Showing posts with label Friday Fright Night. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Friday Fright Night. Show all posts

Friday, October 23, 2020

FFM (Friday's "Forgotten" Magazines): May 1960 Horror and Fantasy Fiction Magazines: F&SF, FANTASTIC, SHOCK, FEAR!, SCIENCE FANTASY (April), FANTASTIC UNIVERSE (March), MACABRE (Summer)--Friday Fright Night

Some newsstand fantasy and horror (and sf and suspense fiction) in Spring of 1960:












Macabre, Summer 1960 
Price: $0.40
Pages: 28

So...why May 1960 issues?

Well, this was one of the rare instances in which two newsstand horror-fiction magazines were launched with the same cover date...and the same lack of capitalization. Both Shock and Fear! were to last only briefly, three issues for Shock, two issues for Fear!...Winston Publications launched Keyhole Mystery Magazine at the same time, and with the same editor (though Dan Roberts didn't hide behind a Frankenstein's behemoth and an intelligent spider for the crime-fiction magazine--cutesy editorial fictions rarely help) and many of the same contributors, managed three issues before folding. Fear! was the product of Great American Publications, which had bought King-Size Publications' two fiction magazines (The Saint Mystery Magazine and Fantastic Universe--the US edition of the British New Worlds was launched with the March 1960 issue perhaps in part to make up for the folding of FU) and then added a small slew of other fiction magazines in an excess of enthusiasm, or at very least optimism...which overextension apparently contributed to Great American's crashing and burning by the end of 1960...they had folded Fantastic Universe, after an 8-year run, after beginning but never continuing the serialization of Fredric Brown's horror-adjacent sf novel The Mind Thing, and offering an uncredited translation of the first Jorge Luis Borges story to appear in an English-language fantasy magazine, in March (meaning it probably was still sitting on a few newsstands, at least, by the time the others here were issued).  The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF), Fantastic and the UK's Science Fantasy (the more fantasy and horror-receptive stablemate of New Worlds) would continue apace for some years, as would Joseph Payne Brennan's modest little magazine, the most prominent of those devoted to publishing weird fiction and poetry in 1960, Macabre.  

F&SF always included some horror in its mix, as did Fantastic, Fantastic Universe and Science Fantasy also...F&SF's first mooted title was Fantasy and Terror, though that was not seen as a particularly easy sell in the immediate postwar years, despite the continuing popularity of horror fiction and horror drama on radio and to some extent in film; the first issue, as edited by founders "Anthony Boucher" (William White) and J. Francis McComas, was titled simply The Magazine of Fantasy when released in 1949, and the current title (it's the only magazine in our array here still publishing, though the most recent revival of Fantastic folded only a few years ago) came with the second issue, as sf magazines had already established that they had a receptive self-conscious audience (while horror and fantasy readers were less likely to see themselves that way until the attempts to market to them began began consistently succeeding in the 1970s and '80s). Fantastic (founded in 1952), Fantastic Universe (in 1953) and Science Fantasy (established as a professional magazine under that title in 1950) all were ready from the start to announce their openness to sf...FU almost to a ridiculous extent, though in a sense it has perhaps the most cheerful and optimistic title of any professional fantasy/sf magazine so far (and in moments of anger, the initials work).

As noted, Shock was the stablemate of a crime-fiction magazine, most of Fear!'s freshet of stablemates were crime-fiction as well (and a couple of those were tv-series-tie-in magazines, 77 Sunset Strip and Tightrope, which mixed in non-series-related stories), and F&SF was seen as a fantasticated offshoot, in most ways, of its original stablemate Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine; the relation of The Saint Detective Magazine and Fantastic Universe was in imitation of F&SF and EQMM. Fantastic, while its first two editors were at least as much interested in crime fiction as speculative, was for its initial 1952-80 run the consistent partner of the sf magazine Amazing, much as Science Fantasy was of New Worlds.  Brennan's little magazine was launched in 1957, as an attempt to provide a focus for those hoping to see a revival of Weird Tales magazine, which had folded in 1954, with Brennan as one of its last major "discoveries" (he had published more widely as a poet than a fiction writer, though had published a number of western stories, before WT in its last years published, most famously, such short horror fiction of his as "Slime" and "The Calamander Chest").

That said, it's perhaps also a mark of the times that led their publishers to try to launch horror/suspense magazines...a few publishers, particularly Ballantine Books, were starting up horror lines, however tentatively (and some of the crime-fiction book lines were showing an increasing willingness to dip back into at least borderline horror, tagging some titles as "novels of menace" and the like); the increasing embrace of horror hosts on television film packages, local and syndicated, seemed to be embraced by the culture at large in a way that horror comics had not been, even though they both had their roots in radio horror and suspense hosts--on series which in their turn had inspired some short-lived magazines in the 1950s, the eclectic Suspense and The Mysterious Traveler, and the later and somewhat more affectionately than respectfully remembered Tales of the Unanticipated. Television dramatic anthologies touched on horror and sometimes jumped in with both feet (following in the footsteps of such radio series transplants as Suspense and Lights Out), and odd hybrids such as Alcoa Presents/One Step Beyond arose, and then the first long-term success in US fantasticated tv drama anthologies, The Twilight Zone, beginning in 1959. In the UK, such writers as Nigel Kneale were offering wildly popular drama dancing on the line between sf and horror. And British horror films, from Hammer and other studios, were doing well in the States, as were some rather more sophisticated horror and suspense films than the low-budget monster movies that had flooded in with the advent of drive-ins and lots of teens with spending money. Such borderline horror as Psycho couldn't've have hurt the sales pitches for horror/borderline horror magazines to their publishers and distributors. 

All that said--what of the stories (and nonfiction features)? One thing that's hard to miss is how each of the magazines offers reprints--Shock almost to a fault, and the minor fiddling with titles of reprints in that issue seems almost as if they're hoping you won't recall those titles--seven out of 13 stories are good to excellent reprints, but some are definitely going to be familiar to most readers of horror--and if the magazine was aimed at kids (as the editorial fiction cuteness suggests), Theodore Sturgeon's "Bianca's Hands" probably wasn't going to be one of those reprints (though this is its first US magazine appearance, after beating a Graham Greene story in a contest in the UK magazine Argosy--after having appeared in at least a Groff Conklin horror anthology and Sturgeon's second, and horr0r-heavy and brilliant, collection). Such originals as Avram Davidson's "The Tenant" are nothing to be ashamed of, either. (The cover story in the third issue of Shock is Robert Bloch's brilliant suspense piece "The Final Performance", a new story--which, of course, editor Roberts presented as "Final Performance".) The least mining the past we see is in the Macabre issue, apparently...I haven't found a copy to read, so I don't know if Brennan's own H. P. Lovecraft essay builds on his nonfiction about HPL he'd published in the '50s; though it's amusing to note that this is certainly HPL month for nonfiction pieces, between Damon Knight's brief dismissal of how Lovecraft avoided overexposing his monstrous presences definitely to a fault and Sam Moskowitz's typically clumsy historical/critical profile; Brennan's is probably more adeptly written, and it would be interesting to see if it's more generally critical than Moskowitz chose to be.  In the Science Fantasy issue, the reprint is the similar Moskowitz essay about A. Merritt, which series ran on a several-month delay from their original appearances in Fantastic. Accompanying the essay in Fantastic is a reprint, from the very early and fairly elaborate 1935 fanzine Fantasy Magazine issue in which two quintets of writers were requested to write round-robin stories with the title "The Challenge from Beyond"--one group of five asked to take a science-fictional approach, the other, Weird Tales stars all save A. Merritt who was more an even earlier big draw in the likes of the US Argosy and All-Story magazines, to collaborate on a Cthulhu horror story. So, Catherine L. Moore (my favorite of this five), Abraham Merritt, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Frank Belknap Long fell to and produced the story reprinted here. (You are invited to imagine the prices copies of this issue of the 1935 magazine go for when made available.) 

Fear! dusts off a Wilkie Collins story from 1874, albeit one with a complex history; Fantastic Universe's only "true" reprint appears to be an Israeli news story (polymath editor H. S. Santesson might not've translated the Borges story, collected in Spanish as well as English in the versions of The Universal History of Infamy, as he refers in his editorial to Borges as a Mexican, rather than Argentine, writer...but perhaps it was a momentary slip). F&SF, as does Shock, reprints a John Collier story, only a relatively new 1956 item from The New Yorker, rather than a chestnut originally from Harper's in 1931 in the latter case; the F&SF issue also reprints a Joseph Hansen poem from Harper's, from the previous year. Shock reprints its Anthony Boucher story from F&SF in 1954; F&SF would eventually return the favor, reprinting Davidson's "The Tenant" a decade later, in 1971. 

And, Fantastic and F&SF in these issues offer impressive new stories by Fritz Leiber, one each in his most sustained series: a Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story, "When the Sea King's Away" in the Fantastic issue, and a Change War story in the F&SF, "The Oldest Soldier"...

More to come. (It's been a surprisingly and suddenly busy two days.) Perhaps some pruning of the above, definitely some digging in with the horror fiction offered by each...

[late bulletin--alas, no, but a Very belated correction of one of my typos...]








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Saturday, October 17, 2020

FRIDAY'S "FORGOTTEN" BOOKS AND MORE: the links to reviews and related texts: 16 October 2020 (including Short Story Wednesday, #1956Club and Friday Fright Night entries)

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.


Patricia Abbott: The Expendable Man by Dorothy B. Hughes; "The Midnight Zone" by Lauren Grof, The New Yorker, 23 May 2016, edited by David Remnick, and Short Story Wednesday links

Frank Babics: Ghost Story by Peter Straub

Mark Baker: R is for Ricochet by Sue Grafton

Paul Barnett/"John Grant": The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware

Brad Bigelow: This Little Hand by Pamela Kellino

Les Blatt: The French Powder Mystery by "Ellery Queen" (Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee)

Joachim Boaz: Doctor Rat by William Kotzwinkle

Brian Busby: the novels of Frances S. Wees

Larry Clow: Before the Fall by Noah Hawley

Douglas Cohen: Realms of Fantasy, October 1996, edited by Shawna McCarthy

Liz Dexter: 666 Charing Cross Road by Paul Magrs; The Amir Sisters Trilogy by Nadiya Hussein

Scott Edelman: Geoffrey Landis and Yoji Kondo

Martin Edwards: Deadly Hall by John Dickson Carr

Peter Enfantino and Jack Seabrook: Warren horror comics, July/August 1973

Barry Ergang: Fields for President by W. C. Fields 

Will Errickson: "Blood Son" by Richard Matheson, Imagination: Stories of Science and Fantasy, April 1951, edited by William Hamling (WE's Favorite Horror Stories series)

José Ignacio Escribano: "The Theme of  the Traitor and the Hero" by Jorge Luis Borges, revista Sur ("South" magazine), February 1944, revised version included in Ficciones, 1956; translated by Anthony Kerrigan for Ficciones, Grove Press 1962; "Footprints in the Jungle" by W. Somerset Maugham, Cosmopolitan, January 1927, edited by Ray Long

Curtis Evans: The Lake of Darkness by Ruth Rendell and Friday Fright Night links

"Olman Feelyus": The Chocolate Cobweb by Charlotte Armstrong; The Arena by "William Haggard" (Richard Clayton)

Paul Fraser: New Writings in SF 23, edited by Kenneth Bulmer

Cullen Gallagher: Strange Witness and League of the Grateful Dead and Other Stories by "Day Keene" (Gunar Hjerstedt)

Aubrey Hamilton: Not All Tarts are Apple by Pip Granger; The Rage by Gene Kerrigan

Bev Hankins: Murder on the Eiffel Tower by "Claude Izner" (Liliane Korb and Laurence Lefevre); Shadow on the Wall by H. C. Bailey; Talking About Detective Fiction by P. D. James

Lesa Heseltine: Hiding the Past by Nathan Dylan Goodman

Rich Horton: stories of Marie Brennan; Caitlan R. Kiernan stories; Bryce Walton stories; Leviathan by Scott Westerfield

Jerry House: Death of a Flack by Henry Kane; The Cocktail Waitress by James M. Cain (as edited by Charles Ardai); "Who Wants a Green Bottle?" by "Tod Robbins" (Clarence Robbins); All-Story Weekly, 21 December 1918, edited by Robert H. Davis; Tom Corbett's Wonder Book of Space by Marcia Martin (illustrated by Frank Vaughn)

Kate Jackson: Too Many Bones by Ruth Sawtell Wallis; The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie

Tracy K: A Necessary End by Peter Robinson; "The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb" by Agatha Christie, The Sketch, 26 September 1923, edited by Bruce Ingram

Colman Keane: The Hardest Hit by Frank Scalise; Anything Short of Murder by Tony Piazza

George Kelley: The Tindalos Asset by Caitlin R. Kiernan; Author's Choice Monthly Issue 11 by Ron Goulart; The Osiris Ritual by George Mann

Mark R. Kelly: Rogue Moon (aka The Death Machine) by Algis Budrys

Joe Kenney: Triple Platinum by Stephen Holden; The Incredible Hulk: Stalker from the Stars by Len Wein, Marv Wolfman and "Joseph Silva" (Ron Goulart)

Margot Kinberg: notable short fiction by Arthur Conan Doyle, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edgar Allan Poe, Fredric Brown, Patricia Abbott, Paul Thomas

Rob Kitchin: Land of Shadows by Rachel Howzell Hall

Damon Knight: The Power by Frank M. Robinson; The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson; Murray King: Avalon adult sf releases in 1956

Karen Langley: Settling the World: Selected Stories by M. John Harrison

B. V. Lawson: 1997 Anthony Award-winners: Death in Little Tokyo by Dale Furutani; Someone Else's Child by Terris McMahan Grimes; and Detecting Women 2 by Wiletta Helsing

Xavier Lechard: crime fiction without murder

Des/D. F. Lewis: Black Static, September/October 2020, Interzone, September/October 2020, both edited by Andy Cox

Evan Lewis: "The Girl with the Silver Eyes" by Dashiell Hammett, The Black Mask, June 1924, edited by Philip Cody, as syndicated to newspapers including The Vancouver Sun, November 1936; After the Thin Man newspaper coverage/hype, and of Dashiell Hammett, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, the script's collaborators (Mark Coggins: Hammett's treatment published in The New Black Mask #5 &6, 1986, edited by Richard Layman and Matthew Bruccoli)

Steve Lewis: A Bullet for the Bride by Jon Messmann; "The Right Profile" by Carolina Garcia-Aguilera, Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery edited by Sarah Corter and Liz Martinez

Robert Lopresti: "The Whole Story" by Andrew Welsh-Huggins, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, June 2020, edited by Carla Coupe and John Gregory Betancourt

Barry Malzberg: an interview with Cele Goldsmith Lalli (both having edited both Fantastic and Amazing Stories); on The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis: 

Arguably the greatest novel in our language published in the
1980's.  I have fiercely advocated for almost four decades.  Martin Cruz Smith's endorsement is on the jacket of the Random House first edition.  ("I would not play chess with Mr. Tevis.")  I knew Walter Tevis just barely well enough to call him in 1982 immediately after finishing and as quietly as possible tell him my reaction, one of reverence.  The Luzhon Defence is superb but Tevis is far beyond Nabokov here.

I feel and have gone public on this three and a half decades ago that Walter Tevis' death at 54 was a tragedy to the arts on the scale of Mozart's passing at 36.  Tevis had remarried, fled that highly contested State, Ohio, was - after a decade and a half essentially lost to alcohol and academy - writing fiercely and well, and had produced four novels and a collection in five years, showing steadily increasing assurance and power.  Granted a Biblical lifespan and an equivalent pace, the world was denied perhaps a dozen novels and two collections of immeasurable possibility.  We are blessed to have these five books after the luftpaus but they are also a taunt, a mockery (or mockingbird if you will).  Maybe the adaptation will bring him back a little.  Fast Eddie's final page in The Color of Money evokes Mozart's final composition. 

The trailer for The Queen's Gambit limited series doesn't look so great but I can hope.  All these decades awaiting this adaptation.  The backstory of its journey is as frustrating as Walter's life was tragic.  But I'll leave that narrative to Berlioz or Brahms. 

Ed McBride: Damnation Alley by Roger Zelazny

Stephen J. McDermott: Wild to Possess by Gil Brewer; The Bedroom Broker by Gus Stevens

Jeff Meyerson: Challenge the Impossible: The Final Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne by Edward D. Hoch

Meygan: Moon at Nine by Deborah Ellis

Neeru: Mister Enderby Missing and Tragedy at the Thirteenth Hole by "Miles Burton" (Cecil Street)

Steven Nester: Not Dead Yet by Daniel Banko

Jess Nevins: English Jack Amongst the Afghans; or, The British Flag—Touch It Who Dare! by Anonymous

John F. Norris: London After Midnight by Marie Coolidge-Rask; Lucifer and the Child by Ethel Mannin

Jim Noy: The Dead Sleep Lightly by John Dickson Carr

Ray O'Leary: Freak by "Michael Collins" (Dennis Lynds)

Kristina Olsson: Stasiland by Anna Funder (best to skip the droning introduction)

Paperback Warrior: The Big Caper by Lionel White; The Black Berets: Deadly Reunion by "Mike McCray" (Michael McDowell and John Preston); Paul Bishop's Fey Croaker novels; We Who Survived by Sterling Noel; the Swamp Master series by "Jake Spencer" (Jerome Preisler)

Christine Poulson: the ghost stories of M. R. James

James Reasoner: Whistling Lead by Eugene Cunningham; "No Light for Uncle Henry" by August Derleth, Weird Tales, March 1943, edited by Dorothy McIlwraith; "The Call of Cthulhu" by H. P. Lovecraft, WT, February 1928, edited by Farnsworth Wright; "The Hounds of Tindalos" by Frank Belknap Long, WT, March 1929, edited by Wright; "The Colour Out of Space" by H. P. Lovecraft, Amazing Stories, September 1927, edited by Hugo Gernsback

Richard Robinson: The Case of the Constant God by Rufus King; "Diplomat-at-Arms" by Keith Laumer, Fantastic: Stories of Imagination, January 1960, edited by Cele Goldsmith Lalli

Jason Sacks: We, the Venusians by "John Rackham" (John Phillifent); The Water of Thought by Fred Saberhagen

Gerard Saylor: Wall of America by Thomas M. Disch; Rut by Scott Phillips

Steve Scott: "Night Ride" by and interview with John D. MacDonald, The New Black Mask, #8, 1987, edited by Matthew Bruccoli and Richard Layman

Marina Sofia: The Beginning of Spring and The Means of Escape by Penelope Fitzgerald

Kerrie Smith: Blood River by Tony Cavanaugh

Jonathan Strahan: Rebecca Roanhorse

Simon Thomas: Thin Ice by Compton Mackenzie

Scott Thompson: Living on Yesterday and The Island of Desire by Edith Templeton

"TomCat": The Body Vanishes by [Yves] Jacquemard-[Jean-Michel] Sénécal (translated by Gordon Latta); Meredith's Treasure by Philip Harbottle and John Russell Fearn

Prashant Trikannad: "The Case of the Wandering Redhead" by Leigh Brackett, New Detective, February 1951, edited by ?Peggy Graves; reprinted from Flynn's Detective Fiction, April 1943, edited by ?Harry Steeger

Krys Vyas-Myall: Gamma, September 1965, edited by Charles Fritch and Jack Matcha

Bill Wallace: The Midwich Cuckoos by "John Wyndham" (John Benyon Harris); Weird Tales, July 1926, edited by Farnsworth Wright; Evergreen Review, August 1968, edited by Barney Rosset

Gary K. Wolfe: Sheila Williams

A. J. Wright: Alabama Poetry edited by Louise Crenshaw Ray

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