Showing posts with label Shirley Jackson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shirley Jackson. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 2, 2022

Short Story Wednesday: Shirley Jackson, Robert Bloch, Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, Jerome Bixby, Manly Wade Welllman, Ray Bradbury, Gahan Wilson et al: THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION March 1954 edited by "Anthony Boucher" and J. Francis McComas and FANTASTIC April 1954, edited by Howard Browne

Two issues off the shelf, and I thought I'd mention (in first pass, anyway) the stories I particularly remembered, from collecting and reading these two some years back or from reading beforehand the stories collected elsewhere, contemporary issues (as Fantastic was a bimonthly that year) and both published just over a decade before I was born. 

Neither has the best cover that either magazine would sport in their early years, though the F&SF cover did inspire Alfred Bester to write the impressive cover story, my default choice for his best short fiction.

Shirley Jackson's first short story for F&SF, "Bulletin", is a fine jape in the form of a story of apparatus, several fragments or documents returned from a time-traveler's investigation of the U.S. in 2123, including a scrap from the New York Herald-Tribune (well, it Could be possible again, eventually), a US history exam questions sheet from a frosh course in an unnamed college, a letter home from summer camp from a young boy, and a Your Weight and Fortune card...something a bit Retro even in 1954, I think. Jackson has the most fun with the history exam questions, running some jokes by us that could be a bit recondite even for relatively well-informed readers today, seven decades later ("Identify Twelve of the Following:", with the appended list including "Sinclair (Joe) Louis", and "Sergeant  Cuff"--the pseudonym once used, adorably, by Saturday Review magazine crime-fiction reviewer John Winterich, after the character in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone).

"5,271,009" digs a bit deeper, and is just as funny, as Alfred Bester introduces us to a humanoid alien who chooses to aid a human artist whose work he has admired, the latter currently locked up in a psychiatric hospital after some acting out. The mysterious Mr. Solon Aquila, who speaks in a jazzy patois that drops in phrases from various languages and types of English-language slang, forces Jeffrey Halsyon to undergo a series of psychodramas that rather savagely mock a number of childish and adolescent fantasies not altogether uncommon to fantasy readers/fans and rather more conventional people, alike. Bester once had it collected in an early volume as "The Starcomber" (a reference to Aquila, as akin to a beachcomber), but was convinced to revert to the magazine title for subsequent reprints.

"All Summer in a Day" is one of Ray Bradbury's most widely-reprinted stories, set on his fantasy of the planet Venus as an environment of endless rain, albeit at a livable temperature for its largely unprotected human colonists, including a young girl who is locked by her classmates away so that she misses the one afternoon of relatively clear skies and opportunity to romp about in recess one year. A bit heavy-handed, I thought even as I read it for the first time in a 7th-grade reading textbook, but makes its points; Bradbury apparently approved a 2002 sequel story by one Jason Marchi, originally published in Verbicide magazine, and eventually in a chapbook with the Bradbury story and introduction by Bradbury's old friend William F. Nolan.

"Dumb Supper", as Manly Wade Wellman originally called and would again title this John the Balladeer story, in the collection Who Fears the Devil? and subsequently, is a fine entry in this cycle, but I'll have to reread it to recall which events occur in this entry in the series vs. the others. They reward rereading, as prime examples of folk horror and fantasy decades before that term achieved its current fashionable status.

Robert Bloch's "Mr. Steinway", with a handsome, boldly inked illustration by Bill Ashman in this issue of Fantastic, is a fine example of a kind of haunted object story that Bloch executes here (and on most other occasions) with panache, one of the earlier examples of his work in this mode to appear other than in Weird Tales, the magazine which folded for the first long stretch in 1954, and which had helped launch or further the careers of so many of the best fantasy and horror writers of the early 20th century in English.

Jerome Bixby's "The Young One", involving a New Kid in town who definitely seems to have Something Odd going on (as do his parents), is an utterly charming story that I first encountered in one of Robert Arthur's YA "Hitchcock"-branded anthologies published by Random House in the 1960s. Happily, this kid is far less threatening than the protagonist in Bixby's most famous story, "It's a Good Life--"

Gahan Wilson has two of his first professional cartoons in this issue, having sold his very first to Fantastic for publication in the January, 1954 issue, and one can see the seeds of his career in the early examples here, and in the other Fantastic and stablemate Amazing Stories issues of the period...his drawing style not yet as distinctive, but the kind of subject matter he was drawn to already clear. His tenure at the Ziff-Davis magazines not nearly as long as it would be at F&SF during Edward Ferman's editorship; a pity for the ZD magazines and their readers.

Much as with the Wellman story, I know I've read (and enjoyed) the Sturgeon, which I read at least in Sturgeon in Orbit under his preferred title of  "Extrapolation", but will have to reread, at least skim, it to help segregate it from other good Sturgeon stories of the era.

Fantastic, April 1954 --can be read here



The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1954  
More to come. (Really!)

for more of today's short fiction (and more), 



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Wednesday, February 2, 2022

Short Story Wednesday: In tribute to Shirley Jackson and Cornell Woolrich: Anthologies of new fiction: WHEN THINGS GET DARK edited by Ellen Datlow (Titan/Penguin 2021); BLACK AS THE NIGHT edited by Maxim Jakubowski (Titan/Penguin 2022)


4 October 2022
Black as the Night: Stories Inspired by Cornell Woolrich 
edited by Maxim Jakubowski * 448 pp.
Introduction/Maxim Jakubowski
Neil Gaiman/A Woolrich Appreciation
Joel Lane/The Black Window (poem)
stories
Joseph S. Walker/A Shade Darker Than Gray
Vaseem Khan/A Thin Slice of Heaven
Charles Ardai/Sleep! Sleep! Beauty Bright
Kim Newman/Black Window
O'Neil De Noux/Blue Moon Over Burgundy
Paul Di Filippo/The Bride Hated Champagne
James Grady/Eyes Without a Face
Donna Moore/First You Dream, Then You Die
M. W. Craven/Institutional Memory
Ana Teresa Pereira/Looking For You Through the Gray Rain
Joe R. Lansdale/Missing Sister
William Boyle/New York Blues Redux
Kristine Kathryn Rusch/Our Opera Singer
Mason Cross/People You May Know
David Quantick/Red
Lavie Tidhar/The Case of Baby X
Tara Moss/The Husband Machine
Warren Moore/The Jacket
A.K. Benedict/The Lake, the Moon, and the Murder
Bill Pronzini/The Long Way Down
Nick Mamatas/The Man in the Sailor Suit
Max Décharné/The Woman at the Late Show
Martin Edwards/The Woman Who Never Was
Samantha Lee Howe/Trophy Wife
Brandon Barrows/Two Wrongs
Maxim Jakubowski/What Happens After the End
Susi Holliday/The Invitation
James Sallis/Parkview
and, in comments, Maxim Jakubowski notes that another story has been added:
Barry N. Malzberg/Phantom Gentleman
...and the further good news that he's contracted with Titan for a tribute anthology in honor of J.G. Ballard to be published in 2023...


• anthology edited by Ellen Datlow
Titan Books, a line from Penguin/Random House, is clearly in the tributes business, and one could only wish these two were published more closely together, as the overlap in audience between those who love the work of Jackson and of Woolrich is not one of unanimity, but it can't be too far from it. Both are best remembered for their work in the outré, suspense and horror and simply charged narratives full of emotion usually in full disarray in Woolrich's fiction, in incompletely controlled cloaking frequently in Jackson's. Even the work they are less well-remembered for, "Jazz Age" stories in The Smart Set for Woolrich and book-length collections of humorous accounts of family life for Jackson, can be seen to have some similar spirit...and similar undertones. 

So, a heads-up for the forthcoming Jakubowski anthology (I suspect [incorrectly...see comments] there are advance readers copies about) and a brief review of some of the stories in the Datlow, a book I've had on hand for on a busy few weeks.

M. Rickert's "Funeral Birds" leads off the fiction, and certainly seeks to fulfill what Datlow describes as called for in her introduction, stories which are not pastiches of Jackson but which incorporate her interest in how the mundane details of daily life and behavior can both mask and drive madness and despair. A thoroughly unlikable home health aide attends the funeral of her recent client, and an after-funeral get-together at her former charge's daughter's house. She finds that perhaps her relation with the departed isn't finished. Rickert does revel in the physical details of the aide's life and eccentric passage through it.

Elizabeth Hand's "For Sale by Owner" digs even more deeply into  Jacksonian exploration of the notion of the invasion of the houses of others, and how the domiciles can return the "favor". Elegant prose, including some that verges on "real-estate porn", as well as an engaging exploration of the friendship of the middle-aged women protagonists, who find over the course of the story a shared attraction to wandering into and through the New England summer houses belonging to others...and what might make that more dangerous than a lark, quite aside from random police checks and the like. How many of us have first read Jackson via "The Summer People", "The Lovely House" or The Haunting of Hill House? Probably relatively few compared to those who first encountered "The Lottery", but I was finding her work in explicitly supernatural horror anthologies first, and "The Lottery" came a year or so later, not too long before such lighter stories as "One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts" in my first Best from [the Magazine of] Fantasy and Science Fiction volume. 

Carmen Maria Machado's "A Hundred Miles and a Mile" is an allusive story about the passing on of what might be secret wisdom, and certainly is at least important...how we can be the bearers of such without fully knowing it, and how carrying it with us doesn't necessarily make our lives easier. 

Joyce Carol Oates's "Take Me, I am Free" is also allusive, but in a more emotionally brutal manner, unrelenting as it limns a certain kind of too-common child abuse as well as drawing in some implications of something beyond that quotidian evil. I suspect Andrew Vachss would've admired if not also loved this one, and he would be correct.

The design of the book as a whole is handsome, and the custom endpapers, fetishizing the style of eyeglass frames Jackson wore in her photographs even more than the jacket/cover art does (as do the story headers), are an amusing touch. Sadly, the copy I first received from a certain Bad Place to Work was rather less-well-"built", as was the replacement I ordered--both had warped boards, and not the firmest binding I've found on a hardcover; I hope a certain source got a bad batch or treated it roughly, rather than all the first printing sharing the same flaws. (In comments below, Ellen Datlow notes she hasn't heard this plaint till now, which I take to be a good sign...and an argument for picking up a copy through an independent or other brick and mortar store, if practical and safe. I do prefer seeing the condition of my copies before I buy them.)

Definitely a book worth having. 

More to come...


For more of today's Short Story Wednesday reviews, 



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Friday, October 24, 2014

FFB consumer's advisory bonus: two quartets of horrors for the season...

The US reader (of English) is this year offered essentially four Best of the Year volumes collecting horror and related material...I have yet to crack my copies, but I have all four...

The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Six 


The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2014 

Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 1 

Best New Horror: 25th Anniversary Edition 
  • Editor: Stephen Jones
  • Year: 2014-11-11
  • ISBN: 978-1-62873-818-6 [1-62873-818-9]
  • Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
  • Price: $15.95 
  • Pages: 608 

  • INTRODUCTION: HORROR IN 2013 The Editor 
  • WHO DARES WINS: ANNO DRACULA 1980 Kim Newman 
  • CLICK-CLACK THE RATTLEBAG Neil Gaiman 
  • DEAD END Nicholas Royle 
  • ISAAC'S ROOM Daniel Mills 
  • THE BURNING CIRCUS Angela Slatter 
  • HOLES FOR FACES Ramsey Campbell 
  • BY NIGHT HE COULD NOT SEE Joel Lane 
  • COME INTO MY PARLOUR Reggie Oliver 
  • THE MIDDLE PARK Michael Chislett 
  • INTO THE WATER Simon Kurt Unsworth 
  • THE BURNED HOUSE Lynda E. Rucker 
  • WHAT DO WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT Z— Lavie Tidhar 
  • FISHFLY SEASON Halli Villegas 
  • DOLL RE MI Tanith Lee 
  • A NIGHT'S WORK Clive Barker 
  • THE SIXTEENTH STEP Robert Shearman 
  • STEMMING THE TIDE Simon Strantzas 
  • THE GIST Michael Marshall Smith 
  • GUINEA PIG GIRL Thana Niveau 
  • MISS BALTIMORE CRABS: ANNO DRACULA 1990 Kim Newman 
  • WHITSTABLE Stephen Volk 
  • NECROLOGY: 2013 Stephen Jones & Kim Newman
  • USEFUL ADRESSES 
And...recently, I was seeking a pair of short novels for a new friend, a native speaker of Spanish who loves horror and wanted preferably short novels in English she could practice her Anglophone reading with...since she's a lover of horror film, as well, my favorite duo from 1959 came to mind first, even if one is a suspense novel rather than horror (and the other is arguably so as well, with difficulty):

























...and two more became pretty obvious next choices (in rather battered first editions pictured below):











Further suggestions?

("Impure" horror collections that also came to mind:
All The Stories of Muriel Spark and 
E Pluribus Unicorn by Theodore Sturgeon)

(...and...and...)
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Friday, August 8, 2014

Friday's "Forgotten" Book: Robert Arthur, editor: ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS: STORIES MY MOTHER NEVER TOLD ME (Random House, 1963)

From the handsomely-done Alfred Hitchcock Wiki (which in turn all but credits ISFDB and Zybahn's Casual Debris for information):
Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories My Mother Never Told Me

Contents

  1. Introduction by Alfred Hitchcock (ghost written)
  2. The Child Who Believed by Grace Amundson
  3. Just a Dreamer by Robert Arthur
  4. The Wall-to-Wall Grave by Andrew Benedict
  5. The Wind by Ray Bradbury
  6. Congo by Stuart Cloete
  7. Witch's Money by John Collier
  8. Dip in the Pool by Roald Dahl
  9. The Secret of the Bottle novelette by Gerald Kersh
  10. I Do Not Hear You, Sir by Avram Davidson
  11. The Arbutus Collar by Jeremiah Digges
  12. A Short Trip Home novelette by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  13. An Invitation to the Hunt by George Hitchcock
  14. The Man Who Was Everywhere by Edward D. Hoch
  15. The Summer People by Shirley Jackson
  16. Adjustments by George Mandel
  17. The Children of Noah by Richard Matheson
  18. The Idol of the Flies by Jane Rice
  19. Courtesy of the Road by Mack Morriss
  20. Remains to Be Seen by Jack Ritchie (as Steve O'Connell)
  21. The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles by Margaret St. Clair (as Idris Seabright)
    One of Dell's half-the-hc-content reprints
  22. Lost Dog by Henry Slesar
  23. Hostage by Don Stanford
  24. Natural Selection by Gilbert Thomas
  25. Simone by Joan Vatsek
  26. Smart Sucker by Richard Wormser
  27. Some of Your Blood by Theodore Sturgeon

UK edition
It's a very close call (due to their consistent excellence), but this might be my favorite of the AHP: volumes that Robert Arthur edited (Harold Q. Masur took up the task after Arthur's death in 1969, till Hitchcock's death in 1980).  Quite a large number of these stories have stuck with me over the years since I first read them, at age nine, in one of the first of the adult "Hitchcock" anthologies I took up, and it is a pretty striking slice through a range of many of the best writers of the time (we'd lost Fitzgerald, but not too many of the others yet) who'd done some sort of work in suspense fiction and related fields...the Jackson, the St. Clair, the Bradbury and the Davidson are (unsurprisingly) memorable horror stories (St. Clair's is her most famous story by some distance, and almost deservedly so);  the Matheson is Just this side of Reality, and not less unsettling (at least to the young reader) for it, even as one key aspect of Theodore Sturgeon's novel about a non-supernatural vampire did inspire some investigation on my part as to what the novel's resolution involved (hint: it isn't altogether unrelated to the previous post on this blog). Even if I mostly remember "The Arbutus Collar" for how puzzled I was as to how pronounce "arbutus"(I recall that the dictionary was not helpful), the balance of the volume, from writers as splashy as Kersh and Collier and Rice and Dahl (to say nothing of the South African Cloete--I wouldn't learn how to pronounce "Clew-tee" for years)  or as simply as assiduous as Hoch and Ritchie (though I didn't know it was Ritchie story till today) or as interesting  though overlooked as Thomas, collectively sticks with me as simply so much enjoyment and revelation, about the nature and range of storytelling one could find in these eclectic volumes.  It's too easy for me to cite a given volume of the various Arthur/AH series for FFB purposes, perhaps, but these books really should be remembered clearly, as an achievement on their own ticket, and as an example of how the task can be done...

 Please see Patti Abbott's blog for today's prompter citations.
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Saturday, February 8, 2014

correction and update: FFB/S/M: Shirley Jackson's stories first published in fantasy-fiction magazines

Shirley Jackson, author of one of the most unpopular stories ever published in The New Yorker ("The Lottery", of course, which has utterly outlived most of its outraged critics and subscription cancellers, and, perhaps sadly, sustained a readership that most of Jackson's work has not), and one of the pivotal figures in the creation of the new horror fiction, and the allied suspense fiction (such as that clangorous short), that was emerging in the 1940s, with Jackson along with John Collier one of its progenitors who only infrequently contributed to the fantasy-fiction magazines (unlike Robert Bloch or Fritz Leiber or Margaret St. Clair, whose careers orbited initially around those titles, or Cornell Woolrich or Algernon Blackwood, who were fairly frequent contributors even if their primary markets were elsewhere). As far as I know at the moment (thanks to Matthew Davis's comment below, I've added one--in fact her first for F&SF), only five of her stories were first published in the fantasy markets, somewhat unsurprisingly in the two most sustained fantasy magazines to fully establish themselves in the 1950s, Fantastic (as founded in 1952 and edited by crime-fiction writer Howard Browne) and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (as co-founded in 1949 and co-edited, then solely edited, by crime-fiction among much else writer Anthony Boucher, born William White).

Jackson's "Root of Evil" appeared in the March-April 1953 issue of Fantastic, and publishers Ziff-Davis were feeling cocky enough about their packaging to have a wraparound cover, with Jackson's story advertised only on the back. Richard Powers's unusually non-abstract imagery is fine, and having both B. Traven and John Collier (and, for no compellingly good reason, Billy Rose the Gypsy Rose Lee promoter, who is credited with fiction in other markets at about this time as well) made Ziff-Davis feel they didn't need to properly advise the newsstand browser. Fantastic in those early years was paying very well, indeed, and stunts such as having stories as by Billy Rose and Mickey Spillane in those issues seemed to be paying off, but Ziff-Davis lost their nerve, and Fantastic soon would be hitting a pretty low point by the mid-'50s, though it was still in its way entertaining, as authorities on the scene such as Bill Crider and Mike Ashley can attest (and even under the darkest days of Paul Fairman's editorship, the run of routine stories mostly by Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, Randall Garrett, Henry Slesar and Milton Lesser [before he started publishing most of his best work as Stephen Marlowe]--routine stories by intention, these talented writers were there to deliver it Tuesday rather than good, though if good, no problem--would be supplemented by the finds that Fairman's assistant [and eventual vastly better successor] Cele Goldsmith would pull from the slushpile, such as Kate Wilhelm's first published story, "The Pint-Sized Genie"). ZD's purchase of all rights in those years meant that Jackson's story was also reprinted in one of Ted White's early issues of the magazine, a rather better reprint than most he was offered from the same storehouse at the turn of the '70s (albeit the others in that 1969 issue were pretty solid, as well).

 Courtesy ISFDB: 

 Publication: Fantastic, March-April 1953
Publication: Fantastic, June 1969
Much of what I was surprised about in the packaging of F&SF issues with Jackson stories below becomes even more surprising when one considers Jackson's first appearance in the magazine, with (as Matthew Fox reminds us in the comments) "Bulletin," part of a very star-studded issue indeed, with impressive stories by Alfred Bester, Manly Wade Wellman, Ray Bradbury and others...and Jackson's name deservedly on the cover. Even though I have this issue, I don't believe I've read "Bulletin" yet...something I should remedy.  (This would be Jackson's only story in an issue while J. Francis McComas was still co-editor; cover is at top of post.)

Publication: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1954

Jackson's second story for the less "slick" and less stunt-driven, more "literary" (in the same sense that sibling magazine Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine strove to be the most elegant and literate of the cf magazines) F&SF was apparently one she had trouble placing with other markets; as Laurence Jackson Hyman or Sarah Hyman Stewart put it in the clumsily titled collection Just an Ordinary Day, "One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts" sold for peanuts (comparatively...Fantastic at its commercial height was paying 5c/word as a standard rate, and probably a little more to Jackson, while F&SF was more likely to pay 2c/word, again with a bit of a bump--pay rates somewhat reminiscent of the little magazines, as well...this at a time when The New Yorker was paying several hundred 1950s dollars for its short fiction, and The Saturday Evening Post paid five to ten times what TNY chose to afford). 

 "Peanuts" is a fine story, even though it's not a fantasy so much as a charming story about people causing varying sorts of mischief; Jerome Bixby's vignette "Trace" would take the same sort of framework and make it unadulterated fantasy, but Boucher rather doubted, apparently, that his readers would mind a not-quite-fantasy by Jackson in their pages. This set up a precedent for two further Jackson stories in Boucher's F&SF, "The Missing Girl" and "The Omen". Though it's notable that Jackson's name is again not on the front cover for the January, 1955 issue, with William Sansom (a rather slick writer of sf and fantasy, who would contribute to The Saturday Evening Post or Playboy at least as often as to fantasy magazines), J. T. McIntosh (once a great F&SF favorite), Isaac Asimov and John Dickson Carr getting the lines instead...
At least by her third appearance, Jackson's credited on the cover...and her fourth and last original publication in F&SF was given an almost solo credit, along with Jane Roberts (most famous for "Seth" "nonfiction" but a fairly prolific contributor to the magazine in the 1950s).

 Publication: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1955

 Publication: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1957
This less impressive cover also a wraparound...or at least a duplicate.

 Publication: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1958
Though it's notable that when F&SF readers were polled for their favorite contributions from the history of the magazine, for an all-reprint-fiction 30th Anniversary issue, they chose the non-fantasy, non-sf story by Jackson over the later entries...it would be further reprinted by the fantasy magazine Twilight Zone a half-decade later, and Richard Lupoff would include it in his first volume of stories that probably should've won the Hugo Award...but, then, her heirs almost managed to name the collection of her uncollected stories after "One Ordinary Day..." as well.

For more of today's Jackson and non-Jackson FFB entries, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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