Showing posts with label Dennis Etchison. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dennis Etchison. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 17, 2024

SSW: DARK AT HEART edited by Karen and Joe R. Lansdale (Dark Harvest 1992); LORD JOHN TEN edited by Dennis Etchison (Lord John Press 1988); STALKERS edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg (Roc/New American Library 1993)




Two gray books. Or, at least, two 
gray jackets. 


Lord John Ten ed. Dennis Etchison (Lord John Press 0-935716-43-2, 1988, $25.00, 240pp, hc) Largely original anthology of 35 stories, poems, articles, and other items, celebrating the publisher's tenth anniversary.

Dark at Heart ed. Joe R. & Karen Lansdale (Dark Harvest 0-913165-64-6, Apr ’92 [Mar ’92], $21.95, 307pp, hc, cover by Peter Scanlan) An original anthology of 20 crime and suspense stories, many by writers also of fantasy and horror fiction.

And another in mostly darker tones:

Stalkers ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg (Penguin/Roc 0-451-45048-5, Dec ’90 [Nov ’90], $9.95, 386pp, tp) Reprint (Dark Harvest 1989) original anthology of 19 horror stories. This edition adds a story by Barry N. Malzberg.
  • 1 · Introduction · Ed Gorman · in Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 2 · Trapped · Dean R. Koontz · na Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 59 · Flight · John Coyne · nv Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 99 · A Day in the Life · F. Paul Wilson · nv Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 145 · Lizardman · Robert R. McCammon · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 158 · Pilots · Joe R. Lansdale & Dan Lowry · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 175 · Stalker · Ed Gorman · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 193 · Getting the Job Done · Rick Hautala · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 209 · Children of Cain · Al Sarrantonio · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 229 · A Matter of Principal [Quarry] · Max Allan Collins · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 242 · Miss December · Rex Miller · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 264 · A Matter of Firing · John Maclay · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 271 · The Sacred Fire [Newford] · Charles de Lint · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 285 · The Stalker of Souls · Edward D. Hoch · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 306 · Darwinian Facts · Barry N. Malzberg · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Penguin/Roc, 1990
  • 321 · The Hunt · Richard Laymon · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 340 · Mother Tucker · James Kisner · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 350 · Jezebel · J. N. Williamson · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 361 · What Chelsea Said · Michael Seidman · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 375 · Rivereños · Trish Janeshutz · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
































This is a trio of impressive volumes that I've been meaning to review in depth for several years, now, and perhaps with this posting, I will compel myself to get off the starting point. I hope that you're already familiar with all three, but suspect that's least likely in the case of Etchison's Lord John Ten...but they are all worth the effort to find. (I have a number of relatively ambitious multi-item reviews as yet unfinished, but several of them are at least a bit further along than this one...but not yet enough to justify the posting.)

For more of today's short-story posts, please see Patti Abbott's blog.



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Wednesday, May 31, 2023

Short Story Wednesday: Three Items (Arguably) in Three Books and a Magazine: Ethel Rosenberg's "So Take Your Diamonds With You", George Woodcock's "Raven, the Prometheus of the Indians" and A CENTURY OF HORROR (1970-1979) edited by Dennis Etchison and M. H. Greenberg

As almost always, but with more purpose than usual, I am sifting through the chaotic collection of reading material in the house, of late to help create a new office for my cohabitant's private practice. So, some old (inanimate, literary) friends are uncovered, and I am reminded of them, or look at them again. And at other items they remind me of.

First up today is not exactly a short story, but it can be read as one, as it's a gracefully-lifted excerpt from "a sort of novel" as the author or her publisher tagged it, on the cover at left, below. And has any writer used her legal name at a worse time than Ethel Rosenberg, with her first novel Go Fight City Hall (1949) and a sequel of sorts, carrying over a major character from the first book, Julius Pasternak, and his family and social circles, Uncle Julius and the Angel with Heartburn (1951).

What it is, is rather expertly-detailed mild kvetching and noodging between the Pasternaks, their sister/in-law and the adult kids involved as the elders attempt to leave for a wedding in Philadelphia from their 
apartment building in Brooklyn, only to find a number of small distractions and annoyances in the way of getting to the train station on time, not least that the landlord, that goniff, has sent in a painter to finally give the apartment a new coat, and a sensitive painter who complains of distraction no less, and the Pasternaks' niece has actually engaged a taxi for them, with the meter running and all, yet the cabbie comes up and asks for a glass of water, while offering advice, as he's a psychologist, as well. '"You know what that means, don't you?" "Yes," Julius says patiently. "It means you took a course once."' As one might expect, this is rather familiar ground all these decades later, from no end of dramatic as well as literary variations since, but amiable and well-recomplicated and still worth the look. Rosenberg signed most of her subsequent work, apparently all aimed at younger readers, Eth Clifford (the latter a middle or maiden name). That was the byline on her 1995 MWA Edgar Award shortlister, for "juvenile novel", Harvey's Mystifying Raccoon Mix Up. Best Humor Annual editors Louis Untermeyer and Ralph Shikes had their own fun in the McCarthyite tenor of the early '50s, as well.

A different sort of Raven than MWA's or Poe's comes into play with Canadian poet and anarchist scholar George Woodcock's essay/ recounting of how the Raven trickster/creator myths are embedded in the religious traditions northwestern North American nations,  in the fifth, June 1988 issue of The Raven (a link to where the issue can be read), a quarterly journal that was for some years the stablemate of the venerable UK-based anarchist newspaper Freedom.  "Raven, the Prometheus of the Indians" notes in summation "How much of all this makes Raven an appropriate mascot for an anarchist magazine? He is always, in his own way, Lucifer, concerned with bringing the light and dispelling the darkness. Whatever his motives, he is never seen on the side of the powers that be, whatever they are, but carries on a perpetual trickster's war against their pretensions." As one who loved the origin myths that Woodcock deals with in the essay when reading and hearing them in my youth, his take is elegant and a bit nostalgic.

Nostalgia of various sorts brought me, while pining a bit for my copy of Ramsey Campbell's first anthology Superhorror, and its perhaps most brilliant story and probably the most criminally overlooked in the career of its author, R. A. Lafferty, "Fog in My Throat" (also a consideration of the place of religion in our lives...and deaths)--only one relatively rare, limited-edition collection among Lafferty's includes it, and no other reprints have occurred so far I'm aware of...I managed to land on Dennis Etchison and Martin Harry Greenberg's A Century of Horror: 1970-1979, clearly meant to be the first volume of a ten-volume series, but, as with a lot of the later Greenberg projects, plagued with certain obstacles, and the only volume that appeared. Terrible cover illustration, as well. Here's the contents as detailed by ISFDB, which (like myself) tends to segregate more or less "realistic" suspense fiction from horror fiction, but inconsistently, and does so with the clumsy tag "non-genre":
--where, for example, Bradbury's "Gotcha!" (probably his best late-published story though apparently one he'd written and put aside some years before) is no more horror per se than is the Matheson or the Lumley--the Lumley being one of his best stories, far from the clumsy melding of boy's adventure and Cthulhu mythos fiction that afflicts much of his other work.  But, then, Greenberg was a good (if not always attentive) editor, and Etchison was an even better one...though "Sticks" is perhaps more Karl Edward Wagner's most popular horror novelet than his best one (some of his "Kane"-series short fiction, straddling sword and sorcery and horror better than anyone else who comes to mind except for Fritz Leiber, and more consistently, probably would've been my choice here), and the Card story is a clumsy diatribe in the form of a not particularly good story on any level, though it does succeed in being as disgusting as Card wants it to be. Most of the rest of the choices are at least reasonably arguable, if not always the best of the decade as promised. Certainly the Lafferty story cited above, from the same source anthology of originals as the Lumley, should be present...

For more of today's SSW reviews, please see Patti Abbott's blog (and Pennsylvanians and others in the Philadelphia area can see Megan Abbott tonight at 7p at the Phoenixville bookstore Reads and Company).


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Friday, May 31, 2019

FRIDAY'S "FORGOTTEN" BOOKS AND MORE: the links to the reviews: 31 May 2019


This week'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.

This week dedicated to the memories of Sandra Seamans, Dennis Etchison and Anthony Price.

 Patti Abbott: The Devil's Own Ragdoll by Mitchell Bartoy; Sandra Seamans, RIP

 Frank Babics: The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

 Brad Bigelow: My Heart for a Hostage by Robert Hillyer

 Les Blatt: The Clocks by Agatha Christie

 Joachim Boaz: The 1972 Annual World's Best SF edited by Donald A. Wollheim

 Ben Boulden: Lynched by Ed Gorman

 Brian Busby: The Phantom Freighter by "Franklin W. Dixon" (in this case Amy McFarlane)

 Bob Byrne: The Khoraja stories by Robert E. Howard and others

 Martin Edwards: Anthony Price, RIP

 Peter Enfantino: Atlas (proto-Marvel) Horror Comics: May 1952

 Will Errickson: Dennis Etchison, RIP; Carnosaur by Harry Adam Knight

 José Ignacio Escribano: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

 Curtis Evans: Melora by Mignon G. Eberhart; "How to Stop Hitler" by "Q. Patrick" (Hugh Wheeler and Richard Webb)

 Olman Feelyus: Queenpin by Megan Abbott

 Jeremy Finley: Peter's Pence by Jon Cleary

Paul Fraser: Astounding Science-Fiction, December 1943, edited by John W. Campbell, Jr.

 John Grant: The Black Book of Secrets by F. E. Higgins; The Murder of Ann Avery by Henry Kuttner (presumably with input from Catherine L. Moore)

 Aubrey Hamilton: Death and the Icebox by Linda Berry

 James Wallace Harris: Phoenix among other books by Dorothy Mills

 Rich Horton: The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank; Needle, Iceworld and short stories by "Hal Clement" (Harry C. Stubbs); Mars Crossing and short fiction by Geoffrey Landis; A Posse of Princesses and Senrid by Sherwood Smith; Matthew Hughes stories; Nina Allan stories; Threshold Shift by Eric Brown; Alec Nevala-Lee stories

 Jerry House: "The Bacteriological Detective" by Arthur B. Reeve, Cosmopolitan, February 1911, edited by C. P. Narcross; Captain Jet, May 1952, edited by Ruth Roche

 Kate Jackson: ...And Presumed Dead by Lucille Fletcher; A High Mortality of Doves by Kate Ellis

 Tracy K: Death Sends a Cable by Margaret Taylor Yates

 Colman Keane: "The Ehrengraf Fandango" by Lawrence Block (LB Publications e-chapbook, 2014)

 George Kelley: The Hugo Winners, Volumes 1 & 2, introduced by Isaac Asimov

 Joe Kenney: Room at the Bottom by J. L. Potter; Mafia Women by "Joseph Cenni" (Miles Donis)

 Rob Kitchin: A Decline in Prophets by Sulari Gentill

 B. V. Lawson: The Yellow Turban by "Charlotte Jay" (Geraldine Halls)

 Evan Lewis: Wild Times by Brian Garfield

 Steve Lewis: "Half Past Fear" by John Jakes, Super Science Stories, August 1951, edited by Ejler Jakobsson; "Woman Missing" by Helen Neilsen, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, May 1960, edited by William Manners; Star Trek: The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay comics magazine, August 2014, script by Harlan Ellison as adapted by Scott and David Tipton, illustrated by J. K. Woodward; "Persons or Things Unknown" by "Carter Dickson" (John Dickson Carr), The Sketch, Christmas 1938, edited by Bruce Ingram

 Todd Mason: The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series VII edited by Gerald W. Page

 John O'Neill: Emergence by David R. Palmer; If This Goes On, anthologies edited by Charles Neutzel and by Cat Rambo

 Matt Paust: Alligators at Night by Meg Pokrass

 Tim Powers: "Who?" by Algis Budrys, Fantastic Universe, April 1955, edited by Leo Margulies

 James Reasoner: Run the Wild River by D. L. Champion

 Richard Robinson: The Rolling Stones by Robert A. Heinlein

 Gerard Saylor: We Few: U.S. Special Forces in Vietnam by Nick Brokhausen; Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger (translated by Michael Hoffman)

Jack Seabrook and Peter Enfantino: DC War Comics: January 1975

 Victoria Silverwolf: Worlds of Tomorrow, October 1963, edited by Frederik Pohl

 Kerrie Smith: Where the Dead Lay by David Levien

 Kevin Tipple: The Splintered Paddle by Mark Troy

 "TomCat": Moorden in Maastricht by "F. van Overvoorde" (F.A. Haak-Ochsendorf)

 A. J. Wright: Through the First Gate and other work by John Craig Stewart

 Lisa Yaszek: "Created He Them" by Alice Eleanor Jones, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1955, edited by "Anthony Boucher" (William White)

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FFB: THE YEAR'S BEST HORROR STORIES, SERIES VII edited by Gerald W. Page (DAW Books 1979): Dennis Etchison memory, among others

Dennis Etchison died this past week, after a long career (and, I'm sure, a too-brief life) of good to brilliant work as a writer and editor. 

 I thought I'd take a minute to recall not quite the first story I read by him, but the first brilliant one that came to mind (the first I read was the good but slightly less effective psychodrama "The Soft Wall" in First World Fantasy Awards, edited by Gahan Wilson, where it was included as an example of the kind of fiction Whispers magazine would feature--Stuart David Schiff, editor and publisher of the little magazine of horror and fantasy, won the Special Award for Non-Professional work, not quite true but certainly Schiff wasn't making his living from Whispers). "The Pitch" leads off the seventh and last volume of The Year's Best Horror Stories that Jerry Page would edit, before handing it off to Karl Edward Wagner for the rest of the run. Such a nest of memories and connections, given how important Page's and Wagner's volumes of the series were to me, and that Page would work at TV Guide's Atlanta bureau for some years before I would work the Radnor home office for more than 17 years, and Wagner would send me a very nice letter after reading my first published story.

 "The Pitch", like "The Soft Wall", is actually not horror fiction so much as realistic, intense suspense fiction. Much of it describes the demonstration pitch made for a vegetable chopping device by the protagonist to a department store audience...and what that might lead lead to. It makes sure to be subtly unsettling from jump, deftly exploiting the contrast of the prosaic circumstances in which it is set with the not altogether wholesome drives of the accomplished pitchman and his sharp-edged product, and what, we eventually learn, set the events of the story in motion and what will happen after the story's end. Lean and understated and disturbing. 

 Like a lot of Etchison's fiction, and much of the best of what he would present in his impressive series of anthologies...one of the most atypical, and wide-ranging, will be the subject of another FFB entry here soon. 

 The rest of this volume (or, for that matter, the 1978 Whispers issue pictured above which first ran "The Pitch") is full of impressive work as well, which I shall re-read and review in greater detail later on:
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