bizarre conclusion.

"Jane Brown's Body" (1938) by Cornell Woolrich: Interesting combination of the horror and hard-boiled crime-fiction genres. Gangsters, mad scientists, and a tragic ending you know is coming, as inevitable as death in a world where death has been temporarily conquered.

"Killdozer!" (1944) by Theodore Sturgeon: Sturgeon goes full-on Basil Exposition here as he explains pretty much everything you ever wanted to know about how to operate a bulldozer and a backhoe. I kid you not. There's pages and pages of handy bulldozer operation knowledge here. An interesting premise (an electromagnetic monster takes over a bulldozer; hilarity obviously ensues) bogs down in interminable explanations of how everything works. If you're fascinated by the heavy machinery of 1944, this novella is for you. Made into a movie of the same name.

"The Shadow Out of Time" (1936) by H. P. Lovecraft: One of Lovecraft's least horrifying, most science-fictiony and sublime meditations on cosmic stuff and time abysses. The aliens here -- 12-foot-tall rugose cones dubbed "the Great Race" -- are probably Lovecraft's least threatening, most benign race of super-aliens. Also, they're socialists.

"The Stains" (1980) by Robert Aickman: Aickman is at his creepy, ambiguous best here in a story of a buttoned-down widower who starts a new life with a young woman who is...well, I don't know. Baffling, oblique, and utterly haunting, but not for anybody who wants some sort of minimal explanation of what is actually happening.

"The Horror from the Hills" (1931) by Frank Belknap Long: Gonzo Exposition from Long's Gonzo Exposition Cosmic Horror Period that also yielded such distinctive, Lovecraft-lecture-series gems as "The Space-Eaters" and "The Hounds of Tindalos." A man-sized, vaguely elephant-shaped idol comes to life and threatens all life on Earth. And only a museum director, a cop, and an occult inventor can save us in a final battle staged in...New Jersey! Paging Jules de Grandin!

"Children of the Kingdom" (1980) by T. E. D. Klein: I've read this novella at least ten times over the course of 32 years and find something new to ponder every time. This time around, it's the fact that in this story of racism and xenophobia in the decaying, crime-ridden New York of the late 1970's, the ultimate horrors that move literally beneath the surface are fish-belly white.

"Frost and Fire" (1946) by Ray Bradbury: Disquieting and propulsive bit of science-fiction-as-metaphor by Bradbury, as humans stranded on a highly radioactive planet by a spaceship crash are born, age, and die in the space of eight days (!). A telepathy mutation allows the children to rapidly learn, but can one determined man find a way to reach the last extant starship and find a way off the planet?

The Horrors of the 'Me' Decade

Whispers II: edited by Stuart David Schiff, containing the following stories:

Undertow by Karl Edward Wagner; Berryhill by R. A. Lafferty; The King's Shadow Has No Limits by Avram Davidson; Conversation Piece by Richard Christian Matheson; The Stormsong Runner by Jack L. Chalker; They Will Not Hush by James Sallis and David Lunde; Lex Talionis by Russell Kirk; Marianne by Joseph Payne Brennan; From the Lower Deep by Hugh B. Cave; The Fourth Musketeer by Charles L. Grant; Ghost of a Chance by Ray Russell; The Elcar Special by Carl Jacobi; The Box by Lee Weinstein; We Have All Been Here Before by Dennis Etchison; Archie and the Scylla of Hades Hole by Ken Wisman; Trill Coster's Burden by Manly Wade Wellman; Conversation Piece by Ward Moore; The Bait by Fritz Leiber; Above the World by Ramsey Campbell; The Red Leer by David Drake; and At the Bottom of the Garden by David Campton.

Stuart David Schiff's Whispers was the biggest little magazine of horror and dark fantasy in the 1970's, so much so that it became the Little Engine That Carried on The Tradition of the Mostly Defunct Weird Tales. Schiff couldn't pay a lot, but with weird fantasy markets in decline, he was able to assemble a Who's Who of then-contemporary greats, with careers sometimes extending back to the 1920's and 1930's.

Whispers II collects fine stories by names familiar and unfamiliar. I've got a real soft spot for David Drake's revisionist werewolf tale "The Red Leer," which also seems to act as a commentary on the sorts of manly men who once frequented the horror stories of Robert E. Howard. There really aren't any weak spots here, though Ken Wisman's "Archie and the Scylla of Hades" is bizarre in both tone (it's like a Jack Vance fantasy story as reimagined by Robert Service) and style (it's a long poem!). When you see these Whispers compilations in used bookstores, you should snap them up. Along with editor Charles L. Grant's hardcover original anthology series Shadows, Whispers represents the height of 1970's and early 1980's dark fantasy and horror. Highly recommended.

　
　

Tales of Fear and Fantasy by R. Chetwynd-Hayes, containing the following stories: Manderville; The Day Of The Underdog; The Headless Footman Of Hadleigh; The Cost Of Dying; The Resurrectionist; The Sale of the Century; and The Changeling (Collected 1977): Chetwynd-Hayes was amazingly prolific in the late 1960's and early 1970's. His learning curve was dramatically steep: six years after the release of his first, enjoyable, pulpy collection, this collection shows a writer rounding into top form.

　

Five of the stories mix horror with black comedy, with the most successful being one of the adventures of "the world's only practicing psychic detective" as he and his lovely, extremely psychic assistant try to solve the mystery of "The Headless Footman of Hadleigh." There are two non-humourous stories here, and they're both hauntingly excellent: "The Resurrectionist", in which a man falls in love with photos of a woman long dead, and "The Changeling", a creepy riff on pop-culture 'horror families' such as The Munsters or The Addams Family. This family, though, not so much fun to belong to. In all, recommended.

When We Was Weird

More Weird Tales edited by Peter Haining (Collected 1975) containing the following stories, poems, and essays:

The Valley Was Still (1939) by Manly Wade Wellman; A Weird Prophecy [It Happened to Me] by Ken Gary; Winter Night [It Happened to Me] by Alice Olsen; San Francisco [It Happened to Me] (1940) by Caroline Evans; Heart of Atlantan (1940) by Nictzin Dyalhis; The Phantom Slayer (1942) by Fritz Leiber; The Beasts of Barsac (1944) by Robert Bloch; Bang! You're Dead! (1944) by Ray Bradbury; Cellmate (1947) by Theodore Sturgeon; The Familiars by H. P. Lovecraft; The Pigeon-Flyers (1943) by H. P. Lovecraft; Roman Remains (1948) by Algernon Blackwood; Displaced Person (1948) by Eric Frank Russell; To the Chimera (1924) by Clark Ashton Smith; From the Vasty Deep (1949) by H. Russell Wakefield; The Shot-Tower Ghost (1949) by Mary Elizabeth Counselman; Take the Z-Train (1950) by Allison V. Harding; The Little Red Owl (1951) by Margaret St. Clair; Ooze (1923) by Anthony M. Rud.

Peter Haining probably edited about a thousand anthologies in his lifetime. This, the second half of a hardcover collecting stories from pulp magazine Weird Tales' first iteration, which ran from 1923 to the early 1950's, is a very good one.

Weird Tales was the first true American pulp magazine devoted to fantasy, horror, and science fiction. Its heyday was the 1920's and early 1930's, but it still offered a viable market for short-story writers right up until its death during The Great Dying of the pulps in the late 1940's and early 1950's.

Haining does a nice job of finding stories from female writers, of which Weird Tales had more than a few, and of offering reprints of some of the non-fiction features of the magazine (It Happened to Me and the letters column The Eyrie), along with some decent poems from writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith (who really was a good poet), and Conan creator Robert E. Howard.

Haining also seemed to have an eye on what had been collected before, as the Fritz Leiber, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Bloch, and Ray Bradbury selections are relatively little-known. Leiber's "The Phantom Slayer" is the strongest from one of those four stalwarts, an urban nightmare that characterizes Leiber's reimagining of the horror genre in the 1940's as something set in urban landscapes bleak and otherwise, where people try and sometimes fail to connect with one another.

Among the lesser known writers, the improbably named Nictzin Dyalhis offers an enjoyable lost-world story much in the vein of Clark Ashton Smith and A. Merrit. Margaret St. Clair, a fairly well-known genre author of the 1940's and 1950's, impresses with the childhood fantasy nightmare "The Little Red Owl," which essentially pits a psychopathic uncle against a fictional character. The anthology finishes with a story from the first issue of Weird Tales, "Ooze," a fun story of amoebas gone wrong. Or is that amobae? Recommended.

Sexual-Harassment Gargoyle

Burn, Witch, Burn (aka Night of the Eagle): adapted by Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson from the novel Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber; directed by Sidney Hayers; starring Peter Wyngarde (Norman Taylor), Janet Blair (Tansy Taylor), and Maragret Johnson (Flora Carr) (1962): It's an all-star writing team-up as genre greats Richard Matheson (Duel, Hell House, a lot of Twilight Zone episodes) and Charles Beaumont (a lot of Twilight Zone episodes) adapt Science-fiction-and-fantasy Grandmaster Fritz Leiber's terrific 1940's fantasy novel Conjure Wife for the big screen.

The action is moved to England and compressed in time, doing some violence to the original, but the result is still an enjoyable, fast-paced bit of modern horror-fantasy set in the cut-throat world of academia. Yes, academia. Professor Norman Taylor seems to have led a charmed life both personally and professionally. And he has. But he's about to find out the cost. And witchcraft is involved. And possibly Sexual-Harassment Panda.

Two bits of goofiness mar the very beginning and the very end, seemingly added by a nervous studio. But they're minor. This story of modern witchcraft has some real thrills and horrors awaiting, along with one pissed-off eagle-shaped gargoyle. The film-makers do a nice job of suggesting as much as possible, a necessity given the budget and visual effects limitations of the time. The most chilling scene relies on no visual effects whatsoever -- just Tarot cards, a match, and an increasingly panicked Norman Taylor.

My main beef with the movie would be that the scariest line of the novel -- and the events that flow forwards from it -- have been replaced here by a more conventional ending in which our protagonists are quite a bit less intelligent than they are in the book. Oh, well. Still a superior tale of magic and its discontents. Recommended.

Bazaar of the Bizarre

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser: adapted by Howard Chaykin from stories by Fritz Leiber; illustrated by Mike Mignola and Al Williamson (1991; collected 2010): Lovely adaptation of several of Fritz Leiber's terrific, seminal sword-and-sorcery tales featuring Northern barbarian Fafhrd and Southern thief Gray Mouser having adventures in and around the imaginary city of Lankhmar in an unknown time and an unknown place.

Leiber's stories were unique for their sense of humour at a time -- the series started in the 1930's -- when sword and sorcery tales were in their infancy, the rules of the game having just been codified by Robert E. Howard in his Conan stories. And Conan wasn't a barrel of laughs. These stories often are, though they also contain sinister magic and mayhem, sorrow, ghosts, monsters, and literally cut-throat businessmen.

Obviously, one should read the originals. Leiber was one of the true greats of the Golden Age of American science fiction and fantasy, with a career stretching from the 1930's up until his death in the early 1990's. He was probably the best prose stylist in the entire field for decades, while his eccentric and encyclopedic tastes and interests made him a major figure in American horror, science fiction, and fantasy.

Howard Chaykin, one of comicdom's wittiest scripters, does Leiber proud here in distilling the stories down into dialogue. A young Mike Mignola approaches his later Hellboy form, aided by legendary inker Al Williamson. Mignola's art shows when it should and suggests when it should. The monsters are creepy and the women gorgeous.

Teeming Lankhmar itself becomes a seedy, crowded warren of strange houses and temples and dim alleys. The countryside, when we see it, is filled with menacing space. Williamson makes Mignola lighter in the lines than Mignola-inking-Mignola later would, which fits the material -- there's no character here as massive and gravitic as Hellboy. These characters are light on their feet; so, too, both writing and art. Recommended.

Uncanny Banquet (1992) edited by Ramsey Campbell

Uncanny Banquet (1992):

edited by Ramsey Campbell, containing Russell Kirk - Behind The Stumps;; Dorothy K. Haynes - A Horizon Of Obelisks ; Alison Prince - The Loony ; Henry Normanby - The First-Nighter; Fritz Leiber - The Hill And The Hole; Robert Aickman - Ravissante; Donald Wandrei - The Lady In Gray; Walter de la Mare - A Mote ; Ramsey Campbell - McGonagall In The Head, and Adrian Ross - The Hole Of The Pit : 

Leave it to Ramsey Campbell to create a horror story oriented around the malign effects bad poetry has on the mind of a young newspaper writer, complete with a tribute to one of the world's worst poets in the title ("McGonagall In The Head"). It's one of Campbell's most playfully sinister stories, as the possibly supernatural mania affecting the protagonist manifests itself in the character obsessively finishing every sentence he hears or thinks of with a rhyme.

Campbell's second reprint anthology had as its stated goal the reprinting of lesser-known stories by major horror writers, along with offerings from a few lesser-known talents and one lost novel, The Hole Of The Pit, of which more in its own entry. My only complaint would be that I'd like more, though the anthology still clocks in at about 350 pages.

As Campbell notes in his introduction, none of the stories are blood- or grue-filled ('Splatterpunk' was in the middle of its ascent at the time Uncanny Banquet appeared). Instead, terror and suggestion reign throughout, whether the setting is a lonely backwoods area of rural America in Russell Kirk's offering, or the salons of Paris in Robert Aickman's. Campbell selects one of the late, great Fritz Leiber's eeriest offerings, an emblematic collision of ancient horror and modern technology oriented around surveying ("The Hill and the Hole"). Two 'young adult' horror stories are solid ("The Loony" and "The First-Nighter"), as indeed are the rest of the entries . Along with Adrian Ross's odd, haunting novel, a solid collection. Recommended.

Superhorror

The Far Reaches of Fear (previously published as Superhorror [1976]), edited by Ramsey Campbell (1980) containing:

The Viaduct by Brian Lumley; Fog in My Throat by R. A. Lafferty; Christina by Daphne Castell; The Case of James Elmo Freebish by Joseph F. Pumilia; The Hunting Ground by David Drake; The Petey Car by Manly Wade Wellman; Wood by Robert Aickman; The Pattern by Ramsey Campbell and Dark Wings by Fritz Leiber.

Campbell's first original anthology really sees him come out of the gate running. Hell, his first three original anthologies (this, New Terrors and New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos) show a keen mind in the unfortunately not-all-that lucrative world of original horror anthologies. But the 1970's and early 1980's were somewhat financially kinder to the purveyors and writers of short stories.

As with New Terrors, the range of the stories is impressive: Castell's melancholy, M.R. James-tinged ghost story; Drake's terrifically tense tale of a wounded Viet Nam vet come home to a war with something inhumanly worse than the Viet Cong; Pumilia's homage to the EC horror comics of the 1950's; Lafferty's surprisingly understated (for Lafferty) tale of existential science-horror; Wellman's slice of homespun Appalachian creepiness; Leiber's X-rated tale of dopplegangers; Lumley's perfect, awful piece of childhood horror; Aickman's typically mysterious tale of clockwork toys and malign wood-working; and Campbell's own unusual take on predestination and fate.

It's a solid selection of stories under either this name or its original title of Superhorror (the latter hardcover has an awesomely creepy cover). I originally got the latter for 25 cents from the Tillsonburg library in about 1982. Highly recommended.

Reality Invaded

Movies:


Trailer Park Boys: Countdown to Liquor Day. Starring Robb Wells, John Paul Tremblay, Mike Smith, Pat Roach, John Dunsworth, Jonathan Torrens, and Alex Lifeson as Undercover Prostitute#1. Written by Mike Clattenburg, John Paul Tremblay, Mike Smith, Timm Hannebohm and Robb Wells. Directed by Mike Clattenburg. (2009): The Trailer Park Boys franchise has managed to balance lowbrow comedy and biting social satire in a way unique to Canadian television. Maybe all television. The satire all aims upwards: at the hypocrisy of institutions, the willingness of governments to profit from people's addictions to gambling, the glaring flaws in the education system, and a host of other social ills. The comedy gets many of its laughs from violently slapstick moments -- never has a TV series (and subsequent movies) gotten so much profitable comic mileage from characters discharging handguns, for instance.

In this second TPB movie, nothing much has changed. Ricky, Julian and Bubbles get out of jail at the beginning, having served their time for yet another failed criminal enterprise. Mr. Lahey and rotund, unshirted Randy now run a new trailer park, the old one having been boarded up and abandoned. The boys come up with various schemes. Mr. Lahey falls off the wagon. Julian carries a rum-and-coke with him everywhere. The usual criminal hijinks ensue. Disaster looms. Oh, and Ricky studies to get his Grade 12 diploma.

As it's a movie, there's more money for car chases and location work. If nothing else, TPB:CTLD presents the world with an unprecedented twist in car chases, one which I won't explain here because it's quite funny -- and completely in keeping with the spirit of the series. I'm not sure what someone who had never seen a TPB movie or TV episode would get out of this movie. . There's nothing here as funny as the TV escapades of Mountain Lion Steve French, or satirically complex as the episode, "If I Can't Smoke and Swear, I'm Fucked," but I'd still say Highly Recommended.


Sanjuro, starring Toshiro Mifune, directed by Akira Kurosawa (1962): Mifune's wandering, crabby, justice-restoring samurai returns from the classic Yojimbo, this time to prevent an evil Superintendent from taking over a town. Kurosawa stages this as more of a comedy than Yojimbo, which makes the sudden shifts into serious drama quite startling. Like most of the great heroes of Hollywood Westerns, the samurai is doomed to save societies which he can never feel comfortable within. Highly recommended, but only if you've already seen Yojimbo.


Books:


The Last Coin by James Blaylock (1988): Along with the great American fantasist Tim Powers and several others, Blaylock was a friend of Philip K. Dick's. When a group of writers are friends, one calls it an Affinity Group. If there's any influence of Dick on Blaylock, it's in the realms of plot structure and character. The plot veers again and again into unexpected territory; the heroes are normative, faintly ridiculous, but well-meaning.

In this novel, Blaylock presents the reader with a present-day historical fantasy based on equal parts Christian fantasy and eclectic speculation. The 30 pieces of silver paid to Judas Iscariot for his betrayal of Christ are potent magical items which have never been collected all together since Judas attempted suicide after Christ's crucifixion. At that time, Iscariot discovered that he couldn't die: assembled, the coins conferred immortality and great mystical powers upon their owner, though that mystical power was evil and debilitating for most humans. Fully repentant of his sins, Iscariot dedicated his immortal life to keeping the coins -- apparently forged by Satan -- from ever being fully recollected. Animals -- including a giant sea creature and a giant pig -- are naturally disposed to help protect the world from the coins; various humans take on the job of storing one or more of the coins; a sinister magician named Pennyman seeks to reunite them so as to gain complete power over the Earth.

And that's really just the backstory. In 1980's California, a somewhat hapless fellow who runs a hotel for some very peculiar people tries to get ready for the grand opening of his restaurant. Around him and his friends (and his mysterious uncle), the whole plot wheels. This is really a delightful romp with a cast of eclectic characters and a supernatural premise that's a lot more interesting than, say, The DaVinci Code. Highly recommended.


The Penguin Book of Horror Stories, edited by J.A. Caddon (1984): Any time I run across a survey anthology with a 50-page historical introduction, I figure the publisher was hoping for textbook sales. Caddon's selection of stories bounces from interesting to wonky and back again throughout -- I'd say about a third of the stories fail the Horror Test, which is to say I can't imagine anyone actually being horrified by them.

However, there are good and unusual selections from high-end, non-genre writers that include Faulkner, Kafka, Zola and de Balzac. I'd actually have been more interested had the editor tried to create an entire horror anthology out of horror excursions by non-genre writers -- the more traditional genre examples often fall short, though there are nice (albeit overly familiar) stories here by William Hope Hodgson and M.R. James and a few others. Recommended.


Dead Man's Boots: A Felix Castor Novel by Mike Carey (2007): At some time in the recent past of Carey's Felix Castor novels, some supernatural cataclysm resulted in dead souls being released from Hell, and the dead on Earth often being able to stay on Earth in spiritual form indefinitely. One of the attendant effects of this cataclysm was to awake a buried ability in some humans to act as exorcists, capable of binding souls or even sending them back beyond the veil of death. Castor is one of these exorcists, narrating his adventures in the manner of decades of hardboiled detectives before him. Each exorcist has a unique method of dealing with souls. In Castor's case, the music he plays on a tin whistle (!) can summon, bind and/or exorcise spirits and other spiritual entities (there are demons running around the Earth as well).

Here, the apparent suicide of another exorcist helps lead Castor and his allies (primarily the reformed succubus Juliet) deeper and deeper into a mystery surrounding the apparent (and supposedly impossible) physical resurrection of an American serial killer in present-day London. Something strange enough to attract the attention of Hell is going on, and Castor soon finds himself the target of attacks both natural and supernatural. Carey does a lovely job of using the world-weary tone of most hardboiled detective narratives in a dark fantasy context, and the fantasy elements are consistent and 'rational' without too much exposition being used to explain the workings of this particular universe (and Castor isn't certain how or why certain things like exorcism work anyway). Highly recommended.


Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber (1940; rev. 1953): Conjure Wife is one of American fantasy Grandmaster Leiber's two or three best novel-length excursions into what I'd called 'hard fantasy-horror.' 'Hard' refers to the technical concern brought to bear on the 'laws' of magic, not to any prurient content. In this novel, a young American sociology professor is under the mistaken impression that his successes are solely the result of the hard work that he and his wife, Tansy, have put into his academic work over the past decade at staid Hempnell College.

They aren't.

Behind the scenes, the political wars of academia are fought by the wives of the faculty (this was written in 1940) through magic, an area all women are aware of but almost no men. When the protagonist finds his wife's store of magical items, he rationally assumes that his wife is suffering from a neurosis that must be addressed by getting rid of all the charms and wards she's been creating over the years to protect the two of them from magical academic intrigue. But when all the charms are gone, the professor soon discovers that witchcraft works.

Conjure Wife really is a model of suspense and 'rational' magic all the way through, along with a fair bit of horror. While the protagonist seems a bit dense at times, he is operating from the initial assumption that magic and the supernatural are imaginary, and that everything can be explained through empirical means. The portrait of academic life, while dated, still rings true in a lot of places. The book even nods to the old adage that the wars in academia are so nasty because the stakes are so low: and at Hempnell, the war gets very nasty very quickly. Highly recommended.


Comic:


Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol Volume 1: Crawling from the Wreckage by Grant Morrison, Richard Case, Scott Hanna, Carlos Garzon and Doug Braithwaite (1989): Scottish comics writer Grant Morrison's first foray into American comic-book superteams at DC in the late 1980's came on The Doom Patrol, one of DC's more marginal properties that had first appeared in the 1960's, been cancelled by the end of the decade due to low sales, and been revived twice after that. Morrison took over in the 19th issue of the second revival, and rapidly moved Doom Patrol into the realms of weird, adult-oriented superhero comics.

In their original configuration, the Doom Patrol were "the world's strangest heroes", fighting strange, quasi-scientific menaces throughout the 1960's. The initial line-up was brought together by wheelchair-bound super-genius Niles "The Chief" Caulder. Cliff "Robotman" Steele was the muscle of the group; Rita "Elastigirl" Farr could grow, shrink and stretch; and Larry "Negative Man" Trainor could release a bizarre "negative energy" duplicate from his body. They were easily the most misfit team in 1960's superhero comics -- compared to them, the original X-Men and Fantastic Four were exemplars of normalcy.

Morrison quickly ratcheted up the weirdness in what would ultimately by a nearly 4-year run on the title. The Chief became colder, more distant and more manipulative. Cliff Steele started to suffer grave psychiatric crises related to being a human brain stuck in a robot body. Rita Farr...well, she'd actually been dead since the late 1960's, and she didn't return. Larry Trainor and the energy being merged with Doctor Eleanor Poole to form a bizarre new hermaphroditic entity that called itself "Rebis", the "product of an alchemical marriage." Crazy Jane, a woman with 64 different super-powered multiple personalities, joins the group early in Morrison's run.

The villains also became weirder, though they'd always been weird (two of the Patrol's early nemeses were The Brain, a brain in a tank, and Monsieur Mallah, a hyper-intelligent, beret-and-bandolier-wearing gorilla). In Morrison's first 4-issue arc, reprinted herein, the Patrol face the Scissormen, shock troops of an invading, fictional reality created by a bunch of professors initially as a thought-experiment. Thus, Doom Patrol became the first superhero comic to have villains who were an homage to Jorge Luis Borges's short story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius." Later would come The Brotherhood of Dada, the Painting That Ate Paris, Hofmann's Bicycle, the SexMen, Flex Mentallo ("the man of muscle mystery!"), the Candlemaker, the Cult of the Unwritten Book, Danny the Street and a host of other weird and wonderful friends and enemies. Highly recommended.

You're All Alone

Book:

The Sinful Ones (a.k.a. You're All Alone) by Fritz Leiber: It sometimes seems as if science fiction exists partially to repeatedly ask the question 'What is reality?' and then offer a nearly endless variety of possible answers to that question. Fritz Leiber's short novel starts off in the 'One ordinary day...' mode before quickly veering off into one of the more disturbing examinations of 'reality' ever put to paper. You're All Alone, Leiber's original title for the novel, sums up this paranoid fantasy about whether or not a person can ever be certain of the reality of the people and things around him or her. In a very vague way, this is a vacuum-tube era version of The Matrix, but without kung fu or computers or any easy answers. Or a Messiah, for that matter. Highly recommended.


Comic:


Essential Fantastic Four Volume 5 by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, John Romita, John Buscema and others: Jack Kirby's last twenty or so issues of his original Fantastic Four run appear here, along with a handful or issues illustrated by other hands. We again do a lot of revisiting of villains and situations, including Mole Man, the shape-changing alien Skrulls, the Submariner, Doctor Doom in what may be the best Doom story ever, and the antimatter Negative Zone and its bizarre inhabitants.

The most pivotal storyline included is that of the birth of Franklin Richards, first child of Mr. Fantastic and Invisible Girl. He'll undergo some serious rapid aging over the course of about twenty issues, going from birth to what appears to be two years old, prior to settling back into the more sedate 'normal' world of superhero aging. Highly recommended.

From Hell's Heart

Books:

Hunger for Horror ed. Robert & Pamela Crippen Adams & Martin H. Greenberg: The 1970's and 1980's were the Golden Age of genre reprint anthologies, before the bottom starting dropping out on a lot of things in the publishing business (most of them related to short stories). Thanks to his work with Isaac Asimov and others, Martin H. Greenberg has his name on an awful lot of those genre anthologies, primarily in the realms of science fiction, fantasy and horror. This theme anthology collects horror stories that feature food and eating, and it's an enjoyable jaunt from the always acidic Ambrose Bierce to the 1980's. I'm not sure that Michael Bishop's bizarre bit of metafiction about a man who turns into a planet-sized tomato qualifies as horror, but it is pretty funny. Recommended.


Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber (1977): Leiber was a restless giant of genre writing, producing major work in science fiction, fantasy and horror from the 1930's until his death in the early 1990's. His mature prose style managed to be allusive without being overwhelmingly dense, with a narrative tone that foreshadows Neil Gaiman, only tougher minded. He wrote one of the seminal "bridge" works in American fantasy fiction, 1940's "Smoke Ghost", which suggested that an industrial age would spawn its own peculiar new horrors rather than simply regurgitating the ghosts and vampires of the past. Much of his horror fiction worked within that vein which he helped to create, positing modern incarnations of vampires ("The Girl with the Hungry Eyes") and witches (Conjure Wife) that were no longer tired, anachronistic tropes.

This novel manages to gently satirize cosmic Lovecraftian horrors while at the same time seriously investing in the possibility of new horrors that far outstrip the old in malevolence and power. Two books purchased at a used book store in San Francisco turn out to be a seemingly loopy explanation of how cities breed new supernatural horrors called "paramentals" and a lost diary of real-world fantasy writer Clark Ashton Smith. And then things start to get strange for the protagonist, a fantasy writer and recovering alcoholic in his late 40's. My only complaint about this novel is that one wants it to be longer -- it clocks in at under 200 pages, leaving one wishing for more but also impressed at Leiber's brevity in a world dominated by 500-page horror novels. Highest recommendation.


Comic:


Marvel Illustrated Presents Moby Dick, adapted by Roy Thomas and Pascal Alixe: Herman Melville's Moby Dick resists adaptation in movies and comics, partially because of its great length and partially because of its idiosyncratic content -- a number of lengthy chapters explain at great length the nuts and bolts of things like whaling, rope-making and what-have-you, making it one of the most expository novels ever written.

Writer Roy Thomas has been the king of comics adaptation for decades now, beginning with his lengthy run on Conan the Barbarian, so he's a pretty good choice for any literary adaptation that one doesn't want to see diverge too much from the source. He does a nice job here of boiling down the narrative to fit into a 130-page comic, partially (as he notes in the foreword) by throwing out most of the exposition and expanding the length of the final battle with the Great White Whale in relation to the rest of the text. Thomas mainly resticts his writing to selections culled from the novel to supply both dialogue and Ishmael's narration, foregrounding the neo-Shakespearean Gothic of Melville's prose.

Pascal Alixe's art is a bit too cartoony and large-eyed to be wholly successful -- there are times when the characters are way too cute for what's happening to them. However, he effectively renders Moby Dick himself as a sinister, almost impressionistic force seen mainly as a series of inhuman body parts: the sublime and terrifying head, the tail, the harpoon-studded back with a dead man accidentally lashed to it. Recommended.