SSW: Robert Bloch: "The Movie People" THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, (F&SF), October 1969, edited by Edward Ferman; Jorge Luis Borges: "The Gospel According to Mark" in translation in THE NEW YORKER, 23 October 1971, edited by William Shawn; Marcelle Dubé: "Sky Lanterns" THE SATURDAY EVENING POST, November/December 2024, edited by Patrick Perry; Carl Jacobi: "Phantom Brass" RAILROAD STORIES, August 1934 (editor uncredited); Joyce Carol Oates: "The Maker of Parables" KENYON REVIEW, Spring 1990, edited by David H. Lynn; Wilma Shore: "A Bulletin from the Trustees of the Institute for Advanced Research at Marmouth, Massachusetts" F&SF, August 1964, edited by Avram Davidson: Short Story Wednesday

Bloch: can be read gratis from the paperback edition of his collection Cold Chills at this site.

Borges: can be read gratis at this teacher's aid site, from the US Bantam paperback edition of the Borges collection Dr. Brodie's Report (as translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in consultation with Borges); originally in the newspaper La Nación, 2 August 1970

Dubé; can be read gratis at The Saturday Evening Post site.

Jacobi: can be read gratis online in his collection Revelations in Black at this link.

Oates: can be read online at the Kenyon Review site (free account access).

Shore: can be read gratis from the online posting of Robert Silverberg's anthology Voyagers in Time

Robert Bloch's "The Movie People" (first published in the issue above and very widely reprinted) is one of his best-remembered late '60s stories, and with good reason...Bloch, who was a film fan from his childhood in the silent era, who grew up to be the man who wrote the novel Psycho among much else in prose (including a nonfiction account of "H. H. Holmes"/"Herman W. Mudgett" decades before The Devil in the White City), as well as becoming a notable screenwriter and, before that, a radio scripter, posits a sort of afterlife in film, in a charming manner that I think I remember being filmed, but I don't see noted here. 

One of the better later Borges stories, and better read this way than in the clumsy translations by Andrew Hurley that are foisted on us these years by Penguin Books, an ironic not-quite-uncanny tale of perhaps too much piety, "The Gospel According to St. Mark" is a well-turned kind of philosophical crime fiction. one of the kinds of work, along with straightforward if cosmic fantasies and mythic gaucho westerns, that Borges loved to write. 

Marcel Dubé is one of only two living writers cited in this week's installment, with a story, "Sky Lanterns" in a recent issue of The Saturday Evening Post, not hardly weekly any longer, but too easy to forget as a source of magazine fiction (and income for writers). A deft tale of regret and lifelong debt, by a writer who usually publishes more straightforward fantasy and crime fiction

Carl Jacobi is best-remembered these years for his contributions to Weird Tales, the hugely influential horror and fantasy fiction magazine, but he was a veteran writer before he started publishing there, and inspiring younger writers, such as Bloch. This one's a bit of historical horror, set in the pre-radio days when railroads depended on telegraph operators for traffic control warnings. I hadn't reread Jacobi for decades, before George Kelley's recent piece on his most famous collection.

The other writer still with us is Joyce Carol Oates, whose highlighted contribution is a vignette verging on a parable, a fantasy that reminds me far too much of me, if I had achieved a bit more in these directions...I suspect it reminds Oates of herself in some senses as well.

While our last selection for this week is by Wilma Shore, of whom I've written before here, with her first story of two for F&SF, toward the end of an impressive and diverse career writing in a number of venues, not least the slick women's magazines of the '40s through the '60s, as well as leftist magazines and more than one volume of Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Awards annuals...this was the first and for many years the last story by her I was to read, a charming and funny time travel tale of sorts. I read it when I was very young, in a battered copy of Robert Silverberg's anthology for young readers, Voyagers in Time--a copy my father might've picked up out of a shady bookdealer's collection of stripped paperbacks (their front covers sent back for store credit) in Boston, where he picked up a number of earliest '70s paperbacks for a dime each on his way home for the office...this one definitely caught my eye, and I've been able to thank Silverberg for this collection (though I'm not sure if I've ever mentioned to him that his fine time travel novel Hawksbill Station was the first adult sf novel I read by a living writer--as opposed to H. G. Wells, Mary Shelley or Edward Bellamy).

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's short stories reviews.