FFB guest review by Laurel Scholnick: HORRORS edited by Charles L. Grant (Playboy Press 1981)

Laurel Scholnick is a professional archivist, librarian and researcher, and a lover of horror fiction, comics/graphic literature, and in dramatic form, particularly film and television drama, and one of the most prolific contributors to the discussion list Horror in Film and Literature at Indiana University. Among her projects has been completion and enhancement of a database of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood episode segments.

On first consideration, Horrors, edited by Charles L. Grant, is a pinnacle among selections of short horror fiction, and as you let the stories sit with you and sink in, the book even more thoroughly lives up to the paperback original's wonderfully foreboding cover, an image of an eyeball floating in a sea of blood. I was hooked from reading Grant's introduction and the first story, as Dennis Etchison's now-classic "The Dead Line" gets at the futility and despair one would feel while one's loved one is incapacitated and is essentially being mined for fluids and parts. A horrible thing, made even more horrible by the way her husband deals with the hopeless situation his wife isn't quite enduring. From there each of the other stories also deals with various sorts of terrible things people (and things like people) can do to each other or, sometimes, to themselves.

There is no lack of supernatural horror in the anthology, but what soon becomes apparent is how well the stories presented here can play on anxiety in the face of both supernatural and real-life horrors.  While no one eats 'dollburgers', and dolls don't in turn actually eat people (as in Lisa Tuttle's "Dollburger"), people (especially women) enter into bad marriages against their better judgment all the time and can end up with children, too, as a result...and then find out just how crazy the one they really love is (as in "Shadetree" by J. Michael Reaves). It can be scary to think that kindness to animals could lead to our undoing...for some it's a just-deserts kind of thing, a price for disingenuousness and cheating ("The Inheritance" by Alan Dean Foster), and for some it's from letting it all go too far to be a benefactor (as in Richard Houston's "The Man Who Was Kind to Animals"). There are stories here of adulterers, a child unaware of how to control his unusual powers, revenge seekers, those who give of themselves until there is (literally) nothing left, werewolves, a pair of occultists, murderous parents who find the tables turned on their predation, a torturer, another magical child, a hypnotizing pool that absorbs much more than the stress from people's muscles...and a toy that will not let itself be lost: Stephen King's "The Monkey", which I first read years ago in his collection Skeleton Crew, is a fine closer as it leaves you with a terrible foreboding that there will be no end to the nightmarish havoc this cursed little mechanical cymbal-clapper will continue to wreak on the world.  

Each of these selections had me eagerly turning the pages and wondering what I was in for in the next story.  Highly recommended!

Horrors ed. Charles L. Grant (Playboy 0-872-16905-7, Oct ’81, $2.25, 223pp, pb)
• 7 · Introduction · Charles L. Grant · in
• 9 · The Dead Line · Dennis Etchison · ss Whispers Oct 1979
• 20 · Black Evening · David Morrell · ss *
• 26 · Party Night · Reginald Bretnor · ss The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF) Mar 1969
• 40 · A Demon in My View · Melisa Michaels · ss *
• 52 · In the Land of the Giving · Beverly Evans · ss *
• 56 · Nightshapes · Barry N. Malzberg · ss Werewolf!, ed. Bill Pronzini, Arbor 1979
• 63 · Savoury, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme · Chelsea Quinn Yarbro · nv *
• 87 · The Inheritance · Alan Dean Foster · ss *
• 95 · Dollburger · Lisa Tuttle · ss F&SF Feb 1973
• 101 · Shadetree · J. Michael Reaves · ss F&SF Sep 1977
• 116 · Kisses from Auntie · Craig Shaw Gardner · ss *
• 124 · Morning Talk · Steve Rasnic Tem · ss *
• 127 · The Man Who Was Kind to Animals · Richard Houston · ss *
• 141 · Far Removed from the Scene of the Crime · Nicholas V. Yermakov · ss F&SF Apr 1980
• 150 · The Drum Lollipop · Jack M. Dann · ss Orbit 11, ed. Damon Knight, G.P. Putnam’s 1972
• 162 · The Good Is Oft Interred · George W. Proctor · ss *
• 177 · The Pool · William F. Nolan · ss *
• 186 · The Monkey · Stephen King · nv Gallery Nov 1980

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Guest FFB: Barry N. Malzberg on ANATOMY OF A KILLER by Peter Rabe

Just finished this, one of 16 Rabe novels I ordered from Stark House in fulfillment of an ancient sense of obligation (I had never read a word of Rabe...read his divorced wife Claire [Rabe, initially as by "Anna Winter"]'s Olympia Press novel FLESH AND BLOOD when it was published with mine and five others in 1969 in a series of "the inaugural American Olympia hardcover novels" all of which bombed ferociously...it was quite good). This is one of the craziest, most disjointed, most fascinatingly implosive and explosive novels I have ever read; as I just observed to my patient spouse "When you are turning out books for $2500 advances in two or three weeks because you are trying to make a living you can't go back and get it right, but if he had had that unlikely opportunity this could have been a breakthrough work". Even so, I have never read existential fragmentation and individual psychic breakdown merged the way that Rabe manages in the final 15,000 words. That was my off again, on again shtick and in the fourteenth and final novel of THE LONE WOLF [series published as by "Mike Barry"] I might have gotten close but Rabe was on another planet. It's on a level with the last chapters of LOLITA and Rabe does not for better or worse allow linguistic virtuosity to get in his way.

This guy was (as Carter Scholz wrote of me 35 years ago) synchronously the best and worst writer going, sometimes in the same damned paragraph. A stunning broken talent. And a beacon toward the horrible time in which two thirds of a century later we now exist. 

I feel driven to make this observation public, just for the record.  As you were, ladies and gents.

--BNM, reprinted with permission from Rara-Avis.

FFB 1: Damien Broderick: a Guest's Friday's Forgotten Book: NEUROPATH by R. Scott Bakker (Orion, 2008; Penguin Canada, 2009; TOR, 2009)

Damien Broderick: 
I just stumbled on Canadian R. Scott Bakker's 2008 philosophical horror novel Neuropath, which I found rather good, a sort of blend of Greg Egan and Thomas Harris. It was published in the US by TOR, and is an sf novel to the extent that half of Moscow has been nuked (or something similar), the world is in deep shit generally, neuroimaging has advanced at the rate one might expect, and the US seems to have fallen into the grip of people who eerily foreshadow Trump and his chosen support team. The only review I've managed to find is this at Strange Horizons, but it doesn't give the remotest sense of how gripping and informed this novel is. But then to unwrap its motor would ruin it; Bakker's winding threads of neuroscience and Dennettesque philosophy is discursive but thoroughly enacted by his characters. 

Bakker seems to have started with complex fantasy narratives.  I sent the above paragraph to Scott, who replied inter alia: "the esteemed pop culture critic and speculative realist Steven Shaviro devotes a whole chapter to NP in his latest book, Discognitions, exploring the ability of narrative to take us where arguments cannot go...There's a few academic treatments out there, but his reading is smack." I've never heard of Steven Shaviro** nor heard "smack" used as a term of excited endorsement (an upgrade to the tedious "dope", I assume), I'll leave it there for the moment. 

**Wiki tells us: "Shaviro has written a book about film theory, The Cinematic Body, which examines the dominance of Lacanian tropes in contemporary academic film theory. According to Shaviro, the use of psychoanalysis has mirrored the actions of a cult, with its own religious texts (essays by Freud and Lacan)," an opinion only the cultists would disagree with, as I argued a couple of decades back in Theory and Its Discontents.

Recommended. I have a suspicion that it was probably too smart for the sf groundlings ("booorrring") and that maybe it sank swiftly into oblivion--although I see paperback and ebook editions, so I hope I'm wrong.

Copyright 2016 by Damien Broderick 

FFB: Ed Gorman on Evan Hunter/Ed McBain and LEARNING TO KILL

Evan Hunter, Ed McBain and Learning to Kill.



A year or so before he was diagnosed with cancer, Evan Hunter seemed intrigued by my idea of doing a massive collection of some of his earliest tales. Intrigued enough, anyway, to have somebody make copies of sixty-some stories and send them to me.

The stories covered virtually every pulp genre – crime, western, adventure, science fiction, horror – done under seven or eight pen-names.

We had everything ready to go when Evan had second thoughts. There were just too many of these stories he didn’t want to resurrect.

In Learning to Kill (Harcourt, $25) Evan and Otto Penzler have brought together the very best of those early stories in a stunner of a hardback package. This shows you how early Hunter was a master of both form and character.

The stories are divided into categories: Kids, Women in Jeopardy, Private Eyes, Cops and Robbers, Innocent Bystanders, Loose Cannons, Gangs.

He wrote well across the entire spectrum of crime and suspense stories, so well in fact that several of these stories are true classics that will be reprinted for decades to come – “First Offense,” “Runaway,” “The Merry Merry Christmas,” “On The Sidewalk Bleeding” and “The Last Spin” aren’t just for readers. They’re also for writers. These particular stories yield great insights into use of voice, plot, character and milieu. I could teach a full semester of writing using just those stories I mentioned.

Hunter/McBain was one of the two or three best and most influential crime writers of his generation. Otto Penzler has paid tribute to that fact with this hefty and important contribution that belongs in every mystery collection.

FFB: guest Richard Lupoff on Day Keene & Leonard Pruyn's WORLD WITHOUT WOMEN; TM on Barry Malzberg & Mike Resnick: THE BUSINESS OF SCIENCE FICTION

The current issue:

Richard Lupoff probably needs no introduction for most of the readers of this blog, but as a fiction writer, editor, publisher, historian, and critic he has moved from strength to strength for over half a century...with wife Pat Lupoff, Dick was the co-editor and -publisher of the highly influential fanzine Xero, among much else one of the birthplaces of organized comics fandom, and one of the relative few 'zines, particularly of its era (1960-62), to have a recent Best-Of published from its contents.... (Contributors to this volume range from Avram Davidson to Donald Westlake [bitterly "quitting" sf] through James Blish to Harlan Ellison [reviewing the film Psycho] to a young Ed Gorman and the rather bad doggerel of a similarly young Roger Ebert, who provides a new introduction). Lupoff was the editor of a series of Edgar Rice Burroughs reissues for the small Canaveral Press in the 1960s; published the pioneering All In Color for a Dime (with fellow comics 'zine pioneer Don Thompson), and began publishing his own fiction in the 1960s, including parodies, more broadly satirical work, sophisticated adventure fiction, and crime fiction and detailed alternate-historical fiction. His most recent books are the novel The Emerald Cat Killer and the crime-fiction collection Killer's Dozen (with an introduction by Gorman). He has reviewed books for Pacifica Radio, among others, over the decades, though (sadly) only infrequently drops by his old show, Bookwaves on KPFA, these years. Happily, he's using at least some of that saved time for more fiction. I told him about FFB, and while protesting that he had too many commitments to do anything too formal, did send along this brief review of a work he'd just read:


But here's a forgotten book for you: World Without Women by Day Keene and Leonard Pruyn. A global plague strikes. It may be caused by atmospheric pollution due to atomic weapons testing. (This was a 1960 publication.) Ninety percent of women die. The book was obviously written hastily and carelessly. Sometimes the surviving ten percent are all sterile. Other times ten percent of the surviving ten percent (i.e., one percent of all the women in the world) remain fertile.

The main plot gimmick is much too obvious, much too soon. Odd pacing problems, too. At one point one of the surviving women decides to bake a cake. We're treated to two pages about how to do this. First gather ingredients, then stir batter, add flour, bake for so-many minutes at 350 degrees. Is this padding? What does the bear do in the woods?

Actually, it's more funny than annoying, except you find yourself laughing where the authors were not trying to be funny. That's very bad news.

Still, a fascinating and very readable book. Day Keene of course was an immensely prolific pulper and paperbacker, did a couple of hardboiled novels, wrote for radio and movies. Largely forgotten for several decades, he seems to be enjoying quite a renaissance thanks to Stark House, Ramble House and John Pelan's Dancing Tuatara Press.

Leonard Pruyn on the other hand seems to be something of a mystery character. What few details are known can be had from the great Bill Crider! [Not here, mind you, though Bill is discussing Keene in an archived page at Steve Lewis's Mystery*File. TM]

World Without Women was a Fawcett Gold Medal original. I've also seen an English-language reprint by a company in Israel. There may have been other editions, but I've seen only the two. --Richard Lupoff



OK, for me to attempt to label this book "forgotten" is more than a bit of a cheat...not only was it published last year, even if by the relatively small but industrious (and never inexpensive) McFarland, but (unlike Malzberg's two brilliant collections of historical and critical essays, one an expansion of the previous one, and both unusually published by a major commercial publisher rather than a small or university press), it's still in print...and the only book I'm aware of that Amazon has offered to buy back from me (for a pittance, to be sure), presumably so that they could meet sudden demand. These are somewhat achronic essays on the state of the sf marketplace, somewhat divorced from time as presented here undated despite all coming from publication in the last decade in the Science Fiction (and Fantasy) Writers of America Bulletin, where the two columnists, who have taken on essentially every possible task in sf and closely-related writing, editing and publishing between them, conduct a regular dialog mostly about a given germane topic in every issue: foreign sales, myths and fallacies, the slow appearance of royalties when at all; the death of fiction magazines (and how well webzines pay in comparison, which has since become very dated, sadly, as Resnick's own editorial gig at Jim Baen's Universe has vanished along with that publication, the last so far of the very lucrative [for contributors], non-peripheral sf/fantasy webzine markets). It is both a how-to book on conducting one's literary career (and not solely in sf) and a casual history of the publishing industry (also not restricted to sf publishing). Barry is by nature more than a little pessimistic, Resnick certainly more the optimistic booster, though neither is terribly starry-eyed about the current state of publishing, as would befit two professionals who both began publishing in fantastic fiction, among much other work, in the mid 1960s; Malzberg suggests repeatedly in the columns collected here that he speaks with the Authority of Failure, and Resnick, one of the most consistently in-print and popular of the non-bestselling sf/f writers, with the Authority of Success...something that Resnick often tries to shrug off while moving onto another bit of practical advice, and (infrequently) misunderstanding Barry's usually quite sensible warnings as something rather darker. It's an excellent and useful book to read, and one could wish it was a more comprehensive selection of the well over forty columns the duo has published so far. I foresee this book falling out of print, though perhaps I misjudge McFarland, and being informative and entertaining long after its more immediate sorts of career advice are outdated. --Todd Mason

Please see George Kelley's blog for the round-up of links to others' "forgotten" books this week; roundelay originator Patti Abbott is scheduled to host the links again next Friday, after her return from a working vacation.