Z7's Headquarters

Z7's Headquarters has finally decided to move locations. No, our safe house was not compromised. I've just found a more permanent place to host this reading log. And I want to use the "Z7HQ" domain name without having "blogsot" attached to it. All the old archives will be maintained here. You can go here for new posts starting with Jan 1, 2012.
And thanks for stopping by!

Conan: The Road Of Kings by Karl Edward Wagner (1979)

2011-12-24T00:04:00.003-05:00

I've covered the works of fantasy writer Karl Edward Wagner (1945-94) many times. A brilliant writer who died much too soon, Wagner is responsible for creating the dark hero Kane, a red-haired giant who resembled his creator. Kane was based on the biblical persona with the same name, but in this case rebelled against a mad god who had created humanity as his toys. Cursed with immortality, Kane wondered the distant and recent past, trying to build a power base for his own machinations.
KEW's take on Conan is significantly different than Howard's. In Road of Kings, Conan finds himself mixed up in a "game of thrones" situation. I can't help but wonder if the outline for Road began as a Kane novel. It would make sense, as Kane was always playing power politics of one form or another. Political intrigue is the theme of this novel with different groups trying to out maneuver each other.
The book begins with Conan finding himself on a gallows. He's just killed a captain in the Royal Zingaran Army, where he was employed as a mercenary. It was a fair fight, but the commanding general has decided the barbarians whom he employs must be taught a lesson. Conan is rescued at the last minute by a band of rebels. They're not trying to free him, but one of his fellow exuctionees, who happens to be a ringleader in the resistance against the king.
Freed, Conan soon throws his lot in with the rebels and their many factions. Here is where the story begins moving: KEW doesn't care so much about the political issues behind the rebels, he portrays them as being just as power hungry as the forces they are trying to over-through. Once a sorcerer makes an appearance telling the rebels how he can assure their revolution, the novel becomes very interesting indeed. Conan finds himself in the middle of street fighting, counter-revolution and evil magick.
This isn't one of Wagner's major works. I would tell anyone interested in his writings to start with Dark Crusade. But it is a fascinating take on the whole Conan character.

How The West Was Weird: Campfire Tales, edited by Russ Anderson, Jr.

2011-12-17T10:02:00.000-05:00

The old west is a perfect setting for horror tales. Isolated farmhouses, a mysterious stranger dragging a coffin, a hero who cannot be killed, (and that's just from Django) all the elements are there. I can't think of too many literary versions outside of Joe Lansdale; most of what comes to mind is from the cinema (Into the Badlands, etc.). Fortunately, we have Russ Anderson to correct the situation.

How The West Was Weird: Campfire Tales, hit the Internet stands a few months ago and features some of the best writing in this new cross-over trend. There are definite traces of steampunk, oops, Victorian science fiction and traditional oater tales. We've even got one journey to the center of the earth. And of course there are zombies. You have to have zombies these days.

The collection leads with my favorite, "Mr. Brass and the Crimson Skies of Kansas", by Josh Reynolds. Normally, I don't like mash-ups with historical characters and literary ones. I don't usually like retreads of established literary characters. It seldom works, the recent BBC adaptation of Sherlock Holmes being the exception to the rule. But "Crimson Skies" makes it all happen. Teddy Roosevelt is flying in a cavorite-powered airship across the open prairie.It's been years since the martians tried to conquer earth, but he's still protected by two Pinkerton operatives, one of whom is a cybernetic clockwork man. There's even air pirates led by Buckaroo Banzai's Hanoi Xan. Even Mark Twain makes an appearance. And yet it all works to make an excellent pulp adventure.

"Hell's Own" by editor Russ Anderson mixes Max Brand with George Romero. One night a meteorite falls outside a small town in the old west unleashing a horde of flesh-eating zombies. It's up to the town's sheriff to do his best to defend the civilians against the raging fiends, but he is hardly up to the task. To tell more would ruin the story.

"The Tale of the Baron's Tribute" by Better in the Dark Podcaster Derrick Ferguson is mythic story, almost into Sergio Leone territory, with a touch of Jodorowsky. Lone gunman Sebastian Red travels to the disputed lands between Mexitli and the United Republic of America to spend time in an isolated Iahn village. The villagers are having a celebration: they are going to pay-off their padron, Baron Orwell and own the land free and clear. But Sebastian Red has enemies who will go to great lengths to get at him, even if it involves the death of innocents. This is a good story which would've made a better novel.

The final selection, "Gunmen of the Hollow Earth", by Joel Jenkins, takes the readier into Edgar Rice Burroughs land. A group of old west heroes are on the run from banditos and venture into the prehistoric world of the Inner Earth. There's Amazon warriors (always a plus for me) and cowboys battling it out with dinosaurs. It ends a little abruptly, almost with a "to be continued" feel, making me wonder if "Gunmen" isn't a treatment for a larger work.

Western, horror, fantasy,and sf fans should check out this anthology. It may pave the way for a new genre. CowFantasy? SplatterWest? OaterPunk? You decided.

The Game: Original Stories Inspired by Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game"" (Seven Realms Publishing), Edited by Sean Ellis.

2011-12-14T17:23:00.004-05:00

"The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell is one of those short stories everyone has either heard about or read. First published in 1924, the story is about Sanger Rainsford, a big game hunter who finds himself marooned on an island off the coast of South America. He finds a large palatial estate on the island inhabited by a former Tsarist general, Zaroff, and his deaf-mute servant Ivan. Rainsford discovers Zaroff has been hunting ship-wrecked sailors as game on his estate every since he became bored of animal hunting. Zaroff turns the hunter into the hunted in his next game, but Rainsford is able to elude the general with his superior skills. It's implied Rainsford triumphs in the end.
The story has been collected and adapted many times. I first encountered it in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbinders In Suspense. It was first adapted for the screen in 1932, staring Faye Wray (in a character which didn't appear in the story). It was also the basis for the 1982 Australian movie, Turkey Shoot, about a bunch of prisoners in a futuristic prison being hunted by the warden and friends. More recently, someone produced a video called Bambi Hunt where people paid money to shoot paint balls at naked Vegas showgirls. This last one sparked a huge outrage until it was revealed the "hunt" was staged just to sell a DVD.
This year, editor Sean Ellis asked 10 authors to contribute their take on the story for a new collection. He also contributed his own story. The result is The Game.
Most of the stories are quite good. He picked established writers, so the stories flow quickly and are professional. If I have one complaint with the collection it is the inclusion of "paranormal fantasy" as the theme of many stories. 7 of the 10 either use paranormal reality as the plot device or let it slip in at some point. Another one is set in outer space, but that does add some flavor. "The Most Dangerous Game" concept works best when it's one human against another, using only their wits and abilities.
"The Most Dangerous Reality" by Rick Chesler uses a "reality" TV show as the theme. A man who has racked up thousands of dollars in student loans getting both a legal and medical degree signs up for a TMDG theme TV show on an isolated island. He's supposed to be paid big money if he survives, but what he doesn't know is that the event is all a fake. The TV producers have decided to give the "hunter" a blank gun and broadcast the entire event to see how far people in financial straights will go. However, the prey doesn't know it's all fake and is playing for keeps. Tragedy results.
"Freakshow" by J. Kent Holloway fits into his Enigma series. Dr. Obidiah Jackson, a cyrpto-zooligist, finds himself trapped in a derelict amusement park. It's run a hidden figure only known as "Freakshow". Freakshow is giving Dr. Jackson a 30 minute start in the park before he releases his pet monsters. Should Dr. Jackson survive the ordeal (no one has yet), he will be released. And one other little bit of seasoning: there's a mother of three tied up somewhere in the park, not too far away, who will get eaten if Jackson doesn't release her. Jackson manages to bring all his knowledge of mysterious monsters to play against the game master.
"Code Duello" has Nicholas Boving's spymaster Maxim Gunn in a cat-and-mouse game in the Scottish Highlands. Years earlier, Gunn had thought he's killed mercenary Devlin in a jungle fortress. But his adversary has survived and is hunting Gunn in an estate near the Scottish coast. A raging thunderstorm adds to the tension of the story.
"The Andromeda Solution" by novelist Rick Nichols takes place in outer space. The sole survivor of an alien attack on a remote outpost finds himself pursued by attack ships in an asteroid belt. Although he lacks weapons, the pilot is able to put the tools on his little pod to good use. What he finds when he enters one of the alien ships was a shocker.
"Running Wild from the Hunt" by Alan Baxter is one of the many paranormal themed stories in the collection. Young Tom Jamieson has nightmares about being pursued by a wild hunt in his dreams. The hunt is more than a bad dream because the dark faerie folk have decided to take Tom out as he represents a potential threat to them. Fortunately, Tom has Isiah, an older man and supernatural guardian to defend him.
"Dark Entry" by David Wood comes close to being the best story in the book. Treasure hunters Dave Maddock and "Bones" Bonebreak travel to a park in Virginia looking for a missing American Indian heirloom. But the park is also the home of a bunch of rednecks who like to prey on humans for sport. Since both Maddock and Bones are former navy SEALs, they readily beat the hunters at their own game.
"A Most Dangerous Ruse" by R. J. Fanucchi is the strangest tale in this collection. It's told from the viewpoint of General Zaroff, who finds himself entertaining several guests who have heard about The Game and want to play. They've also brought along their own victim, who's face is covered by a mask. The general reluctantly agrees, on his terms. But he can't seem to remember what happened after he was defeated by Rainsford.
"The Shiva Objective" by David Sakmyster is the best story in The Game. Nina Osseni, a woman gifted with the psychic ability to "remote view" is sent by her employer at The Morpheus Initiative to check out a potential client in Agra, India. But she's shanghaied by a rich Indian to take part a TMDG. Professional and amateur killers from around the world have paid big bucks to take out the quarry. Dumped in the middle of an alley, she has to reach a statue of Shiva in an underground labyrinth beneath the Taj Mahal to win. But she may never reach the building at all since there are snipers and assassins everywhere trying to kill her. Sakmyster plays fair and never lets his protagonist use ESP as a deus ex machina. Osseni is a trained killer and quite the match for her opponents. I'll be looking for more works of fiction with Osseni in the future.
R. P. Steeves' "Misty Johnson and the Monsters of the Caribbean" features immortal investigator Misty Johnson recounting her tale of surviving a TMDG on an island. Whisked away by a magical creature known only as "The Author", Misty finds herself fighting for survival with a group of supernatural characters. They're up against, zombies, werewolves, and other things that go bump in the night. The story moves at a rapid pace and never fails to entertain.
"The Toughest Mile" by William Meikle takes us to Robert E Howard country. A pit fighter known only as Garn is promised his freedom if he can survive a 10-mile passage. But he has to escape the Witch-Queen's bodyguards, ten savage women who will be released after giving him a head start. This is a gruesome story which plays on the physical prowess needed to survive such an ordeal.
The final tale, "The Unbreakable Law" by editor Sean Ellis, serves as a sequel of sorts to the original TMDG. Rainsford did manage to defeat Zaroff and now rules on the island in the general's place. Several of his big game hunting friends have traveled to the island for a visit. They've learned The Game continues and are eager to get in on the action. Rainsford agrees, but there is a price to be paid.
The Game is one of the better theme anthologies to be published in electronic format this year. All the writers are seasoned veterans and bring their skills in to play. I could've used less paranormal themes, but such is my own preference.

Martians, Go Home (1955) by Frederic Brown

2011-12-12T10:02:00.000-05:00

This has to be one of the most hilarious science fiction novels ever written. Frederic Brown (1906-72), who had spoofed space opera with What Mad Universe in 1949, returned a few years later to write the perfect alien invasion novel, Martians, Go Home. Brown was in rare form with this book. It was the triumph to his prolific writing streak in the 1950's.
Luke Deveraux is a failed writer specializing in science fiction who's decided to shack it up with a friend in the desert so he can work on another book. He's also failed in his marriage and is smarting from the divorce wounds. One morning, after suffering from the latest drunken binge, he awakes to find a little green man at the front door. Thinking this is the result of too much alcohol he makes his way to a nearby diner only to discover there are little green men everywhere. Earth has been invaded.
But this isn't the usual 'People Of Earth" invasion. The martians, and there are millions of them, have come to earth not to conquer, but to amuse themselves. They can teleport anywhere they want and see through objects. But anyone who tries to kick a martian finds their foot going through empty space. The martians have no material substance.
Mass chaos breaks out as humanity has to concern itself with little green men who appear everywhere, making fun of people. The entertainment industry goes into a slump since it's impossible to produce anything when the martians teleport in and start making comments. A psychologist trying to conduct a seminar dealing with the aliens finds himself reduced to a gibbering mass. When a martian appears in his office, it begins revealing secrets about his personal life.
Even primitive tribes suffer. They can't easily hunt wild game when little green men show-up and start scaring off the quarry. And everyone hears the martians make insults in their native tongue.
Sexual activity nearly draws to a standstill. No one wants to make love when a little green man is likely to appear in their bedroom and start laughing.
Although the over-riding issue of Martians Go Home seems to be about privacy and secrets, the novel also discusses solipsism towards the end of the book. Luke Deveraux suffers a shock and becomes one of the few people on the planet who can't see the martians. From here, he begins to wonder if the martians were created by his own imagination. It's an issue which the book never really resolves, down to the authors own postscript where he points out: "I invented Luke. So where does that leave him or the martians? Or any of the rest of you?"
I'd like to answer, but there's this little green man who keeps telling me to type faster.

NIGHTMARE ALLEY (1947) by William Lindsay Gresham

2011-12-11T20:19:00.001-05:00

This is the story of Stanton Carlisle, a carnival
sideshow mentalist, who decides to strike out for the big time by
going into the spiritualism racket. With his knowledge of human
nature from years of working sideshows, he is able to fleece enough
people to start his own church. But it all comes crashing down
around him when he tries to scam a wealthy industrialist. The book
ends with the protagonist's descent into alcoholism.
First published in 1946, this is a grim book. Its moral could best be summed up
as: "There's always somebody who can hit harder than you can."
The novel contains one of the most fiendish examples of the "femme fatale"
I have ever encountered in literature. Carlisle meets his match in the person of Dr. Lilith
Ritter, a psychiatrist who has risen to the top of her game by
holding the secrets of many rich and powerful people in the
Manhattan. When he first goes to her office for an appointment, she
puts him in a marital arts hold and proceeds to tell him that she
knows what his game is and how it's run. A few chapters later
Carlisle has already turned into her sex slave and is being used to
set-up the wealthy industrial magnate.

What makes the character of Dr. Ritter so memorable is the way the author
describes her background in a few short paragraphs. The daughter of a saloon
keeper, Dr. Ritter turned the abuse she suffered while growing up
into an asset against the kind of people who took advantage of her.
Carlisle, on the other hand, never recoverd from his mother leaving
him as a child and that tragedy sets him up for his eventual fall.
NIGHTMARE ALLEY is a depressing read, but a good book to get a look
at the kind of con games that were run against unsuspecting people
during the Depression.

Domino Lady: Sex As A Weapon (Moonstone Books), Edited by Lori Gentile

2011-12-06T16:01:00.001-05:00

The Domino Lady was the subject of 6 adventures in 1936. All but the last one was published in Saucy Romantic Adventures. No one knows who wrote these stories, the magazines credit one "Lars Anderson", but speculation remains the real author was any number of house writers. What makes Lady Domino different than the other hero pulps of the time is her Modus operandi: a plain domino (upper face) mask, sheer dress with plunging neckline, cape and heels. No super scientific gadgets, no power to "cloud men's minds", no blazing automatics. One look at this Madonna in a tight dress is enough to render most crooks speechless. Which gives her enough time to make them helpless with a special hypodermic syringe and knock-out drug. For added attraction, she carried a small caliber pistol strapped to a garter belt.
In her straight life, The Domino Lady was Ellen Patrick, affluent socialite and Berkley graduate. He father, Owen Patrick, had been a crusading district attorney until an assassin's bullet had ended his career. Her alter ego was created to avenge his death.
One of her motifs is leaving behind a card which states: "Compliments of the Domino Lady".
Two years ago, Moonstone Books was able to bring out a volume of new Lady Domino stories by 9 different authors. Recently, the kindle edition has hit the Internet (see below). Editor Lori Gentile and illustrator Ver Curtiss have managed to showcase several distinct takes on the character.
In one sense, you have to admire the ability of any writer to create a Domino Lady story. The character was designed for a depression-era erotica magazine (sold under the counter) and styles have changed greatly. The image of the Domino Lady may have sent Bob the Mechanic's pulse racing in 1936, but today you can download far more for free from the Internet (not that I would know a thing about it. No sir, not me). All the authors have kept the action in the same time frame the original stories took place.
The collection kicks off with "Domino Lady and the Crimson Dragon" by K G McAbee. In this story, The Domino Lady becomes mixed up with gangsters who import Chinese women to be sold into sex slavery. The character of Ling Chin, a Chinese woman who battles against her captors, in particularly moving. Bonus points for the character trying to solicit help while singing "Jesus Loves Me".
"Blondes In Chains" by C J Henderson has the best title. The Domino Lady travels to New York City and helps The Black Bat stop a gang kidnapping rich young women. The final scene in the villain's lair was excellent and would make a great grindhouse movie.
Chuck Dixon's "Stealing Joe Crick" is one of the best stories in the anthology. He mixes the largely forgotten aerial ace pulp genre with The Domino Lady by introducing Airboy Davy Nelson. Airboy, who flies a plane with flapping wings, helps the Domino Lady rescues an imprisoned eccentric inventor.
"Target: Domino Lady" by Bobby Nash has The Domino Lady framed for murder. Her enemies have decided to turn the forces of law and order against her by killing a small-time crook and leaving her calling card next to him. Naturally, The Domino Lady triumphs.
Airship 27's Ron Fortier contributes "The Claws of the Cat". Here, cats are being stolen from rich families by a gang of crooks and held for ransom. It's up to The Domino Lady to stop the gang and find out who is behind the scheme. Fortier also mixes in the depression era local politics of the Los Angeles, which reminded me of the Jack Nicholson movie Chinatown.
"The Strange Case of Domino Lady and Mr. Holmes" by Nancy Holder attempts to meld Victorian adventure with the pulp hero. Holmes doesn't put in much of an appearance, which is good because his presence would over-power anything from this era. Holder also drops Mr. Hyde into the story very effectively.
The best story in the collection is The "Devil, You Know" by James Chambers. Not only does Chambers give us a Chinese-American diamond fence named Lee who dresses and talks like a cowboy, but he has The Domino Lady captured by a band of Satanists. Taken to a yacht off the coast, the Domino Lady is recruited by their sinister leader and forced to watch obscene rituals. It has all the sleaze factor you might expect from the shudder pulps, including a naked Amazon whipping men to death. Off course, The Domino Lady is a little too smart for her captors.
Martin Powell's "Masks of Madness" teams The Domino Lady with The Phantom (AKA The Ghost Who Walks). In this story, she's shipwrecked on the coast of Africa and rescued by an African chieftain who takes her to the Phantom's liar. Soon, The Domino Lady swings into action to save a village from the very pirates who marooned her. This story also concludes with her trip back to the US and discovery of the man who ordered her father's execution.
This is a good collection of stories based around a classic, if lesser-known, pulp hero. I might've wished some of the stories to have brought The Domino Lady to the present, but she works best in her depression era scenery. It's truly amazing what contemporary writers can do with a creation from the last century.

Echo of Guilt (AKA Pulled Down) by Phyllis Paul (1964)

2011-12-01T12:42:00.001-05:00

There's not much written these days about Phyllis Paul (1903-73). She published 12 novels over a 30+ year period. Most of them can be classified as "thrillers", although there are enough supernatural overtones to put them in the supernatural category. My interest in her began when I read a comparison of her writings to R R Ryan. Mark Valentine of Wormwoodiana has a very high opinion of her work, which piqued my curiosity.
Echo of Guilt has a very dense, literate style. This is not an easy novel to read, which makes me wonder why it was marketed in the US as a Gothic romance (note the Lancer Guild cover which has the generic woman standing in front of a dark mansion). It's more of a tragedy enacted over a 50-year period, with two prominently British families whose fate is intertwined. There's also a lot in this book about the Roman Catholic Church in 20th century England (although no Holy Grail conspiracies).
The novel begins by introducing Ms. Alice Hawke. Ms. Hawke has a bit of a problem. Her son has joined the Catholic Church and wants to become a priest. However, he's wild-spirited and the church has doubts about him. She visits a prominent English Catholic layman, Dr. Rodney, and tries to get him to intercede for her son.
This is where the book starts to become interesting. Dr. Rodney, and his family, is the major focus of the novel. As the book describes him:

He had not been accepted for the religious life; but in his youth his soul had been bound to the ethos of the monk;he had been taught by monks and prejudices of monks had made their iron impress.

Eventually, Dr. Rodney's wife passes away and he is forced to care for his children alone. At the halfway point, Ms Hawke is murdered. The culprit is never found, but her renegade priestly son, Lewis, is sent to stay with Dr. Rodney's family by the church (figuring the exposure to the esteemed layman will do him some good).
Now the book turns up the thriller volume. Lewis tells Dr. Rodney one day that a strange man was seen leaving the house after the death of his mother. He also tells the good doctor that the stranger looked a lot like Dr. Rodney. And where was he on the day of the death?
From Dr. Rodney's actions, you're never quite sure if he was the killer or not. He tries to retrace his movements for the day, talking to everyone he knows,trying to get a witness to his whereabouts on the day of the murder. He even tries to get a prominent protestant scholar to vouch for him. But he never can quite be sure.
And then Dr. Rodney disappears off the face of the earth.
After some chapters discussing the effects of his vanishing on his family, the novel advances thirty years. The children of the both families have grown and moved on with their lives. Most of Ms. Hawkes' children are active in the Catholic church. The book closes with a long meeting between several of her children where Lewis, now a prominent Catholic priest, expounds on his theory as to what happened to Dr. Rodney.
But we never really do find out. Even as the book closes. Dammit.
The overall feel of Echo of Guilt is moody. It has been said that Phyllis Paul's books are filled with doomed characters. The reader is filled with a sense of dread from page one. Which doesn't make it an easy read. Still, Paul is a very literate writer and I'm disappointed she's not better known today.

An Interview Not To Miss!

2011-11-27T13:04:00.001-05:00

Excellent interview with Mark Valentine, of the Wormwordiana blog, who has one of the best libraries I have ever seen. And he made it all the way through William Hope Hodgeson's The Nightland. I love that he collects reading editions. He also has some kind words for Phyllis Paul, another author whose book I am struggling to read.

Pulp Ink, edited by Nigel Bird and Chris Rhatigan (Needle Publishing)

2011-11-26T00:08:00.001-05:00

It may be that the anthology format will be the best one for e-publishing. At least with the newer generation of pulp writers, this seems to be the best introduction to their works. I found this collection to be a quick and deadly read, perfect for my Sony e-Reader. Editors Bird and Rhatigan are to be commended for putting together a selection which is of superior quality.
The editors of Pulp Ink had a great idea: take little snippets of dialogue from Pulp Fiction the movie, send them to a host of writers working the same groove and ask them to write short stories based on the ideas. The result is this tome, a book with an edge every thousand words. I'm no Tarantino scholar (are there any?), but I do feel the vibe of his 90's classic funneled through these stories.
I will warn any potential reader that most of these tales are from the dark side. There's not to many people in them to be admired. So if you are looking for stirring stories of inspiration, look elsewhere. If you are looking for demons of the inner mind, you'll find plenty in this collection. Typical is "Zed's Dead, Baby" written by Eric Beetner. It's from the point-of-view of a loan shark enforcer who reminisces over the sound of broken bones when he'd found a reluctant payee.
Reed Coleman's "Requiem for Spider" leads the pack. It's the story of a Jewish gangster named Moe who's hired by his boyhood Italian friend Spider to help broker a deal with Russian Jewish mobsters. Spider wants his old friend to supply back-up because he's of the same persuasion. But as Moe tries to explain to his buddy:

“Oy, Spider,” I said. “These guys aren't Jews the way you know Jews. They pretty much grew up godless, without religion like you know it. I may be as lapsed a Jew as there is, but I’m the chief rabbi of Jerusalem compared to them."

Of course the meeting doesn't quite turn out as everyone planned.
"Jack Rabbit Slim's Cellar" by Jodi MacArthur is one of the few stories that ties in directly with the movie. It seems that while Uma Thurman and John Travolta were dancing up stairs at the 50's theme restaurant, somebody was being interrogated in the basement. I did learn a lot about the history of bubble gum from this story.
"Padre" by A J Hayes is one tale which will stick with you for a long time. A renegade priest is meets with a Russian gangster who holds a precious cargo. I highly recommend this one, but to tell more would ruin the conclusion. Easily the one story which would make a great Drive-In movie.
"Creation of Ice" by Sandra Seamans heads out to the rural part of America. A viscous woman finds herself tied to a chair after killing an old man. It's told from her POV as she tries to figure a way out of her mess. Good ending, which did surprise me.
Alan Guthrie's "Your Mother Should Know" is another story which remains in the rural part of the USA. It's also told from the POV of the main character, a ripe young woman with a very religious mother. Her father had died years ago from a lighting blast, which momma had attributed to the wrath of God. Lighting does strike twice in this one, with deadly results.
"You Never Can Tell" by Matthew Funk continues into the hinterlands. A young man named Junior with a wife and kid are hunting down the men he believed murdered his sadistic father. But the real killer may be closer than he could imagine.
"A Whole Lotta Rosie" by Nigel Bird, had me confused. A rough and tumble women in New Zealand shears sheep and arm-wrestles on the side. I'm not sure about what else happens. It's still a great story.
"The Lady And The Gimp: A Peter Ord Investigation", by Paul Brazill, is amusing in a twisted sort of way. A private detective is hired to find a missing woman who may be living in a caravan (mobile home for us yanks; the story takes place in the UK). A burial neatly captures the mood of the story:

“There comes a time in every young man’s life,” he said, his long arms stretched wide, “when he knows that he will never be The Fonz. Shortly after that realization it becomes clear that he won’t even be Richie Cunningham. And, so, then, he has to make a choice. Will he be Ralph Malph or Potsie Weber?"

"A Night at the Royale" by Chris Holm is a very tight little tale that takes place in Amsterdam. Three American hipster tourists make the mistake of getting noisy at a retrospective showing of Foxy Brown, Death Race 2000, and Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS. But the idle man sitting in front is there to enjoy the movies and is in no mood to deal with loud chumps. One for those of us who've had to endure audience participation one time too many.
"Clouds in a Bunker" by David Cranmer is the saddest story here. An old man with an advanced case of senility has locked himself in a backyard fallout shelter with his wheelchair-bound wife. The police and his daughter are trying to talk him out, but he's lost the ability to identify objects directly. What he's planned is far worse than anyone imagines.
"The Wife of Gregory Bell" by Patricia Abbot would fit into a book of supernatural stories. You're never quite sure if the effects of the lead character's thefts are real or a product of his own imagination. Another side of the gentleman thief so beloved in European fiction.
"If Love is a Red Dress – Hang Me in Rags" by Michael Solender is a prison confession. It's one of the shorter works in here, but still effective.
"A Corpse by Any Other Name" by Naomi Johnson is another hilarious tale. Two boobs are hired by a Mr. Big in the hinterland to take out one Frank Murray. But they get the wrong Frank Murray and now Mr. Big has a problem on his hands. They decide to dispose of the unwanted body in a cemetery, but things go from bad to worse.
In "Surf Rider", by Ian Ayris, a couple of Brits decide to steal a valuable surf board from a homeless surfer. The surfer hasn't been right in the head for years (too many drugs), but the board is the one thing he holds dear. And he'll defend it to the death.
"The Slicers’ Serenade of Steel" by Gary Phillips is another supernatural themed story. A small time thug is trying to run from a hit man with the power of death. Just when you think it's over the story turns into a martial arts duel straight out of a 70's Shaw Brothers movie. This one would make a good anime subject. "The October 17 Economic Development Committee Meeting" by Chris Rhatigan has a vengeful reporter taking out a bunch of corporate types with a gun. But what saves it from being another revenge number is the final confrontation with the one older reporter the assailant did admire. I see in the bio that "Chris Rhatigan made it out of the newspaper industry alive". Not too surprised.
"Threshold Woman" by Richard Godwin, sings with sensuality. A gangster is in love with the sister of his boss. His boss is a dangerous man. Much tension results.
"Redlining" by Jim Harrington is dark humor with from the Joe Lansdale school. A hold-up man is talked into taking along a relative by his sister. But his new sidekick is an incompetent oaf who may get them both arrested. And the hold-up man needs the money for medical treatment. Time is running out for both of them."Jungle Boogie by Kate Horsley is another tale of deception and theft, but with erotic overtones. A man is duped into stealing a statue of the Jaguar god from a museum. However, the gods of the jungle are not known to deal with sacrilege lightly.
How someone could tell a sweet story like "The Little Piggy", when it involves a foot fetish, is beyond me. But Hilary Davidson manages to do it and for that I am impressed. Did I mention it also involves gangsters?More fetish material emerges from "Comanche", by Jason Duke. It's a viscous tale of a mobster who likes to abuse his wife. His wife has another plan, involving the mobster's fortune, and a boyfriend her husband doesn't know about.
More gangsters become involved in "Misirlou" by Jimmy Callaway. A Greek restaurateur known as "Cheeseburger" is murdered by persons unknown. The numbers runner he worked for brings in "Funk" to find the culprit and sends him off with two of his men. In an amusing scene, Funk tells the other gunsels they are playing a game of Dungeons and Dragons and "another adventure in an open-ended campaign".
"The Only One Who Could Ever Reach Me" by Matt Lavin is particularly viscous. A keeper in a secret prison takes a liking to a prisoner just before the torturer comes to do his business. Another one for "The Road to Hell Paved" category.
All stories of exceptional quality which will keep you turning to the next page. If nothing else, Pulp Ink demonstrates the high caliber of writers working in the new "pulp" field.

The Chloe Files #1: Ashes to Ashes by Howard Hopkins

2011-11-18T22:58:00.001-05:00

The character of Chloe Everson grew out of another one of Howard Hopkins' novels, Grim, where Arlo Grim battles a coven of witches trying to resurrect a demon in New Salem, Maine. Hopkins liked the character so much he decided to give Chloe here own series of books, of which Ashes to Ashes is the first. There is one other Chloe Files book and a third one is rumored to be on the way.
Chloe is a 5'6" 30ish former stripper who hunts down demonic creatures in New Salem. She and her fiance Arly, a detective in the New Salem police force, are considered "special" in that they can see creatures which normal humans cannot. Chloe lost her parents at a tender young age and was soon separated from her identical twin sister when they went to foster homes. Chloe would go on to an exotic dancer career hitting the circuit until she ended up in New Salem.
Chloe doesn't come across as the brightest light bulb in the pack, but she has a good heart. Which, ironically, makes her more realistic than all the other barroom dancers you encounter in action literature. And she has a good way of sizing up her opponents. She refers to one of her opponents in the book as "Ms. Pixie Sticks" and the name hangs on.
The only real problem with the book is Chloe's constant references to events which happened in the novel Grim. She's perpetually bringing up the coven of witches she and Arly defeated. This might make the reader interested in buying another book, but I found it irritating.
Ashes to Ashes opens with Chloe trying to find out what happened to her fiance Arly. Next, she'd visited on a dark and stormy night by a monkey which delivers her a locket. It had been given to Chloe years ago by her dead parents. But the creep factor really pumps when she has a vision of diseased children singing the "Ring around the Roses" nursery rhyme. She also begins seeing her vanished sister Patricia on TV. Is someone trying to warn Chloe about another demon working its way into the real world?
There's plenty of weird supernatural creatures to go around. A priest who seems to know more than he should. A librarian who may be working for the demons. And she begins to have visions of Arly chained to a wall begging for help.
The final battle scene was the pay-off for the book. After nearly 100 pages of back story, the plot began moving to a page-turner conclusion. It's clear that Hopkins is a shudder pulp fan. The final scenes wouldn't be out of place in a Doctor Death novel. I just wish the book had ramped it up earlier.
Chloe files #1 is a good beginning for a series. It will be interesting to see where Hopkins takes it.

Where Do You Do Your Best Reading?

2011-11-13T19:00:00.001-05:00

Chester County, PA has done one thing right: it has extended the Schuylkill River Trail past my little borough. I now have a place to go read in peace. Every chance I get, I head in the direction of the trail and walk it with my attention firmly placed on my electronic book reader ( a Sony). It's a win-win situation for me: I get to hike a few miles, get some solitude and read. The trail, built over an abandoned rail bed, is level, so I can walk and read at the same time without having to worry about cars.
It's not the public library, but I don't have all the distractions of books I haven't read.

Pagan Passions by Randall Garrett and Larry Harris

2011-11-10T23:47:00.001-05:00

Randall Garrett was a post-WWII science fiction writer who created a number of fictional words for which he is little remembered. He was also one of the earliest members of the Society for Creative Anachronisms, a recreation medievalist organization. He passed away in the late 1980's and will, sadly, be remembered less as the years go by. Fortunately some of his books are finding their way back into print.
Pagan Passions is a light and amusing fantasy novel about what would happen if the ancient Greek and Roman gods returned to earth. The novel begins by informing us how the gods of Mt. Olympus have returned after several thousand years of absence. Major wars are now abolished (Mars having some understanding of the occasional need for minor ones). Most of the action takes place in a future New York City where everyone is a devotee of one of the major gods.
The book opens with a teacher of world history, William Forrester, lecturing to his students about the return. Forrester is an acolyte of Athena, but he'd hoped one day to make priest. The action switches to a female student (of the faction tied in with Venus, naturally) making suggestive remarks to him for a better grade.
As he contemplates his situation, Forrester is called into the tower of the all-father Zeus. The gods need a replacement for Dionysus, who is currently indisposed, and they've decided to elevate Forrester to demi-god status.
The rest of the book describes Forester's attempts to officiate at an revel held in New York City in honor of Dionysus. These revels take place every 7 years and all his followers party down hard. Forrester even finds himself forced to deal with having 7 gorgeous women presented to him while he secretly pines for a lost love.
The book ends amusingly. I've not read any other of Garrett's books, but it seems this is a minor work.

Beat to a Pulp: Hardboiled, edited by David Cranmer and Scott D Parker

2011-11-07T09:30:00.000-05:00

"Hardboiled" fiction has been popular since the post WW2 era. Every since returning GI's started coming home after the Good War, there has been a certain cynicism in detective fiction. Hardboiled differs from the pulp era in that problems could no longer be solved by costumed crusaders and super scientists. No longer were people content to read about masked villains who created zombies, they wanted to read about the real killers. And this style of writing has stayed around.
Ron Scheer creates a bit of a time warp by putting the start of hardboiled fiction at the election of 1912 where Woody Wilson won with a plurality of the electorate. This allows him to connect the latest pulp revival to the election of 2000 where another candidate lost on a technicality. All good and fine, but I don't seem to recall Kaiser Wilhelm exploding a zeppelin over Manhattan in 1914. Which is a nice way to say that he goes a long way to a make a minor point.
Be as that may, the stories in Beat to a Pulp: Hardboiled are all bleak and excellent, with only a few having a ray of hope at the end. "Second Round Dive" by Benoit Lelievre has to be the best of this lot. It's about a prize fighter who's tapped to take one more dive for a Big Man. His observations of boxing strike home to anyone who's ever trained in hand-to-hand combat:

No one gives a shit if you're a good Christian, if you're a family man or a faithful husband. It's irrelevant. If you're injured, if your brother died or if your dog is sick, nobody in the crowd cares.

"Ric With No K" by Patrica Abbot is in the same vein: a teenage girl becomes involved with an older hood, but you wonder who is the corrupted and who is the corrupter. "The Death Fantastique" by John Jacobs goes further in this direction in its tale about a drug mule, a prostitute, and her vicious pimp. These are the kind of stories where there is no "good guy".
On the black humor side there is "Vengeance on the 18th" about a golf course owner who takes out his revenge on a cheating wife with a snappy conclusion. There's also "Tachibana Hustle" by Garnet Elliot where Japanese hoodlums screw up one time too many.
I also learned a new term: flash fiction. It's applied to any story under 500 words. In the old days we called these "short-short stories". Several of the writers here are connected with an online zine called Shotgun Honey which is devoted to this style.
The final story, "Bulls Eye View", is my own favourite. A private eye and a bounty hunter are relaxing in an Oklahoma bar when one of them notes an infamous New Orleans hitman in their midst. What happens next is worth the read. Not to give to much away, but I'll be a lot more careful he next time I go fishing.
All the stories in this collection are of superior quality. I hope we'll be seeing more in the future.

The Avenger: The Gray Nemesis by Howard Hopkins

2011-11-05T11:36:00.000-04:00

(Outstanding George Gross painting for one of the 70's Avenger reissues.)

Richard Henery Benson, AKA The Avenger, was a character hero of the pulp era who battled all kinds of criminals through the years 1939 and 1942. A world class adventurer, he'd made his fortune in the rough parts of the globe. At the start of the series, he suffers a tragedy which turns his hair white and makes his skin plasticine. Later in the series, his skin and hair return to their normal state.To avenge himself and others who have suffered at the hands of criminals, he uses his vast fortune to create "Justice, Inc.", an organization dedicated to fighting crime. Most of the novels were written by Paul Ernst under the house name Kenneth Robeson.
I first read The Grey Nemesis, Howard Hopkin's study of The Avenger series in 1992 when it was originally released. It has since been updated in 2008 by the author and is available as an electronic download. Its an excellent study and I highly recommend the book. Nemesis is not very long, just a little over a hundred pages, and can be read in a single sitting.
In the first few chapters, Hopkins breaks the book down by characters: Benson and his sidekicks. Each of the Avenger's assistants get a profile, from Irish Chemist Fergus McMurdy to Cole Wilson, the final member of the team. He examines possible inspirations for them and how each character resembled what was accepted at the time. For instance, Hopkins applauds the series' principle writer Paul Ernst for creating two black American heroes, but points out the accepted stereotypes of the era.
The series was reissued in the 1970's action paperback boom. Although the original pulp series was discontinued at episode 24, the reissue company paid write to continue it. Hopkins feels the "new" adventures, although still set in the proper time frame, are inferior. There were also a number of Avenger short stories written as filler in the pulp magazines after the original series discontinued.
One area I totally agree with him was the appeal of the paperback covers in the 70's. He writes of the monthly trip to the mall to grab a new one. And those covers sold the book: excellent examples of graphic art which featured Richard Benson in some of the most eye-grabbing action shots imaginable. They were magnetic and sold those novels.

The book is an excellent study of one of the lessor-known heroes of the pulp era and how it was revived in the 1970's.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson (2008)

2011-11-03T18:17:00.002-04:00

Author Neal Stephenson continues to provide outstanding science fiction novels. Right now, I emeshed in his latest doorstoper, Readme. I've been following his writings every since The Diamond Age turned me on the possibilities of nanotechnology. I didn't have the endurance to make it all the way through his Baroque cycle of three books, but was impressed by another one of hishistoricals, Cyptonomicon. It's too bad that the immersion 3D computer technology he championed in Snow Crash never came about, but it was a good read just the same.
Now, he's returned to the world of hard science fiction. Anathem is a complex book, one which I hope people will read in years to come. I was lucky to grab the one I saw at the Chester County library and ended up renewing the loan just to finish it. It's not easy finding time to read a book which is almost 900 pages long when you are helping to run the greatest epoxy company in the Known Universe. Heck, right now I had to write this at the auto repair place where I was getting the brakes repaired for the my van.
Anathem is about a world called Arbre which is very similar to our own planet. At some time in the distant past of Arbre, philosophy became a competing force with organized religion. After the fall of a great empire, similar to Rome, philosophers began organizing themselves into cloistered communities called "Maths" to practice their discipline away from the saecular or mundane world. The mathic world may have many "concerts" (convents) housed together or be smaller. They keep order by only opening the doors once a year for "apert" to the general public. However, some of the groups inside these monasteries only open their sections to the general public every ten, hundred, or even thousand years.
The world outside the concerts has continued on its merry way. Since the "avout" (those who live within the walls of the mathic world) do not reproduce, new recruits are collected from the outside. The avout are only permitted to own three things: a robe, a tie to hold it together, and a device known as a "sphere" which has a multitude of purposes. They gather each day for a service which reaffirms their community.
The book's main character is Fra Erasamus, who has lived most of his live behind the mathic walls. Since his sect is a "tenner" he's allowed to leave at the apert which occurs at the opening of the novel and visit the rest of the world. This allows the reader some idea as to how the saecular world contrasts to that of the mathic. But soon after he returns, many of the avout are "evoked"(summoned) by the saecular government. It won't be telling much to give the reason: astronomers have dedicted a giant spaceship in orbit around the planet. No one knows where it originated or what it wants.
It's difficult writing about Anathem since Stephenson has created such a complex world. Although there are plenty of analogs to philosophies and ideas on earth, it can be difficult to identify which ones. For instance, there is much discussion about Gardan's steelyard. It took me awhile to figure out this was the parable to Occam's razor. And there are similar philosophical discussions of Godel, Plato, and Michael Faraday.
The book is also filled with fascinating characters, another of Stephenson's trademarks.
Highly recommended, this could be The Name of the Rose of SF novels.

Wetbones by John Shirley (1993)

2011-11-02T16:32:00.001-04:00

First of all I want to give a shout-out to Glorious Trash for turning me on to this book. I'd always thought of John Shirley as a science fiction writer from the new school until encountering this punch in the gut. I'd read his City Come A-Walking book a few years ago, found it decent, just nothing to get excited about. No way was I prepared me for Wetbones. Holy Mother of Pearl, this book takes a chainsaw to just about everything sacred in Hollywood.

The story is split between many different points of view. Under a lot of lessor writers, this would bog down the plot. Shirley, on the other hand, is able to use this technique to show different aspects of it. In some ways, he uses this book to slam the entire entertainment industry. If Wetbones has one over-riding theme its how corrupt and damning the entire system is to everyone connected with it.

The cast of characters include:

Tom Prentice, a screenplay writer who has seen better days.
Rev. Gamer, a liberal christian minister who helps addicts.
Gamer's teenage daughter Constance.
Tom's brother.
Ephram Pixie, a college professor turned serial killer.
Orpheus, a street kid from the 'hood.
Eurydice, his sister.
The More Man, a sinister enterainment executive.
An immortal German matriarch
The Handy Man, a sinister henchman
An avenging hippie living in a shack
The Akishra, worm-like psychic vampires who live off human desires.

And these are just some of the major characters.

Of course all of these people are going to end up in the same place: a decrepid mansion near Hollywood called "The Keys", where a degenerate entertainment producer and his equally degenerate wife live. The place is falling apart and guarded by a huge black guy who is paid to look the other direction. Because what lurks inside The Keys is hideous beyond belief: people embedded in rose bushes, couples forced to have sex until they drop dead, people who self-mutilate, and worse. The human allies of the Akishra have developed mind control techniques which allow them to force their will on anyone.

There's even reverse astrology consisting of such constellations as The Hangman, The Black Widow, etc. The serial killer Ephram consults the sky constantly trying to find direction in this sinister zodiac. He's also the main focus of the book's title: Wetbones being an evil ritual which turns people inside out, leaving them in a pile of goo and calcium.

Shirley displays his political bent by turning his nose up at another character's NRA dad and making a not-so-suttle reference to Reagan's first Secretary of the Interior as one of the worm creatures best allies. But his depiction of a ghetto is not the sort of thing which would ever pass for PC. Shirley is disgusted at every facet of Los Angeles in general and Hollywood in particular. The overall theme: This is where hedonism leads.

One of the best books of the "splatterpunk" movement and not to be read on an empty stomach.

Happy Halloween!

2011-10-31T21:48:00.002-04:00

Because it only comes once a year.

The Black Chalice by Steven Savile

2011-10-29T18:44:00.004-04:00

There seems to be a resurgence in epic fantasy. It's a genre that is always with us. After all, Robert E Howard has been in print for years. With the recent Game of Thrones mini-series, we'll probably be seeing a lot more books in this field.

Black Chalice by English writer Steven Savile, is one of the better offerings. Written as if it was a new discovery, the book is filled with notes and explanations. The "hook" here is is the book is a lost addition to the Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. I expect the publisher will be launching more "discoveries" in the near future.

Black Chalice is the story of Alymere, who travels to Camelot in hopes of becoming a knight of the table round. His father was a knight, so surely Alymere will have no trouble getting King Arthur to squire him to a knight. But the knight he ends up squiring to is his uncle, whom Alymere blames for his family's genteel poverty. After several years of training, the squire accompanies his uncle to inspect the sentry houses which guard the wall between England and the north.

And then things get very strange.

Because Alymere encounters a strange witch woman who tells him of the Devil's Bible, a forbidden book with forbidden knowledge. He eventually finds the book in a monastery, which leads him on a path of near-destruction.

We have: a monastery of blind monks. An unholy grail guarded by a giant with an ax. Tretchery. Betrayl. And many wrong decesions. In some ways, this book takes the traditional grail narrative and flips it on its head.

Worth reading if you are looking for an interesting variation on the Legend of the Holy Grail.

The Cheaters (1960) by Orrie Hitt

2011-08-28T22:55:00.008-04:00

Back again with sleaze publishing's laureate, Mr. Orrie Hitt. Now enjoying a revival of interest, it comes years after the great man's death in 1976. A prolific writer, he is rumored to have turned out a novel every two weeks. The Cheaters is Mr. Hitt at the top of his game. All the elements of his working class sweat fiction are here: bombastic women, masculine men, and people stuck in lousy jobs and worse towns.

The book is told from the view of Cliff, a big country boy from New England. He and his girl friend Ann decided to get the hell out of Dodge when Ann's stepfather took a liking to her. Not that there was much else holding them back in the hick town they where they busted sod. Cliff revisits the place mentally in the course of the novel with disgust. Although his view of it changes toward the conclusion.

At the beginning of Cheaters, Cliff and Ann are holed up in a boarding house looking for work in a port city only slightly better than the hayseeds they left behind. Ann takes a job as a waitress, Cliff finally lands a position as a bartender at a dive in a slum section of the town. Known as "The Dells", this is the bottom of the ladder for the working poor. The bar serves cheap beer and drinks to the dock hands.

But the real money is made off the girls who use the bar to attract customers. The bar's owner, Charlie, gets a cut out of their business and provides them with a location to turn tricks. To make matters worse, there's a corrupt cop named Red who hits the girls up for protection money and shakes the bar down as well. However, Cliff proves to be a good worker and the bar owner keeps him on.

Cliff does so well running the bar that Charlie offers to sell it to him in installments. Cliff isn't interested at first, but Charlie's bombshell wife Debbie makes a hard play. Cliff finds himself so smitten by Debbie, an ex-dancer, that he considers dumping the now-pregnant Ann. He ends up spending all his time running the bar and brings in a few new girls for the afternoon shift. Debbie entices him with tales of all the money Charlie possesses and how it can all be theirs if he just bides his time.

It all starts to spin out of control one night after Red beats Cliff senseless and leaves a scar to remind him who the real power is in The Dells. Cliff then leaves Ann after Debbie makes it worth his while. But a strike is looming at the docks, the newspapers are pressuring the cops to crack down on all the vice, and Red starts demanding more pay-off money. However, in true Hitt fashion, the book ends on a good note.

Once again, Orrie Hitt shows us the world of working class poverty that he knew so well. His books remind me of the films of Russ Meyer: stark, cartoonish, and lurid.

At least in this book you learn all about the day-to-day functioning of a dive bar.

Damballa by Charles Saunders

2011-08-21T20:38:00.010-04:00

Charles Saunders, author of Imaro and other African Sword and Soul heroes has released his own tribute to the pulp novels if the 1930's. It is a fact: there were no black pulp heroes in the 1930's save Dick Benson's sidekicks. It's good Saunders can rectify this with his "New Pulp" book.

It's Gotham City in the 30's and the only thing looming bigger than the Johnson- Kreiger heavyweight championship fight (patterned on Louis vs. Schmeling) is the mysterious Damballa, hero of Harlem's downtrodden. Cloaked in a black cape, Damballa appears out of nowhere to stop a home invasion robbery at a soiree organized by the Harlem elite for the Black American heavy weight champion, "Jackhammer" Johnson. The police, especially Detective Errol Bynoe, are respective, but jealous, of this one-man avenger. The Third Reich is sponsoring Kreiger as the "Aryan Adonis".

As the big fight looms closer we learn the German Nazis have concocted a deadly serum which will render their prize fighter invincible in the ring. Damballa eventually discovers the nature of the serum. With his African grandmother, he cracks the formula in a secret underground laboratory. Now he has the power to administer it to the Black American boxer, but will the serum do more damage than good?

The best parts of Damballa center around the heavyweight bout. Saunders shows his knowledge of boxing by having the description of the fight given by an announcer. As Kreiger and Johnson bash into each other you can feel the surge of energy from the fans. This is easily the best part of the book.

If there is any thing negative to said about Damballa, it would be stylistically. It's hard to recreate the world of the 1930's which gave birth to the pulps. In some ways, why would anyone want to? The pulp hero novels stuck to a very specific formula which is hard to duplicate. Saunders has his own style, which serves the novel well.

I'm looking forward to the next Damballa episode. Maybe the local newsstand already has it in stock.

Jungle Goddess (1965) by Charles Nuetzel

2011-07-25T13:31:00.016-04:00

I love jungle stories. Always have since watching Ron Ely swing from the trees as Tarzan in his 1960's TV show. As I grew a little older I came to understand that Africa was not an endless forest of vines and howling animals. But that never stopped me of dreaming of lost cities and noble warriors.
Paperback commando Charles Nuetzel has recently released some of his 60's novels into ebook form. This is a good thing as some of these books are not easy to find. Unless someone puts their old copy up for sale on the Net, they don't surface very often. With bookstores fading everywhere, it's hard to remember a time when the racks were miniature art galleries. The cover for Jungle Goddess was painted by Nuetzel's own father.
Jungle Goddess is a quick, fun read. A "Mens' Adventure" writer is sent on assignment into Africa with a up and coming photographer to photograph places seldom seen by civilization. The writer, Bob Lake, is a washed-up hack who hides from reality in a bottle. His photographer, Carol Hill, is determined to become famous in her field. Along the way they make the aquaintence of poor little rich girl Rita Bentley and big game hunter John Barton. All four of them are forced to survive as one group when their plane crashes somewhere in the forbidden jungle. And, of course, there's a wild feral girl named Tallie who lives in the rain forest and swings from the trees.'
It's obvious that Nuetzel's big sell for the book was Tallie the jungle girl. He spends a lot of time talking about her, showing the action from her point of view, etc. He's quite taken with her. We never do find out how a blond girl was dumped in the jungle to fend for herself, but there is a reference to an airplane crash. Detailed back stories are not one of this novel's strong points.
One of the more embarrassing aspects of jungle stories is how they depict the native Africans. And this book doesn't go out of it's way to sympathize with them. Africans are usually referred to as "the blacks". They exist just to play the role of gun bearers or savages. But, as African American writer Derrick Ferguson often points out, you have to consider the times when these books were written.
And yes there are sex scenes. Did you expect otherwise? But they are tastefully written. The novel came out at the junction when the Adventure "Sweat" magazines where being phased out in favor of stronger material. Graphic encounters were not yet the norm.
Jungle Goddess is an amusing, if dated, look at the world of adventure paperbacks from the early
60's.

Rabbit Heart by Barry Reese

2011-07-21T21:58:00.010-04:00

This is the first book I've read from "New Pulp" writer Barry Reese. It's impressive. Reese is a full-time librarian with a wide range of influences. He's already had countless short stories and other novels (which you can't find at my local Megabookstore, dammit!) published. What intrigued me to purchase this one was a podcast interview he gave where he stressed the personal nature of this book.

Let me make one thing clear: this is not a novel for those with tender sensibilities. Reese isn't the least bit afraid to go for the throat in his descriptions of violence. I was particularly sickened by a graphic account of rape and murder toward the end of Rabbit Heart. In all fairness, I think he wanted the reader to be repulsed by this scene; to feel the utter horror of the taking of an innocent life. If that was the case, he succeeded beyond all intents.

Rabbit Heart begins with the murder of a young couple in a cemetery. Two kids, barely out of high school and pumped up on hormones, decide to party. Unfortunately for them a creature known as a lich, has been recently awakened. The lich, a demonic sex carnivore, makes short work of them before looking for more prey.

The novel moves to Fiona Chapman, a young dark-haired girl whose just been attacked by a maniac at a summer camp. Fiona miraculously survives only to discover she's been reborn as a member of the Furious Host. The Furious Host is an incarnation of the Wild Hunt of legend, demonic creatures who rode through the lands slaughtering any one in their path. The Hunt is led by Edric, who has decided to reincarnate the Host in a battle to the death. Points are scored by how many humans they kill, but bonus points are awarded when one of the Host kills another member of it.

Fiona can shift into her "archetype" form as needed: a small femme fatale clothed in bandages, one eye covered by a patch, and wielding a black machete. After being informed of her destiny by Edric, she rejects him and everything he represents. Instead, she vows to take out the entire Host, starting with the rampaging lich.

The action shifts to the college town of Milledgeville, Georgia, where the sinister lich, who calls himself "Uhrl the Unconquered", is finding plenty of victims. Fiona begins to track him down. She's assisted by Ascott Keane, who claims to be a descendant of an occult investigator from the 1930's. Fiona learns that Uhrl is looking for something in Milledgeville which he must not find....

Reese is good at showing the action from a variety of characters. You may not like being in the head of a horny college student, but he forces you to see the world from those eyes. It's a difficult trick, showing multiple viewpoints, but he neatly pulls it off.

My only criticism with the novel is the countless cultural references with which he loads it. It's bad enough when he wants to show an emotion by quoting "Solitary Man", but comparing a police officer to Denzel Washington? Enough with the cultural short-cuts!

A good book in what I hope will be a new series. Now if I can just find a copy of his Tales of Ki-Gor....

The Colossus Triology

2011-07-04T01:10:00.022-04:00

One of the more memorable parts of my early years was watching Colossus: The Forbin Project on network TV. The part about a monster computer taking control of the world was chilling enough, the ending where it was revealed that the creature couldn't be stopped was worse yet. The synthetic voice of the machine gave me nightmares. And this mad computer wasn't trapped on a spaceship headed for Saturn. Later I discovered the movie was based on a book. And that it had two sequels. Naturally, I've been itching to read them for years.

The first Colossus novel was written in 1966 by British author D F Jones. It takes place in the distant future where North America has been unified into one political entity. Much the same is true for the rest of the world, where the Soviet Union still playing the bogeyman. To solve the nuclear stalemate problem, a massive computer is built under the direction of Professor Charles Forbin and given control of the entire arsenal of North America. The computer, named "Colossus", will launch a full nuclear strike on the Soviet Union and allies if it perceives the enemy is preparing for war. The logic behind this move is one of cost: with the ultimate defense system in place, there will be no need for a large standing army.

However, the Soviet Union has been thinking along the same lines. As soon as Colossus is activated, it informs it's human masters (by way of a teletype, this was state-of-the-art in 1967) that another super computer exists. The leaders of both states agree to put the computers in connection (bad mistake) to see what results. Both computers soon merge into one conscious entity. An attempt to separate them leads to a disaster as they now control all of the world's nuclear weapons and have no hesitation about using them. The rest of the book concerns the world's leaders and scientists trying to figure out a way to shut down the new Colossus.

The second book, The Fall of Colossus, was written in 1974. It's the best of the triology as it tries to imagine what kind of world might exist after a supreme intellengence has taken over all human affairs. War is abolished, but continues on in the Sea War Game where different nationalities build robotic WWI dreadnaughts that blast each other in the ocean. Some of the former functionaries who built Colossus has formed themselves into The Sect, which worships the computer as a god. They are opposed by the underground Fellowship which tries to find a way to shut down the machine. Colossus permits no interference in its' will and those convicted of anti-machine activity are quickly executed. Forbin reluctantly functions as an intermediary between Colossus and humanity from the machine's complex on the Island of Wright. The rule of Colossus seems absolute, but strange transmissions from outer space reveal a plan to shut it down....

Colossus and The Shark reveals what Colossus was protecting humanity from all along: alien invasion. The aliens from Mars who gave Forbin and his aides the means to shut down the machine show up and inform Forbin that they are now in charge. Forbin decides to hold the information from the rest of humanity once the aliens have activated the lower functions of Colossus, permitting it to mindlessly control the planet's government and economy. The aliens demand from Forbin half of Earth's oxygen. When Forbin balks at the demand, they produce a detailed plan for a device which can extract oxygen from the air on a huge scale. The book concludes with a reactivated Colossus working out an alliance with the aliens and humanity against a new threat from space.

The movie version of the first book, Colossus: The Forbin Project (1969), follows the first novel closely. Eric Braedon (who would later go on to star in Escape from the Planet of the Apes and soap operas) played Dr. Eric Forbin, the designer of the Colossus computer. The film takes place in the near future, as opposed to the distant one of the book. It is amusing to look at all the clunky computer monitors used in the film as they were considered futuristic at the time. The monitor installed in Forbin's private suite for Colossus appears to weigh several hundred pounds.

Jones is very concerned about the technological aspects of the books. A good chunk of Colossus and the Shark focuses on the design of the oxygen collector. He also spends a lot of time on the physics of the aliens arrival on Earth. But he doesn't ignore the psychological aspects. We discover in The Fall of Colossus that the Super Computer has created special research centers for the study of human emotions. Colossus uses them to conduct unspeakable experiments which wouldn't be out of place in a Nazi concentration camp.

The trilogy is somewhat hampered by new advances in technology, but at least Jones does update to video tape in the later books. It's still a good read. Too bad the author passed on years ago, because a fourth Colossus book was hinted at the conclusion of Colossus and the Crab.

The Ignored (1997) by Bentley Little

2011-06-21T22:53:00.005-04:00

Bob Jones has a very ordinary life with very ordinary tastes. He works for a faceless computer company called Automated Interface writing manuals and copy. He eats out at fast food joints and has a girl friend who works at a daycare center. His music tastes are all in the top five, as his favorite TV shows. There's just one small problem: people are starting to ignore him.

It starts at his work. People begin having personal talks in the elevator, completely oblivious to him. His coworkers start acting like he's not around. Finally his girl friend leaves him and nobody seems to be aware of his existence. He's not invisible, just "ignored".

It all climaxes when he decides to take-out his asshole boss while wearing a clown suit. Nobody notices him walking into the building where he works, not even the security guard. But when he does the deed, he suddenly meets Philipe.

Philipe is the leader of a group of Ignored who have decided to band together to become "Terrorists for the Common Man". They don't know why they are being Ignored, just that they are. This gives them the ability to do just about anything they want. They start by trashing offices, but their exploits grow. Eventually Philipe is planning out terrorists attacks. Bob, the narrator of the novel, starts to wonder if Philipe is stark raving mad.

The Ignored is an excellent little novel about the dehumanization we all face. It takes many strange turns, but never loses the reader. A recommended read to make your depressing day even more depressing.

Wither L A Morse

2011-05-23T21:54:00.009-04:00

As far as I can tell, L A Morse only published three detective fiction novels and all of them came out in the 1980's. He's written several other books, but I can't imagine any of them have the punch these three packed. Which is a shame because he's largely forgotten today. I was reading a review of another late-era mens' action novel when I suddenly remembered reading and enjoying these books. I gather they never were all that popular, although The Old Dick was made into a forgettable TV movie and starred Robert Mitchim.

Unfortunately it's been over 20 years since I read any of these books, so I can't furnish much in the way of description. Do check them out if you ever encounter them at a used book sale.

Lost Horizon by by James Hilton (1933)

2011-04-25T12:39:00.003-04:00

Fascinating little novel by British writer James Hilton about an isolated community in the Himalayan mountains where people live for centuries and peace abounds. It was the basis for the Frank Capra movie in 1937 and the wonderfully bad musical film in 1973. The book is very polished and has all the marks of being written by a writer of great skill. I won't go into much about it because so much has already been written. I do recommended it.

Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons by George Pendel

2011-04-10T10:25:00.008-04:00

"Jack" Parsons is one of the many enigmas of 20th century America. A College drop-out who formualted the first successful solid fuel rockets, he was also heavily involved in many occult groups at the same time. Married three times, his promising life came to an end in 1952 when, at the age of 37, he blew himself up in a makeshift laboratory. Science writer George Pendle has managed to produce a biography of this amazing man which will stand the test of time. Pendle's book, Strange Angel, was able to be written only after the author was given access to the many letters and documents which still survive about and by Jack Parsons.

It's another book which seems to have come from the pages of Fantastic Tales. Young inventor strives against odds to produce something which will change the course of the human race and is destroyed at the moment of his triumph. Toss in some mystical groups from the shudder pulps and you have a theme ready for an MGM production. But, as life usually is, things are somewhat more complicated.

Parsons was raised in Pasadena, CA in the early part of the last century. At the time, Pasadena was a paradise of orange groves and country estates. At a young age he became entranced by the stories of H G Wells and Jules Verne, starting his own backyard rocket experiments. Parsons was lucky to be raised a poor little rich kid with a wealthy grandfather, not so lucky to have a an absantee father. In 1933, while just eighteen years old, he dropped out of community college. The family fortunes had gone south in another great regression and he needed to find a job.

While working at an explosives factory he was able to learn the secret of things that went boom. This knowledge he would apply to his work with the "suicide squad", a group of young men who dreamed of building rockets to the sky. Cal Tech provided them a haven, but most of the gut work they did on their own. With WW2 on the horizon, Parsons and chums were able to attract some money from the military which they used to produced the first JATO's (Jet Assisted Take-Off).

But there was another side to Parsons: the mystical. He became involved with the followers of British occultist Aleister Crowley in 1939, becoming an important member of the local "Agape lodge". Along with his rocket experiments, this would occupy most of his time for the rest of his life. He even purchased a house with the intent of turning it into a commune for the followers of Crowley and other nonconformists.

But events moved in odd directions after the close of WW2. He was urged to sell his stock in the company he started, Jet Propulsion Labs. Although the stock sale put a lot of money in his pockets, he would have became a very rich man had he held onto his shares. His experiments in cooperative mystical living dissolved (as did his first two marriages). Reduced to the point of homelessness, he was mixing chemicals for a Hollywood effects company when an explosion brought his life to an end.

Strange Angel is a detailed look at Parson's life, his legacy, and the times he lived. It will probably be the definitive work on the life of Jack Parsons.

Good-Bye Borders

2011-03-31T16:17:00.005-04:00

The bell has rung, fat lady sang, etc.

Just had to post these pics of a local Borders', now closed. It had been a Dalton's, before that venerable mall chain was absorbed into the great limited edition machine. I think the same thing happened to Walden's, another mall chain of bookstores.

Still, a closed bookstore is a depressing thing.

Mariposa and Quantico by Greg Bear

2011-03-30T17:57:00.005-04:00

In the near future, the United States is threatened by bio-terror, state succession, religious fanatics, and bankruptcy. Sounds timely, no? Fortunately, a diverse group of FBI agents rise from their training to save the republic and set the stage for a New World Order.

Welcome to the latest two novels in "hard" science fiction writer Greg Bear's Queen of Angels series.

Bear has always been known for his cutting-edge science application to the craft of fiction. His characers are compelling, but not essential to the plot. Most of his books peak at a specific event which is crucial to the plot. In Mariposa and Quantico, he's ventured into Ken Follet territory by applying his style to contemporary thrillers. And by setting the books a few years into the future, he isn't stuck with creating a whole Brave New World. It works quite well, actually. I was on the edge of my seat waiting for the conclusion of each novel.

Major characters carry over from one book to the next. We are introduced to a team of stalwarts trying to complete their final training at the FBI center in Quantico: a Muslim american, the son of a famous FBI, among others. Bear seems most concerned with his heroic Muslim FBI agent, Fuad, making me wonder if he isn't saving the character for something bigger in future books. Most of the trainees reappear in the next book, Mariposa, as full-fledged agents.

Both books are exceptionally well-written and I'm looking for more in the series

Stolen World by Jennie Smith

2011-03-29T23:43:00.003-04:00

Two full-time jobs and various home remodeling projects have taken a toll on my reading, but never-less I endure.

I don't usually post about non-fiction books, unless they have something to do with the fiction I do read. However, Stolen World has the feel of a pulp adventure from the 1930's. In one volume you have reptile-obsessed collectors, fauna smugglers, and people risking death or imprisonment just to find the rarest of all snakes. I kept expecting Doc Savage to make an appearance and send all the perpetrators flying into the next chapter. Stranger yet, the events in this book start in the distant years of 1970 and continue to the present day.

Subtitled " A Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers, and Skulduggery", Stolen World is a book which focuses on the universe of people fascinated by snakes. Fascinated to the point of having their interests in our scaly friends dominate every aspect of their life. Fascinated to the extent of illegally importing rare iguanas at the risk of doing jail time. And some of them end up spending years behind bars.

Two men are the focus of this book: Hank Molt and Tommy Crutchfield. Molt started out selling Kraft Food products around Philadelphia, turned his herpetology hobby into a full time job, was imprisoned for importing endangered species, but bounced back again and again as a snake expert. Cructchfield ran a reptile emporium in Florida, fled the country to avoid charges against him for smuggling iguanas from Fiji, but is still a respected expert in his field. Along the way, we get to witness red boa hunts in the Dominican Republic and thefts of rare turtles.

What makes the book stand out is the author's fascination with her subjects. For all the wretchedness of them, these are people who truly love reptiles. The same man who can beat his own brother senseless can gaze in wonder at a small lizard. You can't help to be astonished reading about a man who figures out a way to care for rare African vipers.

I just wish the book came with some decent illustrations. It would have been nice to have seen a photo of a Fly River turtle. An index would've helped too.

Bring the Jubilee (1953) by Ward Moore

2011-03-03T22:00:00.005-05:00

I am a sucker for a good alternative history novel. But the genre has been around so long that it's starting to get dull. Recently I picked up a novel by a noted SF writer about might have happened if the Nazis had lived to fight a guerrilla war against the victorious allies. I'm still trying to get into it. In the meantime, I did manage to finish one of the grandaddy of all "Lee Triumphant" books, Bring the Jubilee.

Known for his science fiction novels, Ward Moore, didn't publish much, but what he did get into print was top-notch. Greener Than You Think (previously reviewed) and Lot are both considered classics. Too bad he didn't turn out much after the 50's.

In Jubliee, the South has won the civil war. The book begins in the 1920's, but not our 1920's. Hodge Backmaker is recounting his strange life, how it began on a poor farm in upstate New York. The United States consists of all the Northern states in the civil war that the victorious South let them keep. While the imperial Confederacy has conquered most of central and south america, the US is mired in debt, corruption and illiteracy. Many people sell themselves into virtual slavery as indentured servants in the North. Slavery has been ended in the South, but full citizenship is restricted to actual descendants of the whites. Hodge manages to acquire a basic education on his own before heading to New York City.

In New York, he expands his literacy horizon by working for a bookstore. In his spare hours he visits the Haitian ambassador, whom he's met while delivering books. Much of this section is taken up with him discussing the concept of free will between his employer and the ambassador. After getting involved with a secret Unionist "lost cause" army, Hodge manages to make the journey to a scholars colony in the isolated town of Haggershaven near York, PA. There, he achieves renown as a Civil War historian, but his very fame will alter the past.

As with his other books, Moore has no qualms about using science and fantasy to crictize his present world. This is a fascinating novel which served as the touchstone for all alternate history works.

Add Flesh to the Fire by Orrie Hitt

2011-02-01T22:45:00.008-05:00

Orrie Hitt is currently enjoying a revival. There's at least one blog cataloging the massive literary outputs of the "Shakespeare of Sleaze". Several specialty publishing houses have started reissuing his books. Not bad for a man who's been dead since the 70's. No one knows how many books he penned, but he claimed to have knocked out a novel every two weeks to support his large family and put kids through school. His subject matter was raw emotions and tough men, not quite Hemingway, but able to tell a good story and make it match to the lurid cover.

Add Flesh to the Fire starts with it's protagonist, Clint Walker, drinking rum on his boat, The Shark. It's 1958 and he's contemplating what to do next. His wife having run out on him (with his brother), he's got all the time in the world. Other than taking out the occasional fishing party, he really doesn't have a whole lot to do. He lives on the boat, which is moored at one of the Florida Keys. Other than seducing the college educated daughter of the boat dock owner, he doesn't have many goals.

One day a man named George Gordon and his daughter Vera make an appearance. Gordon wants Clint to take a special run to the Cuban coast for the astronomical sum of five thousand dollars. Clint doesn't want to do the job, it sounds too suspicious, but Vera the bombshell soon changes his mind. Soon the ex-wife shows up and complicates matters because she wants Clint to take up with her again.

Clint is in a quandary. Should he continue his nighttime activities with his landlord's daughter, become serious with Vera, or consider his former wife who wants to patch things up? Soon Gordon wants Clint to make more than one trip to Cuba. And is Vera really Gordon's daughter?

The novel is short on descriptive passages about the Keys, but long on Clint's observations about the way society works. This is not the 1950's of Chuck Berry or even David Halberstam, but a decade where men worked hard and barely made enough cash to pay the dock rent. A lot of the book consists of conversation, more to pad the page lengths, but it keeps the narrative moving.

A good book from the age of novels that were sold by the sizzle.

Greener Than You Think by Ward Moore

2011-01-25T17:48:00.003-05:00

(Note this was originally posted by me at several other groups, but it seems appropriate. It's also mentioned here on the Reading California Fiction blog.)
Apocalyptic science fiction novels have been around for a long time. H G Wells's War Of The Worlds(1898) was one of the first and still remainspopular. The plot of the book usually involves some Threat To Life On Earth As We Know It which is thwarted by a dashing young scientist. The style remains popular to this day. Both Independence Day(1996) and The Day After Tomorrow(2004) are good examples of this genre in film. Greener Than You Think was Ward Moore's contribution. Known for his other SF novels, such as Bring The Jubilee (1953), Moore considers this threat to humanity: ordinary lawn grass.
In Greener, an amateur chemist named Josephine Spencer Francis formulates a product she calls "the metamorphizer". This compound can cause plant life to take advantage of just about any raw material for growing. Thus, wheat fields could spring forth in the desert and corn could be grown on a highway. She hires a plucky young salesman named Albert Weener to sell the metamorphizer to the agricultural industry. Unfortunately, Weener decides to market the product to suburbanite home owners with bad lawns. When nobody wants to buy it, he sprays it on a pathetic yard near Los Angeles as a demonstration.
The next day he returns to find the sickly lawn a beautiful green. But there is one problem: the home owner's antique lawn mower soon chokes up while cutting the grass and expires. And the grass grows. And grows. and grows....
Soon, the entire city of Los Angeles is covered by the grass as it spreads across the city. Next, the population of California flees as it envelopes the state. Nothing can stop its deadly march and the whole country is soon threatened. The book tends to the melodramatic side, which is it's major weakness.
Moore's style seems reminiscent of the pulp writers of the depression, not very sophisticated, but determined to tell a good yarn. His characters also tend to the one dimensional side, but they are outlandish: the army general who wanted to be a musician and the newspaper editor who continues to write about the grass as its spreads closer.
The book is narrated by Weener, who, by sheer luck and guile, becomes the richest man in the world. One of the book's strong points is how is shown to be totally clueless as to the damage he has and continues to cause. It could be Moore was making a not-so-sutle jibe at the spread of post WW2 suburbia in the USA.
Not a "must-read" book, but definitely worth your time if you can find a reprint, which is what I did. Greener also predicted the controversies over biotechnology and nanotechnology.

Agent of the Unknown (1956) by Margaret S. Clair

2011-01-19T22:55:00.014-05:00

And thus we come to an end with the novels of Margaret St. Clair.

Agent of the Unknown was originally published in Startling Stories in 1951. This was an abridged form and the full novel was issued as part of an Ace double book five years later with Philip K. Dick's The World Jones Made. As this novel was written in the midst of her most prolific writing period, it seems the best place to end the series.

Agent begins with Don Haing waking up on the beach. He's hung-over again and desperately in need of a drink. Don's a beach bum, who makes his money finding objects tourists have left in the sand and selling them to anyone who will buy. But this is no regular beach. He's stuck on Fyon, an artificial planetoid created as a resort for the wealthy. Needless to say, the novel takes place in the distant future.

But Don's luck has changed: he's found the most wonderful miniature doll buried in the sand on the beach where he sleeps every night. No bigger than the length of his hand, the doll resemblesthe perfect form of a nude woman. And she's weeping, or at least seems to be weeping. Sure this doll will bring him some cash, Don takes it to his friend Kunitz, who lives in a small house by the beach. Kunitz informs him the doll is priceless; the only other one like it exists in a museum on Earth. Both were made by Vulcan, a master craftsman who lives on the edge of galaxy.

Although Don wants to sell the doll, he discovers he can't. A tourist who tries to take it off him gets an electrical shock. Soon, Don notices that his alcohol craving has disappeared. He takes a job as a short-order cook at a local bar and shows the doll to the bar owner. Once the bar owner sees the doll, he too becomes fascinated with it. It's not long before everyone Don meets wants the doll. Eventually, The SSP, the only organized force in the galaxy, starts sending out agents who are determined to get the doll away from Don at any cost.

St. Clair shows her classics background in this novel. The craftsman who makes the doll is known as Vulcan (Roman god of metal work). One of the villains in the story has the name Mulciber (another title for Vulcan). The prison planetoid where the SSP takes their victims is known as Phelegthon, one of the five underworld rivers in Greek mythology. The final appearance of Vulcan at the novel's conclusion resembles something out of Bulfinch.

One again, the future looks bleak. Most of the people can't read, using "isotypes". After a plague, known as pyrexia, has killed the bulk of humanity, the SSP (Special Serum Purveyance) remains the only government in the galaxy. The SSP controls all scientific research with an iron fist and rigidly hunts down any mutants. Psychotropic drugs keep the population in line. But change is coming.

A solid book with a powerful conclusion.

The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) By G K Chesterton

2011-01-19T10:52:00.006-05:00

Strange, surreal book by Roman Catholic writer G. K Chesterton. Known mostly for his Father Brown mysteries, Chesterton, was a prolific writer at the turn-of-the-century England.

Thursday concerns secret policeman Gabriel Syme's infiltration of an "anarchist council". Each member of this council has a different code name, one for every day of the week. Syme manages to get himself elected to the post of "Thursday", the British representative. However, it soon turns out that each represenative is also a police agent. Moreover, they've all been recruited by the same unseen figure.

I'm told this is a favorite book of people who've worked in real secret service agencies.

Finishing Touches/ Father Panic's Opera Macabre by Thomas Tessier

2011-01-17T22:43:00.012-05:00

Will Errikson at Too Much Horror Fiction turned me onto this book recently. I'd heard a lot about the writings of Thomas Tessier, just never had the opportunity to read anything by him. He seems to consistantly make everyone's "top ten" list.

Originally published in 1986, Finishing Touches was recently republished with another of Tessier's writings, Father Panic's Opera Macabre. Touches is the story of Tom Sutherland, a recent medical school graduate who's slumming in London from an inheritance. One night he runs into Roger Nordhagen, a successful cosmetic surgeon, at a pub. Roger takes a liking to the younger man and begins inviting him to carouse the seedy side of London. Soon, Tom meets Lena, Nordhagen's beautiful assistant and embarks on a wild affair of debauchery. It almost comes to a quick end when Lena arranges an escapade which nearly gets Tom killed. But Tom decides to stick it out and soon finds what Nordhagen's real life work is all about.

At times, Touches reminded me of a shudder pulp from the 1930's. Dr. Roger Nordhagen isn't too far removed from Dr. Rance Mandarin and his "maggots of madness". But Tessier is a very literate writer and can twist a paragraph into a deadly shape. Furthermore, Tessier didn't have any reservations about holding back on the descriptive sex and gore scenes.

Father Panic is a shorter work and seems to be a sketch for a longer novel. Traveling through Italy, a writer named Neil finds an isolated house in the mountains when his car breaks down. He approaches the house for assistance and meets Marisa Panic. She lives there with her extended family. They live in the house in the manner of medieval feudal lords, taking care of their tenant farmers. Although Marisa speaks eloquent English and Italian, she converses in another language with her family and field hands. Neil decides to stay on for a few days when Marisa makes a play for him, and this proves to be the beginning of his undoing. After an erotic opening, the novella suddenly shifts gears and Neil is thrown backwards in time to a genocidal massacre in Croatia during WW2. The book ends all too quick, making me think it was intended to be a much longer piece.

Definitely a good a scary set of reads, but not for those with weak constitutions.

The Green Queen (1956) by Margaret St.Clair

2011-01-02T17:23:00.017-05:00

Save Now The Green Queen was Margaret St.Clair's first published novel. Although it was issued in 1956 as part of an Ace double book (paired with Three Thousand Years), the novel first saw publication in 1955 in a shorter form as Mistress of Virdis. It readily falls into her golden age SF period of writing.

A moody book, it opens with the quote: "The one who loved me is dead. And the one who loved power goes on living."

Green Queen takes place in the far future on the planet Viridis. It exists in the same continium as St.Clair's The Games of Neith. Both books reference the migration of the worshipers of Jovis and their battle cry of "Jovis is a first class god!" There's even some reference to the same Chinese furniture in Neith. It would be interesting to know if she was working out some sort of future history.

Two hundred years before the novel begins, Viridis was settled by a man named James Renfrew and his Jovian followers. Later, a man named Jensen attempted to lay-out suburban tract housing all over the planet,but both failed to account for the high level of background radiation. Once the settlers began dying in large numbers, people begin moving to cities which were protected by anti-radiation barriers. As time passed, the populace evolved into two classes: The "uppers", who live in the splendid higher regions of the urban environment, and the "lowers", who exist at the bottom levels, where life is brutal and short. The best any lower can hope for is to be hired as a body-servant and move "up the stairs".

The novel opens with mask-maker Bonnar trying to figure out what sort of rumor to spread in the lowers to keep them in line. He's part of a secret service which creates Veridical Masks (i.e., 3D images) for control of the lowers. He decides on propagating a legend of "The Green Queen", a universal savior who will purify Virdis and lead the populace to salvation. Years before Frank Herbert wrote of the use of messianic figures as propaganda in Dune, Margaret St. Clair was thinking along similar lines.

After using a sorting machine known as an ibim (as usual in St. Clair's novels, technical devices are a given and not explained), Bonnar selects two candidates to play the role of the Green Queen in his latest mask. The first is Leaf Amadeus, an apprentice mask-maker and an immigrant from Earth. The second is Caroline Augliner, an embroiderer. Neither are married.

Bonnar arranges a field trip outside the capitol city of Shalom to examine the ruins of the abandoned settlements with Leaf and a historian named Horvendile. This is the most fascinating part of the book as it gives the reader some insight as to how St. Clair felt about suburbs. Although abandoned for hundreds of years, the tract housing is perfectly preserved. There are even small domes in some of the back yards where the original settlers tried to protect themselves against the radiation. During this trip, Bonnar witnesses Leaf slipping into the role of the Green Queen unconsciously.

Later, the uppers discover Leaf is being hailed as the Green Queen all over the city. Bonnar and his band try to coach the other candidate, Caroline Augliner, in the role of the queen. But nothing goes as planned and soon the entire planet is in the grip of religious fury.

An excellent example of St.Clair's writing from her most productive period.

The Trail of the Cloven Hoof by Arlton Eadie

2010-12-30T23:24:00.007-05:00

The Dancing Tuatara Press imprint of Ramble House has once again rescued a lost thriller from obscurity. Kudos go to John Pelan who located the complete book length adventure which had been serialized in Weird Tales during the 1930's. Although the editor of that magazine had chopped the original novel into bits for inclusion as a serial, Pelan discovered the complete adventure had been published in book form. His hard work has resulted in the first reissue of the 1935 novel.
In the introduction, John Pelan describes how the original serial version of Cloven didn't seem up to Eadie's usual high standards. Although I haven't read the serial version, I do think I understand why Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright might've cut the original down to size: it tends to run on too long in some sections. After the fourth or fifth description of the isolated moors of England, you want to move onto an new passage. And there is also an annoying tendency of the author to phonetically render the local dialect. Not to mention his snobby descriptions of the lower classes.

The novel starts with Hugh Trenchard, late of medical school, on a walking tour of England. He finds himself in an isolated village where one Silas Marle is battling the "Terror of the Moor", a half-human, half-stag creature. Hugh is later joined by his old school mate Ronnie Brewster, a local doctor. Let's see, there is Lucien Felger a foreigner who runs a near-by insane asylum with sinister connections. Also in this cast is Sergent Jopling, the regional police officer. There's at least one mysterious woman. Add a few disappearing bodies, and we have the standard British pre-WW2 thriller.
I would dismiss this book as not up to the usual high standards of what Tuatara reproduces were it not for the final chapters. Let me say that the last few chapters redeem the whole novel. I was hit by some surprises I didn't see coming and a gripping conclusion. Which makes the entire book worth reading.

Naming of Parts by Tim Lebbon

2010-12-20T11:07:00.005-05:00

I usually don't care for zombie books or movies. Every since George Romero and company spooked everyone with Night of the Living Dead, they all seem to be retreads. And really, just how many times can you revisit that theme without making it seem boring? I thought once S. King got into the game, it would be over. Now even AMC has jumped on the corpse wagon with The Walking Dead (which I'll probably watch once it comes out on DVD).
But Tim Lebbon's short novel, Naming of Parts, struck me as a different angle which might be worth reading. How would a 12-year-old boy deal with the complete collapse of the world around him? What if he wakes up one morning to find dad blasting away with a shotgun at the next door neighbors for now apparent reason? This is the plot of the book.
It's a short read, you can get through it in one sentence. I doubt the entire book is 60 pages. But it is a page turner and has some odd angles. For instance, the zombie outbreak effects every living thing, even foxes are described as standing aimlessly by the side of the road. I wish the book hadn't ended so abruptly, but it's still worth the time if you can find it.

The Dolphins of Altair (1967) by Margaret St. Clair

2010-12-14T11:48:00.011-05:00

1967's The Dolphins of Altair is the beginning of Margaret St. Clair's "psychedelic" period. It would continue on with The Shadow People (1969) and conclude with The Dancers of Noyo (1973). Although the plots of the book are significantly different, her use of the California coast, environmentalism, and counter-cultures all link these books. They are also told in the first person.
Dolphins is told from the viewpoint of a dolphin historian named Amtor. At the beginning of the novel, the dolphins, or sea people as they refer to themselves, have become distressed.The seas are becoming increasing polluted. Humans are capturing and placing dolphins into naval research stations for underwater warfare training. The dolphins form a council and decide to reach out telepathically to three people: Madeline Paxton, a secretary at the Half Moon Bay naval research station; Sven Erikson, a former soldier and dock worker; and Dr. Edward Lawrence, a clinical psychiatrist who works for the US navy.
Madeline proves to the most receptive to the Dolphins' cries for help. Sven later joins her. Finally, Dr. Lawrence hires a boat to drop him off on the a rock far off the California coast. Together, they concoct a plan to free the imprisoned dolphins from the research station. Using Sven as a courier, they steal a powerful under water mine from a weapons shipment and give it to the dolphins. The mine is then dropped by one of the dolphins into a deep trench off the coast where it explodes, causing an earthquake. The earthquake, timed to be a minor one and on a Sunday evening to minimize loss of human life, bursts open the dolphin pens, freeing the sea people to the open ocean.
But then Dr. Lawrence disappears from the rock, with no explanation given. Moments later, the rock is strafed by a navy plane. Several of the dolphins are killed and Madeline is wounded. Why did Dr. Lawrence betray them? Do the dolphins have time to come up with a new strategy now that war between them and the "splits" (humans) seem to be immediate?
The launching point for the novel seems to have been the US Navy Marine Mammal Program where dolphins were studied for their ability to hunt for mines and rescue seamen. The navy has always claimed no dolphins were ever trained to attack humans. Obviously, the very concept of dolphins being manipulated by humans was offensive to St. Clair.
One of the more interesting ideas put forth in the book is that humans and dolphins originated from the same species. According to the dolphin historian, millions of years ago, the commons ancestors of both creatures migrated to earth from a planet in orbit around the star Altair. Over the millennia, some of the settlers stayed on land while others returned to their natural environment, the water. At some point in the distant past, the land dwellers began mating with terrestrial primates, producing humans. This is the origin of "The Covenant" mentioned in Dancers of Noyo.
The book is well-plotted and easy to dissolve into. Much of it consists of conversations between the dolphins and their human allies trying to figure out the least destructive means to strike back at the surface dwellers. This could be the original ecological science fiction novel. There are no themes of magick or Wicca in this novel.

Margaret St. Clair Ephemera

2010-12-08T22:40:00.007-05:00

As my obsession with the mysterious Science Fiction writer Margaret St. Clair continues, I find myself forced to seek-out tangential material. Recently, I obtained a copy of Margaret St. Clair: Space Frontierswoman (1986) and a men's' magazine, Dude, which contained one of her short stories. I'm sure more material exists and perhaps one day I will find that elusive photograph of her.
Margaret St. Clair: Space Frontierswoman (2nd revised edition) is volume 15 of Galactic Central, "Biographies for the Avid Reader". It was put together by Gordon Benson, Jr. and describes itself as a "working biography". Format-wise, it can be described as a chap book, is printed by photocopying, and appears to have been set in type with an early home computer graphic program. It's a mere 10 pages in length, but does attempt a complete listing of all her short stories and novels. 113 stories are listed as having been published, as well as 11 books. There is also a third section listing the 8 "Oona and Jik" stories as having been published from 1947-49. I haven't encountered these stories as of yet. It's a concise little listing, but contains no new biographical information.
The Dude magazine was one of the many publications aimed at the swinging bachelor which appeared in the wake of Hugh Hefner's success. It was published from 1956 to 1976 on a bi-monthly basis. Most of the articles dealt with the good life: European women, French stage shows, and booze. In September of 1959, Margaret St. Clair published a short story in it entitled "The Lost One". It's not mentioned in any anthology of her works.
I mention this short story because it has become my favourite one by her. "The Lost One" shows St. Clair at the top of her game and clearly demonstrates her ability as a writer. The plot is simple: a divorced lawyer goes to a bar to drink his troubles away and meets a mysterious, beautiful woman. She tells him how much he resembles her dead husband and they go home together. Weeks later, the lawyer feels a longing for the mysterious woman and returns to the same bar where he sees her with another man. To tell anymore would ruin the story, but I will say the ending hit me with a brick to the head.
Hopefully, I will find more material by and about her in the future.

Diamondback: It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

2010-12-06T20:33:00.006-05:00

I've never met Derrick Ferguson, but he seems like the kind of guy I'd hang out with. Every week he and a fellow cinemaphile Tom Deja broadcast podcast Better In the Dark, a show recorded in Derrick's basement. For the longest time I would listen to the show while I worked on refinishing my upstairs bathroom. I became so enamored over the show I would quit grouting tile just to find more episodes for listening. To listen to Derrick and Tom play off each other, their love for New York City movie houses, their encyclopedic knowledge of obscure TV shows, well, it made the job of ripping out lap boards much easier.
But now I'm finished with the remodeling.
Guess I'll have to tile another floor just to justify listening to their show.
I'd known Derrick was a writer every since listening to the show. However, his books can be difficult to find. Since he was also a pulp fan like myself, I was determined to find at least one of them. And the first one I've ran across is Diamondback.
Ferguson has described the novel as his attempt at doing a modern spaghetti western film in book form. I have to admit, all the elements are there: the stranger coming to town, the rival gangs, the beautiful saloon girl. It's set in the mythical town of Denbrook, which is a corrupt major United States city (I picture Philadelphia, but then I'm right next door to the city Where All The Brothers Love Each Other). And it is also one of the bloodiest books I have ever read.
The plot is simple: Denbrook's major crime lord Titus Hegemon is planning to retire and turn his operation over to his loyal lieutenant, Nickleby Laloosh. He has one big score left. Hegemon's paid for a gun shipment which will roll into town born in the guts of three tractor trailer trucks. To make sure he doesn't have any problems, Hegemon pays to have the Denbrook police round-up all the rival crime bosses and hold them till the deal is sealed. It looks to be a good plan.
But he hasn't planned on Diamondback Vogel showing up in town. Diamondback is a legendary gunman whom everyone had thought dead. Within 24 hours of his arrival, the city of Denbrook is ripped apart by gang war. And the trucks have yet to arrive.
When they do, it causes a battle right out of a WW2 movie. There are factions too numerous to mention all trying to get their hands on those guns and they manage to shoot each other to pieces within minutes of the weapons' arrival.
I should also mention the lack of any admirable personages in this novel. Everyone is playing their own game, trying to outsmart, their rivals. No one is the least bit sympathetic, save Diamondback, who does let an innocent person flee the carnage.
A sequel is promised.

Rite of Passage by Alexi Panshin

2010-12-02T23:01:00.016-05:00

Alexi and Cory Panshin wrote one of the best histories of early science fiction, The World Beyond the Hill, in 1989. I found the book at a bookstore in Wichita, Ks when I lived there in the early 90's and read it cover-to-cover in one sitting. So it was a surprise to me when I found this neat little book at Indian Path Books a few weeks ago. Needless to say, it ended up in my "To read" pile.
Winner of the 1968 Nebula award, Rite of Passage shows the influence of the dean of American science fiction, Robert Heinlein. As a matter of fact, Panshin even discusses the book's creation here and how Heinlein figured into the writing. I note that Mr. Panshin lives nearby in Quakertown, PA. He also lists Harper Lee as an influence on the novel, which anyone familiar with To Kill a Mockingbird will understand.
The novel follows several years in the life of Mia Havero, who lives on a massive interstellar star ship nearly two hundred years in the future. Obviously there was a huge advancement in technology from the present since the first of the interstellar ships was completed in 2041. Sometime afterwards, a series of wars, brought on by overpopulation, led to the destruction of Earth. Fortunately, a number of other planets outside our solar system had been colonized, so humanity was able to survive. The ship in which Mia lives was made by hollowing out an asteroid. It was built to haul colonists across the galaxy, but the scientists and engineers piloting the ship decided to stay on board after the last colonists were delivered.
Told from the viewpoint an older Mia, the story begins with her moving out of one quadrant of the ship into another at the age of twelve. Her parents having split up, Mia is raised by her father, who has a prominent position in the ship's society. She yearns to be a "synthesist", a person who has accumulated a general, but expansive, amount of knowledge. Her best friend Jimmy, also twelve, wants to be a ordinologist, or classifier of information.
There is one small hurdle they with both have to overcome: The Trial. At age fourteen, after extensive survival training, all children are dropped off the ship at the nearest inhabitable planet. They are expected to survive on their own for one month. At the end of a month, they are picked up. If they manage to survive on their own, the child is now considered an adult and welcomed in the ship's community with all rights and responsibilities. There are no exceptions.
Much of the book leading up to The Trial consists of Mia's recollections of her interactions with other kids and daily life on the ship. She spends a lot of time reading up on ethics at the encouragement of her tutor, Mr. Mbele. She also learns how to ride a horse, since the kids are dropped on primitive planets with them for transportation.
Because of resource limitations, the population of the ship is strictly controlled. Families seldom have more than one or two children. One of the source of disgust is the colonial planets, whom the ship trades information and knowledge with to get needed raw materials. The ship people refer to the colonists as "mudeaters" who practice primitive "free birth". The ship itself has a eugenicists who approves and encourages birthing based on genetic records.
The final test of Mia's class before undergoing The Trial is a tiger hunt. A group of kids are sent out into a wilderness park with their adult survival instructor in pursuit of a full grown tiger. When they do encounter the tiger, they have to kill it using only the knives they carry and whatever rocks can be found. Amazingly, they do it with few injuries. It's Panshin's credit as a writer that he can make this passage so believable.
Mia is finally dropped with her class on a planet known as Tintera. There has been little contact with the planet since it was colonized a 150 years previously. The kids split-up, Mia deciding to spend her month on Trial exploring the planet.
What she encounters is a society similar in technology and organization to what the United States knew at the Civil War. She manages to confront a band of ruffians on horseback before getting bushwhacked. Mia's nursed back to health by an old man named Kutsov who lives alone. She learns enough about the society where she's been dropped to rescue her best friend Jimmy from a territorial prison. They both manage to hide out in the woods until the month has passed and the pick-up ship arrives.
Half of her trial class never make it back to the ship. After hearings are held in the ship's assembly, the citizens decide to punish the inhabitants of Tintera in the worst way possible. I won't spoil the ending of the book for those who want to read it. But I will say the over riding message is how the worst deeds can be justified by the best intentions. Consider Crime and Punishment: it's remarkably simple to justify killing an old woman.
Rite of Passage shows the mark of the time in which it was written. Panshin assumes it would be easy to organize a self-contained society with few internal problems. But this is a minor point. It's a landmark book which needs to be read.

Change the Sky and other Stories (1974) by Margaret St. Clair

2010-11-25T22:25:00.005-05:00

This is the third and final of Margaret St. Clair's short story collections. Published over ten years after Three Worlds of Futurity and almost ten years before The Best of Margaret St. Clair. Change the Sky consists mostly of her short fiction from the 1950's. When you consider she published over a 100 stories from the late 1940's till the early 60's, this was a very productive period for her. The stories vary in quality, which is what you can expect from such a prolific author. Only three appear in the other collections.
The best of the lost has to be "The Goddess on the Street Corner". It's a sad tale which would have fitted into The Twilight Zone. The story concerns an alcoholic pensioner who finds an ancient Greek goddess on a city street. He takes her home and feeds her bourbon, hoping to restore the deity's powers. The story has a bitter sweet ending, which was not entirely expected.
Military themes abound. "The Death of Each Day" has a gunner trying to escape a war-torn city in the future. "Then Fly Our Greetings" is about a scientist trying to create a humane weapon and it's horrifying results. "Fort Iron" has an officer trying to restore a sense of purpose in an ancient fort. St. Clair takes a dim view of the military mind. One character describes it as hitching a jet plane to an oxcart.
This is a good representative sample of her work from the end of science fiction's golden age.

The House of Souls (1923) by Arthur Machen

2010-11-24T22:43:00.003-05:00

It's a little hard to say much about a book where so much has already been said. This is one of Arthur Machen's best short story collections and I recommend it heartily. Consisting of his masterful "The Great God Pan" novella and others, this collection gives an excellent overview of macabre writing at the turn of the century. Full of Victorian shudders.
Few writers have ever been able to make the ordinary so supernatural. In Machen's writing, there's always the survival of something ancient and evil behind every bush and shrub.

The Games of Neith (1960) by Margret St. Clair

2010-11-10T23:48:00.005-05:00

The Games of Neith was released in 1960 as an Ace twin to Kenneth Blummer's The Earth Gods are Coming. It's one of the last whimsical science fiction novels Margaret St. Clair would write before getting down to the "serious" novel writing she began with Sign of the Labrys. You do get the feeling from reading it that she was getting fed-up with all the rockets and ray guns of golden age SF.
In the far future, humanity has settled on the planet Gwethym. Because of the religious riots which had taken place when the planet was populated, the people of Gwethym have decided to worship an artificial goddess called "Neith". Neith really doesn't stand for much, but she looks nice and radiant on her pedestal and provides an outlet for religious sentiments. However, the followers of the rival god Jovis are still plentiful and long for the day when their deity will become prominent.
The book begins with a discussion between the high priestess of Neith, Anassa, and her consort, Wan. Anassa has just survived another assassination attempt by a devotee of Jovis. There's an "energy leak" taking place on Gwethym and the Jovians blame the worship of Neith for bringing it about. The energy leak (a vague concept) seems to have caused by spaceships using a hyper drive.
Eventually Anassa and Wan take an ocean voyage to find the source of the leak. They are tipped off by some sailors who have encountered an old man living among ancient machines. Since the machines appear to be the work of the "old ones", the humanoids who inhabited the planet eons before the humans arrived, they may hold the key to stopping the energy leak.
I would classify this as the weakest Margaret St. Clair novel of the ones I've read. It has all the feel of something banged out quickly for the publisher. There are a few threads which seem to have been recycled from short story attempts. As Neith was published toward the end of her productive short story career, this may have been the result of trying to merge several ideas in a coherent whole.
One for Dame St. Clair enthusiasts only.

The Man Who Saved Britian (2006) by Simon Winder

2010-11-09T10:21:00.006-05:00

I really must confess to never having read a single one of Ian Flemming's James Bond novels. But as a kid growing up in the 60's and 70's it was impossible to miss their impact on popular culture. My interest in Eurospy phenomena has always been the off-shoots: James Eastwood, The Man from Uncle, Where the Spys Are. But writer Simon Winder has made it all unnecessary for me to do so since he's published this amusing little book.
Subtitled A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond, the book is a document about Winder's love/hate affair with Bond James Bond. He re-accounts how he saw Live and Let Die at a local theater while munching on a rum flavored chocolate bar. As a young adult he would travel the world as a book seller trying to cop a very Bondian attitude to the various countries he visited (much to the amusement of the wait staff). Although he views Bond as a hopeless bit of nostalgia for the late British Empire, he admits Sean Connery does look might real behind the wheel of a fast automobile.
I could go on for pages about this book: it's a non-stop delight to read. Winder is able to put Ian Flemming, Bond's creator, into perspective and muse on all the second banana actors who battled 007. He writes about being in a nation that was in decline in the 1970's and the difficulties of raising kids in a modern age. But I'll let the reader experience his witty comments for themselves.
This is one of the best "fan" publications I have ever read. Devoid of postmodern babble and full of love/disgust for it's subject.

The Dancers of Noyo (1973) by Margaret St. Clair

2010-11-04T12:55:00.005-04:00

This was the last novel by Margaret St. Clair, published in 1973. Other than a few short stories and commentaries, I can find no other writing by her after this. Why did she quit writing novels? The answer to this question may never be known. But, as Dancers has never been republished, I suspect the lackluster reception the book received may have been a contributing factor. I'm sure the Aquarian portrayal in the novel- whom the narrator calls "Mandarins"- didn't help it much with the intended audience.
Sometime in the near future, the west coast of the United States has been decimated by a horrendous form of cancer known as the "bone melt". After the disease runs it's course, California reorganizes itself into the Republic of California. Some of the survivors live in the coastal towns. Others have taken to the forest and live in "tribes" or communes. To keep the younger generation in check, the older tribal people start obtaining synthetic human "Dancers". These Dancers enforce the tribal will by making young people join in marathon group dances. They also force them to take psycho-active drugs as a form of vision quest. If any of the kids get too rebellious, they can be sent outside the tribe on the "grail quest". And those who do get sent on the quest have a tendency to return a psychological mess.
The dancers enforce their authority with tribal militias known as "The Avengers". Guns are almost unknown in this post-apocalyptic hippie society, but bows are easily made and arrows can kill. Furthermore, the dancers have begun working with "chemical-conscience men". These are hardened criminals the republic have found easier to control with drugs as opposed to prison. Many are on mood controlling drugs because they were vicious killers.
The novel is told from the point of view of Sam MacGregor, although his tribal name is "Bright Moon". His age is never given, but you get the idea he's around 20-years-old. Sent off by his tribe at Noyo to study with an authentic native American medicine man, Sam returns to his tribal village one evening and refuses to join in the marathon dance. For his insubordination, the tribe's Dancer orders Sam to leave their territory and go on the Grail Journey.
Pursued by a pack of Avengers who are determined to see that Sam meets with an accident on his path, Sam managers to make his way into other tribal lands. Along the way he experiences out of body sensations. Sometimes he's put into the mind of a government agent before the fall of civilization. Other times he's a man named Bennett, who was the cellular template for all the android Dancers. After a bad run-in with a chemical-conscious man who was a serial killer before the treatment, Sam enters the land of the Navarro tribe. But the tribe has vanished. All he finds remaining of it is a young woman chained to a rock, left to die in the rising tide.
Sam rescues the woman who turns out to be Francesca O'Hare, the daughter of the man who created the android Dancers. Her father, whom she describes as ripped out of his mind on drugs, has recently died. She can't figure out why her tribe's Dancer wanted her dead, but she thinks it may have something to do with what she learned before her father died. Sam joins forces with her and flees north to the nearest settlement- Ukiah -outside of tribal control. Together they will do what is needed to bring down the tyranny of the Dancers.
Dancers is similar to both The Sign of the Labyrs and The Shadow People with the use of a first-person male narrator. It falls under the category of science fantasy as it too has elements of both science fiction and fantasy literature. The reader is given a lot of medical herbalism information as Sam carries a small medicine man bag with him. However he's not above using magical rites when they seem appropriate.
St. Clair is particular biting in her depiction of the Mandarins, the aging hippie tribal leaders who will do anything to stay in power. Since Sam was raised in a communal nursery, he really has no idea who is his mother. There's an older tribal woman called "Jade Dawn" who claims to be his mother, but he's not sure. As the local county agent says of the Mandarins: "They're too stoned, usually, to make anybody do anything."
The author still manages to pack the creep factor into the book when needed. There's a chilling scene where Sam and Francesca break into her father's hidden laboratory. It's dark and unoccupied by anything human. The increasingly psychotic O'Hare had booby-trapped the lab not only with chemical poisons, but other android creations. They are forced to navigate their way through the dark labyrinth while avoiding Hunters, Diggers, and other nightmare creatures.
It's sad this would be Margaret St. Clair's final novel. What amazing books she might have penned in the final years of her life.

Message from the Eocene (1964) by Margaret St. Clair

2010-10-27T11:26:00.006-04:00

This is the other half of the Ace double book which is paired with Three Worlds of Futurity. I suspect this novel was written for Ace and twined with the story collection when the publisher needed something else to match. As with all of her novels which I've read by Margaret St. Clair, this one is dedicated to her husband Eric, described in the author info as a "well-known writer of children's stories". The same bio piece lists her interests as sports cars, amateur astronomy, cooking, classical antiquity, gem cutting, and mandolin playing. Quite the polymath, she was.
Message from the Eocene begins several billion years in the earth's past. Technically speaking, this would have been the Paleoproterozoic Era. A humanoid creature only known as Tharg is trying to escape the lighting bolts being hurled at him by an unknown source. He's on the surface of the primitive planet Earth on an important mission for the floating city, Synon. He's a member of a specialized group known as "divers" who travel to the dangerous planetary surface in search of valuable minerals needed by the city. Tharg has been entrusted with a container carrying a mysterious book for delivery to the sister city of Gwynor. He's not sure who is tossing the lighting bolts at him, but suspects they are from their enemies, the Veidimi.
When he's captured it turns out the source of the lighting was the Vaeaa, the "half-mythical overlords" who secretly control the third planet from the sun. By now, Tharg has had the chance to open the case holding the book and find out why it's so important. The book is a guide to the secrets of the universe and was sent to Tharg's people by another advanced civilization. But the Vaeaa representatives disapprove of the book. They are strict materialists who feel threatened by it. They give Tharg a psychoactive drug to test out the book's power, then decide to destroy it. Tharg's last effort is to toss the book (in it's container) into an active volcano, where it will be safe until the right life form can find it. His consciousness now separated from his body by the drug, Tharg drifts away from the Vaeaa's in peace.
As Tharg drifts across the ages, he watches his people rise and fall. The Vaeaa overlords vanish too, but not before planting a projector on Pluto designed to prevent any further books from reaching whatever life might arise on Earth. Soon life does arise on the third planet and Tharg decides to contact it when the life forms have reached a level of maturity equal to his former civilization.
His first attempts at contact are rather amusing. His subject is a Quaker family living in New England in the first half of the 19th century. They become convinced their house is haunted from all the strange noises and apparitions Tharg creates while trying to make contact. They leave the house, but Tharg finds himself trapped in it for years. Once he is able to leave, he decides to make a different connection.
The next part of the book concerns a French mining engineer and his wife. She's "sensitive" to psychic phenomena and they're on the island of New Caladonia where he's overseeing a deep mine. One day the mine is filled with strange geometric shapes and the miners refuse to go down to work. The engineer sends his wife down to investigate. After a series of altercations with the locals, the miners, and finally Tharg, the book is uncovered. But it all ends rather disappointingly.
The final section of the book has Tharg trying to find a way to stop the Plutonian projector as he feels another book must be on it's way to the human civilization. Strange sites are seen all over the planet in preparation for the arrival.
Although it seems to be working the same groove as 2001, this book is a lot more fun.

Three Worlds of Futurity (1964) by Margaret St. Clair

2010-10-26T20:33:00.005-04:00

Margaret St. Clair's first collection short fiction was actually the second half of an Ace "double" book. Turn it upside down, flip it over and you have Message from the Eocene, also by her, as the companion book. I'll get to the Eocene later, but today, let's concentrate on this collection.
The book has but 5 tales: "The Everlasting Food", "Idris' Pig", "The Rages", "Roberta", and "The Island of the Hands". Three of the stories were originally published under different titles. I'm assuming the new titles are the ones she originally wanted to use. The earliest was written in 1949, the latest in 1962. With the exception of "Idris' Pig", none of these stories were included in The Best of Margaret St. Clair.
The first story, "The Everlasting Food", is the best one in the set. After a violent thunderstorm, Richard Dekker discovers his Venusian wife Issa has become imortal. Although she can't share her immortality with him, she can make their son immortal. She flees across the oceans of Venus (this was written in 1949) with the boy and her half-sister in pursuit. Although the ending is a little contrived, the story still holds up well as an excellent romance. Little touches, such as the title "Pamir", are what make it excellent. In typical St. Clair fashion, many of the terms invented for the story are never explained.
"Idris' Pig" is a screwball comedy set on Mars. Not quite Ray Bradbury's Mars, but a neat place just the same. "The Rages" is told from the point of a man who lives for his next ration of euphoria pills from the government. Finally, there's another romance, "The Island of the Hands", which attempts to answer the old question as to what should your inner self should desire.
The stories in this book don't have the same zing as the ones in Best of. The tend to be more serious, more introspective. The one exception is 1962's Roberta, which combines murder, science fiction, and sex change.
A nice little collection, which is a good companion to The Best of Margaret St. Clair.

Sign of the Labrys (1963) by Margret St. Clair

2010-10-24T10:20:00.009-04:00

Sign of the Labrys seems to be the one Margret St Clair novel people remember. Although the cover art has little to do with the book itself (big surprise there), the blurb on the back proudly proclaims: "Women are writing science fiction!" And we are told that it is "Fresh! Imaginative! Inventive!" Just like a loaf of wonder bread. I do hope she got some mileage out of this book, first published in 1963. At least some fame would compensate for the covers.
Written from the point of its protagonist, Sam Sewell, Labrys can best be described as a science fantasy idea novel. Although the hero uses science to further his ends, he also delves into the realm of fantasy, and he does it for idealistic reasons. It's also one of the first novels which treats Wicca as a bonafide religion. In some ways, this book is a statement of faith.
It's a post-apocalyptic book which takes place 10 years after 90% of humanity have been wiped out from scientifically created yeasts. Most of the survivors of the plague are living in underground bunkers built for the nuclear war which never came. The survivors are scaveging off the land- most of the trees having been destroyed-and burying the dead.
The novel begins with Sam recieving a visit from FBY agent Clifford Ames. It's never mentioned what FBY stands for, although Federal Bureau of Yeasts might be a good guess. The FBY is the only thing which passes for a government, since most of the plague survivors can't stand being in close proximity to one another. The FBY man is searching for a woman named Despoina (Greek: "Mistress") and he thinks Sewell may have been in contact with her. The FBY suspects her to be a "sower", which is to say a lunatic who deliberately spreads deadly microorganisms.
Although Sewell just wants to be left alone to live his life on E level in the underground bunker, he soon finds out that other people are interested in him. Someone leaves a mystical ring in his posession, he sees the sign of the labrys ( a double-headed fighting ax) on the cave walls, and mysterious figures whisper "Blessed be" in the darkness. Ames returns, dies in a struggle with Sewell, forcing Sewell to venture into the lower levels in search of truth.
On his way down he encounters a mycologist named Kyra who is doing research in what remains of the government labs in her sector. Through the use of mirror gazing and narcotics, she is able to help him look into his soul. Sewell has visions of another life where he danced around the fire and was chased by animals She's also able to get Sewell into the next level, G.
G level turns out to be where all the self-appointed important people reside. They had fled underground in anticipation of nuclear war. After a casual encounter with a woman on this level results in her death, he begins to suspect he may be carrying a deadly yeast infection. By now he's developed the ability to see inside people. A very intelligent dog is able to show him the way to the final level, H.
At level H, Sewell meets Despoina, in all her pagan majesty. He's initiated into the Kraft, just as the FBY attacks. Sewell manages to make it back up to Kyra at the F level, where they plan on making contact with Despoina, but the FBY attacks once again, this time with super cool carbon dioxide gas, intent on freezing everything out of existence. Sewell and Kyra manage to escape the feds through the use of extra-sensory powers. Their goal is to regroup with Despoina's Krafters and strike back at the FBY.
One of the interesting things about the novel is the use of a labrys as a symbol for Wicca. Today, most Wiccian initiates use the pentagram. Once upon a time, the ankh was in vogue, but the five-pointed star seems to have won out. In Greece today, the labrys is used as a symbol of paganism. In North America, it's usually seen as a lesbian symbol (the amazons were supposed to have fought with a labrys). I suspect that St. Clair, having a background in Greek and Roman studies, wanted to associate the Wiccan religion with ancient Greece as much as possible.
Labrys suffers from some of the loose ends which I've started noticing in St. Clair's other writings. At a crucial point in the plot of the book, we find out the pre-plague civilization had developed matter transmitters. OK...if they could send a physical object anywhere, what protection would an underground bomb shelter furnish? Did the matter transmitters become standard just before the plague? And what's with the secret clan of the Wiccans? Where did they come from?
Once again, St. Clair wrote a good novel, just not the great one I'd hoped to find with this book.

The Shadow People by Margaret St. Clair

2010-10-22T01:11:00.011-04:00

Margaret Sinclair turned to writing books in the 1960's. I don't know why her short story output declines after 1960, but I think it may have had to do with monetary reasons. Science Fiction and Fantasy became big sellers in the Age of Aquarius. Authors are often forced to write to pay the bills. Although the genesis of this novel may have been in the back of her mind for years, the second part seems to have been created for the specific era it was written.
The Shadow People is very much a product of it's time (1969), but it has influences which go back to the early part of the last century and beyond. As if Arthur Machen had wandered into the Fillmore Ballroom. Gary Gygax, one of the creators of the Dungeons and Dragons game, lists it as an influence. St. Clair quotes selectively from Robert Kirk's 17th century tract on faeries, The Secret Commonwealth. I suspect she used Commonwealth as a guide while writing this novel.
But enough with my speculations. Dame St. Clair is no longer with us, so she can't clear-up all my wondering about her motivations.
The Shadow People begins with the Summer of Love in California, although no specific years are given. The narrator, Dick Aldridge, works for a "hip" newspaper in the Berkley area. His girlfriend Carol is an up-and-coming photographer. Although they are deeply in love, one night Carol storms out of Dick's apartment after an argument. She's gone for several days and Dick decides to check out her basement flat. He finds evidence of a struggle, and decides to go to the police. After the police shuffle him off, Dick takes a bus out to Monterrey to see if she's staying with an older couple they both know (perhaps a stand in for the author and her husband?). Dick finds the isolated house vacant with no sign of Carol or the older couple, but plenty of uncollected mail in the box. And on the way back he runs into a fringe character known as Carl Hood, who mentions Carol may have left "the skin of the world."
Still searching for Carol, he later encounters, Fay, the maid at his room in the Shasta Hotel. She also mentions that Carol may have "left the skin of the world." Now Dick has to know what this all means and begs Fay to tell him. She doesn't tell him much about who abducted Carol, but does show him the path to an underground world where his girl friend may have been taken. And so begins the crux of the book.
Dick, taking food with him (Fay has warned him against eating or drinking anything in the underworld), makes the perilous journey underground from an isolated cellar to vast caverns, until he crosses a subterranean river into the world of the "silent people". Along the way he picks up an enchanted sword (which appears to be a Wiccan ceremonial sword from the description) which pulses when it senses danger. And there is plenty of danger in this underworld.
The underworld is populated by elves, who a distantly related to humans. They come in several varieties- gray, black, green, and white. All are dangerous, but more to each other than to the humans on the surface. On occasion, they make foraging trips to the "bright world"(surface) and steal whatever they need. They feed primarily on atter-corn, a bitter meal made with psychoactive fungus, which produces hallucinogenic effects. But they also feed on human flesh when they can get it. Dick is attacked by them several times, but they seem to be incapable of much group action, since any blood spilled during a confrontation drives them into attacking each other.
I don't want to spoil too much of the plot, but Dick does eventually make it back to the surface. He finds three years have passed (time passage being different in the underworld), the Summer of Love squashed, and the forces of reaction in control. The novel shifts gears at this point, turning into another "winter of our discontent" book. This is what leads me to believe the first section was mostly written years before the second, with the latter written to make the narrative more "relevant" to the current target audience.
And it's the above-ground final section of the book where it runs out of gas. There's some kind of nascent fascist state in formation, but we never get much of a picture of it. People are required to wear ID tags, but you never find out how this came about in the three years Dick was underground, other than a brief mention of law-and-order politicians. There's rioting in the street and some mentions of government conspiracies. The book even mentions the CIA may want the atter-corn for chemical warfare, but this reads as an afterthought, instead of a crucial plot device.
Finally, three years have allowed robotic devices to be created which can police the population and run bulldozers. There's a few pages where Dick discovers how the hills around Berkley where removed accidentally on purpose and used to fill in the San Francisco Bay. This came about in three years? I know people believed anything was possible in the 60's (the US did put a man on the moon), but such a time scale is pushing the willing suspension of disbelief.
What really frustrated me were the characters of Carl Hood and Fay. Carl turns out to be some sinister figure with connections above and below ground. But you never really find out who or what he's working with or toward. Fay has more information about the underworld than she lets on, but her role in the novel is never fully resolved. There's defiantly a relation between both characters, but we don't find out what it is till the end of the book. And we never find out how said relationship figures into the big picture.
In conclusion, The Shadow People is a good book, but could've been a great one. We may never know why a writer of Margaret St. Clair's caliber left so many loose ends in the novel. But she did create a horrifying vision of the underworld which influenced many writers.

Starwolf by Edmond Hamilton

2010-10-19T23:25:00.010-04:00

Edmond Hamilton (1904-1977) was one of the true giants of golden age science fiction. He managed to create the space opera sub-genre and crank out a series of pulp novels under the Captain Future imprint. There are stories of him typing so fast the typewriter would move across his desk. Later he would marry fellow writer Leigh Brackett and they would collaborate on many other novels. However, as he was constantly writing, Hamilton was loathe to see his earlier works into print. Much of what he published in the 30's and 40's didn't see print again until after he died.
In the late 1960's, Hamilton wrote three novels as part of an sf series. Series novels were all the rage at the time and someone had decided an outer space theme might prove successful. Known as the Starwolf trilogy, they consist of three separate novels: The Weapon From Beyond, The Closed Worlds and World of the Starwolves. In 1982, Ace Science Fiction issued them as one paperback collection, Starwolf. I'm told the first novel was adapted for Japanese television in the late 1970's, but I haven't had a chance to see it.
The trilogy follows the adventures of Morgan Chane, fully human, but adopted by the Starwolves at an early age. In the far future, his missionary parents had traveled from Wales on Earth to Varna, the home planet of a race of humanoid interstellar raiders, known as the Starwolves. Chane's parent's had hoped to save the Starwolves from their savage ways, but the missionaries perished from the excessive gravity and climate of Varna. Chane was raised by the Starwolves, who resemble human tigers with their golden fur. Later, when he came of age, he went with them on raids all over the galactic rim in search of treasure and booty. All of it came to an end when he killed a Starwolf in self- defense while arguing over the spoils of a raid. With an entire extended clan of Starwolves after him, he was forced to flee in a damaged spaceship.
Chane survives long enough to join up with a band of human mercenaries from Earth. Earth, now an impoverished planet, does supply most of the paid guns in the galaxy in the form of soldiers-of-fortune. Chane decides to stay with the mercenary band which rescued him. However, none of the other mercs, save the band's commander, Dilullo, know that Chane is a former Starwolf. Since Starwolves are usually shot on sight, they decide to keep his origin a secret.
The first novel, The Weapon from Beyond, touches briefly on Chane's origins. Most of it involves the mercenary band he's joined and their mission. A planet with vast mineral wealth has hired the mercenaries to seek out and destroy a weapon of vast power which they believe possessed by a rival planetary system. The mercenaries do find the weapon, but it turns out to be a star ship left over by an ancient intergalactic race. Chane earns respect from his new brothers-in-arms as the Varnan gravity of his youth has conditioned him to be far more powerful than the average human.
The next novel, The Closed Worlds, has Chane and the mercenaries traveling to a planet in search of a missing scientist. The brother of a rich star freight owner has disappeared on the planet Arkuun while searching for traces of another ancient Interstellar civilization. Their mission is ultimately successful, but not before Chane has encountered the radiantly beautiful Arkuun woman Vreya.
The series concludes with World of the Starwolves, easily the best one of the series. In this novel, Chane is forced to return to the Starwolve home planet of Varna and deal with the blood feud which cast him out. Searching for a missing work of art known as "The Singing Suns", Chane has led the other mercenaries into a trap. Although Chane manages to escape, the only way to free the other mercs is by leading the Starwolves to the very treasure planet where the stolen Singing Suns are kept. As before, Chane escapes with his strength and guile.
The quality of the writing varies. Most of the time it is standard action-and- adventure, with little thought given to the science behind Chane's galactic civilization. But no one could write about "booming suns" better than Hamilton. Toward the conclusion of the second novel, Chane encounters a device capable of transferring consciousness to any point in space. Here, the book enters 2001: A Space Odyssey territory with the wonders of the universe a-glow.
It's a shame the series ended after three books. I would've like to have seen where Hamilton would've taken Morgan Chane.

Hell! Said the Duchess by Michael Arlen

2010-10-11T23:21:00.006-04:00

#1. Hell! Said the Duchess by Michael Arlen. An unexpectedly chilling tale of demonic possession by this most charming author. -"13 Best Supernatural Horror Novels", by Karl Edward Wagner.

Michael Arlen (born Dikran Kouyoumdjian, 1895-1956), was a writer of novels in Great Britian during the early part of the 20th century. He's known as the originator of the "Falcon" detective series and many humorous novels involving the tribulations of the English upper classes. Resembling something out of Bright Young Things, he cut quite a figure in proper society.
Which makes Hell! Said the Duchess all that more bizarre. Imagine, if you will, a Pre-WW2 British novel of manners with characters named Major-General Sir Giles Prest-Olive and the Hon. Basil Icelin. Have scenes where riots are halted to allow a baby carriage and a nurse to cross the barricades. Also include high-born English women whose honor is questioned. Add some bumbling detectives. Sounds like an Evelyn Waugh work, doesn't it?
OK, now mix in a serial killer named "Jane the Ripper", who is identified by her exotic perfume. Ad a bizarre alternate universe England in 1938 where Fascist Oswald Mosely is the war minister. Through in a mad scientist in drag. Now we should be in Charles Birkin territory. But we're not.
Hell! reads as the shotgun wedding of a P. G. Wodenhouse and Dennis Wheatley. We have droll humor and conspiracies. Police inspectors concerned about the lower classes being stirred and a satanic killer. Most of the novel is humorous, until the final thirty or so pages where it turns into something dark and deadly. I can't help but wonder if, while deciding to close the book, Arlen took up his pen and thought:"Let's give those Bertie Woosters some real nightmares!"

The novel begins with an account of Duchess Mary Dove. Much beloved of her staff and people, she has had scandalous rumors tossed about lately concerning her nighttime activities. Although she claims to be retiring at 10 PM sharp, various people have seen her hanging out with the lower classes in gin mills and coffee shops well into the morning hours. A detective is brought in to investigate. Scotland Yard intervenes. Could she also be the same "Jane the Ripper" who's been cutting up young men around London? Might this be an attempt to stir up the working classes against their betters by communists and anarchists?

As I have said before, 4/5 of this book resides in the chuckling smart set territory. But the final section is as dark as anything Arthur Machen could conceive. And I think this is why Hell! has resonated with aficionados of horror fiction for so long.

The Best of Margaret St.Clair (1985)

2010-10-06T21:15:00.006-04:00

Naturalist, bohemian, academic, pagan revivalist, and writer, Margaret St. Clair (1911-1995) is largely forgotten today. She began publishing her fiction in the late 1940's in the declining pulp science fiction market and continued to be featured in the same magazines through the 50's and early 60's. Around 1956 she published her first sf novel, The Green Queen, and would go onto write another seven novels until 1973. None of her novels or short story collections (three) are available in print. The Best of Margaret St. Clair was issued in 1985 by a small press in Chicago. The only mention of her life I've encountered is this brief.
As I read through these stories, I was struck by how many I'd read in other collections while growing up. "Child of the Void" was featured in Tomorrow's Children (1967) and "The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles" in Alfred Hitchock's Monster Museum(1965). "Brenda", first published in Weird Tales, was adapted for an episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery (not that good, but worth seeing if you've read the story).
Every story in this collection is pure gold. Most have the snap, biting ending which turns sf conventions of the 50's on their head. Most of them have aged very well. "The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles" works as a wicked satire of modern sales techniques and of Lord Dunsany's fantasy stories. "Short in the Chest" has a robotic psychologist giving disastrous advice to the military. My own favourite in this collection, "The New Ritual", works as a woman's interest story, a pastoral, and fantasy fiction.
The truly sad issue is the lack of any interest in her writing, outside a few fans. Here's a woman who wrote countless stories and novels over a twenty year span, then ceased her output. Why? Writer's block? Health issues? It would be good to know.

Come Die With Me by James Eastwood

2010-09-29T22:36:00.007-04:00

(AKA: Diamonds Are Deadly)
The third and final Anna Zordan novel is the best one of the trilogy. Too bad there were no more issued after this one was published in 1969. Perhaps the whole spy craze was starting to die down, maybe author James Eastwood wanted to move on to other writing. The world may never know why the series ended so soon. And the conclusion of Come Die hints there will be more to come. It has been forty years...we're still waiting.
The plot for this novel involves a script for a TV series by a British production company which was submitted to the "home office" for approval. As per the Official Secrets act, this sort of thing must've been routine. The series involves assassinations, sabatogue and political unrest designed to bring the UK down. In the interest of public safety, the production company was told that maybe this wasn't the best time to be creating a TV show on these topics and the idea was shelved.
But someone has started carrying out a series of terrorist activities. All of them are following the suppressed series. And someone just murdered the Prime Minister.
Enter Sarratt, the chief of the super secret intelligence service only known as "The Studio". Madam Minister once again summons the spy master to her house (kids playing in the background) and sets him loose. Naturally, he dispatches Anna Zordan after the script writer, who's fleeing for his life. Anna tracks him down quickly and gets at the bottom of his problems (hint: it has to do with family issues).
There's a side plot developing involving a financial wunderkind and his femme fatale traveling companion. They are detoured to an isolated island in the Mediterranean where a master criminal plots world domination. The mastermind has plans for Anna too and lures her to the island.
We learn a little bit more about Sarratt in this book. For instance, his lonliness is partly due to a wife who died 20 years earlier in childbirth. This explains his fascination with both Anna and the Minister. But we never do get a clear description of what he looks like. Perhaps this is part of the mystery.
It's a shame the series ended with this book. It was really taking off at this point.

Medusa by E. H. Visiak

2010-09-24T20:05:00.005-04:00

#13. Medusa by E. H. Visiak
If David Lindsay had written Treasure Island in the throes of a peyote-induced religious experience...Well, if Coleridge had given Melville a hand on Moby Dick after a few pipes of opium....
-KEW, 13 Best Supernatural Horror Novels

E. H. Visiak (1878-1972) was better known by his real name of Edward Harold Physick. His interests reigned from John Milton to mysticism. He was also a close friend of novelist David Lindsay, the author of A Voyage to Acturus. He was also an authority on Victorian literature, which shows up quite clearly in this book.
Medusa is a novel which floats along. It begins with the author's childhood: how his parents perished at sea, how he was raised by a Spanish priest before being sent to his grandparents in England. There are no dates given, but I assume the time frame to be the early 19th century. After being sent to a boarding school, he escapes the harsh Dickens-type environment to live with the kindly Mr. Huxtable. This arrangement doesn't last long because Mr. Huxtable needs to go on an unexplained sea voyage and decides to bring the writer along.
The whole book is written in a very verbose Victorian style. And I must say, it is a chore to read. Not quite as painful as Melmoth the Wanderer, but close. Visiak is fond of phrase after phrase carefully strung together to make a sentence.
Before and during the voyage we are introduced to one very interesting character: Obidiah Moon, a salty old sailor and maybe a pirate. If there is a Long John Silver figure in this book, it's Moon. He's got plenty of secrets to hide.
I could go into the book in more detail, but it's hard to do that without spoiling the conclusion. I will say the last 50 or so pages of Medusa exist in some kind of dream world.
An interesting book if you want a challenging read.

The Chinese Visitor by James Eastwood

2010-09-21T20:39:00.007-04:00

Today we take a look at another one of the Anna Zordan spy novels by James Eastwood. Seduce and Destroy was previously reviewed. This was the one which stimulated my interest in the whole Anna Zordan trilogy. The Chinese Visitor is the novel which introduces Anna and her British secret service boss Sarratt. It has the same subtle humor of Seduce. There are a few plot devices which seemed outlandish, but for the most part the book is excellent.
In the first chapter a Chinese trade ambassador is assassinated while visiting the grave of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery. Since this takes place around 1965 (the year the book was published), the cold war is in full swing. A mysterious woman is arrested in the scuffle after the killing, who turns out to be Anna Zordan. But she has nothing to do with the murder. She just happened to like visiting cemeteries.
Anna spends a few days in jail rather than pay a fine. She returns to her apartment to find it occupied by a mysterious stranger who wants information. It soon becomes apparent that the stranger is the killer who slaughtered both of her parents years earlier. There's a fight between her and the stranger where she over-powers the killer before putting two slugs in him (one for each parent). She calls the only person she trusts- Mr. Sarratt, who took care of her after the death of her mother and father.
The dead killer turns out to be a ruthless assassin named Hagmann. Sarratt links him to several other mysterious deaths. Soon she learns her father was working as a double agent for both the British and a sinister group known only as the Organization. Sarratt further uncovers information that the Organization is a front for a radical faction in the Chinese government intent on igniting nuclear Armageddon between the USSR and the USA. With time running out, he decides to recruit Anna into his secret service.
Although Eastwood isn't big on local culture in these books, the characters really stand-out. The prime minister whom Sarratt is beholden is obviously from the Labor Party and keeps a mistress on the side. There's an American general who's marked for death on the discovered hit list, but just can't avoid missing a dinner in his honor. And there's the leader of the Organization: Edwin Steiner, a portly American who appears to be running a charitable foundation.
Best of all is the Chinese official who runs his operation out of an outpost in Albania. Known only as "the god" throughout the book, he never appears to Steiner or the Organization. All his orders are carried out from behind a screen next to a huge Buddha statue. When he does make an appearance it's almost anticlimactic.
I've got the next book in the series on the way. Too bad there's only three.

The Fire-Spirits by Paul Busson

2010-09-13T12:47:00.008-04:00

"A strange tale of a young man's involvement with a bewitching peasant child, mountain legends, and the quest for German unification. The English translation is said to be heavily expurgated, but I haven't read the German to compare."
-13 Best Non-Supernatural Horror Novels, by Karl Edward Wagner.

One of the delights in reading through the KEW list is finding a real gem, a book I never would have encountered had it not been for his comments. The Fire-Spirits is such an example. Here is a book I've longed to read for the past 25+ years. It proved to be worth the wait. I would go so far to say this novel is one of the best I've read in the past year. And it's good to the last page. Hopefully, someone will bring out a new translation (the copy I borrowed was printed in 1929).
I've not been able to find much about Paul Busson, other than he was an Austrian writer and journalist who lived from 1873-1924. There's not much on him in German; he's considered and obscure writer of fantastic fiction. I know The Man Who Was Born Again, another one of his novels is available in an English.
The Fire-Spirits is a novel about Peter Storck, a young man who has traveled to the Tyrolean mountain area, now part of Switzerland and Italy. He's trying to find out what happened to his Uncle Martin, who disappeared from his house near the village of Sankt Marein. It's 1809 and the area is in the midst of the violence brought about by the Napoleonic wars. The Tyrolean region has been forsaken by it's traditional protector, the emperor of Austria, and handed over to the king of Bavaria. Add to this religion-the Tyroleans are catholic, the Bavarians protestant- and you have a deadly mix. Which is why the mountain people have no love for the Bavarian militarists and are planning a revolt.
At the village, Peter meets a number of colorful characters. The hunter Serafin Federspiel, a former university student who saw his family massacred by the french. He's the lone dissenter ("Germans shouldn't be fighting Germans!) in the village when everyone wants to take up arms against Bavaria . There's the innkeeper Christian Lergetpohrer and his niece Notburga, who ends up being Peter's housekeeper. And there is the local parish priest Father Archangelus, who urges the local populace to fight for the true faith against the foreign invaders. Early in the novel, Peter falls in love with the mysterious Julia, a woman held in awe by most of the village. To list all the interesting figures in this novel would take a score card, it's best for the reader to discover them on their own.
Peter Storck takes up residence in his Uncle Martin's house which is filled with curiosities in the study and guns in the basement. Martin Storck had been an officer in the Austrian Imperial Army before resigning after striking a french nobleman. Disgraced, he cursed the emperor and retired to the mountains. Peter soon learns that the local people believe the old officer perished when he tried to spy on the "fire-spirits", mysterious lights which appear in the mountains during the equinoxes. Legend had it the lights are the products of condemned souls who are released twice a year from hell to cool themselves in the glacier. If anyone encounters them, the interloper will be dashed on the rocks below. Peter is even shown the strange lights descending the mountains through the safe distance of a telescope.
Soon, Peter becomes involved with the hunter Serafin in a plan to discover the true nature of the lights. Are they smugglers sneaking down the mountains? Actual demonic creatures? Or something else? Survival of an ancient pagan cult is hinted at throughout the novel, but only resolved in the final chapters.
The theme of possession reoccurs through the book. The innkeeper Christian shoots a Bavarian drummer boy in an initial skirmish with royal troops and begins seeing the victim in his sleep. Peter steps off the carriage as he arrives in the village to see a priest trying to exorcise a nun. It's a theme which never is fully resolved.
The description of mountain warfare is grim. Peter and the rest of the villagers end up in an ambush on a Bavarian-French campaign which is described in gruesome detail. The sack of Innsbruck by the rebels also features prominently.
The Fire-Spirits is an forgotten masterpiece of literature. I can only hope someone will bring the English translation back into print.

Thunder Jim Wade: The Complete Series by Henery Kuttner

2010-08-28T12:27:00.004-04:00

From May through September of 1941, Henery Kuttner published five "Thunder" Jim Wade novelettes in the Thrilling Wonder Stories. Kuttner would go on to science fiction literary success for his many short stories and novels until passing away in 1958. The Thunder Jim Wade stories were all attributed to "Charles Stoddard", a house pseudonym used by the Thrilling Wonder editors. Mostly forgotten today, the stories were considered Doc Savage imitations at the time. However, Altus Press printed the complete set two years ago, so now it's possible to read them and compare.
First of all, Thunder Jim has a unique origin: he was raised in a hidden valley by descendant of an ancient Crete civilization. His father, an famous explorer, crashed his plane in the valley while surveying the area. Thunder Jim survives with the street-wise pilot Miggs, but he's only able to leave the valley as an adult. From the Creteans he's learned he secret of making a metal alloy which makes him wealthy. From Miggs, he's learned all kinds of con artist games and slight of hand tricks. Later, he hooks up with Red Argyle and Dirk Mirat, who become his assistants in all kinds of adventures. From his base of operations in the south pacific, Thunder Jim Wade searches the globe for villains worthy of his talents.
What makes the series of interest is Thunder Jim's all-purpose vehicle: The Thunderbug. The Thunderbug can fly, travel across (and under) water, or rumble over land on it's retractable treads. Made of the special Cretean alloy, it's just about impervious to bullets or standard explosives. I can't help but wonder if Gerry Anderson read one of these stories and it all came back to him when he was planning Supercar and Thunderbirds.
There are five stories in this collection. The opening story has Thunder Jim journeying back to the lost valley where he was raised to stop a band of criminals from looting the place. "The Hills of Gold" takes place near Iraq, of all places. "The Poison People" leads him to South America where a band of cut-throats are attempting to loot Inca treasure from it's rightful owners. "The Devil's Glacier" is another lost valley novelette, this time with vikings. "Waters of Death"
concludes the series in a lost southeast Asian civilization.
It's too bad the series was canceled before it got rolling. There's plenty of local atmosphere in each tale. Some of them have the feel of sketches; perhaps Kuttner had to shorten them for space limitations. Still, it's good to have all the stories back in one volume.

SAVAGE SEASON by Joe Lansdale, read by Phil Gigante

2010-08-11T16:17:00.008-04:00

For a change today, I'm reviewing a spoken word book, Savage Season, availible from Brilliance Audio Books. This was a 5-CD set and unabridged. Although the novel was first published in 1990, this spoken word version was recorded in 2008. It's about five hours long.
I first read this book in paperback form around 1991. I remember handing it off to a few friends who also read it. Although I'd encountered a number of Lansdale's works before, this was the first actual novel of his I'd read. And it hit me with all the hammering of his short stories. Rough situations and even rougher people. A friend and spent days quoting the snappy dialogue back and forth to each other.
The story centers around Hap Collins and Leonard Pine. Both are in their 40's and have "The Sixties" in common. Both live in a rural area of East Texas. Both work for "The Rose Fields" as laborers. And that is what they have in common. Hap is white and divorced from a woman named Trudy. He was an "activist" in the 60's. Leonard has lived alone most of his life and is Vietnam war veteran. He's also gay. But both have bonded over the years and are the best of friends.
Then one day Hap's ex-wife Trudy makes an appearance. She's done this several times before and Leonard always warns Hap to stay away from her, which he never does. But this time Trudy has a proposal to make: some of her activist friends have learned about a load of money stolen from a bank robbery. The robbery went sour and everyone of the robbers are now dead. Trudy's latest husband learned of the bank job from the last surviving member of the gang before that man died too. All Trudy needs is Hap's knowledge of the backwoods were the money was hidden. Naturally, Hap demands Leonard get cut into the deal as well.
Of course, nothing goes according to plan.
Phil Gigante does and exceptional job reading the book. His interpretative style fits the characters nicely. I'd always imagined Hap and Leonard sounding like his voices. Not so much for some of the other characters. Toward the end of the book two drug dealers make an appearance: "Soldier" and "Angel". Soldier is a psychotic killer and Angel his barbell-lifting female accomplice. One of Angel's trademarks is she seldom talks and uses one word when she does. Her character doesn't lend itself too well to interperative reading.
I recommend this audio book, but I also recommend you read the source novel first.

RETURN FROM CORMORAL (1949) by Lester Dent

2010-08-11T12:54:00.004-04:00

This next-to-last Doc Savage novel by Lester Dent (under the house name Kenneth Robeson) has Doc and his side-kicks trying to help a scientist who's been stranded on a deserted island for the better part of six months. Macbeth Williams, the scientist, has just returned from his South Pacific sojurn with a research team. A cargo ship just happened to discover them. They'd been stranded on the Cormoral island when the foundation which bankrolled the expedition when bust.
And Williams is starting to worry about his sanity. Since returning to civilization he's developed an ability to predict the future. Since he's also the heir to a vast fortune, someone may be trying to get him committed to an insane asylum. Enter Doc and company.
The novel has a harder edge than most of the earlier Doc Savage series books. Since the pulp hero format was on the wane, Dent was was getting more hard-boiled in his approach.
For instance, this scene involving a telegraph operator :

THE telegraph office was a narrow recess in a building on Flagler Street not far from Biscayne Boulevard, and remained open all night, presided over by a round-faced man named Gridley. Gridley was a contradiction to the idea that all fat people are jolly; he had an evil temper, a sharp tongue and bad manners, qualifications which had resulted in his being shunted to this undesirable all-night job. His assets were several years seniority, a willingness to put up with low pay, although there was a qualification to this, and a brother-in-law who was district commercial agent for the company.

I'm in the process of reading the Doc Savage novels in reverse order. At some point I'll find out where they went from Super Science to Mean Streets.

Hunt Beyond the Frozen Fire by (as told to) Christa Faust

2010-07-04T11:31:00.007-04:00

The Gabriel Hunt series continues to reward with this latest outing by mystery writer Christa Faust. In keeping with the theme, the book is listed as having been "told to" Faust. A nice Glen Orbick painting graces the cover too. It's good to see Ms. Faust generating more novels; I was quite impressed with Money Shot, her novel for Hard Case Crime (and I'm anxiously awaiting the sequel to it!).
In Beyond the Frozen Fire, Gabriel Hunt, rich adventurer and all-around hero, travels to the depths of the south polar region at the bequest of the beautiful Velda Silver, who is searching for her missing scientist father. The last known transmission from this esteemed antarctic researcher was received near an isolated polar station. Dr. Silver claimed that he could "see trees". Of course, Gabriel decides against the wishes of his brother Michael ( who stays behind doing the bookwork for the Hunt foundation) and heads south by way of New Zealand.
I should also mention the book opens with Gabriel saving the treasure-hunting Professor Fiona Rush from weapons dealers and cossacks on the Romanian boarder. How this figured into the rest of the novel puzzled me, but it did create a lively introduction.
In New Zealand, Gabriel quickly is joined by several companions. There is Rue Aparecido a fiery Brazilian woman, who also happens to be a crackerjack mechanic. Next is Maximillian ("Millie") Ventrose, Jr., a three-hundred pound, 6-f00t-seven, mountain of a man. Naturally, Velda Silver is also going along for the trip.
The action rapidly moves to the Antarctic research center where they assemble everything needed for finding the missing scientist. There's a huge Scandinavian man named Nils and a pilot called Speedo. At this point the action really starts moving along turning Frozen Fire into a superb page-turner. To describe more of the plot would be giving it away. But I will say that it involves blond Amazons, a lost world, and savage birds. And there are plenty of R-rated sex scenes.
Check out this book. You won't be disappointed.

The Whistling Ancestors by Richard E. Goddard

2010-06-18T22:05:00.009-04:00

The Dancing Tuatara Press imprint of Ramble House Books has once again rescued an obscure horror novel from oblivion. Who knows? We may some day be able to order the complete works of R. R. Ryan on-line and have them delivered the next day in a special leather-bound edition. I do feel we are in the midst of a major revolution in small press printing.
The intro by DTP guru John Pelan describes The Whistling Ancestors author Richard E. Goddard as a sales genius who only had one other book to his name: General Cargo-An Introduction to Salesmanship. Since there is very little known about him, we can only wonder why he decided to publish a book which mixed voodoo, satyrs, satanism, race war, conspiracies, and delicate women who need to be rescued. Since the book was originally published in 1936, I think Mr. Goddard must've been reading American shudder pulps in between sales campaigns.
Ancestors introduces us to one of the most interesting criminal masterminds of the 20th century: Dr. Caspar Pettifranc. The villain is discovered by Patrick Worthing, a sidewalk painter.
Worthing, who is in his early 30's, has figured out a means to get a little sympathy from the pedestrian traffic: he hides one arm under his coat, making him appear to be handicapped. He also has a chalk board with him in order to communicate with anyone on the street, so as to seem deaf. One day he encounters a gentleman of mixed ancestry who just happens to need a doorman who can't talk to guests.
I say "mixed ancestry" because such is the best way to describe Pettifranc, whom the author calls "mulatto". As a matter of fact, he uses the "M" word constantly through out the novel. Goddard isn't above using the "N" term as well. The casual racism of this book is one of the most jarring aspects of it. We've even told Pettifranc's sinister plans may be the result of his inability to be part of either race. Makes you wonder what Goddard would think about our current president. The one good thing I can say about this part of the book is that there are few racist characters: all the people of color seem to be educated and well-rounded.
Worthing is able to track Pettifranc back to the good doctor's base of operations. He finds out in chapter 6 that a plan has been hatched by Dr. Pettifranc to unite all the non-white races against the blanc ones. Furthermore, this plan is being made possible by harnessing the power of The Evil One (known as "Zamiel") himself to overthrow the existing order. Along the way he encounters a voodoo mamloei known as Maman Constance and a work team of zombies. The title refers to an odd chirping sound which appears every time the voodoo spirits are summoned.
Oh. Yes. There's a sinister underground laboratory where a mad scientist is creating mythological creatures to help summon Zamiel and a sacrificial altar. At least three women are kidnapped for Pettifranc's fiendish purposes. Several stalwart British gentlemen are forced into cooperating with the forces of evil. Did I miss anything?
One of the other oddities of this book is how the action doesn't kick into high gear until we get to see Dr. Pettifranc at work managing his sinister enterprise from inside his headquarters. And it's tough work being a criminal mastermind: crazy Eastern European scientists to manage, underlings from India you can't trust, and suspicious people trying to mess everything up. No "maggots of madness" here: Pettifranc runs a tight ship and expects the best from his people. You do get the feeling the author identifies with the villain.
So I can recommend this publication as one of the more interesting examples of a British thriller. The book reads well in spite of the racism of the time.

The Hand of Red Finger by Leo Zagat

2010-05-12T21:43:00.004-04:00

In the 1930's, the hero pulps were everywhere. A casual walk to a newsstand would get you the latest Doc Savage, Spider, Phantom Detective, or Operator 5. And it was in the back pages of the Operator 5 magazine another pulp hero was created: Red Finger. Red Finger was a counter-spy whose job it was to take down enemy agents. His turf was America in general and New York City in particular. From 1934 to 1938 The Red Finger battled spies with his signature gas gun and black gloves ( with scarlet trigger finger).
What made Red Finger so interesting was the secret identity he held. Unlike other caped crusaders, the man behind this mask didn't have a lot of money. His true self was Ford Duane, a second hand bookstore owner in a run-down section of New York City. Most of the time he could be seen shuffling his musty volumes around in a cheap coat. He even lives impoverished in a small room at the back of his store. But, every so often, he would receive a message from his government contact as to the next target. Then Ford Duane would vanish out of a hidden passage and emerge as Red Finger, terror of foreign agents.
The best part of each story is the first paragraph. Writer Arthur Zagat manages to grab the readers attention with a brilliant opening montage each time.
The book reprints all of the Red Finger stories, with a new one as a conclusion by editor Tom Johnson. Most of them follow a very tight formula: Ford Duane gets his message, he decodes it, then goes out in disguise to eliminate his target. The code is always based on the letters P-A-T. The enemy agents don't seem to have a lot in common, some are clearly Italian fascists, others German, with a few from an Asian country which stands in for Japan. Although the Asian spies are the most noble, they are often described in the disgustingly racist tones so prevalent before WW2.
Tom Johnson deserves a big round of applause for bringing out this story collection of a unique and obscure pulp hero.

KEW Collection

2010-04-27T11:18:00.002-04:00

Here's a picture of all the books I've managed to accumulate on the KEW list. I haven't had a lot of time to read lately, so the posting has been infrequent. Also, I'm just about out of the books on the list I can find at less than absurd prices. However, hope springs eternal. When I first encountered this list over 20 years ago, it was damn near impossible to find any of these books.
God Bless the Internet and all who sail with it!

Gabriel Hunt: At the Well of Eternity

2010-04-15T10:50:00.007-04:00

Dorchester Publishing is running full throttle trying to create a new pulp hero with their "Gabriel Hunt" line. Gabriel Hunt is the hero and subject of the series with each book not authored, but "told to" the writer. Hunt is a rich and handsome world traveler who is heir to his parents' fortune. In the first book we learn that his parents disappeared at sea, leaving him and his brother Michael to administer the family fortune. They also run the Hunt Foundation, which serves as the background cover for Gabriel's jaunting around the planet.
This book, which opens the series, has Gabriel heading down to Mexico in search of a band of nogoodniks who have dared to interrupt his museum black tie affair. At the fundraiser, he and his brother Michael are approached by a mysterious Latina woman who hands him a bottle wrapped in a confederate battle flag. Before he can talk to her, the waiters have all pulled out guns and started blasting away. When the smoke has cleared, the bottle is broken and the woman has been abducted by the waiters. Good help is so hard to find!
Soon, Gabriel is heading into Mexico on his private jet. Along the way, there's a shoot-out in the everglades and a trip to a civil war battlefield. Somehow, a vanished Confederate general figures into the the mystery. But everywhere he goes, Hunt's enemies are one step behind him, even if they seldom manage to wound. The journey soon leads him to the mountains of Guatemala and a lost city.
I have to admit, the series is off to a weak start. Hopefully, they'll bring in some more interesting chroniclers. And that cover....looks like a Harlequin romance.

Seduce and Destroy by James Eastwood

2010-03-25T09:19:00.013-04:00

Continuing with the spy craze of the swinging sixties we have James Eastwood's Seduce and Destroy, first published in 1967. I can't find out too much information on the author, other than he was British and a professional writer. This is also part of a series of books about Anna Zordan, beautiful secret agent for an even more secret service.
Seduce opens with a letter delivered to Sarratt, the head of a "top-secret British intelligence unit". The letter is from a renowned journalist and details how he married into a family of powerful Neo-Nazis bent on world domination. What makes this family a little different from the usual Neo-Nazi family is that it is run by women. Soon after his marriage, the journalist was introduced to Grossmutti, the bedridden matriarch of the family. She and her daughters had managed to escape to South America with a submarine full of gold bars. The letter ends with the journalists describing the execution of a college who'd ventured to close to The Family.
The action moves to secret agent Anna Zordan (she's part Hungarian), who is tailing a minor film actor named Tony. Tony, it turns out, is part of The Family and has been in Britain stirring up all kinds of trouble. Their affair comes to a head one night when Tony takes Anna for a drive in his spiffy MG. He pulls over to one side of the road, makes some excuse, and is promptly killed by Anna (one precise throat punch) before he can take her out. Anna sends the MG over a cliff before checking back in with Sarratt.
Anna soon finds herself being debriefed by Sarratt. She discovers Tony was the son of a Mrs. Wilberforce, who runs the operations for the The Family. The Family has been scheming with the Red Chinese and supporting a radical right politician in Germany named Bauer. There's all kinds of social turmoil which can be traced to The Family. But the worst of it all is a missing Chinese nuclear weapon. Since the cover for Sarratt's operation is a film studio, Sarratt has decided to send Anna to The Family's compound on the island of Crete as an actress. She's young, pretty, and Mrs. Wilberforce likes girls.
The book shifts into high gear at this point. Anna finds herself bouncing around the Mideast and ends up in a private plane carrying a nuclear bomb. There's a Chinese spy named Mr. Chu. Anna plays into her enemies' exceptions of a weak finishing school bimbo more than once, with deadly results. Sarratt finds himself imprisoned in an East German psychiatric ward. Everything comes to a bizarre conclusion.
Eastwood's style is very drool, in a very witty British sort of way.He saves his best writing for the fortysomething head of the spy agency, Sarratt. For instance, Sarratt only reports to a woman who is always known as "The Minister". One of their strategy sessions takes place in The Minister's kitchen while she is baking an apple pie. Sarratt has deep affections for both The Minister and his special agent Anna. But he can't act on either one for reasons of security. He also has a subordinate who's just waiting for the opportunity to get Sarratt's job. There is a hilariously sublime passage where Sarratt's subordinate suggests his boss is maybe, just maybe, losing the old touch.
I found this book to be pleasantly amusing and a good adventure novel at the same time. Now I'll be looking for others in the series.

Blog List

2010-03-24T09:54:00.001-04:00

I've updated the Blog list to make it more accessible.

Final Blackout by L. Ron Hubbard

2010-03-04T20:58:00.008-05:00

#2 Final Blackout by L. Ron Hubbard
Another future history detailing the destruction of civilization through global war, also written on the eve of World War II, also bleakly antiwar.
(13 Best Science Fiction Horror Novels, by Karl Edward Wagner)

It's a little hard to be objective about anything written by L. Ron Hubbard. Founder of his own religion, he was also a pulp writer in the 1930's and 40's. Most people think of him today as that "Scientology" guy. His last multi-part novel, Battlefield Earth, was everywhere to be found in the last century, especially in used bookstores. He published over a hundred novels and short stories during the pulp years, under a variety of pseudonyms.
Final Blackout began as a three-part serial in the April 1940 edition of Astounding Science Fiction (it was later published as a hardback in 1948). It's important to remember this date when discussing the novel, because it was very much part of it's time. Although the war had been waging on for over a year, Germany and the UK had not undertaken major operations against each other. British troops were in the continent of Europe, but France had not yet been invaded. This would soon change. The United States had a neutrality policy.
Hubbard's premise in Blackout was that the war in Europe would drag on and on. In the opening of the book, the war has been going on for over twenty years. Taking the stalemates of WWI as a model, he envisions a state of continuous conflict where allies shift and boundaries change. New technologies have allowed humans to become more effective killers, but no one has achieved a victory. The blitzkrieg was still over the horizon and a lot of people assumed another global war would resemble the last one.
Blackout begins with the remains of the Fourth Brigade of the British Expeditionary Force trying to outmaneuver a detachment of Russian soldiers. They're somewhere in France, but the officer in charge of the brigade, a charismatic thirtysomething man only known as "The Lieutenant" has had no word from his command in four years. Thus they are surprised when a captain from the BEF shows up and orders them to return to general headquarters. Because of biological weapons, no British soldier has been allowed to return to England in years.
The focus of the novel is on the lieutenant. He's only known war, but has survived so many engagements that his men look on him as some sort of divinity. He doesn't talk much, plays solitaire between engagements, and looks after his troops. But he doesn't hesitate to order an execution if he deems it necessary. "He was born in an air raid shelter", reads the first line of the book.
Eventually, the lieutenant and his troops reach the BEF headquarters. They discover the latest government in England has been taken over by communists, who are ordering soldier's councils (soviets) to be organized in each detachment. The lieutenant is relived of his command and his troops turned over to officers who are more in tune with the new government. This, naturally, provokes a revolt in the enlisted men who seize control of the officers and put the lieutenant back in power. With his troops restored, he takes control of the GHQ and organizes a mass flotilla of soldiers back to England. It turns out a vaccine has been developed against the bio warfare germs which kept them out.
Most of the remainder of the book has the lieutenant sailing into England with his army and seizing control of the country. Hubbard spends a lot of time detailing the king of tactics which an army short on modern weapons and ammunition might have to use. The opposing force on the coast has converted their modern cannons into muzzle-loaders since shells are hard to find. England has been depopulated by war and pestilence. The lieutenant executes the leader of the communist fraction which had been in charge and begins to rebuild England.
His work continues uninterrupted. One day a ship from the US is sited off the coast. The Americans have been out of touch for years and now want to resume contact. The same day an American reconnaissance plane soars over the lieutenant's HQ in the old Tower of London, scaring everyone. They haven't seen any aircraft in years. Suddenly, the lieutenant's kingdom is threatened.
The biggest criticism aimed at this book is that it is fascist. I suppose you could call it a fascist novel if you define fascism as the use of violence to bring about political change, but then Superman falls in that category too. The book seems to be advocating a restoration of a military-based aristocracy; "Cesarism", if you will. It's well-written, if a little simplistic, but a good example of apocalyptic science fiction.

The Silken Baroness Contract by Philip Atlee

2010-02-28T21:02:00.003-05:00

In the wake of Ian Flemming's success with the James Bond novels, a lot of American publishers attempted to get into the spy game with series books of their own. Most of them are pretty forgettable, but now and then you find one in a library discard pile which was interesting. Such is the case of the Joe Gail series by the writer Philip Atlee. A former intelligence operator, Gall retired early in the cold war game and only comes out of retirement for special assignments. He's a spook for hire and the employer is the US government, who still finds him useful. In between jobs he chills at a 19th century estate built in the in the Ozarks by a Union general.
Silken Baroness has Gall sent to the Canary Islands on an ambiguous mission. He's supposed to be posing as an American writer and rents a small place near the ocean. This gives him plenty of time to party away and make the acquaintance of the European baroness in question. Soon, he finds himself the target of a several murder attempts. Someone wants him dead and Gall doesn't even know why he's been hired.
The Gall books are written in first person, much like a hard-boiled detective novel. In some ways the character reminds me of Ross McDonald's Lew Archer: a personality so thin it would disappear if he turned sideways. One of his contacts remarks that Gall is lost if he can't "murder it, blow it up, or paint it pink."
There's a lot of scenic writing in this novel. The author is so detailed with the local life on the Canary Islands and the Iberian peninsula you almost feel you are there. Quite a feel for Franco-era Spain and what it must've been like to live under the shadow of the yoked arrows.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice by Hanns Ewers

2010-02-17T23:07:00.005-05:00

(cover picture courtesy of Mr. John Squires)

#7- The Sorcerer's Apprentice, by Hanns Ewers. The first of the Frank Braun trilogy. Braun hypnotizes a peasant girl into believing she has had a heavenly visitiation, the isolated village goes mad with religious frenzy, and Braun is in over his head.
-KEW's 13 Best Non-Supernatural Horror Novels.

One of the most interesting and controversial writers on these lists has to be Hanns Ewers. A brilliant writer in the early 20th century, he turned to Nazism in the late 20's. But by the time Hitler and Co. had consolidated power in 1933, Ewers was proscribed and his writings were confiscated. He died in poverty during the next decade. As Karl Wagner said: "The question of who is the victim and the master was is a recurrent dilemma in Ewers' work, one which the Nazis finally solved for him."
Ewers' novels are difficult to find in English editions. I've been lucky to either find them in older libraries or reprints. This one was richly illustrated by Mahlon Blaine. His decedent style fits the book perfectly.
The Sorcerer's Apprentice is about Frank Braun, probably an alto ego for Ewers himself. He's a sophisticated German who travels the world, witnessing some of the most bizarre things imaginable. In Alraune, he's there for the birth of a woman without a soul, who causes damage to everyone around her. The Vampire finds him stuck in a hostile America during WW1. Here he decides to take a sabbatical to an isolated Italian mountain village to write. But the village is teeming with religious frenzy.
Braun arrives to this little collection of scrabble farmers to encounter a man who has recently returned from the United States after winning a big sum in a lottery. It seems "The American" had immigrated to the USA from the village of Val di Scodra thirty years previously. While in the States, he joined a Pentecostal church and became quite active in it. Now he's back in town again with plenty of money to finance his missionary activities. The villagers have abandoned the local catholic church and are now attending The American's frequent revivals. The catholic bishop for the area has decided to ignore the situation, least he create a bunch of martyrs.
Frank Braun finds this whole situation amusing. The only people who will have anything to do with him are the innkeeper, Raimondi, the local frontier guard, Aloys Drecker, Ramondi's daughter Teresa, and a hired-hand named Angelo. In the first week, Braun has his way with Teresa, whose father just adds her to the bill.
Soon, Braun is using his elementary knowledge of psychology and hypnotism to bend both Teresa and The American to his will. He conveniences The American that he's the prophet Elijah reborn. And just for kicks he then preaches to the man about the power of self-flagellation. Naturally, The American soon has his entire flock whipping themselves into a mass of blood to chase the devil out.
Very pleased with himself, Braun reflects on how he'll sell the mountain village as a holy spot for all the religious suckers in the world. It seems a good way to make money, so why shouldn't he get in on it? Besides, these rubes will do anything he says. Teresa he even adopts as a pet.
But one day Braun gets lost traveling through the mountains and doesn't return to the village for several weeks. When he shows up at the inn, he discovers Teresa is being worshiped as a saint by the villagers. She's received the stigmata and they are sure the Kingdom of Heaven is upon them. When Braun tries to excert his power over Teresa, he finds it useless. Now Teresa in in charge and she's not about to let Braun leave the village.
The book ends with a description of a blood ritual straight out of Leatherface Central. To go into it further would spoil the ending. Just let me say this is not a book to conclude on a full stomach. However, it is an excellent novel about the power of mass hysteria.

UP FROM EARTH'S CENTER (1949) by Kenneth Robeson (Lester Dent)

2010-02-08T15:31:00.008-05:00

The final of 181 initially published Doc Savage novels has The Man of Bronze fighting the forces of Hell itself. Since Lester Dent (writing as usual under the house name of Kenneth Robeson) had no idea the series was about to end, it's a little strange he took the final bow of Doc and Co. into Lovecraft territory. Dent's writing is at it's usual crisp style- short and too the point with no verbiage wasted. However, there is quite a bit of information about yachting and sail boating at the beginning of the book, suggesting that Dent had done his homework.
The novel begins with the discovery of a castaway on an island off the coast of Maine. Psychiatrist Dr. Karl Linningen has been sailing his yacht, the Mary Too, on a extended vacation. On the Canadian island of Campobello he discovers Gilmore, a geologist who's been missing for months after disappearing in a cave. Gilmore is certain he's been in hell and is sure the rescue party is a group of demons sent to take him back. Dr. Karl decides to take him to the nearest shore. Naturally, Doc Savage just happens to be in the town were they moor.
This is a more subdued, economy Doc Savage. There is some mention of his sidekick John "Renny" Renwick, but he never makes an appearance. Ditto for "Long" Tom, the electrical engineer. "Monk" Mayfair and "Ham" Brooks are the only two who follow along for the ride.
When Doc makes it back to the yacht, Gilmore has vanished from a locked room. They break down the door to find the mysterious Mr. Wail. Wail is one of the strange and more interesting creations in the Savage universe. He's a short little chubby man who claims to have been a Jr. devil sent from hell to fetch Gilmore back. He provides the comedy relief which is normally Monk's job.
The final portion of the book has Doc and company traveling down a deep cavern, in pursuit of the bad guys. But Doc ends up in a subterranean lair filled with fantastic creatures right out of The Mountains of Madness. Are they fiends from the underworld or hallucinations from an unknown gas? Dent leaves the answer open.
You can't help but wonder where Dent was going with this story line. Did he plan another adventure using the same sub-terrain? Dent wasn't known for re-using characters in his stories. It's hard to believe he would take Doc Savage, super scientist detective, into fantasy land.
But we'll never know.

Fade to Blond by Max Phillips

2010-02-05T11:18:00.003-05:00

Hard Case Crime shows it can deliver as a book publisher. With novels such as Money Shot, I've become a big fan of the company It's always good to know there are Still a few publishers out there who can deliver the goods.
Fade to Blond is written from the perspective of Ray Corson, a WWII vet and prize fighter. It's the 1950'S in Los Angeles and he's trying to make a living in the building trades. One day a mysterious blond woman comes up to him on a job site wanting to hire Corson to keep a former boyfriend off her back. Needing the cash and smitten with the woman, he takes the job.
But soon he discovers there's more to the job than she let on. Her ex is a small time hoodlum named Halliday who produces adult films and is in fealty to Lenny Scarpa, a major player in the drug trade. Scarpa, in turn, is beholden to Fausto Burri, the mob boss of Santa Monica. Soon Corson discovers all kinds of inconsistencies in the blonde’s (who goes by the name Rebecca Lafontaine) story. But he’s fallen in love with her and becomes ensnarled in a complex of schemes.
Max Phillips has a natural, but not too easy to follow, writing style. Sometimes it can be difficult to tell who's talking if the scene involves multiple characters. But his feel for natural speaking can also work to his advantage, especially if a given character does not speak standard English. And he can turn a sentence. Such as this description of a young woman who lives too fast:

I was always glad to see Joanie, because it meant no one had killed her yet.

And check out how he manages to capture the spirit of the age in one sentence:

I saw a couple more people about as well-known as Neale and Tremaine, and some players who were just half familiar faces, but you couldn't think what they'd done, and some gaudy specimens who must have been choreographers or designers, and some set dressers and grips and a couple guys who might've been artists, the new kind, that try to look like dockworkers.

The ending of the book is quite stunning, although not too surprising. It out-ranks the famous "It was easy” conclusion from another novel.
A good hard boiled book from a company creating crime fiction with an edge

Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

2010-01-28T14:45:00.003-05:00

From KEW's 13 Best Science Fiction Horror Novels:
#13 The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
Mankind is stricken blind and carnivorous ambulatory plants run amok. Reminiscent of Vampires Overhead and one of the finest world catastrophe novels. Filmed as The Day of the Triffids.

First published in 1951, John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids is one of those books which lives up to its reputation. The plot is quite simple: a new species of plant has been created inside Russia (we are never told how). The plant can grow to ten feet in height and thrives in just about every environment. Its primary use is in the production of high-grade industrial lubricants, but it has many other uses as well. However the plant, known as a “triffid", has the ability to walk for short distances at low speed. And they are deadly: each Triffid comes equipped with a ten foot stinging lash which can kill. The plants are also carnivorous. Since they breed so readily and produce such useful items, the plant begins to appear all over the world. Some people even keep them tethered and docked in their garden.
One night the earth enters a meteorite field which lights up the sky with a brilliant glow. All over the word people walk out of doors to witness the bight display. A party mood prevails. And the next morning, when everyone who has watched the celestial light display wakens, they are totally blind. Now humanity is in chaos and has lost the one advantage it has against the triffids.
The narrator of the novel is William Mason, a man who has made his living working with triffids. When the catastrophe struck, he'd been in the hospital with bandaged eyes from a near-miss by a triffid lash. The bandages on his eyes prevent him from seeing the meteorite display. Thus, when he wakes up the next morning, he's one of the few people left with vision. Since this was supposed to be the day his bandages were removed anyway, Mason pulls them off, when no one at the hospital answers his call for help.
He staggers into a word gone mad. Sightless people are groping around everywhere, desperate for help and food. Mason eventually rescues a women named Josella Playton and together they locate the last few people in London who still posses vision. Part of the book is a debate over triage: how do you decide who is to live when food and medical supplies are running out and help is not on the way.
Maser and Josella become separated early in the novel. He spends most of it trying to find out where she's gone. Along the way he rescues a four-year-old girl named Susan from a triffid attack and takes her along. Eventually he's reunited with Josella and they decide to hold up in a remote farm house with several other people who survived the downfall of civilization. They are forced to learn how to farm since supplies are becoming harder and harder to locate. They're also forced to build a fence around the farm to keep the triffids out. All the while they wait and hope other people have survived the disaster.
The triffids dominate the book. They start out as a nuisance and rapidly become self-aware monsters. Any sort of human movement will attract a triffid and any human enclosure becomes besieged by them. And the plants learn; whatever method is used to exterminate the triffids soon becomes ineffectual.
Day of the Triffids has been filmed at least three times.

Makers by Cory Doctrow

2010-01-26T00:21:00.007-05:00

Makers is a fascinating book by novelist Cory Doctrow about the future of desktop manufacturing. Known for his previous novel, Little Brother, and many other works of fiction, Doctorow has written an optimistic book about the near future. It contains a memorable cast of characters.

The book begins with a press conference called by Landon Kettlewell, a corporate CEO who has
hit upon a great idea: send financiers off into the hinterlands of America searching for
creative and visionary business types. Duplicating the microloan strategy used in SE Asia, "Kettlebelly" soon has creative people producing all Kinds of neat stuff Most of the "new work" is cataloged by reporter Suzanne Church, who has left her regular newspaper job to start blogging about it.

The scene changes to Florida where Lester and Perry, two buddies since boyhood are making
all kinds of contraptions out of waste parts and usable junk. With the help of New Work money,
Les and Perry create a series of household appliances which make them internationally famous.
But as all good things need to reach a conclusion, the money behind new work runs out, leaving
countless inventors destitute. Lester and Perry return to their warehouse of wonders and go back to making their own creations. The parallels to the Dot-com crash are obvious.
(Makers is set in the near future) Years later, after returning from covering Russia, Suzanne hears about a theme ride Perry and Lester have constructed in an abandoned Walmart. The ride showcases the best of the New Work productions and is a big hit with the former people behind the movement. Those who attend the exhibit help to make it better by leaving comments with an electronic device.

The ride becomes so popular that other rides begin open up all over the country. This
phenomena soon draws the attention of Sammy, a young turk executive at Disney. Sammy shot
up the corporate food change because he was able to turn Disney World's fantasyland into a Gothic theme park He's got plans for transforming it again and does not need a group of renegade theme ride operators to steal his thunder....

My major complaint with Makers is the vagueness describing the technology.One of the problems in setting a science fiction novel in the near future is in adapting
current techno trends a few years down the road. For instance, the 3D duplicators are described as using some sort of goop, but where comes the feedstock? Also, the auto industry is supposedly dead, but many of the characters Seem to have no trouble
finding a car.

Still a good book and I can only hope it will inspire backyard inventors.

Burn Witch Burn (1932) by A Merritt

2010-01-15T22:19:00.004-05:00

#9-"Best known for his lost-race fantasy novels, this time Merritt is equally brilliant at modern horror, in tale of murderous dolls animated by the souls of their human counterparts. Filmed as The Devil Doll."
-KEW, 13 Best Supernatural Horror Novels.

Abraham Merritt (1884-1943) was one of the highest paid writers of his day. Although many of his novels remain in print, much of what he has written is unread. Merritt wrote in a verbose form, not at all popular today with our short attention spans. I tried reading The Metal Monster years ago and never made it past the first few chapters. He was a great inspiration to many of the pulp writers.
Burn Witch Burn starts out sudden, but slow. Dr. Lowell is a distinguished physician working in New York City who suddenly has a new patient dumped on him. The patient, a confident of gangster Julian Ricori, is brought to him for treatment. The man, named Thomas Peters, is in a cataleptic state brought on by what appears to be fright. The man has been scared so bad he's in shock. The gangster chief offers any help, any sum of money to find out what caused this to happen.
Puzzled, Dr. Lowell attempts to diagnosis the man's condition by standard medical procedure. But he can't figure out what has brought on the state. When Peters does die, all he can find is a tiny puncture wound, but no sign of poison.
Eventually, the trail leads back to a doll shop not far from Dr. Lowell's hospital. After searching the records, he finds a number of similar deaths have occurred over the past few months which all lead back to the shop. Soon he finds the owner of the doll shop, Madame Mandilip, to be making very realistic dolls. And some of them resemble the murder victims.
The book starts to really take-off when Dr. Lowell realizes he may be dealing with something evil that is outside his experience or training. Although he continually brings up the concept of hypnosis (a popular excuse for many things before WW2), events occur in the novel which have no basis in normal reality. To Dr. Lowell's credit, he understands there may be a set of laws at work outside his knowledge base.
Burn Witch becomes seriously creepy in it's depiction of the animated dolls. Each one is unleashed to carry out an assassination, although we never know why the "witch" of the title is up to. We even see them "punished" for not carrying out the witch's orders.
I dare anyone to read this book and look at a doll store again the same way.

The Black Corridor (1969) by Michael Moorcock

2010-01-08T14:16:00.006-05:00

#8- The Black Corridor by Michael Moorcock.
"As civilization plunges toward destruction, a few people escape in a starship bearing mankind's last hope. The rest in suspend animation, one man remains awake to pilot the ship. Moorcock has never been better."
-KEW, The Thirteen Best Science Fiction Horror Novels

A strange and short little book, Black Corridor is one of the best examples I can find of New Wave science fiction. Although the late writer Thomas Disch dismissed a lot of the New Wave as the triumph of style over substance, this particular school of SF literature did blow the cobwebs out of the older forms, obsessed with aliens and blasters. And the New Wave writers actually talked about sex, something difficult to find in much SF before 1964.
Written with his wife Hilary Bailer, Moorcock's novel concerns the trials of Ryan, a British businessman who has managed to place his family and himself on the sole starship to leave Earth. Ryan is the only person awake for the journey to a planet in another solar system which may be habitable. The other crew members, mostly his family and relatives, are in suspended animation for the duration of the trip. But Ryan is starting to have problems with the isolation and loneliness. He's beginning to hallucinate. He's also having nightmares about the Earth they left behind.
And the Earth left behind is not a pretty place. Ryan had been a successful toy manufacturer there, but shortly before the events in the novel, Earth began going insane. Mass paranoia began breaking out everywhere, infecting the population at large. Large rallies take place in the streets by a group called The Patriots, who want all aliens forced out of the country. By aliens, the Patriots mean the non-English kind, but some of them believe nonhuman aliens are in our midst. Eventually the world breaks down into a variety of mini-states, with different parts of England bombing each other.
Considering when the book was published, the terrestrial portions of The Black Corridor seem to reflect the current racial tensions which raged through parts of England at the time. Immigrants from the Caribbean were appearing n substantial numbers. Racial riots broke out in several major cities. Politician Enoch Powell had already made his infamous "Rivers Of Blood" speech. I can't help but wonder if these parts were penned in reaction.
Much of the book is also written in a stream-of-consciousness format. Ryan isn't sure if he's back on Earth or if he's having another nightmare. Many of the pages are written in typographical art, which can be a little bit confusing if you're used to everything being created with a word processor.
An interesting little book from the list.

The Death Guard (1939) by Philip George Chadwick

2010-01-03T09:24:00.014-05:00

"A future history, supposedly written in the 1970's, detailing the destruction of civilization through global war after Britain develops a synthetic life-form into the perfect soldier. Bleakly anti-war, this novel was published on the eve of Britain's entry into World War II; rumor has it the edition was pulped. Only a handful of copies are known to have survived."
-KEW, 13 Best Science Fiction Horror Novels.

Grim and depressing, The Death Guard is one of those books which originated between the world wars of the 20th century. The author was a prominent Fabian Socialist who was active on the lecture circuit. There is even a rumor that it was one of H. G. Wells favourite books. The edition I was able to obtain was the 1992 ROC reprint. More rumors surround the books scarcity until the reprint: some say it was banned by the British government; others claim the publisher was bombed during a German air raid. There's even a notion the author died in combat during WWII, but my edition of the book claimed he lived till 1955.
Death Guard is the story of a renegade biochemist who hits on the idea of artificial life. A discharged soldier after the end of WWI, he hooks up with a large manufacturer and begins experimenting. His goal is to create the perfect soldier: a being who lives to kill the enemy. Such a creature would make any nation invincible, so goes his reasoning, because no one would dare attack. Thus, Britain will be safe from any future wars.
The book is told from the viewpoint of Gregory Beldite, the grandson of the industrialist who has sponsored the development of the Death Guard. He relates the first experiments by Gobel, the scientist who creates the life-form, to the eventual near destruction of Britain. Since Beldite opts to work in the production end of the process, he is able to recount the human cost of creating these things. We see the "Brothers", as they are known, start in fermentation trays, born as "pugs" and finally nursed into 7 ft. killing machines. The Guard is designed to fight with a metal spear and kill any moving object other than it's own kind. It's not quite an animal, although it resembles a biped, which has disastrous consequences in the latter half of the novel.
The main criticism of the book is the racism on display in the first third. Needing a private facility to create his perfect soldier, Gobel has the Beldite company build a compound in the Belgian Congo. The warm weather is perfect for his research. He's also provided with an endless supply of uneducated locals who know better than to ask questions about what they are doing. But rather than attack the exploitation of the African workers, Chadwick depicts them in the most vile, bigoted manner imaginable. The "N" word is constantly being used to depict these people and great lengths are taken to show them as a superstitious lot easily manipulated. Granted this book was written in the 1930's when such attitudes were routine in the West, but that doesn't excuse it. Even the 1992 introduction to the book, by British SF writer Brian Aldiss, describes this as "the most damaging aspect of the novel".
Death Guard heats up when a training cadre of the Brothers accidentally slaughter a village in the Congo. The world suddenly discovers the British government paying for the production of a super soldier in clear violation of disarmament pacts (which seem to be in force). The combined Continental European powers send a detachment of soldiers to shut down the research facility in the Congo, but the force is wiped out. By this stage, the company responsible for the creation of the Brothers has already relocated most of it's spawn to Britain. Threats begin flowing across the channel and war is imminent.
A lot of next section of the novel is given over to Beldite's observations as a supervisor in his grandfather's factory where the Brothers are being processed. There's a particular gruesome scene where an office worker is gutted by one of the creatures when, for sport, the plant decides to turn a Brother named "Bloody Omega" loose on a cow. The author may have shown his own sympathies by making a pacifist one of the major characters in this section.
When war comes, it shrieks down on Britain from the sky. Chadwick did have a bit of foresight in showing how air warfare would change the nature of combat. Although the Death Guard repels the Continentals' landing, the landscape is devastated by dive bombers, which the author terms "bomb-pluggers". Chadwick envisioned small bombers attacking the ground from a flying mother ship.
Across Britain, workers are in revolt and the country continues to be blasted from the air. Famine is everywhere. The Brothers are a lethal force against the enemy, but they have to be destroyed immediately after deployment. They cannot distinguish human friend from foe, so the army has to deploy tanks in the rear of every Guard detachment. The Brothers who survive the engagement are blasted apart from the rear. And starvation brings about the worst thing imaginable: spores. Since the Brothers are more plant than animal, they reproduce as they decompose. Soon, the battlefields are covered with tiny Death Guards, who will grow up to be stunted, but still deadly, adults.
And then Beldite learns of the British government's plans to launch Death Guard into Europe.....
The Death Guard is not a short book; my copy runs close to 400 pages. It's frighting and not easy to put down. If not for it's incidental racism, the book would probably have a larger following.
Finally, here is the blurb from KEW on the back cover:

"The Death Guard is a true "lost classic"...a terrifying novel if science fiction horror. It remains at the top of the ranks of all end-of-the-world novels written before or since. Read it, and you'll understand why the few who have read it in the past have not let it be forgotten."

Twilight Zone Magazine August 1983

2009-12-29T17:14:00.002-05:00

At long last I have obtained a copy of Twilight Zone magazine from Aug 1983. The significance of this issue is that it contains the the third and final list of KEW. This, the 13 Best Science Fiction Horror Novels, is the only one I didn't have. I have added KEW's comments to the following books reviewed previously:

Vampires Overhead
The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck
The Flying Beast
Land Under England
The Cross of Carl

The Flying Beast by Walter S. Masterman

2009-12-25T18:54:00.006-05:00

"Masterman again takes the detective formula and runs berserk, this time with a haunted English manor, murder, anti-gravity metal, a lost race of troglodytes, and a hidden abyss in the desert."

#7 of Karl Edward Wagner's Thirteen Best Science Fiction Horror Novels list is The Flying Beast by Walter S. Masterman. Masterman has the distinction of providing two books to this list with The Yellow Mistletoe (previously reviewed) being the other. Once again, we have the distinguished book publisher Ramble House to thank for making this gem available at less than astronomical prices.
As in Mistletoe, Beast is preoccupied with bright young things who have little more to do than race around the world in pursuit of a mystery. Years before a foursome was traveling the backwoods of America looking for a mystery, Masterman had his youthful heros doing similar work. And in typical stiff-upper-lip fashion, there is a butler who lives to serve his master. Sir Arthur Sinclair, the polygot investigator, makes another appearance.
Beast begins with Dick Maldon, a toff on a walking tour of England, taking refuge from a storm at an isolated country inn. He soon learns of an even more isolated country mansion. It's surrounded by barb wire and can only be entered by a secret underground passage. In this strange house dwells the Furgeson brothers and a daughter named Joan. Before Dickie even has a chance to say "What, ho!", Joan Furgeson dashes into the inn announcing the sudden death of her uncle.
A party makes its way to the mansion and finds one of the Furgeson brothers dangling from a rope. Dick stays on at the house overnight and encounters strange creatures moving around hidden passages. By the time the police make an show the next morning, he's decided to get to the bottom of the secret inside the house.
The novel introduces plenty of characters and, once again, it's not easy keeping up with them all. There's "Bunny" Vincent, Dick's lifelong friend and companion. Hilda, Dick's fiance. Higgins, a British Amelia Erhardt and her father, the eminent archeologist Professor Higgins. There's also Inspector Heldon, a gruff Scotland Yard investigator who doesn't approve of meddling kids. No talking Great Danes, but there is a race of subterranean cave dwellers who figure prominently into the book.
Characters have a tendency to expire just as they are about to reveal some dreaded secret. Others are sworn to secrecy and refuse to tell what they know. After awhile it's hard to put the book down because you want to find out what everyone is hiding.
Most of the book takes place in England, but the last fifty or so pages conclude in the deserts of Arabia. And it's this section which makes the book memorable. Again, Masterman travels into Lost Horizons territory with a hidden civilization and secret treasure. My only complaint with Beast is that it takes too long to get to Shangra-La. For some reason, most of the characters are quite ready to listen to their betters and stay put when danger is all about. The title refers to an airship which features into the plot, although the author doesn't give it much of a description.
A neat little book, I can see why KEW included it in these lists.

Money Shot by Christa Faust

2009-12-22T14:36:00.005-05:00

This is the first book I've read by Christa Faust (see top photo), but I don't think it will be the last. It's also the second I've encountered from Hard Case Crime. If this is any indication of the publisher's abilities, I may have a new addiction. There has been a lot of chatter on the Net as to how Hard Case has spark plugged the noir genre and I'm starting to believe it. Hard Case is specializing in releasing new classics from masters old(Lester Dent) and new(Jason Starr).
Money Shot begins with former adult film actress Angel Dare waking up in the trunk of a car. She's been badly beaten, tortured, and has no idea why this happened. One minute she's the owner of an employment agency for adult talent and dancers, the next she's watching a former friend shot in the leg because she can't tell some thugs about an unknown case full of cash. Soon, Angel's been shot and left for dead. But through a supreme effort of will she managers to find a pay phone and call the only person who can help her: a former cop named Mallory. With his help, she attempts to find out why she was lured into the trap which nearly killed her. And along the way she will find out a few unpleasant things about herself and everyone close to her.
Money Shot takes place in the world of California adult film and video. As such, the realities of this fantasy world are part of the narrative. Since it's written from Angel's point-of-view, we get her take on the industry. She'd traveled to California in the 1980's from Chicago to party with rock stars, but ended up making adult videos. After ten years at the top of her game she retired to run the agency. Angel has no regrets, since she made her pile of cash and got out at the best time. But other women were not so fortunate.
This is a fast-paced book which I ploughed through in a few days. The story sucks the reader in making it difficult to put down. Christa Faust has a direct writing style which minimizes descriptions and dialogue. The reader is provided with enough material to keep the book moving along. She also manages to pack the hottest seduction scene into two pages involving nothing more than a pair of $700.00 designer boots.
Faust sets the plot up for standard devices which are twisted into angles. Everyone expects the hero(ine) to do the right thing and be rewarded by Justice. But happens when revenge is served hot on a cold dish? Faust leaves the reader in astonishment as perfectly moral and sane people commit the most sinister of deeds.
There's a sequel, Choke Hold, promised to the ambiguous ending of Money Shot. I want to reserve a copy now!

The Shadow On The House by Mark Hansom

2009-12-17T14:30:00.008-05:00

From Karl Edward Wagner's 13 Best Non-Supernatural Horror Novels:

#10. The Shadow on the House by Mark Hansom
Hansom is another of the unjustly neglected group of thriller writers. Usually his novels only appeared to have supernatural content, and in the end we learn it was only Uncle Geoffrey in a Mad Monk costume behind it all. The ending to this one is a stunner.

A difficult book to find for years, Shadow was recently reprinted by Ramble House's Dancing Tuatara Press imprint. It also features a new introduction by John Pelan about the possible identity of the author Mark Hansom. Very little is known about Hansom, other than a number of thrillers were written under his name between the world wars. We may never know who he was, or if the name was a by-line for other writers. At least this edition doesn't feature a contrived cameo of the unknown writer.
Shadow is told from the viewpoint of Martin Strange, a young man living in genteel poverty. Martin's family had at one time posessed a lot of money and land, but the bulk of it went to a relative, leaving Marion with one manservant, Makepeace, and a stipend which allowed him enough for survival. At the beginning of the book, he's living in an unfashionable flat in London with Makepeace.
Soon he makes the acquaintance of Sylvia Vernon, a woman of stunning beauty, and her aunt, Lady Somerton. Martin is smitten with Sylvia and can only think of marriage. However, he lacks the funds to make a proper British husband and she is penniless herself, depending on the good graces of her aunt. Furthermore, there is a rival to Sylvia, Martin's good friend Christopher Knight. Almost by accident, Martin wishes Christopher would drop dead.
Before the book turns into another Henry James pastiche, Christopher is found murdered under very strange circumstances. Next, Martin's worthless cousin Mick, who inherited most of the family fortune, is also found dead. Mick had also been a rival for Sylvia. Martin makes a marriage proposal to Sylvia, who accepts, although she's worried there may be a curse on her.
At this point the novel begins to get very weird. Martin hears a tale from Makepeace about a similar death which occurred during the time of his grandfather. There's a friend of Lady Sommerton, Professor Wetherhouse, who starts showing up at unexpected times. Strange men seem to be watching Martin outside his new apartment. Martin begins to suspect he is the victim of a ghost which has been stalking the family for generations. Or is he going mad?
The novel is written in a very refined style. I agree with the introduction as to how the author had a very clear understanding of the British class system. Once Martin comes into the family money, Makepeace hires other servants who are forbidden to cross into the master's side of the flat after 9 PM. Even the title refers to a "shadow" of shame which may have fallen on the "house" of Strange. And it's not too hard to figure out the solution to the the two murders in the book well before the end of it.
Ramble House is to be commended for bringing out this hard to find classic.

The Cross of Carl by Walter Owen

2009-12-12T12:04:00.004-05:00

"Antiwar novella concerning a German foot soldier in World War I, horribly wounded and baled up with the other battle casualties to be rendered into soap. After this, things really get strange. Owen is best known for More Things in Heaven."

#10 on KEW's 13 Best Science Fiction Horror Novels list is The Cross of Carl by Walter Owen. The subtitle of the book is:

"An allegory; the story of one who went down into the depths and was buried; who doubting much, yet at the last lifted up his eyes unto the hills and rose again and was transfigured".

This may be the shortest work on the lists. It can easily be read in one sitting and looks to have been originally published in the form of a tract. I'm not exactly sure how it was first published since I've read it in the Groff Conklin 1951 collection In the Grip of Terror. I would describe it a novella due to it's brevity.
Cross is the story of Carl, a nondescript older recruit in a pointless war, which seems modeled after WW1. Desiring to win the "Cross", Carl becomes involved in an assault from the trenches on "Hill 51". The first section of this piece is a gruesome description of trench warfare (before air support changed everything). Troopers in tunics and gas masks attempt to over-whelm an enemy position fortified with snipers. Carl watches his comrades ripped apart by bullets and shells until he himself is dispatched in a mine explosion. The account of the battle is detailed, with body parts flying all over the place.
But the second part, "Golgotha", is even worse as Carl finds himself thrown into a train of bodies bound for the Utilization Factory of the Tenth Army Division. In essence, this is rendering plant to dispose of war dead. Corpses gleamed from the battle fields are sent to this plant to be processed into pig food and fertilizer. Carl is tossed in with the rest of the corpses, but he's not dead, merely unconscious. When he wakes up amidst the bundles of bound bodies destined to be processed, he goes insane.
The conclusion of the book has Carl wondering around a swamp preaching to any and everything he encounters. Finally, Carl encounters the army officers who sent him to the front. The ending is hideous, which is why some people have christened this the best anti-war narrative ever written.

FAKE ID by Jason Starr

2009-12-08T16:24:00.006-05:00

Tommy Russo is one of those people you casually meet at a bar or work. He's a sometimes actor, a full time bouncer, and a compulsive gambler. He's down on his luck lately, but that all changes when he meets a man named Pete one cold winter's day. Pete is also a small-time gambler, but he makes Tommy an offer he can't put away: for just ten thousand dollars, buy into a syndicate of investors and become the owner of a race horse. Tommy would like nothing better than to join this group, but there is this small issue involving his lack of funds. No problem, the safe at the bar where he works has all the money he'll need and he has memorized the combination. And one other thing: Tommy is a clinical definition of a sociopath.
Jason Starr lists Jim Thompson as one of his influences and it's not hard to see The Killer Inside Me as an inspiration for this book. A friend once wrote that reading Killer was like having a conversation with a psychopath. Reading Fake ID turns you into a prison psychologist trying to figure out where this nice young man went wrong. But soon you discover the nice young man isn't such a good person. Not since KW Jeter's Mantis have I felt so trapped inside the brain of a seriously disturbed individual.
What makes the book outstanding is how everyone around Tommy can see him going over the edge. At one point he casually tries to hit on a police woman and the brief conversation is wrong on so many counts. Any fool can see the pick-up line is out of place and only going to put him into deeper trouble. Of course, from Tommy's point-of-view, a pretty woman is fair game and anyone opposed to him is an asshole. Tommy has had such a string of success with his natural acting ability and good looks, so he can talk his way out of any bad situation. But that luck is starting to run thin. It doesn'thelp that he's violent prone.
If I have one criticism of Fake ID, it would be the lack of background material on Tommy. How did he end up this way? Since the book is told from his POV, we don't get a lot of asides. There is some reference to child abuse as he remembers being knocked down the stairs by his father, but not much more.
Still, an excellent book and another fine production from Hard Case Crime.