Showing posts with label Ray Russell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ray Russell. Show all posts

Friday, August 10, 2018

FFB: DEVIL'S SCRAPBOOK by Jerome Bixby (Brandon House 1964); THE CASE AGAINST SATAN by Ray Russell (Ivan Obolensky 1962)

...nothing exceeds like The Exorcist...





    ***it might be the case that some of the other covers reproduced below might not be "safe" for all offices/
    environments...

     (indicative of the loving care with which Award Books packaged their wares, the novel makes much of the young woman at the center of events being blond...)

    "...um...
    fiction..."


    Here you see the covers of  the 1972 Award Books edition of Ray Russell's 1962 first novel (and second book, after his Ballantine collection Sardonicus and Other Stories, 1961), and the second, retitled 1974 Brandon House reprint of Jerome Bixby's 1964 first or second book--it's unclear whether his Ballantine collection Space by the Tale came just before or just after Devil's Scrapbook; these are the versions I have copies of (both published when the texts were ten years old). Aside also from the publishers' obvious attempts to piggyback on William Peter Blatty's poorly-written, extremely successful 1971 novel and the 1973 film he coscripted from it, there are a few ironies and parallels here...both Russell and Bixby had studied music,  would die within a year of each other, Bixby at 75 in 1998 and Russell at 74 in 1999, and both were also screenwriters, if neither never had a film nearly as ubiquitous as Blatty's career-making success, though both approached that level of fame on several occasions. Russell is remembered by cineastes for several gothic items such as Mr. Sardonicus, The Premature Burial and Incubus (the first and third based on his own fiction), Bixby for his short story "It's a Good Life-", already his most famous work by the time of first broadcast of the original The Twilight Zone adaptation, followed by remakes or variations in TZ revivals; he wrote very popular episodes of Star Trek and worked on the treatment for Fantastic Voyage and others, as well as having served as the editor of several magazines, including being the best editor the magazine Planet Stories would see (even given that it had already been a showcase for the likes of Leigh Brackett and her student and collaborator Ray Bradbury before Bixby's own first story appeared there in 1949, and his editorial duties starting about then as well). Both writers wrote a lot for skin magazines; some or most of Bixby's collection apparently first appeared, under pseudonyms, in largely unindexed earlier form in relatively minor men's magazines such as Black Magic (a bit more the Kilgore Trout experience than even Theodore Sturgeon, Kurt Vonnegut's model for the character, ever suffered), while Russell was fiction editor at Playboy in its early years (and was still working on the magazine when the Pan paperback came out, notwithstanding the back cover blurb, below); his first story had appeared in Esquire in 1953. Both Brandon House and Award Books were either (the first) itself an erotica publisher or (the latter) the "legit" arm of a company, Universal Publishing and Distribution, that had mostly published Beacon-brand pornobacks earlier (as well as buying the Galaxy group of magazines in 1969, and running them all into the ground by 1980). Both men were much better writers than Blatty...whose magnum opus might or might not owe something to Bixby's notable stories of innocently evil or seemingly evil children, but which almost certainly owes much of its genesis to Russell's groundbreaking work of potentially, but not necessarily, rationalized fantasy.
    The original 1964 Brandon House edition at left; the first US paperback, 1963, above...where Paperback Library strains to piggyback on Morris West's utterly un-supernatural novel. The Russell's small, but not quite small press, publisher's first edition is [no longer] invisible online; I've yet to see an image of the cover--2025 update: ISFDB has found a photo of a battered copy of the first edition in dust jacket; see below.

    These are the only two editions of the Bixby to have been published; the Russell is currently in print from Penguin, cover below, and has been reissued several times in the US and UK, as Russell has had a relatively devoted coterie following in both countries. Neither writer gets highlighted much on the early covers of Russell's novel or Bixby's collection...Ballantine a bit more generous with their collections (see below); Space by the Tale, fwiw, is by no means exclusively science fiction. And at least one and perhaps two of the stories in the Ballantine collection were also first published in the same minor skin magazines, or their peers, as most of the Brandon House book..."Trace", one of Bixby's best stories, definitely did appear in one or another of the publications of the American Art Agency, Inc., and deals with an encounter with a relevant, very notable supernatural force.

     Aside from laying most of the groundwork for what Blatty would write later, The Case Against Satan is both very deftly written, using flashback and interpolation of the transcript of a police interrogation very organically, and in such a way as to not foreground the horror of the events so much as their investigation...both in the sense  of getting to the facts of what is happening to the sixteen-year-old girl who seems to be possessed by Satan, and to helping the exorcists, a somewhat troubled priest, riddled with doubt and facing up to his alcoholism, and the bishop he calls upon for guidance in several matters
    toward the beginning of the novel, confirm their faith and understanding. They both come to see, the priest rather less readily, as a more worldly philosopher (and writer of pop theology articles for the likes of, it's suggested, The Saturday Evening Post or newspaper Sunday supplements), that an exorcism is called for, and they proceed...the priest at first willing to accept the exorcism rites as having a kind of psychiatric value beyond that of their spiritual purpose. Russell has done some research, as well, and has included a number of sharply, often wittily, observed matters as the political interplay between the Catholic Church hierarchy and the more influential laity in the parishes, the concessions and reversal of concessions to secular tradition (a discussion of which wedding marches and songs might properly be played in a Roman Catholic ceremony, and which not) and the points of congruence between psychiatry and church ritual. (He does have his extremely well-versed priest and bishop both blithely assume that at least one of the Salem "witches" was burnt, in passing in a discussion where this was not meant metaphorically; whether this is oversight or sly joke/comment on Russell's part is not clear.)  The matter of incestuous desire, at very least, is raised early in the book, and is not shied away from...not uniquely for 1962 or years earlier, though Russell does feel he needs to address the possible accusation of sensationalism in his brief afterword to the novel.

    a rather hard-traveled copy of the 1962 first edition in its dust jacket
    It is remarkable how many utterly influential and impressive novels (and linked story collections) of horror and suspense fiction, often rationalized but not completely (and certainly not ludicrously so, as was common in the "shudder pulps" or, for later generations, so much a part of Scooby Doo, Where Are You? the children's cartoon series), were to emerge in the late 1950s and early 1960s...Robert Bloch's Psycho, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, Richard Matheson's A Stir of Echoes, Frank Robinson's The Power, the Max Kearney stories collected in Ron Goulart's Ghost Breaker, Manly Wade Wellman's Who Fears the Devil? and, of course, Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby...and even the more explicitly science-fictional examples, such Matheson's I Am Legend, or Theodore Thomas and Kate Wilhelm's The Clone...all of which tend to have a sort of investigational or procedural focus, not solely a matter of psychic investigators chasing spirits and demons away (though there was that sort of thing, too) but trying to get at the very nature of them, in a way the older fighters against evil worried less about in their more certain understanding of the supernatural. The Case Against Satan fits neatly into this tradition, and still is a fine reading experience in a way that the derivative, more traditional-horror-focused Blatty novel was not, for me. 

     As witty, and less ambitious, the Jerome Bixby stories collected here are striving to be and succeeding in being saucy, in the manner expected by the readers of the kind of skin magazines they appeared in (where literacy and craft that might sell a story to Playboy or Rogue in those years were less important, if appreciated, than staying within the spirit of eroticization).  The first story in the collection, "Lust in Stone", has for example a relatively familiar club/bar story setting, and a sexual triangle (plus) plot as recounted among the members of the club, but also a twist ending that has not managed to become cliche in the decades since.  Straight up horror, here, with a certain very black humor inherent. "The Best Lover in Hell", while engaging in certain comedy of humors nomenclature (particularly for Satan him/itself), is likewise a clever, highly readable take on a bet made by a damned soul with Lucifer, and a result not necessarily expected, even if some of the consequences are unsurprising. "The Sin Wager" digs into Bixby's experiences as a writer and editor, as well as exoticizing the latter-day scene, in Paris in the last days of the very-high-budgeted slick magazines (the SEP, Life, etc. ) before they started folding or becoming much more modest in their spending, in a tale of a father's supernatural revenge for the seduction of his teen daughter by a Hemingwayesque writer in his thirties. "The Spell of the Witch Wife" is Bixby doing his quick version of Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife in a more suburbanized (rather than college town) setting...the television sitcom Bewitched might've taken a pointer or two. Two vignettes follow, "The Dirtiest Story in Hell" being another attempt to bargain with the Devil and "The Last Wish" an ugly little revenge fantasy, on the part of the ghost of a man killed (in self-defense) by his desperate wife. Bixby presumably published most or all of these under pseudonyms initially, and this no doubt allowed for him to feel free to play in the fields of Leiber, John Collier, Fredric Brown, Alfred Bester, Robert Bloch and other, similar colleagues as breezily as he does here...the level of sophistication about the world, as well as the canny playing to the perceived market while winking at some of the more double-bottomed seeming endorsement of the more base motives, the more chauvinistic understanding of how women and men behave. Bixby isn't quite playing too hip for the room, but he is effortlessly demonstrating with these utterly readable and entertaining stories that he could do even better...if he was given more incentive to do so. And while doing so, he rings variations on the latter-day gimmick stories common in the fantasy magazines of the 1950s and '60s, and the men's magazines and other slicks...the latter the kind of stories Kurt Vonnegut was wont to note could do or say pretty much anything as long as they basically celebrated the middle class. Bixby is goosing the middle class outlook in a semi-submerged way here, which might be part of why these stories would appear in marginal men's magazines by comparison. And they are, given their obscurity, more worth reading than one might expect...unless one has read Bixby's other work. 

     Here's the ISFDB index for this book...the original dates and sites of publication are  unknown to the indexers there or at the Contento/Stephensen-Payne/Locus indices. The SF Encyclopedia attributes the cover of the first edition, and presumably the illustrations within by the same hand, to an otherwise unspecified "Miller"...presumably this credit is present on the first edition, as Call for an Exorcist doesn't credit him anywhere for the interior images.


      Space by the Tale Jerome Bixby (Ballantine U2203, 1964, 50¢, 159pp, pb)
      • 7 · The Draw · ss Amazing Mar 1954
      • 23 · The Young One · nv Fantastic Apr 1954
      • 47 · Laboratory · ss If Dec 1955
      • 64 · The Good Dog · ss Fantastic Jan/Feb 1954
      • 69 · One Way Street · ss Amazing Dec 1953/Jan ’54
      • 86 · Small War · ss Science Fiction Quarterly May 1954
      • 91 · Trace · ss 1961 (copyright 1961 by American Art Agency, Inc.)
      • 94 · Angels in the Jets · ss Fantastic Fll 1952
      • 104 · The Battle of the Bells · ss Imagination Sep 1954
      • 117 · The Magic Typewriter · ss 1963 (presumably another AAA, Inc. item, or of similar first publication)
      • 127 · The Bad Life · na Galaxy Feb 1963
      Sardonicus and Other Stories Ray Russell (Ballantine, 1961, pb)
      • Sardonicus · nv Playboy Jan 1961
      • The Actor · vi Playboy Mar 1960, as by Brian Rencelaw
      • The Cage · ss 1959
      • The Exploits of Argo · ss Rogue Apr 1961
      • The Sword of Laertes · ss Manhunt Oct 1959
      • Montage · ss Playboy Oct 1958
      • Booked Solid · ss *
      • Take a Deep Breath · ss Tiger 1956
      • The Pleasure Was Ours · ss Imagination May 1955
      • The Room · ss Playboy Feb 1961
      • I Am Returning · ss *
      • Incommunicado · vi F&SF Nov 1957
      • His Father’s House · ss If Mar 1960
      • Last Will and Testament · ss Playboy Jan 1956, as “Will for Nero” as by Rex Fabian
      • The Rosebud · vi F&SF Aug 1959
      • London Calling · ss *
      • Ounce of Prevention · ss Playboy Sep 1960, as by Brian Rencelaw
    ("The Cage" and perhaps several of these other Russell stories might've appeared in relatively obscure men's or similar magazines as well...)


    Aside from this recent edition of the Russell novel, the misleadingly subtitled volume below is available from Penguin, as well:

    And these two relatively recent collections of Jerome Bixby's fiction, both of which seem to emphasize fiction in the public domain:


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    Friday, September 1, 2017

    FFB: TABOO and TABOO 2, edited by Paul Neimark (New Classics House 1964, 1965)

    For fairly obvious reasons, there has been an interplay between First Amendment advocacy, bohemian writers, sexually explicit fiction and other publications, and the occasional publication of fairly serious work by houses that are better known for what was intentionally disposable literature, at best. Usually, whether we refer to such magazines as Evergreen Review or Playboy or Rogue or Eros, or to such publishers as Grove Press or Olympia Press, there was often some desire to package and present sophisticated material in every sense, even if the sophistication of some of that material was solely in the adult themes addressed by it. Thus, the Chicago-based New Classics House, which published such work as Kerry Thornley's assassination account Oswald, Albert Ellis's collection of essays Suppressed, and, in two volumes published in 1964 and '65, Paul Neimark's anthologies Taboo and Taboo 2. Not quite Harlan Ellison's anthology Dangerous Visions (1967), nor DV's first form, the abortive Judith Merril anthology for Regency Books that Ellison had commissioned during his brief editorship at that paperback line (which was a corporate cousin to the more erotic Greenleaf Classics and other imprints), the Taboo volumes nonetheless managed to publish some work by notable writers, some of which remains otherwise unavailable...I'm not sure, but it's possible one or more of the stories in Taboo, at least, had been written with the Merril project in mind. (See Matthew Davis's comments, below.)

    (and this, from Richard Geis's Science Fiction Review, November/December 1978:
    "9-7-78 The speculation/charge that Harlan Ellison may have "stolen" the idea of DANGEROUS VISIONS from a pocketbook series titled TABOO from the early Sixties [in Scott Edelman's letter in SFR #27] has been refuted and demolished by information not-to-be-doubted received today.

    "Briefly, Harlan originated the TABOO anthology idea in 1960 or so, tried to sell it to Regency, and then turned to project over to Paul Niemark in 1961. Several stories had been submitted and two of the authors went along with the change in editorship. Volume One of TABOO was published in 1964.

    "It would be nice if nasty speculations and junped conclusions could be avoided in the future." 

    The issue can be read here [Archive.org] and here [Fanac.org].)

    Taboo, for all the hype inherent in the subtitle "seven short stories that no publisher would touch from seven leading writers", reprints two of its stories from books published by mainline publishers, Charles Beaumont's "The Neighbors" (first in his 1960 Bantam Books collection Night Ride and Other Journeys) and Ray Russell's "Take a Deep Breath" (originally in a 1956 issue of George Fox's Chicago-based Playboy imitator Tiger, probably there as a salvage market since Russell was already an editor at Playboy by that time, but perhaps Hefner or A. C. Spectorsky didn't much care for the story; Russell apparently revised it for inclusion in his 1961 Ballantine collection Sardonicus and Other Stories and here). I believe all the other stories were first published in this volume (index courtesy ISFDB) of 127pp.:
    As far as I've found so far, the Bloch and Neimark stories have not been reprinted anywhere, nor the Algren at least under that title (though at least one study suggests that it's a rather different, more sardonic recasting of an incident in Algren's novel A Walk on the Wild Side). As the links above will demonstrate, the other stories original to the volume have since been reprinted in at least one collection of the authors' works. Neimark was a fairly prolific writer, perhaps best-known in his time as the as-told-to collaborator with Jesse Owens on several memoirs and related books by the Olympic athlete, and the author of the novel She Lives! (1972), which was adapted as one of the more popular US telefilms of the early 1970s. It's notable that all the writers involved had some strong ties to Chicago, and most had at least occasionally published in the men's magazines based in the city. Leiber's story includes an incident of incestuous necrophilia, so the tagline was perhaps not so very misleading as to the nature of the stories, if not the facts of their publication history. 
    Taboo 2 has a less stellar, if still good, lineup of writers, and, presumably as a result, is far easier to procure on the secondhand book market; the second volume includes four stories, one each by James T. Farrell, true crime writer Jay Nash, fellow prolific novelist Con Sellers (who, like Neimark, would make his biggest commercial splash in later years, with his novels set in and dealing with the run up to World War 2), and Neimark himself again--from the Miscellaneous Anthologies Index:
    At least this one is held in local libraries nearby for me (interlibrary loan from mostly Chicagoland holdings for the first volume might be problematic, at best). Niemark published at least one other, nonfiction anthology with New Classics, 1964's Crisis, which includes essays from Farrell and Algren mixed with considerations of the state of the world from L. Sprague de Camp, G. Harry Stine and L. G. Alexander, along with some verse from Carl Sandburg. 

    Given the importance of the contributors and the relative interest both the content and the writers in question might generate, I'm mildly surprised these two anthologies haven't been scanned and posted in such online resources as Open Library, but at least the physical copies are held by some libraries, and the books, like most published in any quantity, are available, if, again, it's far more likely one can buy a copy of 2 than the original. I would like to know what was so taboo about the Bloch story, and why it's not been included in any of his collections over the decades. 

    For more first-hand accounts of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog. 
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    Friday, February 22, 2013

    FFB: Ray Russell's fiction anthologies from PLAYBOY

    Playboy, of course, was always about its (mostly Hugh Hefner's) idea of being sophisticated (or at least being seen as such). As Hefner was a lover of fiction nearly as much as he was of pulchritude and high-end stereo equipment, he was eager to have editors on hand to help bring some of the best fiction of various sorts into the magazine, even as most other "slick" magazines were collapsing or abandoning fiction throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and into the 1970s...while it had been possible, if somewhat difficult, for a writer to live reasonably well on short-fiction sales in the '50s, with The Saturday Evening Post and (in the early years of the decade) Collier's paying very well indeed for a lot of fiction per issue and most of the general-interest and gendered magazines featuring at least a few short stories, by the end of the '60s, Playboy was one of the few surviving markets among magazines not otherwise devoted to fiction that was still likely to publish more than a single short story per issue, if that (The New Yorker, Harper's and The Atlantic Monthly, all paying somewhat less, were among the few others; Redbook was perhaps the last diehard among the magazines aimed at women, with the weak exception, in the last decade or so, of Woman's World and their offer of one romance and one mystery vignette per issue, or Bust with one erotic vignette). Ray Russell was one of the most energetic of Playboy's fiction editors, and a generator of any number of anthologies of fiction and related matter taken from the magazine starting in the latter '60s...there were the big books, The Playboy Book of.... volumes, released in hardcover and paperback, and the slimmer, paperback-only anthologies with titles such as From the S File (all the contributing writers' surnames began with S) or, as pictured above, Stories of the Sinister & Strange.  (One thing they didn't spend too much time on, sadly, were the covers for these volumes...very strange, given the available talent and care given to illustration in the magazine itself. )

     While these books were not quite up to, say, Robert Arthur's (or Harold Masur's) Alfred Hitchcock Presents: anthologies (which had the option of drawing on Playboy as well as any number of other sources for their contents), and the tendency for the slickly facile could rule OK in a given several stories in each book, Russell had a fair amount to be proud of during his term as fiction editor (and was never shy, as you'll note below, about including his own stories in the books). I read them happily as I came across them, mostly in libraries though the mass market paperback editions were pretty well distributed and widely available secondhand as well as new in the 1970s and '80s.  When I picked up Charles Willeford's slim collection The Machine in Ward Eleven a decade or so back I knew I had read that title story before, but couldn't remember where...and certainly Charles Beaumont, who was as close to a Playboy "discovery" as any writer in the early issues, consistently offered searching and profound work to the magazine and others (he was the first film reviewer for as well as fiction contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, for example). Beaumont certainly isn't the only contributor to repeatedly appear in the Russell tables of contents, either, of course. Another memory lapse for me: I knew I had mostly read Ken Purdy's work in anthologies devoted to auto racing, and perhaps other sports-fiction anthos...but had forgotten that, for Playboy at least, he also dabbled in criminous and fantasticated fiction...and Purdy's isn't the only byline I might not've expected to find in these contexts, to say nothing of those who offer decent or better work whom I've otherwise never encountered (John Reese, or H. C. Neal, among others). Ellen Datlow, the editor (first prominent as fiction editor of Omni magazine, from the Penthouse group) of any number of important media for short fiction over the last thirty-odd years, cited the Horror volume here for her entry in Horror: The 100 Best Books.

     Alice Turner succeeded Russell, not immediately (after Robie MacCauley's just under a decade in place) and for a slightly longer stretch, as fiction editor, and I will perhaps, less nostalgically (as her anthologies weren't a small staple of my youthful reading as the Russells were), take a look at her impressive anthologies out of the magazine in the future. Sadly, since Turner's dismissal, the magazine, probably on its way to collapse (one correspondent suggested to me that its publication will probably cease as soon as Hefner passes, kept as it is mostly as a shadowy remnant of what it was out of respect for the Old Man/Founder), has not had much more of a commitment to fiction than its original model, Esquire, albeit the simple majority of issues till recently still had an excerpt or story in them, to supplement the Gahan Wilson and less interesting cartoons.

    courtesy ABE and WorldCat:
    The Playboy Book of Crime and Suspense [edited by Ray Russell] ed. Anon. (Chicago: Playboy, 1966, 405pp, hc)

    Contents:
    A Lucky Day for the Boar by Gerald Kersh
    The Peeping Tom Patrol by Michael Shaara
    The Room of Dark by Gilbert Wright
    The Distributor by Richard Matheson
    Last Will and Testament by Ray Russell
    The Hildebrand Rarity by Ian Fleming
    Everybody Hates David Starbuck by Steve Allen
    The Hustler by Walter S. Tevis
    Walk to the Station by Stanley Cooperman
    Naked in Xanadu by Ray Russell
    The Bottom of the Ocean by Ken W. Purdy
    A Cry from the Penthouse by Henry Slesar
    The Sign of Scorpio by Charles Mergendah
    The Man in the Well by Berkely Mather
    The New Deal by Charles Einstein
    The Hunger by Charles Beaumont
    The Supermen by William M. Clark
    Speak to Me of Immortality by Ken W. Purdy
    The Morning After by Wade Miller
    With All Due Respect by Fred McMorrow
    The Devil to Pay by Stephen Barr 
    Harpy by T. K. Brown III
    The Hobbyist by Fredric Brown
    The Sender of Letters by Herbert Gold
    Balance Sheet by Morton Fineman
    No Fire Burns by Avram Davidson 
    A Fist Full of Money by Henry Slesar & Jay Folb
    Incident off Land's End by Jacob Hay

     Courtesy the Contento Indices:
    The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural [edited by Ray Russell] ed. Anon. (Chicago: Playboy, 1967, $5.95, 390pp, hc)

     The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy [edited by Ray Russell] ed. Anon. (Chicago: Playboy LCC# 66-12861, 1966, $5.95, 403pp, hc)
    • vii · Preface · Editors of Playboy · pr
    • 1 · The Fly · George Langelaan · nv Playboy Jun ’57
    • 40 · Blood Brother · Charles Beaumont · ss Playboy Apr ’61
    • 46 · Love, Incorporated · Robert Sheckley · ss Playboy Sep ’56
    • 61 · A Foot in the Door · Bruce Jay Friedman · ss Playboy Oct ’60
    • 75 · The Vacation · Ray Bradbury · ss Playboy Dec ’63
    • 84 · The Never-Ending Penny · Bernard Wolfe · nv Playboy Sep ’60
    • 101 · Bernie the Faust · William Tenn · nv Playboy Nov ’63
    • 130 · A Man for the Moon · Leland Webb · ss Playboy Aug ’60
    • 140 · The Noise · Ken W. Purdy · ss Playboy Mar ’59
    • 155 · The Killer in the TV Set · Bruce Jay Friedman · ss Playboy Aug ’61
    • 166 · I Remember Babylon · Arthur C. Clarke · ss Playboy May ’60
    • 179 · Word of Honor · Robert Bloch · ss Playboy Aug ’58
    • 187 · John Grant’s Little Angel · Walt Grove · ss Playboy Jul ’64
    • 206 · The Fiend · Frederik Pohl · ss Playboy Apr ’64
    • 215 · Hard Bargain · Alan E. Nourse · ss Playboy May ’58
    • 221 · The Nail and the Oracle · Theodore Sturgeon · nv Playboy Oct ’65
    • 244 · After · Henry Slesar · ss Playboy Jun ’60
    • 250 · December 28th · Theodore L. Thomas · ss Playboy Dec ’59
    • 254 · Spy Story · Robert Sheckley · ss Playboy Sep ’55
    • 268 · Punch · Frederik Pohl · ss Playboy Jun ’61
    • 274 · The Crooked Man · Charles Beaumont · ss Playboy Aug ’55
    • 286 · Who Shall Dwell... · H. C. Neal · ss Playboy Jul ’62
    • 293 · Double Take · Jack Finney · ss Playboy Apr ’65
    • 314 · Examination Day · Henry Slesar · ss Playboy Feb ’58
    • 320 · The Mission · Hugh Nissenson · ss Playboy Dec ’64
    • 338 · Waste Not, Want Not · John Atherton · ss Playboy Jun ’59
    • 343 · The Dot and Dash Bird · Bernard Wolfe · ss Playboy Dec ’64
    • 359 · The Sensible Man · Avram Davidson · ss Playboy Feb ’59
    • 365 · Souvenir [“The Drowned Giant”] · J. G. Ballard · ss The Terminal Beach, London: Gollancz, 1964; Playboy May ’65
    • 378 · Puppet Show · Fredric Brown · ss Playboy Nov ’62
    • 390 · The Room · Ray Russell · ss Playboy Feb ’61
    • 394 · Dial “F” for Frankenstein · Arthur C. Clarke · ss Playboy Jan ’65
    • 403 · Index of Authors · Misc. · ix

    Playboy’s Stories of the Sinister & Strange [edited by Ray Russell] ed. Anon. (Playboy BA0124, 1969, 95¢, 217pp, pb)
    • iv · Preface · Anon. · pr
    • 1 · The Mannichon Solution · Irwin Shaw · nv Playboy Dec ’67
    • 41 · The Dark Music · Charles Beaumont · ss Playboy Dec ’56
    • 57 · Somewhere Not Far from Here · Gerald Kersh · ss Playboy Mar ’65
    • 78 · The Investor · Bruce Jay Friedman · ss Playboy Feb ’62
    • 90 · Ripples · Ray Russell · ss Playboy Oct ’67
    • 93 · The Dispatcher · Gerald Green · nv Playboy Aug ’67
    • 120 · Wise Child [“It’s a Wise Child”] · John Wyndham · ss Argosy (UK) Nov ’62; Playboy May ’67
    • 137 · Welcome to the Monkey House · Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. · ss Playboy Jan ’68
    • 160 · Room 312 · G. L. Tassone · ss Playboy Aug ’67
    • 177 · The Golden Frog · Ken W. Purdy · nv Playboy Jan ’63
    • 200 · The Annex · John D. MacDonald · ss Playboy May ’68

    The Playboy Book of Humor and Satire [edited by Ray Russell] ed. Anon. (Chicago: Playboy, 1967, vii+ 407pp, hc)
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