Friday's "Forgotten" Books (and more): the links to reviews and more

This week's books, unfairly (or sometimes fairly) neglected, or simply those the reviewers below think you might find of some interest (or, infrequently, to be warned away from). Patti Abbott will probably be hosting again next week, watch this space for further developments...

Frank Babics: The Fiction Desk 10: Separations edited by Rob Redman

Mark Baker: The Forgotten Man by Robert Crais

Yvette Banek: Triple Zeck: And Be a Villain; The Second Confession; In the Best Families by Rex Stout

Les Blatt: The Bar on the Seine by Georges Simenon (currently in-print version, as The Two-Penny Bar, translated by David Watson)

Robert Briney: The Three Coffins by John Dickson Carr

Brian Busby: "Nemesis Wins" by Grant Allen

Bill Crider: The Long Haul by Anthony Johnston and Eduardo Barreto

Jose Cruz, Peter Enfantino, Jack Seabrook: EC Comics, August 1954

Martin Edwards: Burn This by Helen McCloy

Barry Ergang (hosted by Kevin Tipple): Hardy Boys: Secret of the Red Arrow by "Franklin W. Dixon"

Will Errickson: Descent by Ron Dee

Curtis Evans: Hours to Kill by Ursula Curtiss

Paul Fraser: Science Fiction Monthly, March 1976, edited by Julie Davis

Barry Gardner: Pictures of Perfection by Reginald Hill

John Grant: The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa (translated by Stephen Snyder); God's Spy by Juan Gomez-Jurado (translated by James Graham); Dear Fahrenheit 451: Love and Heartbreak in the Stacks: A Librarian's Love Letters and Breakup Notes to the Books in Her Life by Annie Spence

Rich Horton: Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation, by Edwin L. Arnold

Jerry House: Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation, by Edwin L. Arnold

Tracy K: Where There's a Will by Rex Stout

George Kelley: Rise of the Terran Empire by Poul Anderson

Joe Kenney: Venus on the Half-Shell by "Kilgore Trout" (Philip Jose Farmer)

Margot Kinberg: The Fortunate Brother by Donna Morrissey

Rob Kitchin: Midnight in Berlin by James McManus; A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Evan Lewis: The Oscar by Richard Sale

Todd Mason: Fantasy: The Literature of the Marvelous edited by Leo P. Kelley; Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, August 1964, edited by Richard Decker, with Victoria S. and Ned Benham, G. F. Foster and Patricia Hitchcock

James Nicoll: Anthonology by Piers Anthony

John F. Norris: Bill "Ironsides" Cromwell and Johnny Lister novels by "Victor Gunn" (Edwy Searles Brooks)

Juri Nummelin: Night Film by Marisha Pessl

John O'Neill: First World Fantasy Awards, edited by Gahan Wilson; The World Fantasy Awards, Volume Two, edited by Fritz Leiber and Stuart David Schiff   [Mason on First World Fantasy Awards; The World Fantasy Awards, V. 2]

Matt Paust: The Fever Tree by Richard Mason  [Neeru on The Fever Tree]

Mildred Perkins: Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt; A Very British Murder by Lucy Worsley

James Reasoner: "The Lost End of Nowhere" by Gordon McCreagh

L. J. Roberts: Bryant & May: Wild Chamber by Christopher Fowler

Gerard Saylor: Britten and Brulightly by Hannah Berry

Steven H. Silver: "A Thousand Deaths" by Jack London; "The Holes Around Mars" by Jerome Bixby

"TomKat": Cat's Paw by Dorothy Blair and Ellen Page

Prashant Trikannad: 2017 reading in review

David Vineyard: "Flight to Singapore" by Donald Barr Chidsey

Morgan Wallace: Three Miles from Murder by Frederick C. Davis (aka Clark Aiken)

FFB: NIGHT FREIGHT by Bill Pronzini (Leisure Books 2000)

Bill Pronzini is another writer I've been reading for nearly all my literate life...I've reviewed some of his books as we've gone along here, mostly as an editor, since he's been impressively prolific and consistently good to brilliant in that capacity as well as in being a writer and critic/historian since starting out professionally with a sale to Shell Scott Mystery Magazine in 1966, of a story he disparages as merely a bad pastiche of Hemingway, and makes a point of Not including in this volume ("You Don't Know What It's Like" and no, I don't, and apparently won't till I find that 11/66 Shell Scott issue). But his second published story, in SSMM's more durable stablemate Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine in 1967, is the title story for this collection, a story he introduces with a mixture of diffidence and pride, wondering in his headnote to the story if he should rewrite it for inclusion here, as he'd updated it for inclusion in anthology, and deciding that its "rough edges" add to its vigor (Bill Crider is among those who approve of the No Tamper/No Update policy for good writers looking back at their early work). Pronzini's early stories were among the standouts of the Harold Masur and Robert Arthur Alfred Hitchcock Presents: anthologies I read when very young, and the first back issues of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine I picked up around the same time (1974), first from the public library (ah, a public library that subscribed to and circulated fiction magazines; I cue Crider again: "I miss the old days"). Through one or more of these venues, I first read "The Pattern," which Pronzini feels might be overrated among his work; I'm fonder of it than he.

Among what's notable about Pronzini's work is how transparent his style usually is; he rarely goes out of his way to draw attention to the way he's relating his narrative, which is almost always in the most straightforward and lucid prose he can offer; his protagonists usually have sharp observations about what goes on around them, but only rarely do they get to expound on the nature of life or otherwise make a pitch for a philosophical outlook in the course of whatever relatively tense business they're about in their stories. He does have his fun, including such memorable comic work as "Another Burnt-Out Case" (Fantastic, October 1978, in collaboration with one of his frequent partners, Barry  Malzberg); his most sustained set of work is about the not-really Nameless Detective, who eventually finds himself, in the late works of the series, addressed as "Bill"...but that bit of self-referential detail took a while to emerge (amusingly, he and his wife, writer Marcia Muller, have patterned their most prominent characters after themselves in many ways, and have enjoyed collaborating on stories where those characters interact). 

The  stories in this volume, packaged in the Leisure horror line (Leisure being one of the last paperback houses to maintain a horror line, and seeking to gain a bit of attention thus, even to the extent of offering a book club subscription service) are an interesting mix, not shrinking from collecting again some of Pronzini's most brilliant work, such as "Strangers in the Fog," even when they'd appeared in one of his too-infrequent previous collections (in that case, his first, Graveyard Plots from 1985); while it's at least as much a collection of suspense stories with no supernatural horror content, and leads off with one of the few stories of his own Pronzini is willing to allow is a hardboiled crime fiction ("Stacked Deck," a short novella from The New Black Mask, 1987), and as a collection was put up for the Horror Writers of America Stoker Award (this year's about to be awarded this weekend as I write). I was surprised at how many of these stories I'd managed to miss, one way or another, over the years before picking this up...Pronzini's work has been too often, if not taken for granted, at least been issued by houses that have had some tough times staying afloat...Leisure is a mere shadow of an imprint now, having been a marginal firm throughout its decades, many of his Nameless novels saw their first paperback editions from the quickly-doomed Paperjacks line, etc....and while it's not been difficult in the online era to find his work, he hasn't been as prominently published, nor as recipient of awards as he might be, over the course of his career. (He mentions having been on the jury that considered his "Strangers in the Fog" for the Edgar Award for best short story of its year, and feeling he had to vote for its most prominent rival, denying himself an Edgar...an award he wouldn't receive for some time later, a few years after the first publication of this book.) This, of course, hasn't stopped sophisticated readers of crime, western or his other fields of fiction from seeking his work out...and, of course, it shouldn't stop you, either. This volume, and Graveyard Plots, and The Best Western Stories of Bill Pronzini collection, among others, await you, particularly if you're mostly familiar with his Nameless stories or not at all, and I recommend you take them up sooner rather than later.

From ISFDB:

• Publication: Night Freight
• Author: Bill Pronzini
• Year: 2000-05-00
• ISBN: 0-8439-4706-3 [978-0-8439-4706-9]
• Publisher: Leisure Books
• Price: $5.50
• Pages: 345

• 13 • Stacked Deck • (1987) • novelette by Bill Pronzini
• 49 • Angel of Mercy • (1996) • shortstory by Bill Pronzini
• 61 • Night Freight • (1967) • shortstory by Bill Pronzini
• 73 • Liar's Dice • (1992) • shortstory by Bill Pronzini
• 85 • Out Behind the Shed • (1991) • shortstory by Bill Pronzini
• 95 • Souls Burning • (1991) • shortstory by Bill Pronzini
• 107 • Strangers in the Fog • (1978) • shortstory by Bill Pronzini
• 121 • Peekaboo • (1979) • shortstory by Bill Pronzini
• 131 • Thirst • (1973) • shortstory by Bill Pronzini
• 141 • Wishful Thinking • (1999) • shortstory by Bill Pronzini
• 153 • Ancient Evil • (1991) • shortstory by Bill Pronzini
• 169 • The Monster • (1996) • shortstory by Bill Pronzini
• 177 • His Name Was Legion • (1979) • shortstory by Bill Pronzini
• 185 • Out of the Depths • (1994) • shortstory by Bill Pronzini
• 211 • The Pattern • (1971) • shortstory by Bill Pronzini
• 225 • The Rec Field • (1980) • shortstory by Bill Pronzini
• 237 • Deathwatch • (1987) • shortstory by Bill Pronzini
• 247 • Home • (2000) • shortstory by Bill Pronzini
• 253 • Tom • (1992) • shortstory by Bill Pronzini
• 265 • A Taste of Paradise • (1994) • shortstory by Bill Pronzini
• 279 • Sweet Fever • (1976) • shortstory by Bill Pronzini
• 289 • Deathlove • (1978) • shortstory by Bill Pronzini
• 301 • Black Wind • (1979) • shortstory by Bill Pronzini
• 311 • The Coffin Trimmer • (1993) • shortstory by Bill Pronzini
• 325 • Funeral Day • (1989) • shortstory by Bill Pronzini
• 331 • I Think I Will Not Hang Myself Today • shortstory by Bill Pronzini

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's books, and I'll be gathering the links for the next two Fridays...please don't hesitate to let me know what I'll foolishly overlook in the course of compilation!

FFB: I CANNOT TELL A LIE, EXACTLY and other stories by Mary Ladd Gavell (Random House 2001)

Most collections of short crime fiction or fantastic fiction, and collections prepared by people who also work in those fields (thus many western story collections, for example) are usually scrupulous about listing previous publication credits, usually magazines that were the first to publish the fiction collected. In contemporary mimetic fiction, for no good reason I'm aware of, one is lucky, usually, to find a small paragraph or sentence tossing off a quick list of magazines that were the sources of the stories, with no indication of the issue or even which stories appeared in which magazine, with, usually, the exception of detailed citations of The New Yorker, in American books...whether as an attempt to toady to that magazine or in some sort of attempt to pretend that it is the exceptional newsstand source of fiction, I'm not sure (perhaps they have a policy of asking for explicit credit when granting reprint rights). 

Sadly, this task was not really necessary for this, the first and

presumably only collection we'll see from Mary Ladd Gavell, who was managing editor of the journal Psychiatry at the time of her death in 1967, at the age of 47, and whose first published short story was in that magazine as a sort of memorial. "The Rotifer" was an excellent tripartite metaphor for the difficulty, to say the absolute least, in attempting to aid others in their lives, and somehow Martha Foley was made aware of its publication in the journal, and liked it enough to reprint in The Best American Short Stories 1968; in going through the volumes in the course of editing The Best American Short Stories of the Century in 1999 (or, more likely, in reading the galleys of what the series editor had provided for him from the volumes), John Updike tapped "The Rotifer" for inclusion in that latter volume, so every blurb and review writer dutifully notes that Updike "discovered" the Gavell story, a feat somewhat similar to Discovering a donut in a box of donuts. Foley's not mentioned, because why would we? None of the other stories had been published until this book appeared in late summer, 2001, just in time for a certain tragedy in NYC, and the often less remarked-about corresponding ones in Pennsylvania and Virginia, to capture most chattering-class attention.

I'm not sure I understand the excess of modesty that led Gavell to make no effort to publish any of her short stories during her life, if she didn't...as they are polished, pointed and remind everyone (including me) of Katherine Anne Porter and almost as often of Lorrie Moore; I'm put in mind of John Cheever and Theodore Sturgeon and Joan Aiken in certain moods as well, and that's good company to travel in...also Wilma Shore, though while these stories share a similar generous feminist spirit, they usually aren't quite as fraught or blatantly pointed as Shore's or Muriel Spark's. The first story, "The Swing," turns out to be a fantasy of loss...the inevitable loss not of a child, but of the relation between a doting mother and her son as a child, as he grows into a man. Gavell delicately traces the slow diminishment of the lives of the protagonist and her ailing husband in their late lives, and what seems at first to be a sort of waking dream of her son as a preschooler returned to her for nocturnal chats at the backyard swing. Bradbury would've made this adorable; Vonnegut wry, but with some flippant asides. Instead, it's pared down but not stark, and utterly deft.

Among the more common criticisms of contemporary mimetic fiction as it's published in The New Yorker and similar venues these years is that it tends to be about superannuated adolescents who have difficulty taking seriously the effects of their actions and behavior on others; self-involvement rules OK to such a degree that alternate approaches to character are almost unseen. Happily, in such stories as "The Rotifer" and "The Infant," Gavell manages to gracefully impart not only, for example, the need for some post-partum recuperation for the mother but also the fierce devotion she can feel simultaneously with the resentment of the world too much with her and moving through her.

Kaye Gibbons, in her introduction, wants you to know that this kind of fiction is still needed, that which manages to see the weight of human interaction as more than just a set of guilty oppressions, means of keeping people from their better lives that Were Gonna Be Like Paris. True, but it's notable how often this kind of fiction is rather shunted aside, as it was, apparently, even by its author at time of creation...perhaps because she thought she'd be able to get to that novel when she retired. 

Too often, it just doesn't happen that way, of course, though usually not as severely as it has for Mary Gavell.

Clay Smith's fine piece about Gavell and her book in the Austin Chronicle, which, however, tells you Much too much about "The Swing" beforehand, if one hasn't yet read it. Mike Ashley let members of the FictionMags list know about that article, after Barry Malzberg brought up Gavell and the book. Thanks, folks.

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

ffb: JOY IN OUR CAUSE: Short Stories by Carol Emshwiller (Harper & Row, 1974)

Carol Emshwiller has been a sophisticated prose artist from, at latest, not long after first publication in 1954, and this fact became impossible to miss by the appearance of her first stories to gain widespread attention, such as "Hunting Machine" (1957), "Pelt" (1958). and "Day at the Beach" (1959); one might correctly gather she's had a keen interest in analyzing the expression of cruelty from the first two titles. This volume, from 1974, was her first collection, and with about half the contents published here for the first time, the book is among a number of other things partially autobiographical fiction (at times verging on essay) and not solely in those aspects a rumination on love, marriage, and the lives of women who are both artists and domestically wives and mothers. Emshwiller had begun publishing fiction with a short story in a regional general-interest magazine, then published nearly all of her next dozen or so stories in the crime fiction and science fiction magazines edited by the adventurous Robert Lowndes, to whom her husband had been steadily selling his illustrations (Emshwiller and Edward Hoch can be said to be Lowndes's chief writer discoveries in those years). By the mid/late 1960s, Emshwiller had begun placing notable stories with the likes of avant-garde anthology series New Directions and the little magazines such as TriQuarterly and Epoch, and so she would continue in these modes, though adding more fantasy and dropping crime fiction per se, and eventually writing highly unusual western novels in the 1990s, beginning with Ledoyt. This volume has only seen the Harper hardcover first edition; ridiculously, no paperback nor foreign editions...rather too much like another excellent collection I've reviewed here before, Wilma Shore's Women Should Be Allowed.

The contents of this book are also included in (the previously cited here) The Collected Stories, Volume 1, but they are arranged here for desired effect rather than by date of publication in the later volume, and this furthers the effect of the often linked nature of the stories in Joy. 


from the Contento/Locus indices, with a few added citations:

Joy in Our Cause Carol Emshwiller (Harper & Row 0-06-011234-4, 1974, hc)
• 1 · Joy in Our Cause · ss
• 11 · The Queen of Sleep · ss New Directions Vol. 22; New Worlds 1970
• 16 · Strangers · ss Bad Moon Rising, ed. Thomas M. Disch, Harper & Row 1973
• 21 · Autobiography · ss
• 30 · Lib · ss New Worlds Mar 1968; TriQuarterly, 1968
• 36 · Eohippus · ss Transatlantic Review 1967
• 45 · Destinations, Premonitions and the Nature of Anxiety · ss
• 56 · To the Association · ss
• 60 · Biography of an Uncircumcised Man (Including Interview) · ss
• 72 · Yes, Virginia · ss Transatlantic Review  1971
• 78 · The Childhood of the Human Hero · ss Showcase, ed. Roger Elwood, Harper & Row 1973
• 84 · Animal · ss Orbit 4, ed. Damon Knight, G.P. Putnam’s 1968
• 96 · Sex and/or Mr. Morrison · ss Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison, Garden City, NY: Doubleday 1967
• 106 · Dog Is Dead · ss
• 111 · I Love You · ss Epoch Vol. XIX, No. 1, 1969
• 117 · Peninsula · ss The Richmond Review 1970
• 129 · Chicken Icarus · ss Cavalier Oct 1966, as “A Dream of Flying”
• 143 · Al · ss Orbit 10, ed. Damon Knight, G.P. Putnam’s 1972
• 155 · Methapyrilene Hydrochloride Sometimes Helps · ss New Worlds Jul 1968
• 161 · Maybe Another Long March Across China 80,000 Strong · ss

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

FFB: Horrors: Old and Almost New: HAUNTINGS edited by Henry Mazzeo; THE NEW MYSTERY edited by Jerome Charyn; THE NEW GOTHIC edited by Bradford Morrow and Patrick McGrath; THE NEW WEIRD edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer; GREAT TALES OF TERROR AND THE SUPERNATURAL edited by Herbert Wise and Phyllis Fraser; ADVENTURES IN TIME AND SPACE edited by Raymond Healey and J. Francis McComas; Ray Russell fiction anthologies for Playboy Press, THE PLAYBOY BOOK OF HORROR AND THE SUPERNATURAL et al.;THE OVERLOOK FILM ENCYCLOPEDIA: HORROR edited by Phil Hardy; ROMANCING THE VAMPIRE by David J. Skal

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: HAUNTINGS: STORIES OF THE SUPERNATURAL, edited by Henry Mazzeo (Doubleday 1968)

Contents, all illustrated by Edward Gorey:

Introduction: The Castle of Terror by Henry Mazzeo
The Lonesome Place by August Derleth
In the Vault by H. P. Lovecraft
The Man Who Collected Poe by Robert Bloch
Where Angels Fear by Manly Wade Wellman
Lot No. 249 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Haunted Dolls’ House by M. R. James
The Open Door by Mrs. Oliphant
Thus I Refute Beelzy by John Collier
Levitation by Joseph Payne Brennan
The Ghostly Rental by Henry James
The Face by E. F. Benson
The Whistling Room by William Hope Hodgson
The Grey Ones by J. B. Priestley
The Stolen Body by H. G. Wells
The Red Lodge by H. Russell Wakefield
The Visiting Star by Robert Aickman
Midnight Express by Alfred Noyes

This might be the most important book to me among all those I've read. It's certainly, among the four or five horror anthologies I read by the time I was eight, one of only two aimed at adults (the other was the Berkley paperback edited by Hal Cantor, Ghosts and Things), and the one which I remember best (odd how few women's stories were collected in either this or the Cantor, which featured only Shirley Jackson's "The Lovely House" in that wise, though Betty M. Owen's Scholastic Book Services anthologies and the Robert Arthur and Harold Q. Masur Hitchcock anthologies helped redress that balance). Happily for me, perhaps (foolishly) because of the Gorey illustrations, this one was classed in the children's section of the Enfield Central Public Library, where I found it easily enough (not that having to go over to the adult section to find, say, Joan Aiken's collection The Green Flash was any great trial).

This book introduced me to all these geniuses, though of course I'd heard of Sherlock Holmes before reading Doyle's detective-free mummy story here, and had probably seen adaptations of at least some of these folks' works on Night Gallery, or in Bloch's case, his Star Trek scripts, and the George Pal productions of adaptations from that other familiar name, H. G. Wells.

Despite the attempts by some reviewers to claim this book for the ghost story tradition, Mazzeo cast his net considerably wider than that, including revenants other than Doyle's mummy, devils (or at least one Assumes they're devils) in at least one of the wittiest stories here (John Collier lets you know, after all, with his title, and Manly Wade Wellman is only a bit more coy in labeling his tale of a place you don't want to be). M. R. James traps children with a toy, Alfred Noyes with a book; Joseph Payne Brennan, with his best story and one of his shortest, traps the childish, and even H. P. Lovecraft is represented by one of his least self-indulgent stories. Derleth shows what he could do, when not attempting to corrupt Lovecraft's legacy into a Christian metaphor, and Wells's stolen body story is an improvement over the "Elvesham" variation collected by Damon Knight in his The Dark Side. J. B. Priestly, a diverse man of letters, I would next encounter primarily as the author (and reader, for a Spoken Arts recording) of his essay collection DELIGHT, which was indeed delightful; Robert Aickman, while also expert on the waterways of Britain, remained for me and many others the greatest of ghost-story writers of the latter half of the 20th Century, even with Russell Kirk and Joanna Russ and Charles Grant and so many others providing excellent contributions to that literature. That obscure fellow James and E. F. Benson (not yet rediscovered for his comedies of manners, and only one of three prolific Benson brothers in the horror field) were the only writers shared by both this book and the Cantor; the Hodgson is a Carnacki story, a fine introduction to psychic investigators.

And the Gorey illustrations will stay with anyone (Fritz Leiber, in his review of the book in his column in the magazine Fantastic, notes the sequence of the Gorey illustrations on the front and back covers tell their own story). This book essentially introduced me to lifelong favorites Bloch, Collier, Benson and Wellman, and even the weakest stories here were rewarding; the Noyes, like the Brennan, is almost certainly the best thing he wrote (at least in prose or the uncanny) and a landmark in the field. I see where Gahan Wilson reviewed this for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1969, Fritz Leiber somewhat belatedly for Fantastic in 1973 [see above]...I shall have to seek out those reviews...for that matter, I will need to read this book again, eventually, and see how completely all of these have stuck with me. And, as far as I know, Mazzeo never published another book.

FFB: "New" Movements This Morning: THE NEW MYSTERY (Charyn), THE NEW GOTHIC (Morrow and McGrath), THE NEW WEIRD (the VanderMeers), et al....

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for this week's other "forgotten" books. (Thanks to Ed Gorman for reminding me of the "alternate" title of Charyn's book, below, for some reason, pasted onto later US editions of this anthology--perhaps to lessen confusion with the magazine New Mystery...)

(The Italian edition, as no pictures of the English-language edition were at first posting poachable!)

The James Blish anthology New Dreams This Morning, an excellent candidate for a forgotten book piece, instead supplies the less than (or post-)gustatory title pun for this quick rumination...things are happening here, what it is ain't exactly clear (well, it's clear enough, actually, just not enough free time at the moment to get them down properly).

What shouldn't be taken away from that weak joke is that I'm mocking the quality of the fiction being gathered under these banners (and such others as steampunk and slipstream and neo-noir, splatterpunk and quiet horror, cyberpunk and humanist sf, surfiction and The New Fiction)...not by a long shot, even if the mediocre and sometimes utter trash is often nestling with the good and great. What's more likely to be noxious is the wind broken over why these are New And Distinct Movements And Much Different From What You've Already Been Reading, Or Not And You've Just Been Too Dense To Note The Shape of The Movement, Haven't You, Mis-Ter Jones?...given how many Mister Joneses of the literary world we have, of all ages and genders, this isn't altogether an incomprehensible approach, and it's certainly helped with marketing and convention and classroom arguments, if not too much else. Each of these would-be movements, and the books and magazines that have fomented them or attempted to capture their essence, or both, are amusingly examples, loudly and accurately proclaiming, of why the Old Boxes and Labels are outdated and inutile, but mistakening insisting instead that the new boxes being built from their smashed walls are less restraining or more accurate, whether or not one carries over smug notions of why something is Generic vs. Literary, or other distortions that should've been seen as useless, at best, decades back. The eclecticism that people such as Judith Merrill and Nelson Algren brought to their anthologies, that I've dealt with in previous entries in this series, is simply furthered by these folks here, and such others ranging from Joe David Bellamy to Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio to George Plimpton to Michael Chabon to Peter Straub to Ellen Datlow, among so many others, who have said, Hey, Look...this is art, this is art in fields and with approaches you may not've considered, c'mon, catch up, catch on. Take a look and think about it. No, it's not Just Good For That Sort of Thing, nor is it An Amusing Fusion of High And Low Art. It's living work among other living work. You should realize that.

Which, again, doesn't begin to excuse the work of William Vollmann. But he's but one among his betters, in the stories and approaches collected in these books, one expanded out of a magazine issue, two of them out of print despite their connected and respectable editors, and one from an industrious but still small press. New Mystery Magazine tried to steal some luster from the Charyn, and had it been published competently, might've sustained itself, as that wasn't the worst idea. Ann VanderMeer is New Weirding Weird Tales these days. Conjunctions still publishes.

The New Gothic:
CONJUNCTIONS:14
FALL 1989
Edited by Bradford Morrow; Guest Edited by Patrick McGrath

Salman Rushdie, An Interview by Catherine
Bush
Walter Abish, Reading Kafka in German
Charles Bernstein, Common Stock
Marjorie Welish, Two Poems
Martine Bellen, Deception
Barbara Guest, Three Poems
Jacques Roubaud, From Some Thing Black
(translated from the French by Rosmarie
Waldrop

THE NEW GOTHIC, guest edited by
Patrick McGrath
Hillary Johnson, From Physical Culture
William T. Vollmann, The Grave of Lost
Stories
John Hawkes, Regulus and Maximus
Jamaica Kincaid, Ovando
Peter Straub, From Mrs. God
Bradford Morrow, From The Almanac
Branch
Robert Coover, Night of the Assassins
John Edgar Wideman, Fever
Clegg & Guttmann, Nine Portraits
Kathy Acker, The Beginnings of the Life of
Rimbaud
Gary Indiana, Dreams Involving Water
Robert Kelly, Carville
Lynne Tillmann, The Trouble With Beauty
Mary Caponegro, The Sound
Sylvia Kelly, Colors
Paul West, A Whore's Agincourt
Afterword by Patrick McGrath

D.E. Steward, March
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Irises
Robert Creeley, Four Poems from Helsinki
John Taggart, Vaguely Harmless
Diane Williams, Five Stories

READINGS: Reviews and Criticism
Paul West on Juan Goytisolo
Paul Metcalf on Lucia Berlin
Peter Cole on Edmond Jabès
Ann Lauterbach on Leslie Scalapino
Robert Kelly on Pierre Klossowski
Tom Clark on David Markson

...and the expanded anthology:
The New Gothic ed. Bradford Morrow & Patrick McGrath (Random House 0-394-58767-7, Oct ’91, $22.00, 336pp, hc, cover by Albert Pinkham Ryder) Anthology of 16 contemporary literary gothic stories and five novel excerpts. 12 of the stories seem to be originals, and three of the excerpts are from works in progress. There is an introduction by the editors.
xi · Introduction · Bradford Morrow & Patrick McGrath · in
1 · Ovando · Jamaica Kincaid · ss Conjunctions #14 ’89
15 · Horrorday [from London Fields] · Martin Amis · ex London: Cape, 1989
37 · Newton · Jeanette Winterson · ss *
51 · Banquo and the Black Banana: The Fierceness of the Delight of the Horror · Paul West · ss *
71 · Freniere [from Interview with the Vampire] · Anne Rice · ex New York: Knopf, 1976
85 · Blood · Janice Galloway · ex Blood, Secker & Warburg, 1991
95 · Didn’t She Know · Scott Bradfield · ss *
113 · Regulus and Maximus [from Monks in Shadow] · John Hawkes · ex Conjunctions #14 ’89
129 · The Fish Keeper · Yannick Murphy · ss *
135 · A Dead Summer · Lynne Tillman · ss *
147 · Why Don’t You Come Live with Me It’s Time · Joyce Carol Oates · ss Tikkun Jul/Aug ’90
165 · The Dead Queen · Robert Coover · ss Quarterly Review of Literature #18 ’73
179 · The Merchant of Shadows · Angela Carter · nv The London Review of Books Oct 26 ’89
201 · The Road to Nadeja · Bradford Morrow · ss *
217 · For Dear Life [from King Solomon’s Carpet] · Ruth Rendell · ex *
231 · Rigor Beach · Emma Tennant · ss Bananas #1 ’75
239 · The Smell · Patrick McGrath · ss *
249 · The Kingdom of Heaven [from Throat] · Peter Straub · ex *
267 · Fever · John Edgar Wideman · nv Conjunctions #14 ’89
301 · J · Kathy Acker · ss *
311 · The Grave of Lost Stories · William T. Vollmann · nv Conjunctions #14 ’89


The New Mystery, edited by Jerome Charyn
Dutton, New York, 1993.
Babel, Isaac,
--The King, 1955.
Barthelme, Donald, (1931-1989)
--Captain Blood, 1987.
Bayer, William,
--Mirror Girl, 1993.
Biermann, Pieke,
--The Law of the Eye, 1990.
Block, Lawrence, (1938- )
--The Merciful Angel of Death, 1993. Shamus
Borges, Jorge Luis, (1899-1986)
--Death and the Compass, 1964. (reprint)
Calvino, Italo, (1923-1985)
--Cities & the Dead, 1974.
Carter, Angela,
--The Werewolf, 1979.
Carver, Raymond, (1939-1988)
--Cathedral, 1983.
Chesbro, George C.,
--Imagine This, 1993.
Daeninckx, Didier,
--Goldfish, 1993.
DeLillo, Don,
--In the Bronx, 1988.
Ellison, Harlan, (1934- )
--Soft Monkey, 1987. Mystery Scene Reader #1, 1987.) Edgar
Ellroy, James,
--Gravy Train, 1990.
Friedman, Mickey,
--No Radio, 1993.
García Márquez, Gabriel, (1928- )
--The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship, 1972.
Gold, Herbert,
--Nicholas in Exile, 1993.
Gordimer, Nadine, (1923- )
--The Moment Before the Gun Went Off, 1991.
Gores, Joe,
--Ishamel, 1993.
Grafton, Sue, (1940- )
--The Parker Shotgun, 1986. (reprint)
Greene, Graham,
--I Spy, 1947. (reprint)
Grimaldi, Laura,
--Fathers and Daughters, 1993.
Highsmith, Patricia, (1921-1995)
--The Snail Watcher, 1964. (reprint)
Hillerman, Tony, (1925- )
--Chee's Witch, 1986. (reprint)
James, P. D., (1920- )
--Devices and Desires, 1990
Kaminsky, Stuart M., (1934- )
--The Man Who Hated Books, 1993.
Lispector, Clarice,
--Pig Latin, 1974.
Mishima, Yukio,
--Martyrdom, 1900
Montalbán, Manuel Vásquez,
--A Boy and His Dog, 1988.
Mosley, Walter, (1952- )
--The Watts Lions, 1993.
Oates, Joyce Carol, (1938- )
--How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again, 1970.
O'Connor, Flannery,
--A Good Man Is Hard to Find, 1953.
Paretsky, Sara, (1947- )
--Dealer's Choice, 1988.
Sciascia, Leonardo,
--Mafia Western, 1983.
Semionov, Julian,
--The Summer of '37, 1993.
Simon, Rober L.,
--Just Say No, 1993.
Taibo, Paco Ignacio, II,
--Manufacture of a Legend, 1993.
Thomas, Ross,
--Missionary Stew, 1983.
Vachss, Andrew, (1942- )
--Cain, 1992.
Westlake, Donald E., (1933- )
--The Ultimate Caper, 1975.
Wright, Eric,
--The Casebook of Dr. Billingsgate, 1993.

The New Weird edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (Tachyon, 2008)
New Weird : The Luck in the Head - M. John Harrison
New Weird : Crossing into Cambodia - Michael Moorcock
New Weird : In the Cities the Hills - Clive Barker
New Weird : The Braining of Mother Lamprey - Simon D. Ings
New Weird : The Neglected Garden - Kathe Koja
New Weird : A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing - Thomas Ligotti
New Weird : Jack - China Miéville
New Weird : Immolation - Jeffrey Thomas
New Weird : The Lizard of Ooze - Jay Lake
New Weird : Watson's Boy - Brian Evenson
New Weird : The Art of Dying - K. J. Bishop
New Weird : At Reparata - Jeffrey Ford
New Weird : Letters from Tainaron - Leena Krohn
New Weird : The Ride of the Gabbleratchet - Steph Swainston
New Weird : The Gutter Sees the Light That Never Shines - Alistair Rennie
New Weird : Death in a Dirty Dhoti - Paul Di Filippo
New Weird : Cornflowers Beside the Unuttered - Cat Rambo
New Weird : All God's Chillun Got Wings - Sarah Monette
New Weird : Locust-Mind - Daniel Abraham
New Weird : Constable Chalch and the Ten Thousand Heroes - Felix Gilman
New Weird : Golden Lads All Must - Hal Duncan
New Weird : Forfend the Heavens' Rending - Conrad Williams

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

(Finally, the qp, and inferior, cover for the US edition.)





































contents, courtesy of British Horror Anthology Hell...I don't believe the UK edition was different in content from the US original. See also this CyberSpace Spinner page for a partial accounting of original publication sources.

Great Tales of Terror & the Supernatural ed Herbert A. Wise & Phyllis Fraser
Tales of Terror
Honore de Balzac - La Grande Breteche
Edgar Allan Poe - The Black Cat
Edgar Allan Poe - The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
Wilkie Collins - A Terribly Strange Bed
Ambrose Bierce - The Boarded Window
Thomas Hardy - The Three Strangers
W. W. Jacobs - The Interruption
H. G. Wells - Pollock and the Porroh Man
H.G. Wells - The Sea Raiders
Saki - Sredni Vashtar
Alexander Woollcott - Moonlight Sonata
Conrad Aiken - Silent Snow, Secret Snow
Dorothy L. Sayers - Suspicion
Richard Connell - The Most Dangerous Game
Carl Stephenson - Leiningen versus the Ants
Michael Arlen - The Gentleman from America
William Faulkner - A Rose for Emily
Ernest Hemingway - The Killers
John Collier - Back for Christmas
Geoffrey Household - Taboo
Tales of the Supernatural
Edward Bulwer-Lytton - The Haunted and the Haunters
Nathaniel Hawthorne - Rappaccini's Daughter
Charles Collins & Charles Dickens - The Trial for Murder
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Green Tea
Fitz-James O'Brien - What Was It?
Henry James - Sir Edmund Orme
Guy de Maupassant - The Horla
Guy de Maupassant - Was It a Dream?
F. Marion Crawford - The Screaming Skull
O. Henry - The Furnished Room
M. R. James - Casting the Runes
M.R. James - Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad
Edith Wharton - Afterward
W. W. Jacobs - The Monkey's Paw
Arthur Machen - The Great God Pan
Robert Hichens - How Love Came to Professor Guildea
Rudyard Kipling - The Return of Imray
Rudyard Kipling - "They"
Edward Lucas White - Lukundoo
E. F. Benson - Caterpillars
E. F. Benson - Mrs. Amworth
Algernon Blackwood - Ancient Sorceries
Algernon Blackwood - Confession
Saki - The Open Window
Oliver Onions - The Beckoning Fair One
Walter de la Mare - Out of the Deep
A. E. Coppard - Adam and Eve and Pinch Me
E. M. Forster - The Celestial Omnibus
Richard Middleton - The Ghost Ship
Karen Blixen - The Sailor-Boy's Tale
H. P. Lovecraft - The Rats in the Walls
H. P. Lovecraft - The Dunwich Horror



The Contento/Locus index:

Adventures in Time and Space ed. Raymond J. Healy & J. Francis McComas (Random House, Aug ’46, $3.00, 997pp, hc); Second Edition, 1953, omits last five stories, also as Famous Science-Fiction Stories. Derivative Anthology More Adventures in Time and Space.
xi · Introduction · Raymond J. Healy & J. Francis McComas · in
3 · Requiem [D.D. Harriman] · Robert A. Heinlein · ss Astounding Jan ’40
20 · Forgetfulness · Don A. Stuart · nv Astounding Jun ’37
46 · Nerves · Lester del Rey · na Astounding Sep ’42
115 · The Sands of Time · P. Schuyler Miller · na Astounding Apr ’37
144 · The Proud Robot [Gallegher] · Lewis Padgett · nv Astounding Oct ’43
177 · Black Destroyer [Beagle] · A. E. van Vogt · nv Astounding Jul ’39
207 · Symbiotica [Jay Score] · Eric Frank Russell · nv Astounding Oct ’43
249 · Seeds of the Dusk · Raymond Z. Gallun · nv Astounding Jun ’38
276 · Heavy Planet [with Frederik Pohl] · Lee Gregor · ss Astounding Aug ’39
286 · Time Locker [Gallegher] · Lewis Padgett · nv Astounding Jan ’43
308 · The Link · Cleve Cartmill · ss Astounding Aug ’42
320 · Mechanical Mice [ghost written by Eric Frank Russell] · Maurice G. Hugi · nv Astounding Jan ’41; given as by Maurice A. Hugi.
344 · V-2: Rocket Cargo Ship · Willy Ley · ar Astounding May ’45
365 · Adam and No Eve · Alfred Bester · ss Astounding Sep ’41
378 · Nightfall · Isaac Asimov · nv Astounding Sep ’41
412 · A Matter of Size · Harry Bates · na Astounding Apr ’34
460 · As Never Was · P. Schuyler Miller · ss Astounding Jan ’44
476 · Q.U.R. [as by H. H. Holmes] · Anthony Boucher · ss Astounding Mar ’43
497 · Who Goes There? · Don A. Stuart · na Astounding Aug ’38
551 · The Roads Must Roll · Robert A. Heinlein · nv Astounding Jun ’40
588 · Asylum [William Leigh] · A. E. van Vogt · nv Astounding May ’42
641 · Quietus · Ross Rocklynne · ss Astounding Sep ’40
655 · The Twonky · Lewis Padgett · nv Astounding Sep ’42
676 · Time-Travel Happens! · A. M. Phillips · ar Unknown Dec ’39
687 · Robots Return · Robert Moore Williams · ss Astounding Sep ’38
698 · The Blue Giraffe · L. Sprague de Camp · nv Astounding Aug ’39
721 · Flight Into Darkness · Webb Marlowe · nv Astounding Feb ’43
741 · The Weapon Shop [Isher] · A. E. van Vogt · nv Astounding Dec ’42
779 · Farewell to the Master · Harry Bates · nv Astounding Oct ’40
816 · Within the Pyramid · R. DeWitt Miller · ss Astounding Mar ’37
825 · He Who Shrank · Henry Hasse · na Amazing Aug ’36
882 · By His Bootstraps · Anson MacDonald · na Astounding Oct ’41
933 · The Star Mouse [Mitkey] · Fredric Brown · ss Planet Stories Spr ’42
953 · Correspondence Course · Raymond F. Jones · ss Astounding Apr ’45
972 · Brain · S. Fowler Wright · ss The New Gods Lead, Jarrolds, 1932

So, here are two anthologies Random House offered during the '40s, which helped establish canons in their respective fields, in part because both anthologies were kept in print consistently as part of the Modern Library.

As I've been checking through a number of the major anthologies of suspense fiction over the decades, I didn’t till being reminded of it the other day recall how much of the Fraser & Wise volume is devoted to non-supernatural tales of menace, mostly though not entirely in the “Tales of Terror” grouping. It’s remarkable how many of these have become chestnuts…essentially all of them…and I have to wonder how many were already common coin in anthologies by the time this one was first issued in 1943. However, along with August Derleth and Donald Wandrei’s efforts at Arkham House, this book was probably the first great exposure H. P. Lovecraft received, as far as the larger reading public is concerned, and was almost certainly the first time Lovecraft and Hemingway were anthologized together (though Dashiell Hammett came close with his horror anthology Creeps by Night [1931]). Also notable, at least in the latter-day British TOC offered here, is the “outing” of Karen Blixen rather than credit of her story to her pseudonym, Isak Dinesen. Even by the time I read this anthology, in a library-sale copy of a 1970s Modern Library edition (with the tamest cover it would get, I suspect), most of the stories were familiar from other anthologies, but not all…to carry another W. W. Jacobs story, aside from “The Monkey’s Paw,” is a small gift in and of itself. Happily, the Modern Library still has this one in print, in the US.

The Healy & McComas wasn’t the first sf anthology from a major publisher in the US, what with Donald Wollheim’s and, just barely, Groff Conklin’s efforts preceding it, along with such mixed selections as Philip Strong’s, but Adventures was one of the most prominent and widely influential, again not least because Random House and eventually the Modern Library imprint were behind it, and Ballantine when purchased by the RH folks did paperback editions with overblown blurbs. As the annotated TOC suggests, John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction was almost ridiculously overrepresented, even given how much good material it had published and how important that magazine under that editor had been in the development of magazine sf in the late 1930s and ‘40s…however, one (1) story each from Planet Stories and Amazing and none from any other magazine (the Unknown essay reprint was the kind of borderline crackpottery that Campbell would pollute Astounding with in the 1950s onward, rather than a story, and very out of place here), and only one entry not from the magazines, don’t make this a particularly representative anthology of the time…and the absence of Theodore Sturgeon, Leigh Brackett, Hal Clement, Clifford Simak, and C. L. Moore (except to the extent that she had input on “The Twonky”) are all telling (and most might wonder where’s the Bradbury?), in a book that makes room for the Phillips article. But, nevertheless, as with Lovecraft in the other volume, this was among the first exposure many of these writers and much of this fiction had for the larger reading public, and much of it holds up well. Unfortunately, this volume hasn’t been reprinted in its Modern Library edition since the ‘80s.

For more of today's selections, please see Patti Abbott's blog. Bill Crider's FFB item this week, in honor of Bouchercon in part, is a memorial volume edited by J. Francis McComas's widow Annette Peltz McComas, collecting from and documenting the birth of McComas's most lasting legacy, co-founding The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction with Anthony Boucher...a very good book all but orphaned by its publisher at birth.

FFB: Ray Russell's fiction anthologies from PLAYBOY

Playboy, of course, was always about its (mostly Hugh Hefner's) idea of being sophisticated (or at least being seen as such). As Hefner was a lover of fiction nearly as much as he was of pulchritude and high-end stereo equipment, he was eager to have editors on hand to help bring some of the best fiction of various sorts into the magazine, even as most other "slick" magazines were collapsing or abandoning fiction throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and into the 1970s...while it had been possible, if somewhat difficult, for a writer to live reasonably well on short-fiction sales in the '50s, with The Saturday Evening Post and (in the early years of the decade) Collier's paying very well indeed for a lot of fiction per issue and most of the general-interest and gendered magazines featuring at least a few short stories, by the end of the '60s, Playboy was one of the few surviving markets among magazines not otherwise devoted to fiction that was still likely to publish more than a single short story per issue, if that (The New Yorker, Harper's and The Atlantic Monthly, all paying somewhat less, were among the few others; Redbook was perhaps the last diehard among the magazines aimed at women, with the weak exception, in the last decade or so, of Woman's World and their offer of one romance and one mystery vignette per issue, or Bust with one erotic vignette). Ray Russell was one of the most energetic of Playboy's fiction editors, and a generator of any number of anthologies of fiction and related matter taken from the magazine starting in the latter '60s...there were the big books, The Playboy Book of.... volumes, released in hardcover and paperback, and the slimmer, paperback-only anthologies with titles such as From the S File (all the contributing writers' surnames began with S) or, as pictured above, Stories of the Sinister & Strange.  (One thing they didn't spend too much time on, sadly, were the covers for these volumes...very strange, given the available talent and care given to illustration in the magazine itself. )

While these books were not quite up to, say, Robert Arthur's (or Harold Masur's) Alfred Hitchcock Presents: anthologies (which had the option of drawing on Playboy as well as any number of other sources for their contents), and the tendency for the slickly facile could rule OK in a given several stories in each book, Russell had a fair amount to be proud of during his term as fiction editor (and was never shy, as you'll note below, about including his own stories in the books). I read them happily as I came across them, mostly in libraries though the mass market paperback editions were pretty well distributed and widely available secondhand as well as new in the 1970s and '80s.  When I picked up Charles Willeford's slim collection The Machine in Ward Eleven a decade or so back I knew I had read that title story before, but couldn't remember where...and certainly Charles Beaumont, who was as close to a Playboy "discovery" as any writer in the early issues, consistently offered searching and profound work to the magazine and others (he was the first film reviewer for as well as fiction contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, for example). Beaumont certainly isn't the only contributor to repeatedly appear in the Russell tables of contents, either, of course. Another memory lapse for me: I knew I had mostly read Ken Purdy's work in anthologies devoted to auto racing, and perhaps other sports-fiction anthos...but had forgotten that, for Playboy at least, he also dabbled in criminous and fantasticated fiction...and Purdy's isn't the only byline I might not've expected to find in these contexts, to say nothing of those who offer decent or better work whom I've otherwise never encountered (John Reese, or H. C. Neal, among others). Ellen Datlow, the editor (first prominent as fiction editor of Omni magazine, from the Penthouse group) of any number of important media for short fiction over the last thirty-odd years, cited the Horror volume here for her entry in Horror: The 100 Best Books.

Alice Turner succeeded Russell, not immediately (after Robie MacCauley's just under a decade in place) and for a slightly longer stretch, as fiction editor, and I will perhaps, less nostalgically (as her anthologies weren't a small staple of my youthful reading as the Russells were), take a look at her impressive anthologies out of the magazine in the future. Sadly, since Turner's dismissal, the magazine, probably on its way to collapse (one correspondent suggested to me that its publication will probably cease as soon as Hefner passes, kept as it is mostly as a shadowy remnant of what it was out of respect for the Old Man/Founder), has not had much more of a commitment to fiction than its original model, Esquire, albeit the simple majority of issues till recently still had an excerpt or story in them, to supplement the Gahan Wilson and less interesting cartoons.

courtesy ABE and WorldCat:

The Playboy Book of Crime and Suspense [edited by Ray Russell] ed. Anon. (Chicago: Playboy, 1966, 405pp, hc)

Contents:

A Lucky Day for the Boar by Gerald Kersh

The Peeping Tom Patrol by Michael Shaara

The Room of Dark by Gilbert Wright

The Distributor by Richard Matheson

Last Will and Testament by Ray Russell

The Hildebrand Rarity by Ian Fleming

Everybody Hates David Starbuck by Steve Allen

The Hustler by Walter S. Tevis

Walk to the Station by Stanley Cooperman

Naked in Xanadu by Ray Russell

The Bottom of the Ocean by Ken W. Purdy

A Cry from the Penthouse by Henry Slesar

The Sign of Scorpio by Charles Mergendah

The Man in the Well by Berkely Mather

The New Deal by Charles Einstein

The Hunger by Charles Beaumont

The Supermen by William M. Clark

Speak to Me of Immortality by Ken W. Purdy

The Morning After by Wade Miller

With All Due Respect by Fred McMorrow

The Devil to Pay by Stephen Barr 

Harpy by T. K. Brown III

The Hobbyist by Fredric Brown

The Sender of Letters by Herbert Gold

Balance Sheet by Morton Fineman

No Fire Burns by Avram Davidson 

A Fist Full of Money by Henry Slesar & Jay Folb

Incident off Land's End by Jacob Hay

Courtesy the Contento Indices:

The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural [edited by Ray Russell] ed. Anon. (Chicago: Playboy, 1967, $5.95, 390pp, hc)

• · Preface · Editors of Playboy · pr
• · Softly Walks the Beetle · John Collier · ss Playboy Jan ’60
• · Heavy-Set · Ray Bradbury · ss Playboy Oct ’64
• · Nasty · Fredric Brown · vi Playboy Apr ’59
• · Sardonicus · Ray Russell · nv Playboy Jan ’61
• · Sorcerer’s Moon · Charles Beaumont · ss Playboy Jul ’59
• · First Anniversary · Richard Matheson · ss Playboy Jul ’60
• · The Jam · Henry Slesar · ss Playboy Nov ’58
• · Beelzebub · Robert Bloch · ss Playboy Dec ’63
• · The Machine in Ward Eleven · Charles Willeford · nv Playboy Mar ’61
• · The Academy · David Ely · ss Playboy Jun ’65
• · The Manuscript of Dr. Arness · Gahan Wilson · ss Playboy Aug ’66
• · The Party · William F. Nolan · ss Playboy Apr ’67
• · Burnt Toast · Mack Reynolds · ss Playboy Nov ’55
• · Rendezvous · John Christopher · ss Playboy Sep ’66
• · Side by Side · John Tomerlin · ss Playboy Sep ’64
• · The Sea Was Wet as Wet Could Be · Gahan Wilson · ss Playboy May ’67
• · Hey, Look at Me! · Jack Finney · ss Playboy Sep ’62
• · For the Rich They Sing—Sometimes · Ken W. Purdy · ss Playboy May ’62
• · I’m Yours · Charles Schafhauser · ss Playboy Dec ’54
• · Double Exposure · John Reese · ss Playboy Feb ’65
• · The Taste of Fear · Hugh G. Foster · ss Playboy Sep ’59
• · No Such Thing as a Vampire · Richard Matheson · ss Playboy Oct ’59
• · Virginia · Calvin Tomkins · ss Playboy Mar ’67
• · Black Country · Charles Beaumont · ss Playboy Sep ’54
• · The Traveling Salesman · Robert Bloch · ss Playboy Feb ’57
• · Weird Show · Herbert Gold · ss Playboy Apr ’58
• · The Life Work of Juan Diaz · Ray Bradbury · ss Playboy Sep ’63
• · Comet Wine · Ray Russell · nv Playboy Mar ’67
• · Index of Authors · Misc. · ix

The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy [edited by Ray Russell] ed. Anon. (Chicago: Playboy LCC# 66-12861, 1966, $5.95, 403pp, hc)

• vii · Preface · Editors of Playboy · pr
• 1 · The Fly · George Langelaan · nv Playboy Jun ’57
• 40 · Blood Brother · Charles Beaumont · ss Playboy Apr ’61
• 46 · Love, Incorporated · Robert Sheckley · ss Playboy Sep ’56
• 61 · A Foot in the Door · Bruce Jay Friedman · ss Playboy Oct ’60
• 75 · The Vacation · Ray Bradbury · ss Playboy Dec ’63
• 84 · The Never-Ending Penny · Bernard Wolfe · nv Playboy Sep ’60
• 101 · Bernie the Faust · William Tenn · nv Playboy Nov ’63
• 130 · A Man for the Moon · Leland Webb · ss Playboy Aug ’60
• 140 · The Noise · Ken W. Purdy · ss Playboy Mar ’59
• 155 · The Killer in the TV Set · Bruce Jay Friedman · ss Playboy Aug ’61
• 166 · I Remember Babylon · Arthur C. Clarke · ss Playboy May ’60
• 179 · Word of Honor · Robert Bloch · ss Playboy Aug ’58
• 187 · John Grant’s Little Angel · Walt Grove · ss Playboy Jul ’64
• 206 · The Fiend · Frederik Pohl · ss Playboy Apr ’64
• 215 · Hard Bargain · Alan E. Nourse · ss Playboy May ’58
• 221 · The Nail and the Oracle · Theodore Sturgeon · nv Playboy Oct ’65
• 244 · After · Henry Slesar · ss Playboy Jun ’60
• 250 · December 28th · Theodore L. Thomas · ss Playboy Dec ’59
• 254 · Spy Story · Robert Sheckley · ss Playboy Sep ’55
• 268 · Punch · Frederik Pohl · ss Playboy Jun ’61
• 274 · The Crooked Man · Charles Beaumont · ss Playboy Aug ’55
• 286 · Who Shall Dwell... · H. C. Neal · ss Playboy Jul ’62
• 293 · Double Take · Jack Finney · ss Playboy Apr ’65
• 314 · Examination Day · Henry Slesar · ss Playboy Feb ’58
• 320 · The Mission · Hugh Nissenson · ss Playboy Dec ’64
• 338 · Waste Not, Want Not · John Atherton · ss Playboy Jun ’59
• 343 · The Dot and Dash Bird · Bernard Wolfe · ss Playboy Dec ’64
• 359 · The Sensible Man · Avram Davidson · ss Playboy Feb ’59
• 365 · Souvenir [“The Drowned Giant”] · J. G. Ballard · ss The Terminal Beach, London: Gollancz, 1964; Playboy May ’65
• 378 · Puppet Show · Fredric Brown · ss Playboy Nov ’62
• 390 · The Room · Ray Russell · ss Playboy Feb ’61
• 394 · Dial “F” for Frankenstein · Arthur C. Clarke · ss Playboy Jan ’65
• 403 · Index of Authors · Misc. · ix

Playboy’s Stories of the Sinister & Strange [edited by Ray Russell] ed. Anon. (Playboy BA0124, 1969, 95¢, 217pp, pb)

• iv · Preface · Anon. · pr
• 1 · The Mannichon Solution · Irwin Shaw · nv Playboy Dec ’67
• 41 · The Dark Music · Charles Beaumont · ss Playboy Dec ’56
• 57 · Somewhere Not Far from Here · Gerald Kersh · ss Playboy Mar ’65
• 78 · The Investor · Bruce Jay Friedman · ss Playboy Feb ’62
• 90 · Ripples · Ray Russell · ss Playboy Oct ’67
• 93 · The Dispatcher · Gerald Green · nv Playboy Aug ’67
• 120 · Wise Child [“It’s a Wise Child”] · John Wyndham · ss Argosy (UK) Nov ’62; Playboy May ’67
• 137 · Welcome to the Monkey House · Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. · ss Playboy Jan ’68
• 160 · Room 312 · G. L. Tassone · ss Playboy Aug ’67
• 177 · The Golden Frog · Ken W. Purdy · nv Playboy Jan ’63
• 200 · The Annex · John D. MacDonald · ss Playboy May ’68

The Playboy Book of Humor and Satire [edited by Ray Russell] ed. Anon. (Chicago: Playboy, 1967, vii+ 407pp, hc)

Featuring: 

P. G. Wodehouse; 

Dan Greenburg; 

Ray Russell; 

Woody Allen; 

Art Buchwald; 

Shepherd Mead; 

Richard Armour; 

Jean Shepherd; 

Roger Price; 

William Iversen; 

Robert Paul Smith; 

Dan A. Jenkins; 

T. K. Brown; 

Bernard Wolfe; 

Larry Siegel 
Gerald Sussman 
Jack Gelber
H. Allen Smith
Jeremy Dole
Meredith Willson

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

Here's the second and so far final edition (1993, after 1985) of one of the more impressive, if deeply flawed, reference/critical works in horror film; among the flaws is that the entries are unsigned, so that one can have the fun of trying to suss out if it was Kim Newman, Tom Milne, Paul Willeman, Julian Petley, Tim Pulleine or editor Hardy, or some combination, who are responsible for one opinionated entry or another. Another rests squarely with Hardy and his publishers and their editors: to make room for new content, two relatively minor films were dropped from this edition (albeit everyone who loves horror in my generation of USians has at least heard of Don't Look in the Basement), while all kinds of questionable inclusions (Sorority House Massacre, Three O'Clock High as examples from either end of the suspense film quality range featuring psychopaths) continue...and similarly quasi-relevant work (say, El Topo) is missing, or, like Kongo, only mentioned in the entry for a film it's closely related to, as in this case as a non-silent remake of West of Zanzibar. Less of a judgement call, the index is all but useless unless you know the title or the common alternate titles of a film they offer a primary entry for; it a title is only mentioned in the text of a primary entry, good luck finding it, as with Kongo. (They have cogent things to say about the most obvious horror and horror-related films of Ingmar Bergman, but no entry in the index for The Devil's Eye, or Wild Strawberries, with its notable nightmare-sequence beginning...which would be more forgivable without full entries for the likes of Fatal Attraction.) And, as almost everyone complains about this book, it's no dry simple compendium of facts, but an often self-contradictory repository of strong opinions; someone on staff really hates Robert Bloch's scripts (without noting how much they were meddled with by the likes of producer/directors William Castle and Milton Subotsky, which one would think might be the purview of a book such as this), while someone else makes a point of praising (justly, I'd agree) the likes of the mistitled (not by Bloch!) Torture Garden (someone presumably had a copy of Octave Mirbeau's novel kicking around the office).

But in this enumeration of some of the faults of the book, I think you might be gathering some of the virtues: it's by no means a comprehensive account of all horror films made (it misses a whole lot of video-only items, including such cult gems as Trancers and Subspecies 2, while noting others as it occurs to them to do so; Japanese and some other east Asian horror filmographies are given a reasonably good representation, but hardly a thorough one, and Korean films--admittedly a booming business in the years since--hardly represented at all), it is in its nearly 500 oversized pages full of informed consideration of a wide range of horror film, including any number of obscurities that might be new to all but the most knowledgeable fan/scholar. It's the kind of book that lends itself to an online or at least hypertextual sequel, and is worth your attention if you come across it. I can see why it's fetching such large prices on the secondhand market. Thanks to Kate Laity for the gift.

Meanwhile, David J. Skal's book is a charming example of what might even hold together better online, but would lose precisely its tactile gimmicks. Skal, who could write the text of this survey of vampires in popular culture in his sleep, has that rather deft (and non-automatic!) text augmented by even more illustration, all in full color when the original is, and with the kind of tipped-in paper ephemera that did so well for Griffin and Sabine and its sequels a decade or so back; as such, this must be, if not the most expensive book Whitman Publishing has ever attempted, then certainly the most elaborate I've seen. (It comes, in its conceit of being a true scrapbook, with an unattached male vampire face mask, as well as with postcards, film-strip-like photo arrays and more in pouches or taped onto the pages.) At 144 augmented pages, all but necessarily slipcased, it sure isn't a Big Little Book while certainly also being a rather fat big book, and given the number of copies available at the picked-over Borders stores I've been visiting, it probably didn't do well...like the Overlook/Horror originally priced at $50 (well, minus 5c and in 2008 rather than 1993 dollars), you can currently get one at a Borders so endowed for $3.75 (less if you have the discount card, which will no longer be honored after Sunday). Eminently worth the effort to take the look.