FFB: WORKERS WRITE! TALES FROM THE COURTROOM edited by David LaBounty (Blue Cubicle Press 2011); LOVECRAFT: A SYMPOSIUM by Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, August Derleth, Arthur Jean Cox, et al. (LASFS/Riverside Quarterly 1964)

Workers Write! has become officially a little magazine appearing annually, but started as a small press anthology in 2005, with Workers Write! Tales from the Cubicle, like all volumes/issues since devoted to fiction and poetry written by or at least from the point of view of workers in a certain field...each issue has had (a bit too adorably) a "Tales from the C---" subtitle, and the 2011 issue is perhaps one of the closest to the usual interests of FFB contributors and readers, the courtroom issue. As the only issue of the magazine I've read so far (they also produce single-story chapbooks somewhat more frequently than the annual issues), it's a solid and engaging selection of crime fiction that is neither completely devoted to procedural accounts nor (as some might stereotype little magazine fiction) nebulous exercises in looking within; I'm only slightly surprised it wasn't cited in the 2012 Best American Mystery Stories, given how much Otto Penzler loves to delve into the little magazines for content.

What led me to pick it up was a story by Liz Hufford, a good writer whose "This Offer Expires" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1976) had stuck with me, and who had published only three rather well-regarded stories in 1970s fantastic-fiction media (one in Damon Knight's anthology series Orbit, two in F&SF) after passing through the Clarion Writers Workshop...she had continued to publish in various little magazines and academic texts occasionally since, while also teaching at Glendale Community College in Arizona. "Gone Accourting" is unsurprisingly one of the better stories in the issue, a rumination on life and particularly the judicial system while also an account of someone not too unlike Hufford herself being called to serve on a jury; as someone who, while living in Philadelphia proper some years back, was called to jury duty something like eleven times while never being empaneled, I could sympathize. (This is one of a few stories in the issue that might put the reader particularly in mind of John D. MacDonald.) Jack Ewing, an old hand who hasn't ever made a huge splash in a long career, has a deft story in "Serves You Right" that easily could fit in any neo-noir context, about why a process server might not wish to pursue his white whale; Randall Patterson's "Old Soldiers" is similarly informed by a long career in both writing and the law, and might be the best story here. Tom Green's "Huntz's Law" might be a bit over-broad, in its account of a judge still rankled by envy of some of his law-school classmates, and seeking one big splashy case to preside over; judges similarly have not so great times of it in Juliet Hubble's "Amicus, Briefly" (a quick portrait of an unfulfilled if useful life) and Anthony Mohr's "Affirmed," where an accomplished jurist in her middle years is treating with the emotional fallout of her father, going into his final spiral, not being capable of recognizing anything but his own vision of how his children's lives should be (not altogether convincingly, I'd say about this story, but I can sympathize with the situation). Michael Del Muro gives us an account of a journalist's crisis of conscience; Tony Press of a trial lawyer's first case on her own, both effective stories. Among the poetry, I liked Kristin Roedell's narrative "Family Law" best among a good lot. As a whole, an interesting gathering of crime literature that doesn't feel so much alien as simply having a slightly different emphasis from the typical issue of a cf magazine or the usual anthology in the field.

Contents:
Bench Book by Charles Reynard 
Mother, With Child by Tony Press 
Family Law by Kristin Roedell 
Matt the Closer by Jeffrey A. Dickerson 
The Barrister by John Lambremont, Sr. 
Old Soldiers by Randall Patterson 
Pled by Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow 
Serves You Right by Jack Ewing 
Leaving the Station by Michael Del Muro 
Gone Accourting by Liz Hufford 
retainers by Joseph A. Farina 
criminal courtroom by Joseph A. Farina 
principles of sentencing (juvenile court) by Joseph A. Farina 
transubstantiation by Joseph A. Farina 
Affirmed by Anthony J. Mohr 
May it Please the Court by Leslie B. Neustadt 
Amicus, Briefly by Juliet Hubbell 
Reading the PSI by Charles Reynard 
Huntz's Law by Tom Green 
Lord Coke Unbenched by Dan Gunter

Briefly, and in October it's almost mandatory, particularly for a lifelong horrorist such as myself, to deal with something eldritch, but I've finally read the August Derleth-annotated transcript of a symposium recorded on 24 October 1963 at the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, a discussion of Lovecraft and his influence featuring a panel including Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, writer Arthur Jean Cox, Sam Russell, and Riverside Quarterly editor Leland Sapiro, along with some comments and questions from the audience. Given that Bloch and Leiber were both helped and influenced by Lovecraft early in their careers and were the two most important exemplars of how to take his model for approaching the matter of horror fiction and improving upon it, it's useful, if not as comprehensive here as one could hope, to see how they thought about that influence and their respective takes on Lovecraft's work and legacy. Bloch unsurprisingly seems most taken by the interior aspects of what Lovecraft was getting at in his best work, the questions of identity and madness and usurpation from within; Leiber, also not too surprisingly, is at least as engaged by the larger implications, philosophically and otherwise, of humanity's not terribly secure foothold in Lovecraft's universe. The notion that such non-fans of Lovecraft as Avram Davidson and Edmund Wilson had more in common with him than their experience of his work led them to believe is briefly if amusingly explored. Not as significant as some of Leiber and Bloch's other considerations of Lovecraft, but useful to read, and one's suspicions of what August Derleth made of what he was transcribing and annotating, particularly when it touches on his own involvement with Lovecraft's body of work, are mildly telling.

For more of today's books (and perhaps magazines), please see Patti Abbott's blog.