"While She Was Out" by Edward Bryant (1988)     

Della's husband Kenneth drinks beer and watches sports on TV and complains about her cutting jokes and her giving the twins too many cookies.  Their marriage is in trouble; Della often dreams of leaving Kenneth, even vocalizes these dreams in his presence.  Della takes night classes, learning how to repair the car herself and learning self defense--I guess a sign she is trying to be independent--and he just makes fun of her.

Tonight, while Kenneth watches ESPN, Della goes out to the mall to pick up Christmas stuff--the big day is approaching!--and tampons.  The parking lot is crowded, and Della is annoyed that somebody has parked an old oversized car across multiple spaces.  She writes a sarcastic note and puts it under the car's windshield wiper.  

The car turns out to be in the possession of four young thugs, one from each major racial demographic--we've got a white thug, a black thug, a Latino thug and an Asian thug.  The thugs do not appreciate Della's brand of humor.  Over fourteen or fifteen pages Della has to run from these criminals or fight them; stuff she has learned in night school helps her to survive and in fact slay all four of these creeps.  Bryant describes everybody's injuries, and Della's physical and psychological experience of killing the four young men, in great detail.  The last creep to die, when he has the upper hand (so he thinks!), tries to seduce Della into joining him in his life of crime, he somehow guessing she is unsatisfied with her marriage.  The story ends with an homage to Dirty Harry, with Della pointing an empty gun (she emptied it into one of the punks) at her husband and pulling the trigger before telling him they have to talk.  Having defeated murderous enemies, Della has proven her strength and gained confidence and is now in charge of their relationship.  Hear her roar!

This is a good crime/adventure story and a feminist story in which a woman overcomes men who want to exploit her.  It doesn't really feel like a preachy left-wing thing, though, in part because Bryant includes the kinds of jokes which progressives today wouldn't make, jokes that make light of the Third World and people born with disabilities and liberal fascination with them (e.g., the biggest Christmas gift of the season, the one the twins are begging for, is "The Little BeeDee Birth Defect Baby.")  I almost wonder if Bryant slyly wrote a story to specifically appeal to liberals and leftists and then included in it these little land mines that would make them squirm. 

Thumbs up!  Our Pulphouse adventure is off to a good start!

Raw material for your new favorite Venn Diagram: the intersection of "inspiring prose" and "extreme horror"

This one only ever appeared in the fifth installment of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine and in this Best of volume.  "Chopped Liver" is a joke story with an urban Jewish flavor, people saying "tsurris" and mentioning "the Hadassah ladies" and eating "flanken" and "farfel" and so forth, and it is actually funny, making it a rarity among the joke stories I encounter here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  

Like today's stories by Bryant and Monteleone, Ellison's "She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother" was in the very first issue of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine.  In the intro to "She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother" here in The Best of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, Rauch announces that Ellison is working on a three-volume set of short stories for Pulphouse Publishing--Ellison was famous for conceiving large scale projects which were never completed, and maybe this three-volume set is another of them. 

Koja had our favorite story from our last blog post, so we have high expectations for her today.  No pressure, though, KK!  Rauch in her intro to "Illusions in Relief" here in the Best of anthology warns us the story is subtle and we have to concentrate to receive its "message."  Oy, the pressure is now flowing in the opposite direction, and it doesn't feel good!

"I want you to work.  You get where you're going the way you're meant to get there.  If you don't jerk yourself off with a lot of shit about guilt.  Save your own fucking soul, you know?"

"Jesus. Philosophy."

"Jesus is philosophy."

The color green in the story, clues suggest, represents peace and goodness, and the old man seems thrilled that he is turning green.  Is the message the old Stoic and Serenity Prayer thing, that you have to accept, even embrace, the world as it comes to you, the things you can't change?  But what is up with the crowd, the people who think Joseph or his collages can heal them?  And Joseph's hand turning green?  Has Joseph's tutelage under the old geezer given him the power to heal, the power others have been feverishly attributing to him despite his denials?  Maybe this story is about how other people's expectations of you can influence your personality and abilities?  Or about the relationship between the artist and his most devoted fans, how each influences the other, for good or for ill?        

Editor Rauch warns readers of The Best of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine that "Nobody's Perfect" is a feminist story, and our two main characters fit the bill: Salazar the serial killer of women and cannibal, a predatory man who hates contemporary art and thinks the Apocalypse is around the corner; and Lydia the young liberal do-gooder--the sadness and injustice of the world gets Lydia down sometimes, but don't worry, her "absorption" of "the world's pain" and the pain of her own personal tragedies (as we will learn, she is a victim of the establishment or patriarchy or whatever you want to call it) hasn't weakened her, but made her "stronger and more positive in the long run."

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Dark Love seems to have been a success, winning the 1996 Deathrealm award, which I had never head of until today, and seeing print in Britain and France as well as in America.  Our European friends seem to have gotten the short end of the stick, however, as the US editions of the book have a quite fine Mel Odom cover illustration (check out the even more beautiful original Odom work from which this cover was adapted here) while the French cover is pedestrian and the British cover is embarrassingly lame.  U-S-A!

I guess Stuart Kaminsky is a big deal, but I don't know that I have ever heard of him before

"Pas de Deux" by Kathe Koja

Our main character is a woman who is living in poverty in a crappy apartment in a big city, trying to make it as a ballet dancer.  But she has a troubled relationship with dance--as a kid she wanted to play soccer, but her fat mother forced her to take up ballet, and the woman at the strip mall ballet studio told her "No sports for you, you've got a dancer's body."  Our protagonist left the world of dance for a while and now that she is back in it she is probably too old to really make it.  Many an evening she goes to night clubs where people dance to thrash metal and "steelcore," which I have to admit I've never heard of.  (I'm always learning!)  Her dancing of course is better than anybody else's, and many men hit on her and she brings them back to her apartment for one-night stands; she explains her philosophy to them after having sex with them.  

The dancer's relationship with men is a major component of the story and Koja includes flashback scenes of her with her chain-smoking father in her teenaged years and with her former long term boyfriend, Edward, who himself had a strange relationship with his first wife and his mother-in-law, Adele, a successful dancer who knew Balanchine well, or at least wrote a book purporting such.  Our main character reads Adele's memoir of her relationship with Balanchine, and it has a powerful effect on the dancer's mind, as do her memories of Edward's critiques of her face and fashion choices.  Perhaps the main theme of "Pas de Deux" is to what extent we make decisions and to what extent other people and other external factors (along with the body we got stuck with) determine our choices.  The main character again and again does things she tells herself she doesn't want to do, but asks herself, "what else is there to do?" 

In need of money, she contacts Edward but he wants sex in return for a "loan" she probably will never be able to repay.  She refuses to grant him any sexual favors, in fact strikes him.  So she gets a job at a used bookstore; she steals from the place and gets herself fired.  She then gets a job as a stripper.

At the same time she pursues her doomed quest to become a professional ballet dancer, our heroine is on a quest to find a man, a partner in life--Adele in her book advises women to "find your prince."  This quest is also doomed--the men the dancer meets at thrash clubs won't do (her body, she feels, will tell her which of the men is her prince, but her body rejects man after man, night after night) and she never even considers the repulsive men for whom she strips.

The dancer's sanity slips, and she stops eating, becoming skeletally thin, which does not endear her to her clients or her boss.  The story ends somewhat inconclusively, like a literary story--there is a climax, in which the dancer encounters Edward again and she beats him up and wrecks his house, but we have to assume this is not going to improve her life and career prospects and that if she doesn't take Edward's unwanted advice ("You're very sick, you ought to see a doctor") she is going to die soon.

Maybe like the Lee stories we read in our last episode, "Pas de Deux" is about women who seek love and when men aren't willing to give it to them they lash out at the man who let them down and/or society at large.  But this is no wish fulfillment fantasy that celebrates a woman empowered--it is all about how women are at the mercy of others, men and women both, and factors over which they have no control.

A good mainstream story about a creative person crushed by the world that has enough sex, violence and creepiness that it also provides the thrills we look for in genre fiction--thumbs up!  "Pas de Deux" has been reprinted in Koja collections in English and in French, the language of (noir?) love.

(An odd little note: the artist Patrick Nagel is mentioned twice in "Pas de Deux," but both times here in Dark Love his name is misspelled "Nagle."  I found an electronic version of Velo/cities, and in there the name is spelled correctly.)

"Bright Blades Gleaming" is well-written on a page by page and sentence by sentence basis, with Copper constructing an interesting character and offering strong images.  Of course I am a sucker for stories in which a sensitive young man lives in a big city in a tiny apartment and spends a lot of time on the crowded streets wistfully looking at young women--there was a time when I was such a young man!  But the plot of "Bright Blades Gleaming" amounts to little and the twist ending is pretty disappointing.  It is frustrating when a guy like A. E. van Vogt comes up with a plot full of crazy ideas and astounding events but his poor writing style limits how much you can really enjoy the wild ride, and it is also frustrating when a guy has a good style but only applies it to a plot that lacks any sort of emotional or conceptual punch or any thrills.  We'll call "Bright Blades Gleaming" acceptable.

The text of "Bright Blades Gleaming" is the diary of a late 19th-century young man who has just moved to Berlin.  He describes in detail his new room and his fellow tenants and hints that he is some kind of weirdo with "inflammatory views" who is often in trouble with the police.   As the story proceeds we learn he is an atheist who loves animals and refuses to step on beetles he finds under his seat at the restaurant but hates human beings, a failed medical student who finances his slacker's lifestyle of sitting in restaurants and parks staring at the girls who go by through clever thievery. 

We follow this dude for page after page as he tidies his room, follows a girl on the street, has tense conversations with his land lady, and denounces aged veterans, slowly learning how truly odd and sinister he is, but instead of some kind of climax in which he achieves some dastardly perverse goal or he is foiled by the authorities or some brave civilian, our supposed pay off is being told he is Jack the Ripper?  Copper's attempt to appeal to the audience's supposed fascination with Jack the Ripper is cheap and unsatisfying, a cop out--it is like he wrote only half a story, just the setting and the character, leaving the reader to supply his own climax and resolution.    

(Defenders of "Bright Blades Gleaming" might call it a mood piece or a character study.  Let's also note that Dark Love is dedicated to Robert Bloch, so maybe this story is an homage to the Jack-obsessed Bloch.)  

Besides in Dark Love, you can catch this rump of a story in the Copper collections Darkness, Mist and Shadow: Volume Two and Cold Hand on My Shoulder.    

"Going Under" by Ramsey Campbell 

"Going Under" takes place in a tunnel that goes under a river.  The tunnel is part of the highway system, and to celebrate an anniversary of its opening it has been closed to automobile traffic to serve as the route of a charity walk--a crowd of people has come to buy a ticket, the money going to their favorite cause, AIDS or whatever, and then walk the length of the tunnel.  Blythe is doing this charity walk by himself, having had a fight with his wife.  Blythe is one of the first people to own a cell phone or mobile phone or whatever English people were calling them in 1995 and while doing the walk, crammed cheek by jowl with strangers in the dense crowd, he leaves wifey a voice mail and then takes an incoming call--these calls are critical, as Blythe has to get his alimony check to his first wife (I think it's alimony--the word "maintenance" is used) in the mail or he will be imprisoned, and he wants his current wife to put the check in the mail, which he stupidly didn't do himself.  The tension of the story is meant to come from the fact that he has trouble getting a signal and then the answering machine malfunctions and then he drops his phone and it breaks blah blah blah.  Campbell tries to make his story funny and/or disturbing by describing how fat everybody doing the charity walk is and how their bodies radiate heat and by having people make fun of Blythe for using a phone in public.  Blythe then goes insane and starts harming people in his feverish quest to retrieve his phone or borrow or steal some other person's phone.

Bad.  Maybe this crummy story serves as a historical document of a time when it was fashionable to envy people who had cell phones and used them in public.  Didn't Stephen King write an entire book about how cellphones are bad?  "Going Under"'s defenders might say that it seeks to evoke the claustrophobic stress of being in a dense crowd at a public event.     

People love Ramsey Campbell, and Stephen Jones included "Going Under" in a best-of-the-year anthology.  You can also find it in multiple Campbell collections.

Pandora is an Englishwoman in her late twenties, a divorcee and owner of an antique store in North Carolina.  She wins a box of jewelry at an auction, and fancies for herself a heart-shaped Victorian locket she finds among the lot.  Pandora puts on the locket, the clasp of which she initially finds difficult to open.  When she does manage to open it, it triggers immersive dreams of rough sex in which she is the subordinate participant; Wagner graphic blow-by-blow descriptions of these episodes are like something out of a porn story.  Soon the locket clasp is opening freely, practically on its own.  Some of the dreams are essentially rape and torture fantasies.  When Pandora wakes up from the dreams she finds underwear or sex toys from the dreams in her possession, ejaculate on her face and blood leaking from her anus--was she having sex in another universe or with ghosts?  

It turns out the locket was owned by a spinster, a very religious woman, and, perhaps, the dreams are that old woman's sex fantasies, which she never expressed or experienced, but kept locked away in the locket.  (SF stories and porn stories often ridicule religious people, suggest religious people are hypocrites; I guess people who put science or sex at the center of their identities see traditional religion as a rival school of thought, a way of organizing the universe which they must supplant or perhaps just resent.)  But Wagner also suggests that Pandora is just a pervert, her sexual desires warped by abuse at the hands of her ex-husband, maybe even the result of brain damage from blows to the head.  As the story ends Pandora tosses away the locket, puts on revealing clothes, and arms herself with a knife--she is going to have rough sex with men she meets at a bar, or maybe her young employees, an attractive woman and a handsome gay man (there is a lot of lesbian sex and lots of gay vibes in this story), and unlike in her magical locket-triggered fantasies, she is going to be the aggressor, is going to leave the other participants bleeding.

A nasty exploitative thing, the supernatural elements an excuse to describe brutal homoerotic scenes of men abusing a woman, abuse the woman ultimately enjoys.  But competent, I suppose.  We'll call it acceptable.

"Locked Away" would go on to be reprinted in three different Wagner collections, all of which sport covers that leverage Wagner's biker image.

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are tracking down collaborations between Kathe Koja and Barry Malzberg on the internet archive.  Today we've got three stories published in 1995, the year of the foundation of the WTO, the murder trial of O. J. Simpson, and many exciting developments in the campaign to uncover and remove weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein's Iraq.  I don't think any of these stories have been reprinted after their initial appearances (I'm not counting the 1999 paperback printing of the anthology our second story appears in.) 

"The Unchained" 

(There is a passage that seems to ridicule the idea of people abstaining from sex, but the lover in the story seems to somehow identify with those who abstain because he, unlike so many other gay men, hasn't contracted AIDS.  He refers to a "Mr. Play-It-Safe" and to a "sole survivor," and it is not clear whether he is applying these appellations to himself or to a theoretical advocate for abstinence.  Is there any chance this guy, though in a gay relationship, has been avoiding actual penetrative sex and thus preserved his health?  Is the fact that he doesn't normally smoke cigarettes and only does so after his lover dies and the nurse forces a pack of Kools on him a clue that he is health conscious and, just as he has been exercising caution to avoid lung cancer, has been cautious about avoiding AIDS?)   

Another remarkable thing about "The Unchained" is its pervasive presentations of disgusting images and of descriptions of horrible smells.  Again and again in the 20th-century scenes we are told about cigarette butts and other sickening trash, like used condoms, left on the ground, and in the scenes in ancient Judea we hear about how bad the dead Lazarus smells.  I guess the idea is that God created and loves all the universe, not just the healthy and beautiful parts, but the ugly and spoiled parts as well.

What of the title?  Does it refer to the chains of death being loosed from Lazarus, and all Christians?  The sloughing off of a diseased body by those who die in old age?  The chains of law and custom that render homosexuals second-class citizens but which in the 1990s were in the process of being removed?  "The Unchained" leaves us with a lot to think about--it feels like every line strikes a chord or gives us something to chew over--this is the kind of economy I admire in fiction and writing in general.  

A challenging story that pushes the mainstream liberal line on gay marriage but not in a boring tiresome way and offers a lot more as well.  I can't tell you it is fun, but I can give it a thumbs up for being well-written, provocative and engaging.  People interested in thoughtful depictions in SF of Christ and Christianity, and of 1990s depictions of AIDS and other issues of importance to the LGBetc community, should check out "The Unchained."  

"Buyer's Remorse" 

How to Save the World is an anthology of stories in which SF writers offer solutions to social problems, and it has one of those hilariously grandiose and self-important introductions in which the editor--for this book Charles Sheffield--expresses the hope this book will offend people and maybe even be banned--oh, please don't throw me in that briar patch!

There are apparently stories in this thing that offer solutions to  racism and pollution and overpopulation and lots of other real or purported problems facing humanity in 1995, but Koja and Malzberg's story goes the whole hog and suggests, or at least examines the possibility of, abandoning this world entirely--physically, spiritually, psychologically.

"Buyer's Remorse" is a series of letters, or I guess electronic messages, received by what amounts to an advice columnist of the 23rd century, and his or her replies.  One correspondent is spending all of his or her time in virtual reality, even eating and having sex in a virtual world, and his or her friends are trying to get the writer to spend more time in the real world.  Another person talks about how there is no longer any such thing as perversity, there no longer being any moral judgements.  The message of a third correspondent makes clear that people in this future all live in domed or subterranean cities with more or less self-sufficient and carefully controlled environments and ecologies isolated from the outside world; this seeker after advice talks about how somebody has contaminated his or her own dome by cultivating eggs.  A fourth complains of a mate's overuse of aphrodisiacs and other drugs and searches for other partners--it becomes clear that use of drugs is the norm in the 23rd century to suppress some feelings and summon others.  

"Buyer's Remorse" is long and slow and accomplished very little.  The advice seekers are all long-winded and pen very flowery letters, but none of them offer compelling images or betray engaging personalities.  "Buyer's Remorse" doesn't have a conventional plot, and much of its text--the replies of the "Courtesy & Advisement Person" in particular, is difficult-to-decipher and eye-glazingly boring philosophical discussion.  I guess the plot and character elements of "Buyer's Remorse" consist of the reader's journey as he uncovers the personality of the C&AP and the nature of this future dystopia, but this material is not satisfying.  "The Unchained" was not an easy read but it was sprinkled with passages which trigger emotion in the reader and argue some kind of point, and trying to figure out the more difficult passages of "The Unchained" yielded something of interest--what was up with the main characters and what were Koja and Malzberg trying to say about religion and the afterlife?  The challenge of "Buyer's Remorse" yields SF banalities--man ruined the environment so everybody lives in hives and uses drugs and video games to make life tolerable.  Koja and Malzberg throw in oblique references to Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and name check Immanuel Kant and Thomas Erasmus--and even one of Malzberg's own characters, Harry the Flat from Underlay, one of Malzberg's best books--but these oases of interest in the dull desert don't do much to bring the story to life.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down.

"Three Portraits from Heisenberg" 

I haven't spent much time with Omni, the covers of which always gave the magazine the air of something sensationalist and exploitative, what with all the advertised stories about UFOs and ESP, expanding your consciousness, and sex.  The issue that includes the sole printing of "Three Portraits from Heisenberg" offers articles on Roswell, dinosaurs, and the afterlife, as well as an ad for a CD-ROM of forgotten science fiction novels introduced by Leonard Nimoy.  (Did Nimoy really take time off from counting his quatloos and photographing nude women to read Stanton Coblentz's The Day the World Stopped, Manly Banister's The Conquest of Earth and George Henry Smith's Druid's World?  Doesn't seem logical.) 

As you humped so frantic and juiceless in the wretched bed, so the stars and planets tumble haplessly toward final implosion.

Like the galaxies before time, like the blind, bare animals of her breasts sinking underneath his grunts.

I'm not an observer, the face said, you're the observer.  I'm the particle in remission at the heart of the neutron star whose reaction is your anti-reaction.

"Pipeline to Paradise" by Nelson S. Bond

Bond was in his eighties when Wheel of Fortune was published, and isfdb suggests this story was originally written for Harlan Ellison's The Last Dangerous Visions, which was originally slated to be published in the 1970s.  "Pipeline to Paradise" certainly feels kind of old with its references to switchboard operators at hotels and the death penalty in New York state (the last execution in New York state took place in 1963.)  I recently read Bond's 1950 story "To People a New World" and found it pretty poor; way back in 2015 I read Bond's strong-female-protagonist post-apocalyptic quest story "Magic City" and deemed it marginally recommendable.  Maybe this story here, which would be reprinted in the 2002 Bond collection The Far Side of Nowhere, will be something I can get really excited about?

Well, not really.  "Pipeline to Paradise" is an acceptable filler story with an ending that I fear makes little sense.

New Yorker Blake has been having terrible blackout headaches--he wakes up from them not remembering what he has been up to.  He starts getting telephone calls--from a man he thinks is dead, Marcus Kane, an old war buddy!  Kane claims to be calling from Heaven!  Blake suspects Kane is actually calling from Hell, and when Blake's girlfriend disappears and Kane keeps telling him to go here and go there to look for her, and instead of finding her at these locales he instead finds murder scenes where young women have been killed, Blake is sure his fears are well-founded.  Kane, no doubt, is enacting a terrible revenge on Blake from beyond the grave, from the pit of Hell!  You see, back in 'Nam, Blake and Kane were alone together and when the Viet Cong attacked them Blake fled and left Kane to die.  (Bond tells us that Blake was carrying an M-30 machine gun, a machine gun I never heard of before.  Maybe this is a typo for M-60.  Or maybe Bond meant to say Blake was lugging around a Browning .30 caliber machine gun, which I suppose is not impossible.  Or maybe this is a clue that Blake's memories of Vietnam are hallucinations.)

Blake's girlfriend turns up dead and Blake is arrested, tried, and convicted for the murders of all those young women.  It appears that Blake is insane--he must have slain his gf and the other innocent women during his blackouts, and all this business about a Kane must be false memories and hallucinations--Blake's court-appointed defense attorney can find no records of a serviceman named Marcus Kane serving in Vietnam.  Like the two novels we just read, Slob by Rex Miller and Knock Three-One-Two by Fredric Brown, "Pipeline to Paradise" is a story about a serial killer and abnormal psychology.  Or is it?  After Blake gets the electric chair the staff at the prison receive a phone call from a laughing man identifying himself as Marcus Kane.  So was Blake's Vietnam story real?  Was he really innocent of the murders?  This ending is meant to be shocking or funny, but it doesn't jive with the fact that nobody can find evidence that Kane was real, so instead of leaving the reader amazed or amused the ending leaves him with a nagging sense this story just doesn't hold together.

I didn't think Sandworld was very good, I thought Crack in the Sky was poor, and I found reading the ambitious "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama" and "The Bentfin Boomer Girl Comes Thru" to be a chore.  The thing is, while I didn't find reading those works of Lupoff's a pleasure, they have all stuck in my mind because they were all odd and surprising.  So here I am, years later, giving this quite long story by Lupoff with an obvious joke title a shot.

"The Tootsie Roll Factor" is a trifling humor story, not annoying but not good, either.  Almost every paragraph contains or is built around some kind of joke which is not actually amusing but fortunately is not actually irritating, either.  As for the plot, it is weak and serves mainly as a mere skeleton upon which Lupoff can hang little joke anecdotes and indulgent nostalgia talk.  (You'll remember how much of Crack in the Sky was devoted to singing the praises of underground comix and Edgar Rice Burroughs--I guess this is just how Lupoff operates, padding out his work with expressions of love for his favorite pop culture artifacts.)

Israel Cohen is addicted to gambling, and this story describes how he became hooked on games of chance and how that addiction has brought him to a terrible crisis, and how he escapes the crisis.  As the story begins, Israel is in Vegas in a casino and is in real trouble because he owes the house a pile of dough and can't pay it back.  It seems possible he may be beaten up or even murdered.  So from his hotel room in the casino Israel calls his three ex-wives for help, one after the other--no help is forthcoming.  He reminisces about how he fell in love with gambling at a Jewish summer camp when he won a giant Tootsie Roll in a raffle.  (In the afterword to the story the author tells us this element of the tale is based on a real-life experience of his--based on my listening to feel like I've heard lots of prominent Jewish people talk about their summer camp experiences.)  Then he sends a fax begging for aid to a randomly dialed number.  

An eleven-year-old girl comes to his hotel room in answer to the fax--she is Lady Luck!  She has the power to take any guise; to demonstrate her powers, she appears as Gene Tierney and then John Wayne.  (This story has lots of references to golden age Hollywood.)  What this power has to do with being Lady Luck, and how her ability to change her appearance furthers the plot, I don't know; I suspect it just offers Lupoff another chance to talk about old movie stars.  I also wonder why Lady Luck's normal appearance is as a child; maybe this is a reference to an old book or film which I am missing.

Lady Luck helps Israel at the craps table, where he wins money sufficient to pay his debt to the casino and leave.  Will he quit gambling?  Probably not.

Barely acceptable.  

"The Tootsie Roll Factor" would be reprinted in the 2001 collection Claremont Tales.

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Though none of them actually stink, I am not crazy about these stories.  You can't expect to roll boxcars every throw, genre fiction readers.  The only people I can really recommend hie over to ebay or internet archive to access Wheel of Fortune are the most devoted of Zelazny's, Bond's, Koja's, Malzberg's and Lupoff's fans.  

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are scouring the interwebs in search of collaborations between Barry N. Malzberg and Kathe Koja, and today we have three specimens of such collabs published in the good old days of the 1990s, one each from the years 1993 (Muslim radicals bomb the World Trade Center!), 1994 (Rwandan genocide!), and 1995 (cultists poison people on the Tokyo subway!)  These stories have, as far as I can tell, only been printed once, so maybe we have reason to fear these are below average productions from these widely-admired (by critics and genre lit professionals, at least) writers, but we won't know for sure until we've read them.  

"The High Ground" (1993)

"Literary Lives" has only appeared in Mike Resnick's Alternate Outlaws, a paperback with a cover illo chillingly depicting Elvis Presley as a bolshevist terrorist.  Recent events suggest that people don't really take seriously the political advice of celebrities like Cardy Bee and Meghan the Stallion or even Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, but if The King of Rock and Roll himself was on on the side of Moscow or Peking maybe today I'd be wielding a hoe on a collective farm or sitting in an office listening in on conversations via bugs and wire taps--scary.  

"The Witches of Delight" (1995)

Here's the third of our unreprinted stories--we are digging deep today, friends!  The sole appearance of "The Witches of Delight" was in Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg's anthology Witch Fantastic.