A while ago I bought a copy of the Fall 1980 issue of Destinies for a dollar.  Destinies was a quarterly magazine in the form of a paperback book edited by Jim Baen; the Fall 1980 issue is the ninth of eleven published issues.  This one has a space war cover by Vincent DiFate and includes a bunch of essays by SF luminaries like Robert Heinlein, Frederik Pohl, Jerry Pournelle, and Joe Haldeman that speculate on the future of war and space colonization and stuff like that; there are also book reviews by Norman Spinrad.  But it is the fiction I will be looking at, stories by Fred Saberhagen of Berserker fame, Gregory Benford-- an actual scientist--and David "Hammer's Slammers" Drake.  James Gunn's name is on the cover but I don't see it on the table of contents.

"Recessional" by Fred Saberhagen 

"Recessional" here in Destinies is illustrated by Stephen Fabian, who contributes two female nudes reminiscent in composition of something from a detective magazine and an effective if traditionally composed mad scientist drawing.  I am a Fabian fan, so these are welcome.  "Recessional" was reprinted first in an anthology edited by Saberhagen himself, and went on to be included in two different Saberhagen collections.

"Recessional" is an allusive and somewhat surreal story, a sort of science fiction crime tale with meta, perhaps autobiographical, elements.  It works, and is pretty economical, so I can mildly recommend it.

Our nameless main character is a science fiction writer who is fascinated by the hard sciences and reads the legitimate academic science journals; he loves jargon and includes lots of science jargon in his fiction.  The story follows him as he leaves a science fiction convention on the east coast and drives west.  We readers get lots of clues that, one, he is passing in and out of alternate universes, places where the United States and his own life are slightly different, and two, that he murdered his wife and threw her into the ocean or (in some other universes) maybe a major river, either years ago or (in some other universes) very recently.  As he travels from coast to coast he sees TV shows and hears radio reports about a new scientific technique that allows scientists to scan dead skulls and pick up images from the bone of scenes the dead person witnessed while alive.  There is some suspicion among the scientific community that the images thus collected may not be quite accurate representations of reality, that what the scientists are seeing may be warped by the expectations and biases of the original, now dead, viewer and by the current viewer who is gathering the images today.  Also, some experts fear that the technique of gleaning the images from the skulls, which involves radiation that alters subatomic particles, may warp reality, may be creating or exposing alternate universes.  The writer also keeps hearing news reports about the police finding dead bodies of women on shores and river banks.  We readers have to assume that it is likely in one or another universe that the cops are going to scan the dead skull of the writer's wife and discover who she is and who murdered her.

"Pick an Orifice" by Gregory Benford

The title makes us expect this is a sex joke story, and that is what we get.  It is the near future and some eleven-year-olds whose fathers are computer engineers get their hands on some powerful new software.  They use it to create wild and crazy pornography, people having sex with vacuum cleaners and animals and monsters and so forth.  Benford goes, a little, into some of the theory of how a computer might model three dimensional objects, and into the social implications of computer-generated cinema--in this story actors and directors become a thing of the past, as a computer can do their jobs, and the kids own copyright to the porn they create and so they make a lot of money when their porn becomes famous.  

Weak (though not actually boring or repulsive) as a piece of fiction, but perhaps prescient when we consider how today AI threatens the work of so many middle-class professionals and people in the entertainment industry as computers increasingly demonstrate the ability to manipulate words and images into coherent documents that consumers will accept as readily as that fashioned by human minds.  We'll call "Pick an Orifice" acceptable.

isfdb suggests "Pick an Orifice" has never been reprinted, making Destinies Volume 2 Number 4 essential for all you Benford completists out there.     

"The Automatic Rifleman" by David Drake

Here we have a story which has reappeared in three different Drake collections.  "The Automatic Rifleman" is too long, moves slowly, and is a little overwritten and silly, with lots of superfluous detail and over-the-top characters, but it isn't actually bad.  We'll judge it acceptable filler.

We've got four characters.  Setting things in motion is a big black dude who is educated and very concerned about pollution and injustice and all that.  He has decided to strike a blow for justice by murdering a Japanese politician who is visiting the United States.  He has two henchman, a short angry "swarthy" veteran and an angry blonde woman, I guess the black guy's girlfriend.  As the story begins these three terrorists arrive at an unscheduled meeting with a fourth individual, a man who claims to have the skills and equipment to ensure they succeed in assassinating the politician.  This guy has an unusual automatic rifle which never leaves his hand.

We get a lot of scenes in which these four macho characters demonstrate how much they dislike each other and try to one-up each other and prove to each other and themselves how tough they are.  The science fiction content consists of the repeated hints that the guy with the strange rifle has participated in many famous assassinations, such as those of JFK and MLK, and that the rifle is alive or a robot, the representative of space aliens who are manipulating Earth history and society through targeted killings of influential Earthers.  There's a long sequence about ranging in weapons, then the scene of the actual assassination attempt, and then the resolution of the conflict between the mysterious man with the advanced rifle and the swarthy guy who has been suspicious of him the entire story.

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Of today's three stories, Saberhagen's is the most ambitious and literary, the one that actually succeeds in depicting a human character and generating some kind of human feeling.  Benford's succeeds in the realistic-speculations-about-the-future game, even though it is a dirty joke story and a get-rich-quick wish fulfillment fantasy.  Drake's tale is a sort of men's adventure version of a Twilight Zone story with its obvious twist and all the padding consisting of macho men trying to psychologically dominate each other with their tough talk and by brandishing guns and knives.  

These stories are not great, but they aren't bad, either, so we shouldn't complain.  One thing that perhaps links the stories together is a sense of 1970s pessimism; Saberhagen suggests SF cons aren't fun anymore and has a broken marriage at its core, Benford's story features broken homes, high energy prices and lonely suburban latchkey kids with nothing to do, and Drake's is all about social unrest and urban terrorism.  

So, an underwhelming and perhaps slightly depressing foray into the anthology shelves of the MPorcius Library.  But we've seen much worse.  Who knows what we'll turn up next among my purchases of the last ten years?  Stay tuned to find out.

Just a few days ago we read Frank Belknap Long's story from Whispers III, a 1981 anthology edited by Stuart David Schiff that published brand new stories as well as fiction and art that originally appeared in issues of Schiff's magazine, Whispers.  Whispers III is full of stories by authors we have talked about in the past here at MPorcius Fiction Log; let's read three such stories, those by Ramsey Campbell, David Drake, and Hugh B. Cave.  I'm reading the stories from the copy of Whispers III scanned into the internet archive, but if you collectors out there covet a physical copy of Lee Brown Coye's drawing from Whispers #9 that depicts a man cooking a baby (!) it looks like copies of Whispers III are available online for ten bucks.

"Heading Home" by Ramsey Campbell (1978) 

"Heading Home" first appeared in Whispers #11-12, and, a big hit, it has since been reprinted many times, including in a 2018 anthology of horror stories called The Five Senses of Horror that includes "psychological commentary by Jessica Bayliss, PhD."   Jessica Bayliss, I find, has published two YA books of fiction and is available to provide personal coaching to aspiring writers as well as to review your manuscript to make sure your characters are "super-compelling" and have "mental health diagnoses" that are "portrayed accurately."

"Heading Home" is written in the rare (outside of a Fighting Fantasy Gamebook or Choose Your Own Adventure) second-person singular.  I recognized the story as soon as I started reading it; I must have read it just a year or two before starting this blog, but had forgotten the title.  This is a quite good story that features several of my favorite topics, like immortality, mad scientists, and disastrous sexual relationships.

As the story begins, we immediately know that "you" have been attacked by your wife's lover and incapacitated and thrown down into the basement.  Campbell describes your painful climb up the stairs to the ground floor--you can hear your killers on what we yanks call the second floor, and English people like Campbell call the first floor.  As you desperately ascend the stairs and then slowly crawl to your laboratory, Campbell gradually reveals that you are a scientist who has discovered how to become almost invulnerable and immortal through the exercise of conscious and precise control over your body; for example, you can detect and cure cancers within your own body by mental effort.  Progress comes at a price, and in the course of your experiments you have found it necessary to murder children.  The biggest reveal, which  has been foreshadowed and which readers may suspect, is that your wife's lover chopped your head off, and you are just a head, struggling--successfully!--to get back to your headless body, which you will be able to reunite with.

This is a great little story that I can recommend with some enthusiasm; it deserves to be reprinted all those times and to have been psychoanalyzed by a PhD.  It is especially pleasant to recommend "Heading Home" because I have so often thought Campbell's stories long and tedious and lacking a payoff commensurate with the labor required to understand them--"Heading Home" in contrast is economical (less than four pages long) and easy to figure out and has a terrific payoff.

"King Crocodile" by David Drake (1981)

"King Crocodile" is set in Ancient Egypt, I guess during or just after the military campaign that first unified Egypt under a single pharaoh, whom Drake refers to as "Nar-mer."  Southerners have been marching north, conquering villages and towns as they go, and our protagonist, muscular fighting man Khati, is one of those Southerners, and has been given authority over one of those villages.  The story follows Khati over several days as he interacts with the natives now under his power, and as the tale proceeds we learn about his life, personality, and relationships with the more prominent villagers.

The main theme and topic of the novella (like 24 pages here) has to do with the fact that many of the villagers worship the crocodile god Sebek, but Khati hates crocodiles because a croc killed his wife, and so he encourages and even compels people to hunt and kill and eat crocodiles.  A determined local priest of Sebek warns Khati to stop this blasphemy, and then a huge crocodile kills the sons of one of the richer men in the village, threatening Khati's already shaky relationship with this prominent citizen and his governorship of the whole village.

As the story title suggests, there is a struggle over who will be king to the people of the village, Nar-mer, represented by Khati, or Sebek the crocodile, who has his own representative, that priest.  Drake presents us scenes in which Khati acts as a politician in competition for hearts and minds with the priest of Sebek, trying to win the populace to his side and make sure fear of the giant croc doesn't ruin the local economy, and scenes in which Khati acts as a warrior, battling it out with the monster crocodile.  He faces many setbacks and dicey moments, including a good horror scene in which he is trapped in the croc's den, but in the end succeeds in defeating the reptile and its priest, though we have to wonder if Khati has lost his humanity in the process.   

This is a good horror and adventure story, and it is also a story about the politics of imperialism that reminds you of accounts you hear of British rule in India and similar situations, accounts that suggest how risky it is to public order and the maintenance of imperial rule to threaten subject peoples' religions, no matter how wacky those religions may be.  Editor Schiff in his little intro to the story says Drake conducted a lot of research for "King Crocodile," and there is plenty of business about the sorts of weapons people of the period carried (we learn that metal weapons are rare, for example, and that many edged weapons are made of flint or even wood) and how Nile boats were constructed back in those days; this sort of thing adds an additional layer of interest to a story that has a pulpy Conan-like climax in which Khati rescues somebody about to be sacrificed on an altar made of a fossilized giant crocodile skull.

Thumbs up!

"King Crocodile" would be included in the 1989 Drake collection Vettius and Friends and in a 1992 Finnish anthology.   

"The Door Below" by Hugh B. Cave

This is a long mediocre thing with an overly complicated, somewhat contrived plot, a plot sort of like that of a detective story, in which an amateurish investigator guy has a theory about some murders and finds some clues that bring the true story of the murders to his attention.

Al Coppard is a middle-aged journalist.  Just two weeks ago his wife filed for divorce.  Don't feel bad for Al, though--he now has a hot girlfriend ten years younger than he, Wendy Corwin, his fellow reporter.  Al is hoping to further his career by uncovering a scandalous conspiracy involving a rich guy and, incredibly, a young boy.  You aren't supposed to like Al, I guess--the most interesting thing about "The Door Below" may be that it is some kind of attack on journalists.

As part of his pursuit of that career-making scoop, Al and Wendy paddle a boat to a lighthouse on a little half-acre island.  As they explore the island and the lighthouse we are filled in on Al's conspiracy theory.  In the lighthouse the journalos discover clues that explode Al's self-interested theory and indicate what really happened.  Then monsters attack and Al gets killed; Wendy, perhaps, escapes.

If you are truly curious about the plot of "The Door Below," read on!  

Background: The lighthouse until recently was operated by Joe Marshall, former chauffer to millionaire cosmetics manufacturer Roy Bolke.  Joe got hurt in a car crash and so Roy got him the lighthouse job.  Roy's wife Amanda was a kook who, like so many people in stories we read here at MPorcius Fiction Log, was a student of the occult.  Amanda even wrote a book about the island the lighthouse is on, in which she put forward the theory that the island is above a gateway to hell or some other dimension full of monsters.

Joe's nine-year-old grandson Danny was with Joe on the fateful day Roy and Amanda's yacht sailed by the lighthouse.  Also on the yacht was a beautiful Spanish model whom Roy was grooming to be the face of his cosmetic line.  According to Danny, Joe and Roy were talking on the radio, then Roy stopped talking, so Joe and Danny took a boat out to the yacht to see if everything was OK.  Everything was not OK--the Spanish model had vanished, but left her clothes on the deck, and Roy and Amanda were dead, their bodies drained of blood and covered in odd puncture wounds.  Joe and Danny returned to the lighthouse, and when Danny woke up in the morning his grandfather was dead, his body in the same strange condition as Roy and Amanda's.  Danny fled to shore to tell this story to the fuzz, but when the cops investigated yacht and lighthouse the bodies of Joe, Roy and Amanda had all vanished.

Al's cynical and dumb theory: Al the scandal monger thinks Danny is lying, that Joe and Roy and the Spanish model murdered Amanda and fled the country.

What really happened:  Al and Wendy get stuck on the island in the lighthouse by a storm that wrecks their row boat.  Al kills time by reading Amanda's book.  Wendy kills time by rifling through all the contents of the light house.  She finds a cassette tape recording of the radio conversation between Roy and Joe as well as a crucifix made in Spain.  With these clues these two members of the Fourth Estate  piece together what really happened that terrible day.  Amanda cast a spell that opened that door to hell and out of it came monsters who slew her and her husband.  The Spanish model survived initially because she had the crucifix.  But then she disrobed to swim to shore, absent-mindedly left the crucifix with her clothes, and got killed.  Danny pocketed the crucifix when he and his grandpa searched the boat.  When the monsters attacked the lighthouse that night, they sucked the blood out of Joe but let tasty morsel Danny sleep on because he had the crucifix on his person.

After Wendy and Al figure this stuff out, the monsters invade the lighthouse again.  Wendy has the crucifix and holds the monsters off as she runs down the stairs, leaving Al behind to be massacred.

This story is long and complicated and the time and energy one expends reading it are not adequately rewarded by the level of fun it offers: the style, the characters, the images, and the plot resolution are all pretty unremarkable.  Cave's story isn't offensively bad, but it just sits there, like filler.  We're judging this one barely acceptable.

I guess some people were impressed by the story, because "The Door Below" would go on to be the title story of a 1997 Cave collection.  It can also be found in a 1993 anthology of adventure and speculative fiction stories in which figure lighthouses. 

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We'll probably read more from Whispers III soon, but first we'll be tackling a 1970 SF novel that a blog post of tarbandu's reminded me I own.

Let's check out four more stories from Playboy Paperbacks's 1982 anthology Terrors, edited by Charles L. Grant, who, at the time Terrors was published, was living in the very milieu in which a young MPorcius grew up, that stretch of Northern New Jersey that lies along Route 80.

"Night Freight" by Bill Pronzini (1967)

Here's a story by Barry Malzberg's friend and collaborator Bill Pronzini that appeared first in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine and would go on to be the title story of a 2000 collection of Pronzini tales.

"Night Freight" is a competent little shocker story about riding the rails that clocks in at about seven pages.  A guy with a suitcase jumps aboard a box car in Southern California.  As the train rumbles northward, we learn all about his failed marriage--his wife didn't want to leave her hometown but our dude had a good job offer in Cali, so off they went.  The wife was miserable in the Golden State, they fought, she left him, got a divorce.  Our dude was brokenhearted--he really loved this chick--and went a little crazy, quitting his job and searching all over until he found his ex-wife.

When the train stops for water or something, two veteran tramps hop in the box car.  These two knights of the road try to overpower our dude and steal his suitcase, which they figure is full of warm clothes--the train is approaching chilly country, after all, and these two bums could certainly use some cozy duds that some other guy paid for!  Then comes our shock ending.  In the struggle the suitcase gets opened and it is revealed that our dude is carrying around the disassembled corpse of his beloved ex-wife, whom he slew when she refused to get back together with him. 

Acceptable.

"Darktree, Darktide" by Michael Bishop (1971)

Here's a horror story by critically-acclaimed Michael Bishop.  "Darktree, Darktide" first appeared in F&SF in the year of my birth and has only ever appeared in book form here in Terrors, so I think we can call this a Michael Bishop "deep cut."

I like to be the rebel or reactionary who disagrees with the critics and bucks trends, but "Darktree, Darktide" is my favorite story so far from Terrors--it is well-written, offers good images and metaphors, addresses themes of particular interest to me and incorporates elements that resonant peculiarly with me.  I guess Bishop deserves the critics' encomiums.

Eight-year-old Jon Dahlquist is the son of a wealthy family.  A worn-out old woman, Chloe, moves in with the Dahlquists--she is not a blood relative, but in some vague way is connected to Jon's family, and in fact begins to eclipse Jon as the center of his parents' attention.  She sleeps in young Jon's room for six nights because the room that is to be hers is unfinished, telling him strange stories he has trouble recalling, but which have an effect on his psyche.  Chloe's presence works changes in his parents' characters as well; for example, Jon's father begins to revere old things, getting rid of their car to buy an older car, one that he says "has tradition behind it," and moving the family into an older house. 

Over seven pages Bishop lays out the clues and sustains a mood that lets us know that Chloe is some kind of witch or soul-sucking vampire who feeds on the energy of others.  After her initial stay in the Dahlquist house, Chloe, terminally ill, is sent to Darktree Sanatorium.  She resides there for nearly two years, during which time Jon and his parents regularly visit her--disgustingly, at these visits bedridden Chloe insists on embracing Jon in her hideous gnarled purple hands, kissing him passionately on the mouth.  Yuck!  In the final scene of the story Chloe the sorceress or whatever she is, through one of her sickeningly erotic kisses, switches bodies with ten-year-old Jon, so that he finds himself in her dying husk of a body, watching through her filmy eyes his own healthy young form walking away with his smiling parents, who have traded their son in for an older model with a long history behind it.

This story integrates classic supernatural/SF elements--parasitic longevity techniques and body switching--with our all-too-natural fears of death, worries our parents will betray or abandon us, and revulsion at the smell and touch of the aged.  Quite good, well worth seeking out (you can read it at the internet archive at the link above.)  I'm a little surprised it hasn't appeared in more of the many horror anthologies that are being published all the time.

"Today's Special" by Dennis Etchison (1972)

"Today's Special" first appeared in Cavalier, and would go on to be included in Etchison collections and some anthologies, including 100 Menacing Little Murder Stories.  I was dismayed to find it a joke story about the kind of comic stereotype European immigrants you might find in an old sitcom.  I guess this sort of irreverent material is appropriate for a skin rag, though.

Business is lousy at the neighborhood butcher shop owned by Lou Avratin and his wife Rachel.  We learn why when Mrs. Teola, a friend of thirteen years who demands to be called Mrs. Taylor because her husband Manny changed their name to Taylor because he thought it would be better for business, refuses to buy anything and, when pressed, exclaims, "You get Luttfisk back, then maybe we talk meat.  That Luttfisk, he knows meat!"  Rachel nags Lou to get his former partner, Luttfisk, back, even though the man tried to rob Lou.  Exasperated, Lou appears to agree...and then he wreaks a terrible revenge!

Lou hires the best butcher in the county, a master of the blade who is also a hitman!  Etchison gives us a comic scene of this well-dressed, well-coiffed gent, who is known as "The White Collar Butcher," meticulously preparing his razor sharp tools and his chopping block.  Then we cut to the final scene of the story, in which all the women in the neighborhood line up at the door of the Avartin shop early in the morning in eager response to the huge banner Lou has hung in the window that reads "LUTTFISK IS BACK!"  When Lou opens up the shop the women look in the refrigerated case to see the many pieces of the flawlessly butchered body of Luttfisk.

I consider this sort of thing a waste of time.


"Smokie Joe" by David Drake (1977)

"Smokie Joe" first saw print in the second of Michel Parry's two Devil's Kisses anthologies, which Parry edited under the pseudonym Linda Lovecraft, in keeping with their theme of "erotic horror." As you can see on the cover, the boys down in marketing at Corgi also came up with the idea of leveraging the fact that Corgi was the publisher of the British paperback edition of The Exorcist. More Devil's Kisses ran into considerable legal trouble in Great Britain; read all about this contemptible incident of government suppression of freedom of speech and of the press in this blogpost, which includes extensive quotes from Parry and Drake.  "Smokie Joe" would later be included in various Drake collections.

I've enjoyed some of Drake's horror short stories in the past, but "Smokie Joe" is just not very good, a boring organized crime story written in a clunky style and full of lame metaphors ("The trio scuttled down the steps, their eyes darting about the street like lizards' tongues.")  I guess Drake's primary aim with the story is to shock and disgust the reader--the most memorable parts of its twelve pages are descriptions of injuries inflicted by firearms and explosives and descriptions of severely diseased penises.

The plot:  An Irish-American crime boss, Tom Mullen, is in some kind of war with another boss, Tullio, and enlists three men of violence, Angelo, Nick, and their leader Smokie Joe, to help him.  Mullen's outfit is relatively tame, their income based on the numbers game, but under the influence of Smokie Joe and his crew extreme anti-social policies are undertaken--Tullio is defeated by detonating Claymore anti-personnel mines at his church that kill over a dozen people, Mullen's accountant is murdered so Joe can take over the gang's finances, and Joe shifts the gang's operations over to heroin-dealing and prostitution.  Mullen's new brothel caters to the most violent and depraved of clients, for example, those who want to watch a huge black man with a diseased penis whip and rape a drugged girl.  Smokie Joe has bribed and blackmailed all the local politicians, so these outrageous atrocities are not subject to prosecution.

As the story ends we learn that Smokie Joe has contrived for Mullen's son to contract the same penis affliction that that oversized African-American man is suffering, and when Tom in a rage tries to murder Smokie Joe it becomes even more obvious that Smokie Joe is no ordinary criminal mastermind, but the Devil himself.

I am predisposed to skepticism towards stories about organized crime and stories about the Devil, so "Smokie Joe" was already facing an uphill battle trying to win me over, and it fails spectacularly, not only because it is poorly written, but because it comes off as a parody of a story that is striving to be as offensive as possible.  Maybe "Smokie Joe" is a big goof that Drake deliberately wrote poorly as some kind of satire?  Maybe Michel Parry commissioned Drake to provide a story that would emphasize over-the-top exploitative elements?  Whatever Drake is doing here, I don't like it; gotta give "Smokie Joe" a spirited thumbs down.  This is far worse than Steve Rasnic Tem's "The Poor" or Dennis Etchison's "Today's Special," neither of which I liked but both of which are clearly sincere efforts to achieve an artistic vision--"Smokie Joe" in sad contrast just feels cynical and shoddy, and I'm surprised Grant saw fit to include it.

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The Bishop is obviously the stand out here.

That's enough late 20th-century horror for a while; it's mid-century science fiction in our next episode!  Stay tuned!

Looking around everybody's favorite online resource, the internet archive, for stories by Tanith Lee, I came upon prolific anthologist Martin H. Greenberg's 1997 Vampires: The Greatest Stories.  I've actually already read and blogged about the Lee story included by Greenberg, "Red as Blood," but Vampires: The Greatest Stories contains quite a few stories by other writers we are interested in here at MPorcius Fiction Log--Robert Bloch of Psycho fame, Amber scribe Roger Zelazny, creator of Hammer's Slammers David Drake, the man who brought us Kane, Karl Edward Wagner, and the guy who wrote Vincent Price's and Steven Spielberg's best movies, Richard Matheson--and I decided to check them out.  Could they really be among the greatest of all the many vampire stories out there?

"The Bat is My Brother" by Robert Bloch (1944)

A title ripped from today's headlines!  Oh, wait, I thought it said "The Bat in My Broth."  Anyway, "The Bat is My Brother" debuted in Weird Tales, and was mentioned by name on the cover.  When I see that this issue includes stories by August Derleth, Manly Wade Wellman and Hannes Bok which I have never read, and a Ray Bradbury story I should reread, I realize that, unless I achieve immortality (you know, like a vampire!) I will never run out of weird fiction to read.

Graham Keene awakens to discover he has been buried alive!  A poor man, he was interred in a cheap unsealed coffin in a shallow pauper's grave, and manages to tear his way out of the casket and up out of the earth.  Back on the surface, in the cemetery, Keene is greeted by a gray-haired wrinkle-faced man who welcomes him to his new life--as a vampire!--and introduces himself as his guardian--this guy is going to show Keene the ropes!

"The Bat is My Brother" is one of those stories that divorces vampirism from religion and the supernatural and tries to explain it scientifically.  I am skeptical that this is really a good idea.  Keene's new friend tells him vampirism is a disease, and spends quite a number of pages explaining to the new recruit to the ranks of the undead what "rules" of vampirism hold in this story: it is true that vampires cast no shadow or reflection, but the idea that they can change into bats or wolves is just superstition; a vampire really can't be killed by weapons, but he is not truly immortal, eventually, he will decay.  And so forth.  If we accept the existence of God and the Devil (or the deities of polytheistic religions), it is easy to accept that a guy might suffer the curse of having no shadow or reflection or be granted the power to survive getting shot full of holes, but it is hard to accept that a mere disease might thusly exempt you from basic physical laws.

Anyway, the old vampire explains to Keene his plan to create an army of vampires to take over the world, and why no vampire over the centuries has ever done this before.  He wants Keene to be his lieutenant, and Keene must decide if he is willing join to this vampire revolution and embrace a position as a high ranking member of the vampire dictatorship.

This story is sort of pedestrian, though not actually bad.  The best scene is when the old vampire explains in detail how to best kill and feed on a young woman, using your left hand to cover her mouth and your right to pinion her arms, etc., because this scene is chillingly cruel and disturbingly erotic while fulfilling the story's theme of applying science and logic and practicality to the essentially supernatural or allegorical idea of vampirism.  Otherwise, "The Bat is My Brpother" is sort of bland.

Acceptable.  "The Bat is My Brother" has been included in several anthologies, including Michel Parry's The Rivals of Dracula.

The contents page of the 1944 issue of Weird Tales in which it appears teases "The Bat is My Brother" with what we might call a social justice joke

"Dayblood" by Roger Zelazny (1985)

"Dayblood" was first published in Twilight Zone magazine.  It was first reprinted in the 1989 Zelazny collection Frost and Fire, which I own, but which I have yet to read anything from.  Unless I live forever (you know, like a vampire!) I'll never read all the SF books I have accumulated.

"Dayblood" fits the Twilight Zone brand, with a twist ending and a snarky, smart alecky, attitude.  A vampire has turned a local beauty into a vampire, and the woman's fiance forms a three-man posse with a priest and a physician and, armed with garlic and stakes, head to the ruined church where the vampire and his new companion are residing.  Our narrator is a smart ass journalist who complains that the vampire was foolish to let these mundanes (you kids say "muggles") detect his work and track him to his lair.  The reporter is waiting by the church when the three vampire hunters arrive.

The twist ending is that the journalist is a monster who feeds on vampires, so he ambushes the innocent Christians and murders them, preserving the two undead monsters so he can later kill them himself and gain sustenance from them.  The narrator talks of an "underworld ecosystem" that needs to be balanced, explaining that vampires haven't multiplied so much that they could take over the world because if there were too many vampires there would be too few living people for them to feed on.  Again we see scientific concepts applied to the fantastical idea of vampirism.

Acceptable.  This story has been widely anthologized in some of the many vampire books out there.


"Something Had to Be Done" by David Drake (1975)

"Something Had to Be Done" had its debut in F&SF and has reappeared in quite a few anthologies and Drake collections, including the 1976 edition of DAW's Year's Best Horror Stories.  It is short and economical, which I appreciate, is told in a clever and slightly oblique manner, and has a good twist ending that packs a punch.

Captain Richmond has the unenviable task of visiting the families of personnel killed in Vietnam.  He is accompanied on these visits by another officer, and on today's visit, to the Lunkowski family, it is a Sergeant Morzek, who served with the dead Private Lunkowski, who comes with him.  Morzek is old and emaciated and covered in weird moles, and seems to be drunk!

Morzek isn't acting like people usually do on these generally sad and solemn visits, and the three surviving Lunkowskis also act in an odd fashion as Morzek talks to them about their son's service and death.  Morzek's brief narrative and the Lunkowskis' reactions indicate that Private Lunkowski was a vampire, and so are the three people in the house here with Morzek and Richmond!  Lunkowski started murdering his comrades to drink their blood, and when Morzek realized this, he killed Lunkowski (who had proven immune to rifle fire during an attack by "the dinks") with a phosphorus grenade.  The Lunkowskis surround Morzek and Richmond and start closing in for the kill, but Morzek came with the specific purpose of cleansing the world of the Lunkowski menace and has brought another phosphorus grenade with him!  He tells Richmond to jump out the window and then detonates the explosive, incinerating himself and the monsters.

Quite good.  All the little details Drake includes as the story goes along that at first seem like window dressing or to hint at one thing in fact add to the tone or plot and end up hinting at something else--for example, because he is so sick-looking I initially thought Morzek might be a vampire, but in fact he has terminal cancer and the fact that he only has a few weeks to live has made easier his decision to die fighting the undead menace.


"Beyond Any Measure" by Karl Edward Wagner (1982)

"Beyond Any Measure" made its debut in Whispers #15-16, the special Ramsey Campbell issue of the magazine.  It has reappeared in many Wagner collections and vampire anthologies.

Lisette is an American art student studying in London; she shares a room with Danielle, another tall, slender young American artist.  Lisette has been having bad dreams, and Danielle arranges for her to meet a Dr. Magnus at a gallery opening--Magnus, she says, is an expert on dreams.  Lisette begins going to Magnus's office regularly to be hypnotized; Magnus believes that past lives have an influence on our thoughts, through racial memory in our DNA or because of reincarnation of the soul, and he provides "treatment" to Lisette free of charge because he thinks her case can finally settle the questions of the reality of racial memory and the immortality of the soul.  Under hypnosis Lisette relates memories of being a lady in the late 19th century, memories that all seem to have to do with coffins and graveyards and blood!

"Beyond Any Measure" is long, almost 50 pages in Vampires: The Greatest Stories, and it feels long because Wagner fills it with long conversations and long descriptions of people's clothes and bodies that do little to move the plot or generate emotion in the reader.  Wagner seems to be trying to make his story sexually arousing, so in every scene we have to hear all about about what clothes Lisette and Danielle are wearing and how their attire shows off their bodies, and Lisette's dreams and recovered memories always mention that her hair or rain water or blood or whatever is running over her breasts.  One of Wagner's themes in the story is the indulgence and license of the cultural elite, so in a scene at a masked ball where everybody snorts cocaine (which they call "toot") we get verbose descriptions of half a dozen people's BDSM outfits.

Lisette and Danielle are lesbian lovers, though their relationship is not very convincing or interesting--they don't act like any couple I have ever met or like any lesbians I have ever met; in most scenes they just act like casual friends, so when they suddenly started having sex in the shower I was taken by surprise.  "Beyond Any Measure" has three lesbian sex scenes, all of which end in blood.  In the first Lisette performs oral sex on Danielle, who hasn't realized she is on her period, so that when Lisette stands up sees herself in the mirror with blood on her face--you know, like a vampire!--and faints.  In the second a character introduced in the second half of the story, Beth Garrington, a wealthy woman who looks just like Lisette, murders Danielle after tricking her into thinking she is Lisette.

Then comes a long plodding explanation of what Dr. Magnus turned up by hypnotizing Lisette and by scouring old newspapers and public records.  In short, in the 19th century an aristocratic woman became a vampire.  When you become a vampire your soul leaves your body, but the soul is immortal, so the lost soul of this vampire lady--who now goes by the name Beth Garrington-- reincarnated in the body of Lisette when she was born.  Driven by the subconscious desire for justice and revenge that lies buried in her soul, without knowing what she was doing, Lisette came to London and sought out her former, now vampiric, body.  (I think.)

Beth Garrington, intrigued by Lisette's physical similarity to her, lures Lisette to her estate, where she starts having sex with the student and then bites her neck to drain her blood.  But, because they are, in some way, one person, this, for some reason, kills both of them.  Dr. Magnus arrives at the estate to find the two nude bodies, one still young and beautiful, one like a dried up mummy, intertwined in death.

Have to give "Beyond Any Measure" a thumbs down.  The plot is complicated and limp; the characters don't demonstrate drive or motivation, none of them seems to have any ambition or love or hate or fear, they act listlessly, like leaves in a gentle breeze.  The story feels very long and slow; there are repetitive and superfluous scenes and repetitive and superfluous sentences within scenes.  The whole time Wagner seems to be trying too hard, piling on the descriptions of clothes and boobs in an effort to be sexy, describing drug use and punk rock attire in an effort to be edgy, trying to get horror fans on his side with his name-checking of Psycho, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Edgar Allen Poe.

I must be some kind of outlier because this mess won a 1983 World Fantasy Award for Best Novella.  What did people like about it?  Maybe all the talk of people snorting cocaine, dropping acid, wearing black leather S&M outfits, and having lesbian sex was considered "with it," "an update of the vampire for the '80s?" 

Two Karl Edward Wagner collections from Centipede Press.  Left: 2011's Karl Edward Wagner: Master of the Weird Tale Right: 2012's Where the Summer Ends

"No Such Thing as a Vampire" by Richard Matheson (1959)

"No Such Thing as a Vampire" first appeared in Playboy, our most prestigious skin rag (unless you count National Geographic), and has been reprinted in numerable Matheson collections and horror anthologies.

This is a competent though somewhat pedestrian story in the twist-ending-Twilight-Zone mold, though suited for Playboy with its inclusion of nudity and a sexual element.  In a Romanian town full of superstitious peasants lives a doctor and his beautiful wife in a fancy house with a bunch of servants--the doc and the missus have separate bedrooms.  One morning the wife wakes up with her night dress pulled down, her bare breasts covered in blood!  The doctor finds two tiny holes in her neck!  Obviously a vampire has attacked!

The doctor and the brave butler (the other servants flee) do all they can with garlic and crosses to fortify the house, but to no avail--every morning, even when the sawbones stays in his wife's bedroom all night long, she wakes up having been further drained.  The doctor writes to their friend in another town, and he comes to help.  When he joins the doc to sit up all night with the wife we get our twist ending--the doc has been faking the vampire attacks by drawing his wife's blood with a syringe (don't worry, folks, she will recover...physically, at least.)  His wife having cheated on him with this friend when they went to visit him last summer, the doctor has been plotting a terrible revenge!  He drugs the friend, puts him in a coffin in the basement, and arranges it so that the heroic butler finds the "vampire" and kills it with a stake through the heart.

Acceptable.



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The Drake is the big winner here--his story is economical, striking, and "brings the vampire into the modern world" in a way that is interesting.  The Wagner is the polar opposite, long and tedious, and, by sticking a vampire in the middle of a bunch of coke-snorting punk rockers and lesbian art students, "updating" the vampire in a way that is lame and boring.

We'll be orbiting Mother Earth in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, reading an early '80s SF novel by a SFWA Grandmaster.

British 1977 hardcover

In our last episode, as part of our exploration of Robert Bloch's 1979 collection Out of the Mouths of Graves, we read Bloch's story about racism and revenge in the American South, "A Warm Farewell."  "A Warm Farewell" was first printed in Frights, a 1976 anthology of brand new "stories of suspense and supernatural terror" edited by Kirby McCauley that won the 1977 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology/Collection.  Nice!  The jacket of Frights tells us that, for this anthology, McCauley was looking not for vampires and werewolves, but contemporary horrors.  We saw how Bloch approached that task, now let's see what sort of mid- to late-20th-century horrors science fiction figures Poul and Karen Anderson, R. A. Lafferty, and David Drake offered McCauley.  I am reading the copy of Frights scanned into the internet archive, a US hardcover edition owned by the Boston Public Library.

"The Kitten" by Poul and Karen Anderson

I have read lots of stuff, over the course of my life and over the course of this blog's existence, by Poul Anderson, but I don't think anything by his wife, Karen.

"The Kitten" starts with a sort of one-page prologue, the description of a burning house and the efforts of fire fighters to extinguish it.  This description is metaphorical and poetic, but it is not good, almost every line being overwritten, cliched or obscure and confusing.  I want to like what the Andersons are doing, because I am very sympathetic to what I take to be Poul Anderson's views on politics and life and culture and all that, but I just can't pretend that this passage is good:

The heat rolled forth like a tide.  Men felt it parch their eyeballs and stood back from trying to breast it.  Meanwhile it strewed reek around them.

Leo Tronen was born a country boy, but has worked hard to become a successful business executive!  He married pretty blonde Una Nyborg because he thought she'd be a good wife for an executive, an asset when dealing with clients and colleagues.  However, she refused to abandon her graduate studies after their marriage, and has been spending lots of valuable time writing a thesis on ancient Egypt and driving back and forth to the university.  As our story begins the couple have a showdown, Leo throwing Una's half-finished thesis into the fire (holy shit!) and Una leaving the house the next day while he is at the office.

It is a cold winter, and a stray cat comes to Leo's door the first evening he spends without Una.  Leo feeds it, calls around the neighborhood hoping to find its owner and get some social capital by doing a good deed, but nobody claims the feline.  In the morning Leo finds the cat has made a mess of the house, so he takes it in the car with him, tossing it out into the cold halfway to work.  After a hard day at the office he is amazed to find the cat, half dead, at his door.  Determined to get rid of the creature, he drowns it and tosses the sodden corpse in the trash...only to find it at his door the next morning!  Even if he pulled it out of the water prematurely, how did it get out of the trash can?

Interspersed with all this cat stuff is a lot of inner monologue and conversations with colleagues that suggest that Leo is a jerk who is losing his mind and that the world at large is careening out of control, with economic hardship, social unrest, war in the Middle East, and tension between the Warsaw Pact and the West.  The Andersons present a few opportunities for friendless Leo to make a connection with the world beyond himself (the cat is only one such opportunity) but he rejects each opportunity.  Getting crazier and crazier, drinking more and more, having to try to kill the cat again and again as it returns each time, Leo finally goes off the deep end and sets out to murder a man whom he thinks is Una's lover by setting him and his house on fire.

Anyway, the end of the story makes explicit its supernatural elements.  According to Una's research, the Egyptians thought a man had numerous souls.  One of them is his "spirit of reason and rightness;" it can leave the body and move about independently.  The cat was representative of Leo's "spirit of reason and rightness," and when he killed it he went bonkers and became a--would-be--murderer. 

The plot is OK, a sort of look at the tragedy of middle-class life, how too much focus on career success can ruin your life because you neglect your relationships and your spiritual/emotional needs (I actually know people, smart industrious people, to whom this has happened) but the writing is way too flowery or purple or however you want to describe it--there is a surfeit of metaphors and odd words that are presumably meant to make the text more beautiful and more powerful but instead slow down the story and obscure the meaning of sentences.  It hurts to see somebody you like fall on his (or her) face, but that is what I must report happens here to the Andersons.  I am marking "The Kitten" barely acceptable.

"The Kitten" would reappear in The Unicorn Trade in 1984, a book full of poems and fiction by Karen Anderson, some of it in collaboration with her husband.

"Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight" by R. A. Lafferty

If isfdb is to be believed, "Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight" was never included in a Lafferty collection or anthologized outside of Frights, which I think makes this a "rare" Lafferty story and makes Frights a must-have for all you Lafferty collectors out there!

"Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight" is a sort of apocalyptic American folk tale, told largely in the dialogue of six odd characters, dialogue that sometimes questions the nature of reality.  If the Anderson's "The Kitten" is about the plight of the suburban American bourgeoisie--business executives and academics--Lafferty's story has its roots in America's rural communities of Indians, hunters, and park rangers.  At times "Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight" can feel rambling and you wonder where the hell it is going, with the characters seeming to be talking in circles, but the jokes and the final destination make the trip worthwhile, and on a second read all the various parts can be seen to be working together smoothly.  (As with the work of Gene Wolfe, I find that to really appreciate a Lafferty story I have to read it twice.)

Three men from town are walking in the wilderness of Oklahoma's Winding Stair Mountains, hunting.  They are soon joined by three additional men, a game warden and two Choctaw Indians.  Hector Voiles, a meteorologist, remarks on how this area is a site of strange weather phenomena-- at this time of year storms which enter the area sometimes abruptly disappear, leaving a brief but severe cold snap in their wake.  Voiles witnessed this last year, but his colleagues refused to enter it into the records.  "It was so improbable that the temperature in this small area should be forty degrees lower than that of nearby areas that it just wasn't a thing that should be recorded."  Lloyd Rightfoot, a naturalist, points out that this area is also said to be home to a one-of-a-kind tree, a tree of no known species which grows a single fruit that somehow never fully develops.  Andrew Widepicture, a cosmologist, talks about Storm-Cock, a crow reputed to live in this region and said to eat fully grown cattle--the game warden, Will Hightrack, says that Storm-Cock is a bird that "never saw the inside of an egg."

All of the bizarre phenomena the men describe are significant in that, in some sense, their reality has not been, could not be, accepted--each represents a potential that has not come to pass or at least was not recognized: gathering storms which subsided, cold spells which were not recorded, a tree of an unknown species whose fruit always die before ripening, a bird which did not come from an egg--if these things didn't achieve maturity or don't officially exist, how do the characters know so much about them?  The reader is left feeling uneasy by the way these men talk with confidence of things they cannot really know, of events that have not (yet!) happened.

The two Coctaws, James South-Forty and Thomas Wrong-Rain, explain to the city folks that if the fruit from the unique tree ripens, it will cause widespread death with its "shadow," and hint that the fruit is the source of the huge and murderous Storm-Cock.  Tonight there must be a frost that will kill the fruit, which is on the verge of maturity, or disaster will occur.  For over a hundred years the unusual frost has come that has killed the fruit and saved the region, but Thomas Wrong-Rain fears that this year the tree has outsmarted the weather--if there is to be a life-saving frost, men must will the frost into existence.   

That night Thomas Wrong-Rain calls Hector Voiles, urging him to predict an unlikely freeze as a way of making it more likely to eventuate and save the region from the depredations of Storm-Cock, even though all the scientific evidence indicates that the freeze will not occur.  Voiles makes his counterintuitive forecast on TV, inspiring rage from TV management and viewers, and his forecast proves wrong--the freeze does not occur, instead the storms, which so often in past years were abortive, rage across the region, causing mass destruction.  Thomas Wrong-Rain blames Voiles for this cataclysm, which killed his wife, because Voiles laughed on TV and annoyed "something down there that can't stand derision."  The storms are followed by the surreal attack of Storm-Cock, who kills one out of three people he encounters--Voiles, Widepicture and Hightrack are together when confronted by the 747-sized bird, and they draw cards to see which of the three of them will be torn to pieces by the monster and devoured.  (Many Lafferty stories use death and gore to comedic effect, and this is one of them.)

A totally crazy story that challenges the reader with its bizarre sense of unreality, but feels like the work of a sure hand--the story has strange, unconventional, goals, and it achieves them.  When a line of "The Kitten" feels odd, you suspect the Andersons have made a mistake, but when a line of "Oh Tell Me Will It Freeze Tonight" feels odd (and many of them do) you feel like Lafferty's intention is to make you uneasy, that he is trying to surprise you or throw you off kilter.

Lafferty fans should definitely seek this one out.

For paperback publication in the UK, Frights was split into two volumes

"Firefight" by David Drake

You know I am interested in warfare and violence--for example, in the past week I read U-Boat Killer, Donald Macintyre's memoir of commanding Royal Navy destroyers and frigates during the Second World War, and enjoyed it--it was entertaining and I learned quite a bit about the various tactics and equipment used by the Allied navies in their struggle against Axis submarines.  As you also know, David Drake is a veteran of the Vietnam War, and the jacket of Frights suggests that this story draws on Drake's Vietnam experiences. 

This is a straightforward story of combat between humans and ancient monsters.  An American armored unit laagers by a stone wall and a stand of very tall trees in a thinly populated area of Vietnam.  There is foreshadowing--talk of how this area is home to the Mengs, said to be a race of people who lived in Vietnam before the arrival of the Montagnards and the Viets; talk of French and Communist military units being mysteriously wiped out in the area in the past, their bodies not riddled with bullets but mangled as if by knives or teeth; the way the tallest of the trees seems to heal up instantly after automatic weapons are test fired into it. 

Our main characters are the crew of a vehicle armed with a flame thrower and a machine gun, I guess the M132 Armored Flamethrower.  At night a sort of glowing door opens in the tallest tree, and out come men with batwings who fly around the laager, attacking the US servicemen with talons and fangs.  A South Vietnamese soldier working with the US unit as an interpreter turns out to be a Meng and helps the monsters.  Rifle and machine gun fire seems to have no effect on the evil tree, but the flamethrower sets it ablaze and destroys it.

This is an acceptable entertainment; competent, but no big deal.  All the information about Vietnam-era armor and weapons adds a layer of interest for military history buffs.  I can't find any reference to "Mengs" on the wikipedia page on ethnic groups in Vietnam, so I have no idea if Drake just made the Mengs up or if he is referring to a real population using a Western term that has fallen out of fashion or something like that. "Firefight" is the least ambitious and most conventional of the three stories we're talking about today, but it achieves its goals and is readable, so it gets a passing grade.

"Firefight" has appeared in some Drake collections since its debut here in Frights.

**********

Of these three stories the Lafferty is obviously the best.  The Andersons' "The Kitten" would be better than the Drake if it had been written as straightforwardly as the Drake, because it addresses interesting human issues of life in modern America and integrates with those topics ancient Egyptian mysticism, but its poor overindulgent style cripples it, so "Firefight" slips into second place.

More Frights in our next episode!

Let's finish up Whispers II, the hardcover anthology of "stories of horror, supernatural horror, the macabre, and the generally weird" from 1979 put together by Stuart Schiff.  Only four stories to go, three of them by people pretty famous in the speculative fiction world.

"The Bait" by Fritz Leiber (1973)

I read the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories in the 1980s in Ace editions, five with Jeff Jones covers and one with a Michael Whelan cover, and I had definite opinions about which stories were good and which were not very good.  Looking at the contents pages of my six dog-eared Ace volumes and wracking my brain, I will say that the F&GM novel, The Swords of Lankhmar, and the short stories "The Seven Black Priests," "Bazaar of the Bizarre," "Lean Times in Lankhmar," and "Stardock" are among the definitely good.  Two long stories, "Adept's Gambit" and "Lords of Quarmall" I felt had the wrong tone and atmosphere, and a bunch of other stories were merely acceptable, and another group pointless trifles.  Among the pointless trifles was "The Bait," whose three pages I reread for this blog post.

(I often think about rereading all the F&GM stories...maybe some of the stories teen-aged MPorcius found mediocre or odd will appeal to a forty-something MPorcius?  But that is only one of many reading projects that I have conceived that have not yet blossomed into reality.)

Fafhrd and the Mouser are sleeping, dreaming of money.  They suddenly awake to find a naked teen-aged girl ("looked thirteen, but the lips smiled a cool self-infatuated seventeen") in their room.  They both want to have sex with her, and even propose to fight over her.  But then nine-foot tall demons appear in the little room, attack our heroes, and are quickly defeated.  The girl and the demon bodies then vanish.  F&GM speculate that Death, who appears as a character in a number of F&GM stories, sent the three beings to destroy them.

Leiber is a skilled writer and the style here, ironic and clever, is pleasant to read, but plotwise it is a big nothing and doesn't even really make sense.  The girl is not "bait," because she didn't lead the heroes to the demons, or even distract them so the demons could sneak up on them.  There was no reason for Death to send the girl there before he sent the demons; she is just included in the story to titillate the reader and set up jokes about Fafhrd and the Mouser's taste for girls in their early teens.

(One might also complain that "The Bait" has the exact same plot as 1974's "Beauty and the Beasts," and that both "Beauty and the Beasts" and "The Bait" are mere pendants to 1973's "The Sadness of the Executioner.")

"The Bait" was first printed in Whispers #2, and later included in the sixth Fafhrd and Grey Mouser book, Swords and Ice Magic (the one with the Michael Whelan cover), as well as a few other Leiber collections and anthologies.  I find the inclusion of "The Bait" in so many venues puzzling, because I consider it weaker than most Fafhrd and Grey Mouser tales; maybe it was a convenient buy for anthologists because it was so short and could fill in a last few vacant pages that needed filling?  Or maybe editors liked that it was silly and seemed to be a parody of sword and sorcery, a sort of goof on Conan-style stories? 

"Above the World" by Ramsey Campbell (1979)

Here we have what I am calling a meditation on loneliness and alienation.  A divorced guy, Knox, whose ex-wife Wendy and her second husband Tooley recently got killed in a mountain climbing accident, goes to the touristy town where he and his ex-wife had their honeymoon, and where she and her new husband recently stayed--I think this town is also where they were staying when they got killed.  Knox walks around the town, and again and again we get images and mundane events which speak of inability to achieve a connection, to communicate, with others--he hears voices but can't discern the words; the wind blows a postcard along the street--he tries to read it but it falls down a storm grate before he can snatch it; he goes to a book store to get something to read but the store is closed.  And, of course, seeing so many places where he spent time with his wife triggers plenty of recollections of her.  Knox is even staying in the same hotel room they stayed in on their honeymoon!

Knox hikes up a somewhat treacherous path, up a mountain, and finds it exhausting.  On the summit he weeps, and on the way down, encroaching fog hindering visibility, his attention distracted by something he thinks he sees carved into a tree trunk, he gets lost in a forest.  He begins to panic as the mist thickens and the sun begins to set.  As the story ends Knox comes upon two people, no doubt meant to remind us of Wendy and Tooley, who themselves died on a mountain climb, just as Knox fears he will now, and we readers have no idea if these mysterious figures are going to help him or if they are monsters who will kill him or ghosts who signify that he is already dead, or what.  (Early in his climb Knox had a severe chest pain that struck and then passed; maybe he died then and during the the rest of the story he has been a ghost.  Metaphorically, he has been dead for a while, because he has "a hollow at the center of himself" that began growing during his marriage.)

This story is OK; if you want to read page after page about a guy slipping on rocks and grasping at tree branches and tripping over roots, and semi-poetic ways of describing stuff that is far away ("A few dots, too distant to have limbs, crept along that ridge"), well, "Above the World" is for you.  Also, Campbell uses the word "cagoule," which I don't think I've ever encountered before.  Always learning...always learning. 

"Above the World" had its premiere here in Whispers II and has been reprinted in numerous anthologies and Campbell collections, including Dark Companions.  You'll remember that early last year we conducted an ideological analysis of a story from Dark Companions, "Napier Court."

"The Red Leer" by David Drake (1979)

David Drake is an important figure in the history of Whispers.  As he describes at his website, for much of the period in which the zine was published, Drake read the slush pile of manuscripts sent to Whispers, forwarding along to Stuart Schiff the small percentage in which he saw any value for Schiff to choose from among.  (Don't credit me with figuring this out--I got the link to Drake's interesting account of his tenure as assistant editor of Whispers from tarbandu's blog post on Whispers II.)

Old John Deehalter willed his 600-acre farm jointly to his son George and his daughter Alice, so now his son has to work the farm with his annoying brother-in-law Tom Kernes.  On the farm is an Indian burial mound, and Kernes wants to dig it up in hopes of finding a skull to display in his house.  Yuck!

The farmers bust open the mound and find what we readers immediately recognize as an alien high tech artifact.  Not long after that farm animals start turning up dead and people start seeing a strange figure in the night!  Deehalter and the Kernes are in the fight of their lives against a voracious alien creature--will they figure out its nature and weaknesses in time to defeat it, or will America's Great Plains soon be at the mercy of a slavering space monster?

This is sort of a standard horror story, but it is entertaining; Drake paces it well and is good at setting the scene and describing what goes on in the action sequences.  There are mystery elements around the powers and characteristics of the monster, but you can tell what the hell is going on, unlike the Grant and Campbell contributions to Whispers II, which leave you wondering whether the protagonist is dead or alive.

I liked it--thumbs up.  "The Red Leer" saw print first here in Whispers II and has resurfaced in several Drake collections and an anthology edited by Drake.

"At the Bottom of the Garden" by David Campton (1975)

Campton is a playwright and this story first appeared in a British juvenile anthology; like "Archie and the Scylla of Hades Hole," I would have skipped such a thing under normal circumstances.  But while Ken Wisman's satiric folk song about marriage appeared in Whispers II and nowhere else, "At the Bottom of the Garden" appeared first in Armada Sci-Fi 1 and was included later in Whispers #9 and DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VI; maybe the wisdom of crowds indicates this story is actually good?

Mrs. Williams is a sad case: scatterbrained, shy and insecure, not very pretty, and a bad cook.  The first few pages of the story are largely taken up by a comic description of her disastrous efforts in the kitchen.  Mrs. Williams is so overwhelmed by her housework that she barely pays any attention to her equally unattractive and dim-witted daughter, Geraldine, who is I guess six or seven.  So Mom doesn't really take notice when Geraldine talks about her new friend; this new friend, according to Geraldine, removed the little girl's crooked and yellow teeth and straightened and whitened them and reinstalled them.

Having demonstrated prowess in the realm of dentistry, Geraldine figures her new friend might be able to cure her headaches and fix her terrible eyesight.  The friend disassembles the little girl, removing head from body and eyes from skull, to work on them.  When Mr. and Mrs. Williams see this shocking operation  underway in the distance, they sally forth in a state of panic, scaring off the little surgeon, who is some kind of alien or monster.  Geraldine, though in pieces, is still alive, and the uncanny medico could have put her back together again better than new, but the creature is too scared of the parents to return, so Geraldine, alive but immobile, is buried in pieces.

Because it first appeared in a SF anthology I thought we were going to learn all about the alien or whatever it is and how it can take people apart without shedding their blood or killing them, and I expected a warm and ironic happy ending in which Geraldine became smart and pretty and her parents never understood how this transformation took place, or, in their stupidity, took credit for their daughter's improvement .  But "At the Bottom of the Garden" is a surreal black humor horror story, not a science fiction story, so we learn nothing about the creature's origin or how it performs its medical miracles; the point of the story is to make us laugh at the antics of the members of the Williams family, three foolish and selfish dingbats, and/or make us imagine the mind-churning horror we would feel at finding one of our loved ones disassembled by a weird-looking creature.  And maybe consider the anguish of the helpful creature, whose efforts to do good were misunderstood and ended in tragedy.

Merely acceptable.

**********

So there it is, Whispers II.  I'm considering this a worthwhile exploration.  I enjoyed the very good Lafferty story and the solid Drake story, and the Davidson, Jacobi and Wellman stories deepened my quite limited knowledge of those writers and made me think better of them than I did before I cracked open Whispers II.  And next time I play Scrabble with the wife, maybe I can flummox her by whipping out "cagoule."