Wednesday, January 20, 2021

Short Story Wednesday: stories from ROD SERLING'S NIGHT GALLERY READER edited by Carol Serling, Martin H. Greenberg & Charles G. Waugh (Dembner, 1987)

Some of the stories...the whole volume to follow...


the Contento/Stephensen-Payne/Locus index:

Rod Serling’s Night Gallery Reader ed. Carol Serling, Martin H. Greenberg & Charles G. Waugh (Dembner 0-934878-93-5, Dec ’87 [Nov ’87], $15.95, 326pp, hc) Anthology of 18 stories that were adapted as Night Gallery tv episodes.
  • ix · Introduction · Carol Serling · in
  • 1 · The Escape Route · Rod Serling · na The Season to be Wary, Little Brown: Boston, 1967
  • 71 · The Dead Man · Fritz Leiber · nv Weird Tales Nov ’50
  • 104 · The Little Black Bag · C. M. Kornbluth · nv Astounding Jul ’50
  • 138 · The House · André Maurois · vi Harper’s Jun ’31
  • 141 · The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes · Margaret St. Clair · ss Maclean’s, 1950
  • 152 · The Academy · David Ely · ss Playboy Jun ’65
  • 163 · The Devil Is Not Mocked · Manly Wade Wellman · ss Unknown Jun ’43
  • 171 · Brenda · Margaret St. Clair · ss Weird Tales Mar ’54
  • 184 · Big Surprise [“What Was in the Box?”] · Richard Matheson · ss EQMM Apr ’59
  • 191 · House—with Ghost · August Derleth · ss Lonesome Places, Arkham: Sauk City, WI, 1962
  • 199 · The Dark Boy · August Derleth · ss F&SF Feb ’57
  • 215 · Pickman’s Model · H. P. Lovecraft · ss Weird Tales Oct ’27
  • 230 · Cool Air · H. P. Lovecraft · ss Tales of Magic and Mystery Mar ’28; reprinted in Weird Tales Sep ’39
  • 240 · Sorworth Place [“Old Place of Sorworth”;  Ralph Bain] · Russell Kirk · nv London Mystery Magazine #14 ’52
  • 261 · The Return of the Sorcerer · Clark Ashton Smith · ss Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror Sep ’31
  • 279 · The Girl with the Hungry Eyes · Fritz Leiber · ss The Girl With the Hungry Eyes, ed. Donald A. Wollheim, Avon, 1949
  • 297 · The Horsehair Trunk · Davis Grubb · ss Colliers May 25 ’46; ; as “The Secret Darkness”, EQMM Oct ’56
  • 308 · The Ring with the Velvet Ropes · Edward D. Hoch · ss With Malice Toward All, ed. Robert L. Fish, Putnam, 1968
the 1990 Knightsbridge paperback edition (courtesy Andy Austin):

Last Wednesday, I cited Rod Serling's novella "The Escape Route" and its failure as prose (even if it would serve, and probably did, as an acceptable "treatment" to get a script greenlit)...some well-turned dialog, not much else (and the script as shot made for a decent segment of the Night Gallery pilot film...another novella from the same Serling collection was also adapted as the second and weakest of the three stories, directed by Steven Spielberg in a rather painfully "arty" fashion and, like most Spielberg work, wildly overpraised, even giving credit for it being his first professional effort). So, as we build this book's review piecemeal, let's turn to some rather better work, by rather better writers of prose (and at least one of them a playwright who did rather better work at least in fantasticated scripting). 

"The Little Black Bag" is Cyril Kornbluth at his cynical best, the story of his also selected by a poll of the Science Fiction Writers of America for the first volume of their The Science Fiction Hall of Fame (though Kornbluth wrote several books' worth of short fiction in the same league), and as adapted for Night Gallery slightly watered down (such as having the secondary character become a middle-aged man rather than a young woman, perhaps to allow for casting a veteran actor, but even more likely to keep from offending those who would find the character's selfishness easier to take from a somewhat weatherbeaten male). A down and out, homeless and alcoholic ex-doctor comes across a bag of medical instruments more or less accidentally sent back in time from the future...and he and his default assistant find themselves able to do very good things...but the assistant decides the potential for profit should be exploited, with both tragic and ironic consequences.

"The House" is a deft and resonant if somewhat one-punch anecdote of a story; as a vignette, this is enough. I should re-subscribe to Harper's for several reasons, not least to get access to their archive and discover, perhaps, who translated this fine bit of horror (I first read it in Hal Cantor's Ghosts and Things, a Berkley Books anthology that was everywhere one might turn in the '60s and '70s, and one of the two first adult horror anthologies I read at a tender age).

David Ely's "The Academy" is another essentially one-punch story, a bit longer than a typical vignette but not Too much so, and so nicely worked out that even an adult reader who might see the reveal coming might simply continue to enjoy the ride. A suspense story of the disquieting rather than pulse-pounding sort...and even though there's no supernatural element to it, it's usually been reprinted in horror anthologies, such as Ray Russell's The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural, where I first read it. Ely was usually good for this kind of disquiet, as in his near-future sf novel Seconds...very well filmed. For that matter, the NG adaptation of  "The Academy" is only a bit heavy-handed, and Bill Bixby did a very good job as the protagonist.

"The Girl with the Hungry Eyes" is one of the more brilliant of the early stories of the frequently brilliant Fritz Leiber, and it's a severe pity both the Leiber adaptations for Night Gallery were rather half-assed. (Oddly enough, the Lovecraft adaptations were the best I've seen that had been produced up till then, though that wasn't too tough, and they not matched for another decade or so.) A strange sort of psychic vampirism is exploited by both the "girl" (1949 will out) model and the photographer and sponsors  employing them. Another disquieting story, as usually the case with the best of Leiber's horror fiction, and there's no disputing the supernatural element in this one. I might've first read it in the 1978 revised edition of the early Leiber collection Night's Black Agents...

More to come from this volume...and a related one...






Wednesday, January 13, 2021

SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: Doris Pitkin Buck: "Why They Mobbed the White House"; Kate Wilhelm: "The Planners" (ORBIT 3, edited by Damon Knight, G. P. Putnam 1968); Donald Barthelme: "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning"; Leonard Michaels: "Crossbones" (NEW AMERICAN REVIEW #3, edited by Theodore Solotaroff, Signet/New American Library 1968); Rod Serling: "The Escape Route" ('TIS THE SEASON TO BE WARY by Serling, Little, Brown 1967)

 

Doris Pitkin Buck is probably the most obscure writer, these years, in the third volume of Damon Knight's new-fiction anthology series Orbit...a former actor and eventually on the English faculty at Ohio State, she was among the earliest of the women writers recruited as contributors by Anthony Boucher and Mick McComas at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and made a name for herself as much for her light verse  as her fiction for that magazine and elsewhere. I knew her granddaughter Laurel Buck slightly, when we were students at the University of Hawaii, and LB recalled DPB gathering the kids and letting them know, I hope tongue in cheek, that the flying saucers/UFOs were actually alien visitors come to help us out..."Why They Mobbed the White House" is a jovial story (distinct from certain recent events), taking the tack of the newly complex tax forms of the mid-'60s, and the increasing use of computers at the IRS and elsewhere, as jumping-off point for something a bit gentler than the typical "comic inferno" sf stories associated with Galaxy magazine and other markets in the '50s and '60s; told as a DC tour-guide's patter, it details how a certain couple found their way into the White House on the platform of having computers actually fill in rather than simply check tax forms. 

Kate Wilhelm's "The Planners" (which w0n the 1969 Nebula Award for best short story) digs a bit deeper and reads a bit heavier, while demonstrating a darker sort of wit. The planners in question include both biochemists and psychologists who use monkeys and apes (the latter including humans) as their test subjects, in seeing how injections of strains of RNA into their bodies enable...and disable...intellectual abilities...and eventually some of the subjects become planners as well. The protagonist, one of the primary researchers and a psychologist, is also consistently suffering...if that's the right word...a series of hallucinations that interact with his actual life, some seemingly simply reveries of sexual dalliance with various women, others rather more extended fantasias...he seems most grounded when exploring the nature of his relatively unhappy marriage.  The narrative slides through the various sorts of experience he has without too many indicators as to where he is departing from reality, but Wilhelm nonetheless makes it fairly clear where she wants to indicate consensus reality in the story, and where not. This story, even more than the Buck story, is indicative of the kind of literary grace the Orbit series would become famous for in its early years, in its relative departure from "realistic" prose form part of what had a number of more conservative writers and readers grumbling over its incomprehensibility...and a Nebula Awards ballot driven by the mutual admiration of a "Milford Mafia" (after the Milford Writer's Conferences Wilhelm and Knight, a married couple, were hosting by the latter '60s). 

Leonard Michaels also deals with a certain retreat from the reality of his characters', a tempestuous romantic couple's, situation, in the vignette "Crossbones"...
which might well've been inspired at least in part by his troubled first marriage, to the eventually suicidal Sylvia Bloch (Michaels is quoted in one online source as referring to her seeming at times "like a madwoman imitating a college student")...the first sentence in this very short story is a long paragraph (a man after my own heart thus). There are about seven or possibly ten sentences in the entirety, about the surreal abuse they subject each other to, and about the probable progress of the woman's father (possibly) on his machismic way over for a visit.  It's funnier if one isn't as aware of Bloch's eventual fate.

Sad fate also plays a role in "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning", but mostly in the string of events that led, not too long after publication, to RFK's death and, a couple of years later, to Edward Kennedy's near drowning (and not so near for Ms. Kopechne). Donald Barthelme's story apparently would've been accepted by William Shawn at The New Yorker if Barthelme was willing to change the title-character's name to something fictional, but Barthelme simply took it back and sold it to New American Review instead...I'd suggest correctly, seeing that this is, essentially, a piece of parodic fiction about how "sophisticated" magazine profiles of (particularly) political figures of RFK's position are all too often inane examples of marketing, hoping to convince the incautious or uninformed reader that every action on the part of their subject is heroic, every utterance sagacious (the one non-fictional anecdote in this "profile" occurred at a gallery, where RFK made a condescending joke about a certain painting, in the presence of the artist; Barthelme, a visual arts museum curator and journalist previous to his fiction-writing, wasn't favorably impressed). 

So...what all four of these stories are about, to one degree or another, is delusion, of the self and others. to some extent voluntarily accepted but mostly not so much. Can't imagine how they might've seemed appropriate to the times, nor that they might've found their way to reasonably avant-garde magazines in book form in 1968.






















The fifth story, Rod Serling's "The Escape Route", was one of the three newly-published novellas in his first (legitimate, not ghost-written) collection, The Season to be Wary, in 1967. Serling hoped to launch a career as a novelist, apparently (his brother, Robert Serling, had one, after all), and it, too, is about self-delusion...the fugitive concentration-camp second-in-command's delusions about his service to the Nazi regime, and his relative lack of self-delusion about his circumstances as the Nazi hunters of the 1960s are after him, in his unpleasant circumstances in Buenos Aires. Also about Serling's self-delusion that this novella (I've managed to get 20 pages in, about a third of the way through, as it was reprinted in Rod Serling's Night Gallery Reader, edited by widow Carol Serling, RS's old campus colleague Charles Waugh, and Waugh's typical editing partner Martin H. Greenberg; this trio presumably decided this novella was the least worst of the three. Sadly, while "The Escape Route" made for a decent if unsurprising segment of the Night Gallery pilot film (as I remember it from some 45 years ago), the prose of the novella can be described as passable treatment writing...clumsy, overstated, using poor word choices in the narrative passages...while the dialog, given Serling was not a novice as a playwright, isn't too shabby at all, and at times has a nice snap to it--when the preaching isn't getting a bit thick...another Serling flaw).

If not for the hour, or the nature of this day, I'd probably transcribe the first paragraph of the story...perhaps tomorrow...

For more Short Story Wednesday reviews, please see Patti Abbott's blog.  



Saturday, January 9, 2021

FRIDAY'S "FORGOTTEN" BOOKS AND MORE: the links to the reviews and related texts: 23 October 2020


This long-delayed Late October's books and more, unfairly (or sometimes fairly) neglected, or simply those the reviewers below think you might find of some interest (or, infrequently, you should be warned away from); certainly, most weeks we have a few not at all forgotten titles...if I've missed your review or someone else's, please let me know in comments.

Patricia Abbott: The End of Everything by Megan Abbott; "Doctor Jack O' Lantern" by Richard Yates (1954 ?Charm; collected in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, 1962) and Short Story Wednesday links (read the Yates story here)

Barry Alfonso: The Grandmothers by Glenway Westcott

Mark Baker: Hot Enough to Kill by Paula Boyd

Brad Bigelow: The Hiding Place by Robert Shaw

Les Blatt: The Complete Stories by Dorothy L. Sayers; The Glimpses of the Moon by "Edmund Crispin" (Robert B. Montgomery)

Joachim Boaz: The Wind from Nowhere by J. G. Ballard

Joe Brosnan: Beat Not the Bones by Charlotte Jay

Brian Busby: Armand Durand: or, A Promise Fulfilled by Rosanna Eleanor Leprobon (translated by J.-A. Genaud)

Doug Cohen: Realms of Fantasy, December 1996, edited by Shawna McCarthy

Liz Dexter: A Bird in the Bush by Stephen Moss

Michael Dirda: New small press horror anthologies and collections for All Hallows...

Scott Edelman: Robert Shearman

Martin Edwards: No Coffin for the Grave by Clayton Rawson; Jill Patton Walsh

Peter Enfantino and Jack Seabrook: 1980s Batman comics: January 1981

Will Errickson: "Chimney" by Ramsey Campbell (first in Whispers edited by Stuart David Schiff, the 1977 first Doubleday anthology in the series that ran more or less parallel with the magazine for a number of years); "The Answer Tree" by Steven R. Boyett (Silver Scream edited by David J. Schow)

José Ignacio Escribano: The Plague Court Murders by "Carter Dickson" (John Dickson Carr)

Curtis Evans: Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories They Wouldn't Let Me Do On TV (ghost-)edited by Robert Arthur (with assistance from sponsors and NBC censors) and Friday Fright Night links; The Lake of Darkness by Ruth Rendell and Friday Fright Night links 

"Olman Feelyus": The Wooden Horse by Eric Williams; Hunting the Fairies by Compton Mackenzie

Paul Fraser: New Writings in SF: 6 edited by E. J. Carnell

Christopher Fulbright: the Zebra Books horror line

Cullen Gallagher: Razorback by Peter Brennan; Dead Man's Tide by "W. M. Richards" (Gunard Hjerstedt, novel aka It's a Sin to Kill as by "Day Keene"); We Are the Dead: Day Keene in the Detective Pulps, Volume 2 by "Day Keene" (still Hjerstedt!)

Aubrey Hamilton: Away Went the Little Fish by Margot Bennett; Practice to Deceive by David Housewright

Bev Hankins: Gorgeous Ghoul Murder Case by Dwight Babcock and other Halloween-themed titles

Grady Hendrix: Familiar Spirit and Gabriel by Lisa Tuttle

Rich Horton: Claremont Tales II and some short fiction by Richard A. Lupoff; Declare by Tim Powers; Chelsea by "Nancy Fitzgerald" (Waverly Fitzgerald); Engaging the Enemy by Elizabeth Moon

Jerry House: The Diamond Lens and Other Stories by Fitz-James O'Brien; "The Gods and Ritter Tanhuser" by "Vernon Lee" (Violet Paget); Freelance, August/September 1946, written by Ted McCall and drawn by Ed Furness

Kate Jackson: Blood from a Stone by Ruth Sawtell Wallis; Are You a Heroine in Jeopardy? quiz

Tracy K: A Trick of the Light by Louise Penny; Clarkesworld: Year 5 edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace

Colman Keene: Gun in Cheek by Bill Pronzini; The Nobody by Tom Piccirilli

George Kelley: Bourbon Street/Hot Cargo by "G. H. Otis" (Otis Hemingway Gaylord)

Joe Kenney: The Rose by Leonore Fleischer; Kane's War #4: Crackdown by "Nick Stone"

Margot Kinberg: artistic desire vs. pragmatism 

Rob Kitchin: Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson

Karen Langley: Penguin Modern Poets #8 by Edwin Brock, Geoffrey Hill and Stevie Smith; The Gigolo by Françoise Sagan (translated by Joanna Kilmartin); Glittering City by Cyprian Ekwensi

B. V. Lawson: Good Cop, Bad Cop by Barbara D'Amato 

Xavier Lechard: The Mystery of the Grip of Death by Jacques Futrelle; The Magic Casket by R. Austin Freeman

Des/D. F. Lewis: Powers and Presences by John Howard and Mark Valentine

Evan Lewis: "Lady Luck" by Dick French (script) and Chuck Mazoujian (art), The Spirit, 7 July 1940;  "The Girl with the Silver Eyes" by Dashiell Hammett (The Black Mask, June 1924) as serialized in the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph (December 1936) and advertised in the Allentown Morning Call (September 1938)

Steve Lewis: "Fixing Hanover" by Jeff VanderMeer (first in Extraordinary Engines, edited by Nick Gevers); Decoys by Richard Hoyt; "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" adapted from the story by H. P. Lovecraft by Steven Philip Jones and Octavio Cariello, from Lovecraft in Full Color, March 1992

Library of America: "Kerfol" by Edith Wharton, Scribner's Magazine, March 1916, edited by Robert Bridges; "The Masque of the Red Death" by Edgar Allan Poe, Graham's Lady's and Gentlemen's Magazine, May 1842, edited by Poe; "The Black Dog" by Stephen Crane, The New York Tribune, 24 July 1892

Richard Lupoff: World Without Women by "Day Keene" and Leonard Pruyn; on Bill Crider; What If? Volume 3, edited by Richard Lupoff

Richard Lupoff, Richard Wolinsky and Lawrence Davidson: Walter Tevis

John Miller: Weird Tales, May 1923, edited by Edwin Baird

Lisa Morton and Leslie Klinger: "Marsyas in Flanders" by "Vernon Lee" (Violet Paget) (first? in For Maurice: Five Unlikely Stories)

Jess Nevins: the best science fiction of 1889

John F. Norris: The Half Pint Flask by DuBose Heyward

Jim Noy: The African Poison Murders by Elspeth Huxley

Ray O'Leary: The Boy in the Vestibule by Katherine Hall Page

Paperback Warrior: Solomon's Vineyard by Jonathan Latimer; A Piece of This Country by Thomas Taylor; Hatch's Island by Don Merritt; Satan Takes the Helm by Calvin Clements

Moira Redmond: "Casting the Runes" by M. R. James (first in More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, 1911)

Jason Steger: All That I Am by Anna Funder

G. W. Thomas: Manly Wade Wellman

Kevin Tipple: Inhuman Condition: Mystery and Suspense Fiction by Kate Thornton

David Vineyard: I, Lucifer by Peter O'Donnell

Tuesday, January 5, 2021

TAKE THIS HAMMER with James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, Janet Flanner and "Ross Macdonald" and others on THE WRITER IN AMERICA, and producer/director/editor/interviewer Richard O. Moore



                         James Baldwin in Take This Hammer

THE WRITER IN AMERICA series producer/director/editor/interviewer Richard O. Moore:


mostly discussing his 1963 National Educational Television (NET) documentary 
TAKE THIS HAMMER (based on a tour of 1963 African-American San Francisco by James Baldwin);


broadcast cut: https://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-512-2r3nv9b09w  first aired on February 4th 1964.

Other episodes in the series IMDb is aware of:
Season 1: Janet Flanner
Robert Duncan (IMDb has the wrong copy attached to this record)
Season 3Wright Morris
Season 4: John Gardner
Ross Macdonald (misspelled at IMDb)
--see below and at bottom of post for links to archived video online.

Toni Morrison on The Writer in America (sadly, Google, as owner of Blogspot and YouTube, currently at least makes it difficult to embed any video not from, you guessed it, YouTube).

Janet Flanner on The Writer in America and five more episodes linked below/at bottom of post (so far...).


Millar/"Macdonald" and Welty

On Tue, Jan 5, 2021 Paul DiFilippo noted:

 Tiny URL:


Current direct YouTube link to the Macdonald episode (as with all these episodes as currently archived, damage to the source film or perhaps video distorts the Duke Ellington Orchestra score, alas): 

Further episodes of The Writer in America (courtesy Tony Baer):