Tag: darrell schweitzer

Book Review: The Grimscribe’s Puppets, edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Jr., part 2: Warren, Lane, and Schweitzer

On By bibliorexIn Book ReviewsLeave a comment

I’m continuing my look at all things Thomas Ligotti-related by turning now to the wonderful tribute anthology The Grimscribe’s Puppets, compiled by the late, great Joe Pulver. If you haven’t already read this one, you’re missing out. Here are my thoughts on the next three stories in this anthology.

Image

“The Human Moth” by Kaaron Warren

I enjoyed this story because of its sheer insanity. A woman is raised by her strange, abusive parents who take in a large number of cruel, bullying foster children who also abuse her. From childhood she fancies herself a kind of moth in human form. She does things like avoiding eating anything other than lilac, and covers herself in powder. She eventually smothers her parents to death (this seems mostly justified), and then does the same to a drunk she encounters in a park. This one was just plain weird, but fascinating all the same.

“Basement Angels” by Joel Lane

Interesting. Max is a troubled soul, alienated and experiencing blackouts and missing time. He meets a man named Colin, whom he befriends, but who also sells him strange objects: a blue glass pane that seems to look out onto strange vistas, CDs that play strange mixtures of discordant music and noise, a beverage that may be narcotic, etc. Max eventually gets tired of his life and tells Colin he wants to work for him. Max goes to Colin’s studio, gets drugged there, and then has his shadow excised from him and cut into wailing strips that are then dried. Max is then dragged down into the basement and thrown in a chamber with a dozen other lost souls in similar shape. Very evocative.

“No Signal” by Darrell Schweitzer

Interesting. A college professor with a wife and daughter realizes that it is time for him to leave his entire life behind. In a dreamlike state, he travels via subway to another place and meets a crowd of people rushing away. One of them begs him to help and stop someone from leaving. He enters a building and finds a mirror there; he enters the mirror and encounters an unspeakably ancient entity that has been imprisoned in the mirror. He feebly tries to stop it from leaving the mirror, but is easily brushed aside. He winds up being trapped in the mirror. No idea what any of this was about, though I did enjoy it.

Image
Buy the book on AmazonImage

Week 192 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Leinster, Kafka, Schweitzer, and McGuire

On By bibliorexIn Book ReviewsLeave a comment

Welcome to Week 192 of my horror short fiction review project! Today marks the last appearance of The Gods of H.P. Lovecraft; that collection will be replaced by the single-author collection The Skinless Face by Donald Tyson starting next week. Some big name authors included this week, but my favorite story was “Down, Deep Down, Below the Waves” by Seanan McGuire. She presents us with a really interesting take on the Deep Ones as well as a grad student conducting an experiment on her fellow grad students, which, as a former academic, delights me to no end.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum, edited by Robert Arthur (Random House, 1965)

“Doomsday Deferred” by Murray Leinster [as by Will F. Jenkins]

An American naturalist has been hired to travel to a remote South American jungle to bring back specimens of a rare butterfly. There he encounters Jose Ribiera, a man who appears to be paranoid and terrified, but who tells the narrator that his (unspecified) friends can help him acquire the butterflies he’s looking for if only he will use some gold that Ribiera provides to purchase a herd of cattle and bring them to Ribiera’s house outside town. I will gloss over some details here, but it seems that Ribiera and his wife have been enslaved by army ants, which seems to have established an intelligent (but naïve, and far too trusting) hivemind. The narrator averts the threat posed by these intelligent army ants, which seem to be on the verge of descending ravenously on the nearby city. This was a good one.

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer (Tor, 2012)

“In the Penal Colony” by Franz Kafka

An iconic story about which I had heard previously but never read. There are really just four characters in the story, referred to only be their titles: the traveler (a famous explorer visiting an island penal colony), the officer (in charge of a strange machine used for torture and executions), the condemned man (a prisoner who has been condemned to be tortured and executed using the machine), and the soldier (who doesn’t do much but horse around a bit). The machine is old and one gets the impression that other than the officer, who remains enthusiastic about its use, everyone else at the penal colony would prefer to just decommission it. The machine can be programmed to carve a pithy phrase or sentence into the back of the condemned over and over again until the prisoner is eventually exsanguinated. It also seems to induce a kind of religious ecstasy in most of the condemned before they expire. The traveler will be dining as a guest of the colony’s commandant and he officer asks him to put in a good word for him and the machine, which the traveler refuses to do. As an act of protest—at least that’s my reading of it—the officer decides to commit suicide via the machine. It malfunctions, killing him fairly quickly, which means that he does not get to experience the spiritual experience that the condemned experience. In the end, we’ve got a loon who is accidentally killed by a broken old machine, which, one imagines, will now be dismantled. Longer than necessary and a bit over-written, but conceptually interesting though.

Under Twin Suns: Alternate Histories of the Yellow Sign, edited by James Chambers (Hippocampus Press, 2021)

“The Festival of the Pallid Mask” by Darrell Schweitzer

Mostly incoherent and therefore disappointing to me, despite that I like most of Schweitzer’s work. The narrator is a madman having flashbacks—I think—recounting his life in the world of Chambers’ “The Repairer of Reputations” at twenty-year intervals (in 1940, 1960, and finally in 1980 when he ends up in an asylum). He imagines himself to be the unwitting Stranger in play “The King in Yellow,” who cuts off most of his face in an effort to “remove his mask.” Some creepy stuff here, but not altogether satisfying.

The Gods of H.P. Lovecraft, edited by Aaron J. French (JournalStone, 2015)

“Down, Deep Down, Below the Waves” by Seanan McGuire

Violet is a Harvard PhD student in the biological sciences who has been conducting an  experiment on four of her “friends”/fellow grad students for several years. She entices them to accompany her on a visit to her family’s B&B in…Innsmouth, Massachusetts. Yes, diligent Lovecraftians understand exactly what this means. Like any good scientist, Violet has designated a control group—two perfectly normal friends—and an experimental group: two people who have distant ancestors who came from Innsmouth and, not incidentally, human-Deep One hybrids. Violet’s plan is to see if these unknowing Deep One hybrids, who would otherwise never actually manifest their alienness, can have those genes awoken. Fascinating, chilling, well done. A wonderful example of how science can be enlisted in the cause of religious fervor.

Image
Buy the book on Amazon
Image
Buy the book on Amazon
Image
Buy the book on Amazon
Image
Buy the book on Amazon

Week 159 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Etchison, Lumley, Schweitzer, and Schwader

On By bibliorexIn Book ReviewsLeave a comment

Welcome to Week 159 of my horror short fiction review project! Lots of good stories to talk about this week, but my favorite was Ann Schwader’s “When the Stars Run Away.” This is bleak and melancholic and sad, and a must for fans of existential horror. Sometimes things just unravel and go away, and there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s even sadder when that’s happening to the entire universe.

The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories, edited by Stephen Jones (Skyhorse, 2019)

“One of Us” by Dennis Etchison

Kind of nonsensical and not actually horror. A guy named Paul works for his friend’s limo service in Los Angeles; he is hired to take four teenagers to a music festival. It eventually becomes clear that Paul has also been hired as a hitman to kill a music executive who is backstage at the same festival. Paul kills his target and the teenagers also get into a knife fight with some rivals, perhaps killing someone at the festival as well. What was the point of any of this?

Haggopian and Other Stories, by Brian Lumley (Solaris, 2009)

“The Night Sea-Maid Went Down”

A letter describing the last days of a North Atlantic deepsea oil drilling platform by the rig’s sole survivor. As it turns out, the rig accidentally drilled into the body of a Great Old One/monstrous ancient being trapped under the sea and, well, this being did not like its precious bodily fluids being extracted, so it writhed around a bit as it was being exsanguinated. This was one of those excellent doomed stories, a la a Greek tragedy, in which the reader knows the outcome of the tale at the outset, but you read on to see how it all plays out.

Cthulhu’s Reign, edited by Darrell Schweitzer (DAW, 2010)

[previously reviewed] “The New Pauline Corpus” by Matt Cardin

“Ghost Dancing” by Darrell Schweitzer

A man is driving from Boston to Maine, having already lost his wife and child, as the world is destroyed by the Cthulhu Mythos. Wonderfully evocative images of kaiju-esque Mythos creatures wiping out cities. He is traveling to meet his old childhood friend Robert Tillinghast, with whom he has not spoken to in decades. He arrives at Tillinghast’s estate where the pair once sacrificed a girl in an occult ritual before going their separate ways. Tillinghast has now surrounded himself by a new cult, which seeks to repeat the sacrifice and secure a privileged position for themselves in the new world. The narrator resists that. Not a deep story, per se, but well done for what it is, and a highly enjoyable read.

Dark Equinox and Other Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, by Ann K. Schwader (Hippocampus Press, 2015)

“When the Stars Run Away”

Megan is a little girl who lives with her father, a astronomy professor, who struggles to care for her after his wife/Megan’s mother deserts them. Megan’s world is figuratively, and then eventually literally tearing apart. Strange astronomical phenomena emerge, and discussions of dark matter and the Big Rip, a cosmological model/theory I had to look up, that suggests the ultimate fate of the universe may be getting torn apart as everything continues to expand. Dark stuff. Stars and whole galaxies begin shifting positions and strange, liquid shadows begin appearing on Earth, moving through rooms and people, leaving cold spots behind. People begin disappearing. The universe is clearly in the midst of unraveling. Chilling and melancholic existential horror.

Image
Buy the book on AmazonImage
Image
Buy the book on AmazonImage
Image
Buy the book on AmazonImage
Image
Buy the book on AmazonImage

Week 112 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Campbell, Schweitzer, Pulver, and Ligotti

On By bibliorexIn Book ReviewsLeave a comment

Welcome to Week 112 of my horror short fiction review project! There’s really one clear winner for best story of the week, and that’s “The Last Feast of Harlequin” by Thomas Ligotti. Ligotti is an acquired taste for some, but I’ve grown to like his work immensely. I find it difficult at times–I feel like I owe it to Ligotti’s prose to read it carefully and pay attention to it in ways that I don’t with some lighter fiction–but this is one of my favorites of his. Fairly long, but actually very approachable. Highly recommended.

Demons by Daylight, by Ramsey Campbell (Carroll & Graf, 1990)

“The Old Horns”

A group of adult friends are hanging out at the beach near two large dunes (the eponymous “Old Horns”). These dunes in particular have a local reputation as a spot where pagan orgies took place (just the location for a picnic). They play hide-and-seek, and one of the friends (George, who is obnoxious) disappears. The implication seems to be that George has been taken (killed?) by a nature spirit at the site. Ambiguous, and because George is so unlikable, the reader couldn’t care less if George gets dragged off and killed.

Madness on the Orient Express, edited by James Lowder (Chaosium, 2014)

“On the Eastbound Train” by Darrell Schweitzer

Not a great one by Darrell Schweitzer unfortunately, because it’s really just a vignette; by that I mean that this is really a partial story set up without adequate context or resolution. Here’s what we’ve got: A young professor meets an old professor of his acquaintance on the Orient Express in 1912. The old professor has run afoul of a cult while doing research on Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, and now the cult has tracked him down on the train. The cult abducts him, then he later visits the young professor wearing a burlap sack mask. The young professor is eventually driven mad. Did this story involve the Mi-Go? Nightgaunts? Who can say. I’m at a loss. Schweitzer is almost always much better than this.

The King in Yellow Tales, Volume 1, by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. (Lovecraft eZine Press, 2015)

“Mother Stands for Comfort”

Very brief. A woman with a very rough life tries and eventually gives up on lots of different sources of comfort—religions, drugs, booze, etc.—when they fail to help make her life any better. Then, she finds the King in Yellow, who offers her his unique brand of solace and release from her woes (death, of course). Good stuff.

A Mountain Walked: Great Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, edited by S.T. Joshi (Dark Regions Press, 2015)

[previously reviewed] “Black Man With a Horn by T.E.D. Klein”

“The Last Feast of Harlequin” by Thomas Ligotti

Utterly fascinating story; one of my favorites in the collection for all of its understated glory. An anthropologist who researches the clown figure/motif learns of an annual winter solstice festival that involves clowns or clown-like figures and must investigate. He finds the town desolate and its populace unfriendly but nevertheless persists. One of his former mentors, Dr. Raymond Thoss, is coincidentally one of the only scholars to have studied the town of Mirocaw’s festival, though his published research suggests that much more exploration is needed. The narrator attends the festival and observes a cadre of quasi-homeless people in the role of the clowns—including Thoss himself, it seems—being abused by the locals (this abuse seems somewhat ritualized and part of the “festivities.” On the second night of the festival, the narrator disguises himself as one of the clowns and participates in the festival. He is picked up with the other clowns and taken to a kind of underground tunnel/cave network outside of town. A ritual of apparently great occult significance takes place, with the probable sacrifice of the elected winter queen and the transformation of some of the clowns into wormlike beings, as well as possible links with ancient ritual practices of Saturn. Thoss is a kind of high priest-like figure, and announces that the narrator is one of them, the clowns, and has always been one of them. Truly original and creepy with excellent atmospheric build-up.

Image
Buy the book on AmazonImage

Image
Buy the book on AmazonImage

Image
Buy the book on AmazonImage

Image
Buy the book on AmazonImage

Week 64 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Campbell, Schweitzer, Chambers, and Morris

On By bibliorexIn Book ReviewsLeave a comment

Welcome to Week 64 of my horror short fiction review project! There was a very clear “best story of the week”: Ramsey Campbell’s “Call First.” Almost anything involving libraries and creepy occultists is going to be fun and when Campbell is on, he’s a really great writer.

Alone with the Horrors, by Ramsey Campbell (Tor, 2004)

“Call First”

This one was very short but I enjoyed it nevertheless. Ned is a library porter (an attendant of some sort; he seems to man the front desk) and he’s a bit of a brutish thug, trying hard to be liked by his fellow porters, but seems to be more than a little slow. Every day an old man who visits the library and seems to have occult interests uses the library’s phone to call his home and say simply “I’m coming home” before hanging up. Ned is intrigued by this and ends up breaking into the old man’s home at lunchtime while the old man is still at the library. Ned discovers that those calls were far more important than he realized because that’s what disarms the man’s magical(?) home security system. I won’t provide any more details than that, but it was definitely a satisfying ending.

Black Wings of Cthulhu 4, edited by S.T. Joshi (Titan Books, 2016)

“A Prism of Darkness” by Darrell Schweitzer

Darrell Schweitzer is normally an extremely reliable author who has contributed some of the best stories in past Black Wings of Cthulhu collections, but he let me down here. His premise has a great deal of potential: Elizabethan occultist and alchemist John Dee is translating the Necronomicon (or maybe it is translating itself….) While that idea has a lot of potential—I’d love to see a full-blown take on a Lovecraftian Elizabethan England—but sadly nothing much happens in the story. Great premise, boring execution.

The Yellow Sign and Other Stories, by Robert W. Chambers (Chaosium, 2004)

In Search of the Unknown

–The Sphyx (ch 13-17)

The fourth of six linked stories collected in the novel In Search of the Unknown. Professor Farrago is back in charge of the zoo and summons the narrator to join him in the Everglades as he hunts for a mysterious group of invisible creatures or humanoids. The narrator does so, bringing along a plucky female stenographer because no men are willing to join him. He also ends up bringing along a cowardly hunting dog and an assortment of odds and ends that the professor has asked for, all of which ratchet up the absurdity of the situation. As it turns out the invisible beings really like apple pie and have the appearance of beautiful naked women (one is briefly made visible by a chemical dye). When last sighted, Professor Farrago was being dragged off deeper into the Everglades with a big smile on his face by the beings…. Pretty silly (these stories seem to have gotten more absurd as they’ve gone on), but still kind of enjoyable.

The Book of Cthulhu, edited by Ross E. Lockhart (Night Shade Books, 2011)

“Jihad over Innsmouth” by Edward Morris

A really silly story that was clearly a reaction to the September 11 attacks. Here’s the set-up: A Muslim assassin has been hired by Nyarlathotep to kill the Reverend Waite, head of the Esoteric Order of Dagon (from Innsmouth). He turns out to be on the same plane as the assassin. Waite attempts to hijack the aircraft with a fellow Deep One hybrid, and they are stopped by the assassin along with a young man who grew up in Arkham, and who is therefore (1) utterly unfazed by any kind of weirdness, having seen it all while growing up and (2) a master of hand-to-hand combat (why?). They kill the hijackers and the assassin is also a pilot, so no big deal, and he’s fulfilled his contract. What the actual f***?

Image
Buy the book on AmazonImage

Image
Buy the book on Amazon Image

Image
Buy the book on AmazonImage

Image
Buy the book on Amazon Image

Week 44 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Lovecraft, de la Mare, Barker, and Schweitzer

On By bibliorexIn Book ReviewsLeave a comment

Welcome to Week 44 of my horror short fiction review project! Got some good stories for you this week, with an honorable mention going to Lovecraft’s “In the Vault,” which doesn’t get nearly enough love. My top story of the week, however, is “Spiderwebs in the Dark” by Darrell Schweitzer, who usually has a really creative take on horror.

The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories, by H.P. Lovecraft, edited by S.T. Joshi (Penguin, 2004)

“In the Vault”

Critics like Joshi and Hite don’t seem to think much of this story—it’s a pretty traditional sort of horror story of the kind that later appeared in the horror comics of the 1950s and 1960s—but I like it a lot. They don’t all have to include cosmic weirdness to be enjoyable reads. Here’s the premise, though I will avoid spoiling the story’s ending because it’s a nice reveal, even though most readers will probably see it coming: George Birch is a small town’s undertaker who finds himself accidentally locked into the vault where the town’s dead are stored in coffins each winter until they can be buried the following spring. As night falls, George has got to pile the stack of coffins up so that he can climb on top of them and slowly chisel his way out through the vault’s transom. One additional complication: George is also the town’s coffinmaker, and he has tended to build some fairly slipshod coffins, especially for people he doesn’t like, which is a problem when he’s got to stack them into a pile that he can balance on as he works. George comes out a bit worse for the wear, you might say…. Good stuff.

The Dark Descent, edited by David G. Hartwell (Tor, 1987)

“Seaton’s Aunt” by Walter de la Mare

A sad little story, but not exactly horror. Our narrator is Withers, a British schoolboy who is acquaintances with another boy, Seaton, who is weird and disliked by all their classmates. Withers reluctantly visits Seaton’s home, where he lives with his aunt, who seems to despise her nephew and be vaguely verbally and emotionally abusive toward. Seaton mentions that their house may be haunted, but nothing really comes of that. A few years later Withers encounters Seaton, who tells him that he has a fiancée now, the mousey little Alice, and Withers visits the Seaton residence again; not much has changed. There are vague hints that maybe, just maybe, the aunt is a kind of psychic vampire draining her nephew of his lifeforce (maybe? I suspect I’m reading too much into it), but that’s about that. I’m skeptical that anyone really thinks this story has stood the test of time.

Books of Blood, Volumes Four to Six, by Clive Barker (Sphere, 2007)

“How Spoilers Bleed”

Not one of my favorites in the collection, but not a bad story. I just found the characters unengaging and not as well developed as we can typically expect from Barker. Some unscrupulous European investors are attempting to acquire land in the Amazon rain forest and encounter a primitive tribe who refuse to leave. One of the men accidentally kills a child—but is utterly remorseless about it—and the men are then cursed. The rest of the story is simply that curse playing out. It’s not bad per se, but there’s utterly nothing surprising that takes place in the story; the entire plot is telegraphed when the tribe’s shaman curses them. A bit ho-hum.

Black Wings of Cthulhu 3, edited by S.T. Joshi (Titan Books, 2015)

“Spiderwebs in the Dark” by Darrell Schweitzer

Darrell Schweitzer always has an interesting take on cosmic horror, with a number of his stories that I’ve encountered focused on exploring dimensional barriers and travels between worlds. This story explores similar ideas. A bookseller encounters a strange man (Walter, though he calls himself Walrus) who keeps popping up at his shop. A wealthy eccentric, Walrus is never seen actually entering the store, but he regularly shows up and spins entertaining yarns. Like a lot of eccentrics, he has a theory about how the universe works: he thinks that everything is bound together by a kind of “webs” and with the right knowledge, one can manipulate the nature of reality—even travel between dimensions or alternate realities—by manipulating these strands. Unfortunately some kind of vermin, “cosmic lice” live on these strands (are they related to the Hounds of Tindalos?) and follow the pair back to our world. A very nice creepy, horrific conclusion.

Image
Buy the book on AmazonImage

Image
Buy the book on AmazonImage

Image
Buy the book on AmazonImage

Image
Buy the book on AmazonImage

Week 32 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Lovecraft, Russ, Barker, and Schweitzer

On By bibliorexIn Book ReviewsLeave a comment

Welcome to Week 32 of my horror short fiction review project. There were several good stories this week but my favorite is Lovecraft’s very short “The Terrible Old Man.” Nothing to do really with the Cthulhu Mythos, but very good nevertheless.

The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories, by H.P. Lovecraft, edited by S.T. Joshi (Penguin, 2004)

“The Terrible Old Man”

Joshi says this is Lovecraft’s shortest piece of finished prose. It’s another very early work, and the first to use Lovecraft’s fictional version of New England: this story introduces the town of Kingsport, which he would later return to. I actually really enjoyed this short number. It’s got a very chilling wrap-up.

Here’s what we’ve got: A strange (terrible, as it turns out) old man lives in an old rundown house. No one knows anything about him, and he never leaves the property, but it’s said that he is a long-retired ship captain who became wealthy. He is sometimes seen having on-sided conversations with oddly shaped bottles set out on a table—they seemed to “vibrate” in response—and he’s got some weird rocks in the front yeard. Weird, but nothing definite; still, locals avoid the place.

Three crooks decide to visit the old man and torture him until he gives up the location of his wealth. Two go inside while a third waits in the getaway car outside. The getaway driver hears screams and assumes it is the old man being interrogated, but then he looks up and sees the old man smiling hideously at him. All three bodies of the would-be robbers are found, badly slashed and mangled. It’s a small tale, and nothing definite is ever shown, but for all that I found it effective and enjoyable, like one of those old EC horror comics.

The Dark Descent, edited by David G. Hartwell (Tor, 1987)

“My Dear Emily” by Joanna Russ

I know that Russ achieved a good deal of fame for her feminist science fiction writings, but I’ve never read any of her work until this piece. Unfortunately I was not impressed. This is a vampire story about two teenage girls in San Francisco. You know it’s a bad story when you read a couple pages then re-count the number of pages left in the story, over and over again. Honestly, I just wanted it to be over. The characters are insufferable and I couldn’t wait for them to die/be vampirized. I’m sure the story must have some literary merits, because it’s been reprinted several times, but I couldn’t find them.

Books of Blood, Volumes One to Three, by Clive Barker (Berkley, 1998)

“Scape-Goats”

Good premise, but not one of my favorite Barker stories—seemed a bit jumbled to me.

Here goes: A yacht with two couples onboard—lots of sex on the boat—gets stranded on a small island in the middle of nowhere where there’s not supposed to be an island. Things get weirder when they discover a pen containing some goats on the island (what are they doing on this uninhabited island?) As it turns out, this part of the ocean is where all the ocean’s currents send the bodies of those who drown at sea. These bodies are not, as you might suspect, completely dead. It’s not a bad premise at all, I just wish the climax had been more coherent.

Black Wings of Cthulhu 2, edited by S.T. Joshi (Titan Books, 2012)

“The Clockwork King, the Queen of Glass, and the Man with the Hundred Knives” by Darrell Schweitzer

Good story that hints at a lot more than it explicitly delivers, but I liked it nevertheless. We have the story of an English professor and “Minor Poet,” as he describes himself, who befriended a mad genius during college. They stay in intermittent touch over the years, and the prof’s friend, well, I’m going to have to spoiler you a bit here, discovers and travels to another world—a surreal fantasy-esque setting in need of a savior. The prof becomes his sidekick, though he remains skeptical of exactly what the nature of this other world is. There’s a lot of uncertainty and ambiguity about all of this, with just enough room for doubt left such that the reader can’t be quite sure of what’s going on. I will say that given the few hints about the other world, I really, really wanted the story to take us there directly. I can’t imagine a sequel to this story, but I’d love to see one.

Image
Buy the book on AmazonImage

Image
Buy the book on AmazonImage

Image
Buy the book on AmazonImage

Image
Buy the book on AmazonImage

Week 13 – Weekly Horror Short Story Reviews: Lovecraft, Nesbit, King, and Schweitzer

On By bibliorexIn Book ReviewsLeave a comment

Welcome to lucky Week 13 of my horror short fiction review project! There are two really excellent stories this week: Lovecraft’s “Cool Air,” which I knew would be good, having read it many years ago, and a new discovery: Darrel Schweitzer’s “Howling in the Dark.” I don’t know Schweitzer’s work very well, though I’ve known he is very prolific and has been around forever, but that one was really good that I’m going to be returning to in the future. I suspect it’s a story that will reward re-readings.

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, by H.P. Lovecraft, edited by S.T. Joshi (Penguin, 1999)

“Cool Air”

A very creepy short tale of the desire to thwart death, and the lengths that might drive someone sufficiently motivated. It’s also a nice story about body horror (and ultimately, dissolution). Lovecraft is unappreciated for the common theme of bodily horror and transformation in his work. Sure, cosmicism is present in much of his work, but many of his stories are so effective, I think, because he often finds a way to really personalize those horrors and bring them into direct contact with the human body. I think I’m able to appreciate this one much more than when I last read it years ago because I have since seen the episode of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery that depicts a version of this story. I have to say, I think that Serling strengthens the story through the addition of a love interest, though that is never the kind of story you’d get from Grandaddy Lovecraft.

The Dark Descent, edited by David G. Hartwell (Tor, 1987)

“John Charrington’s Wedding” by E. Nesbit

A class English ghost/horror story. A young man (John Charrington) is about to get married to a lovely young woman, both of whom dearly love each other. Not too long before the wedding he says, on separate occasions, “My dear, my dear, I believe I should come back from the dead if you wanted me!” and “Alive or dead I mean to be married on Thursday!” He then heads out of town on a brief trip. I think we can all see where this is going. It’s a quick read, well done and atmospheric, capturing the feel of the classic nineteenth-century spooky story.

The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, by Stephen King (Scribner, 2015)

“Mister Yummy”

Not a bad little story but I don’t think I really understand what King was going for here, and I’m going to have to spoil the story a bit to explain what I mean by that. The narrator is an old guy in a nursing home who is friends with a man named Ollie Franklin who talks about his experiences as a gay man in New York City in the 1980s at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Ollie mentions this as context for what he says is an odd series of glimpses of a young man he once saw in a club back in the 1980s who he had always lusted over. The young man—the titular “Mister Yummy”—has started popping up. Ollie takes these strange reappearances of the unaging Mister Yummy to mean that he will soon die. The narrator dismisses that idea, but Ollie does indeed due soon (he’s also really old and in a nursing home, so that’s not exactly a shocking turn of events). But then the narrator thinks that he is starting to see a young woman who he saw once during World War II, and he takes that as a sign that he too will soon die. Characterization and dialogue are uniformly excellent, but I just don’t understand this one. Why would these lust/fantasy figures from many decades previously become harbingers of death? It’s an interesting idea but I think the premise falls apart on closer inspection.

Black Wings of Cthulhu, edited by S.T. Joshi (Titan Books, 2010)

“Howling in the Dark” by Darrell Schweitzer

A really nice piece that I’m going to re-read down the road. Wonderfully evocative prose and some hints at a much larger cosmology. Schweitzer took many of Lovecraft’s themes and even some of his prose stylings and updated them for a modern audience and setting. The protagonist is a troubled boy (and later, a young man) from an extremely abusive, dysfunctional family, and lives his life with a sense that he has a deep connection with darkness. Not simply “the dark,” but a conception that true darkness has its own substance and form and will. That is intentionally vague because I don’t want to spoil the story for you. Extremely well done.

Image
Buy the book on AmazonImage

Image
Buy the book on AmazonImage

Image
Buy the book on AmazonImage

Image
Buy the book on AmazonImage

Book Review: Wildside Mystery Double #2: Deadly Things: A Collection of Mysterious Tales by Darrell Schweitzer / The Judgment of the Gods and Other Verdicts of History by Robert Reginald

On By bibliorexIn Book ReviewsLeave a comment

Wildside Books publishes a great many short novel/novella pairs as “Doubles”; this is their second Mystery Doubles collection. It focuses on historical mystery short stories by Darrell Schweitzer and Robert Reginald. The long and short of it is that if you enjoy historical mysteries, then you’ll want to pick this collection up.

Some mild plot spoilers follow.

c42881DEADLY THINGS: A COLLECTION OF MYSTERIOUS TALES by Darrell Schweitzer: Schweitzer is one of those extraordinarily prolific authors you see everywhere in anthologies, though I had not previously read a collection of his work. This is a highly enjoyable collection of “historical” mysteries in three types. First are three mysteries set in ancient Rome, two of which feature Pliny the Younger as an investigator. Though I’m a historian by trade, the ancient world is not my area of expertise. Nevertheless, Schweitzer’s portrayal of Pliny’s world of the first century AD rings true. This is a world in which all of the characters have a profoundly pre-modern – but logically internally consistent – mindset that affects all their actions. That’s one of Schweitzer’s strengths here: all too often, authors of historical fiction portray their characters as products of the modern era, with the ahistorical mindset that that entails. No so here. Next are two Shakespearean mysteries, one involving King Henry V as an investigator and the other based on The Two Noble Kinsmen, a play that seems to be currently attributed to co-authors William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. I must confess that my knowledge and interest in Shakespeare’s work are minimal, so these didn’t resonate with me. Other readers with a greater interest in all things Shakespeare than mine would undoubtedly enjoy these two tales more than I. Schweitzer’s final three stories are all previously unknown cases involving Sherlock Holmes (as well as some appropriately low-key brushes with the supernatural). Pastiches like these can be done well or poorly; those of us who read non-Doyle Holmes stories have encountered many of each. I am pleased to report that these three Holmes stories are all very well done. Schweitzer has found a way to portray Holmes and Watson with respect and consistency without mindlessly aping Doyle’s canonical stories. Plus, they are fine stories of Victorian detection in their own right, even though some of the cases presented here remain unresolved.

51-SlvPLT+L._SS500_THE JUDGMENT OF THE GODS AND OTHER VERDICTS OF HISTORY by Robert Reginald: Reginald presents us with four historical murder mysteries: one stand-alone – the eponymous “The Judgment of the Gods” concerning the murder of the Assyrian King Sennacherib – and three involving the medieval philosopher William of Occam (you will be familiar with his “Occam’s Razor” principle). I enjoyed all four stories, though the three involving William of Occam especially appealed to me because of my greater familiarity with and interest in the Middle Ages. Since these involve the commission of the Franciscan William of Occam and his young acolyte and chronicler to serve as detectives and troubleshooters by Pope John XXII, comparisons with Umberto Eco’s excellent THE NAME OF THE ROSE are inevitable. Significantly more approachable than Eco’s postmodern work, Reginald’s stories depict William’s use of reason and insight to solve the murders of a king, a pope, clergymen, and nuns. John XXII’s disputes with the Franciscans and various other power brokers provide a great sense of verisimilitude. That sense of place and time are the real strengths of these stories, which makes them very good historical mysteries indeed.

This double collection of historical mysteries is highly recommended. All are enjoyable, quick reads, and if you’re a fan of historical whodunnits, there’s undoubtedly something here for everyone, whether you are interested in the ancient world, the Middle Ages, or Victorian England.

Image
Buy the book on AmazonImage

Review copyright © 2013 J. Andrew Byers