Showing posts with label fantastic fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fantastic fiction. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 26, 2022

SSW/FFB: First Installment: WESTERYEAR edited by Edward Gorman (M. Evans 1988); THE NEW FRONTIER edited by Joe R. Lansdale (Doubleday 1989); DREAMERS AND DESPERADOES edited by Craig Lesley and Katheryn Stavrakis (Dell 1993)


Some of the titles of the stories collected in these volumes use, for critical purposes, epithets.

WESTERYEAR edited by Edward Gorman (M. Evans 1988; G. K. Hall 1990)
Introduction * Edward Gorman (in) ** (**noting originally published in this volume) --and each item below with a headnote by Gorman
The Sun Stood Still * "Max Brand" (Frederick Faust) (ss) The American Magazine December 1934
Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses * "Mark Twain" (Samuel Clemens) (ar) North American Review July 1895
The Return of a Private * Hamlin Garland (ss) The Arena, V.3 N.1 (January?) 1891
The Idyl of Red Gulch * Bret Harte (ss) Overland Monthly December 1869 
The Lonesome Road * "O. Henry" (William Porter) (ss) Ainslee’s Magazine September 1903
One Dash—Horses (aka Horses) * Stephen Crane (ss) The New Review #81, February 1896 (and newspaper syndication in the U.S. in January of that year)
The Streets of Laredo * "Will Henry" (Henry Allen) (ss) Western Roundup--a WWA anthology editorially attributed to Nelson Nye (Macmillan 1961)
The Hard Way * Elmore Leonard (ss) Zane Grey’s Western Magazine August 1953
Mago's Bride * Loren D. Estleman  ** 
All the Long Years * Bill Pronzini **
The Damned * Greg Tobin **
Wolf Night * Bill Crider **
Liberty * Al Sarrantonio **
Trains Not Taken * Joe R. Lansdale (ss) RE:AL: Regarding Arts & Letters Spring 1987
Whores in the Pulpit * Thomas Sullivan **
Guild and the Indian Woman * Edward Gorman **
A Cowboy for a Madam * Barbara Beman **
One Night at Medicine Tail *  Chad Oliver **
The Time of the Wolves * Marcia Muller **
Hacendado * James M. Reasoner **
The Battle of Reno's Bend * L. J. Washburn **

Index revised and corrected from the WorldCat Index, with links to ISFDB, the FictionMags Index and other databases. Page numbers differ between the two editions.



THE NEW FRONTIER edited by Joe R. Lansdale (Doubleday/Double D 1989)
(Doubleday 0-385-24569-6, May ’89, $12.95, 180pp, hc) Original western anthology of 18 stories and a poem with an introduction by Lansdale and an afterword to a “lost” "Max Brand" (Frederick Faust) story by William F. Nolan. At least four of the stories are also fantasy.
Slightly augmented from the currently offline Locus Index.


 DREAMERS AND DESPERADOES edited by Craig Lesley and Katheryn Stavrakis (Dell/Laurel 1993) 

1 * Introduction(s) * Craig Lesley and Katheryn Stavrakis (in)
15 * Sweetheart * Kathleen Alcalá (ex) Mrs. Vargas and the Dead Naturalist Calyx Books 1992
Iliana of the Pleasure Dreams / Rudolfo A. Anaya --
Heartwood / Rick Bass --
The Snowies, the Judiths / Mary Clearman Blew --
Bigfoot Stole My Wife; I am Bigfoot / Ron Carlson --
Paraiso: an Elegy / Rick DeMarinis --
Winter of '19 / Ivan Doig --
Science Meets Prophecy / David James Duncan --
Cry About a Nickel / Percival Everett --
Optimists / Richard Ford --
Girls / Tess Gallagher --
Personal Silence / Molly Gloss --
Nebraska / Ron Hansen --
Friends and Fortunes / Linda Hogan --
A Family Resemblance / James D. Houston --
Rock Garden / Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston --
The Flower Girls / Lawson Fusao Inada --
Death by Browsing / Karen Karbo--
I Could Love You (If I Wanted) / John Keeble --
Why I am a Danger to the Public / Barbara Kingsolver --
Do You Hear Your Mother Talking? / William Kittredge --
Nevada Dreams / David Kranes --
Eggs ; Absences : Cicadas ; Growing Tomatoes / Alex Kuo --
Sleepwalkers / Ursula K. Le Guin --
Mint / Craig Lesley --
The Interior of North Dakota / Barry Lopez --
The Woman Who Would Eat Flowers / Colleen McElroy --
Dropping Anchor / Valerie Miner --
Idaho Man / John Rember --
Slaughterhouse / Greg Sarris --
Whitney and Tracie / Carolyn See --
Emerald City: Third & Pike / Charlotte Watson Sherman --
It's Come to This / Annick Smith --
Sea Animals / Tom Spanbauer --
The Room / Katheryn Stavrakis --
Pragmatists / Robert Stubblefield --
Migrants / Elizabeth Tallent --
Double Face / Amy Tan --
Boat People / Joyce Thompson --
Talking to the Dead / Sylvia A. Watanabe --
The Indian Lawyer / James Welch --
Buried Poems / Terry Tempest Williams

Slightly corrected (and soon to be augmented) from the WorldCat index.


***Stupid publisher tricks: 
Westeryear--the first edition jacket from M. Evans (immediately above); even G. K. Hall's generic large-print-line wrap (at top of post) is a step up.

The New Frontier--jacket copy referring to Neal Barrett, Jr. as "a new discovery" in 1989, a quarter-century or so into his career; also, a jacket at least as generic if not quite as clumsy as the Evans cover for the Gorman book or D-day's package for Lansdale's previous western originals anthology, Best of the West.

Dreamers and Desperadoes--managing to leave co-editor Stavrakis's name off nearly every aspect of the packaging, save the title page, though at least the table of contents does include her introduction. Also not quite stupid but perhaps not the best choice: the reasonably handsome cover for this trade-paperback original apparently doesn't photograph too well, at least on most of the photos and scans I've seen. Hence the current slightly blurry image above...and the cover isn't the easiest to read even in the handheld presence of the potential reader (poor color choices for legibility).

And none of these received the publisher push they deserved by any means, even if the Gorman did get a second edition for large-print readers.

Contents:
Westeryear's stories are, to say the least, an interesting mix of classics and contemporaries of classics, and new fiction from some of the best writers in western fiction (among work in other fields) active at time of assembly...a quality it shares with the Lansdale and Stavrakis/Lesley  volumes...even if each book has its own share of work that might fall on either side of the line established some years back by the Western Writers of America, porously between western fiction and fiction of the west (both of which they embraced). 

And then there's the Twain essay, perhaps the most famous KTF review in at least the US canon, and persuasive enough to me at age nine that I never sought out too much of Cooper's fiction, and what little I did seemed to conform to the Clemens assessment. Twain goes to a few lengths to ensure you can read his survey for humor, but nonetheless it tells, and enrages Cooper fans to this day. Editor Gorman himself isn't beyond pointing out the warts in the older reprints he offers here, or in the other work by their contributors, in his headnotes, but the stories do help add a certain perspective and none of them are difficult reading, and clearly are part of the development of the range of western fiction all the relatively contemporary writers included in all three volumes have drawn upon and reacted to. 

"Max Brand" (Frederick Faust)'s "The Sun Stood Still" is a good example of his graceful, tense writing; Gorman notes that its wit and appreciation of life as it was lived by the everyday people of the old West wasn't as widely shared by his peers (nor some of his successors), giving his work more of a contemporary if not quite timeless quality than that of many who wrote for the pulp magazines and higher-budget and yet still prone to tropism "slick" magazines in the first half of the previous century. For those who want even early western fiction to lack subtlety and a certain dramatic verisimilitude, even when the mythos of western fiction was already being employed (not too much in this decidedly unglamorized account of farmhand life), Brand doesn't help their case too much.

Hamlin Garland made a poor showing for himself (with the help of those hoping to Reach Yet Instruct Our Youth) with such widely-distributed work as his poem "Do You Fear the Force of the Wind?", unless one was looking for simpleminded machismo. But a similar devotion to simpleminded machismo on the part of, say Hemingway or Mailer (and far too many others, even if these two more flagrantly than most) didn't stop them from having a certain dalliance, at least, with social justice causes, and Garland particularly in his early career was throwing in with agrarian socialists, Populists, progressives and other troublemakers, and his fiction about, particularly, the travails of Civil War veterans and others trying to make a life in the hardscrabble, highly Gilded Age-distorted farming country of the Midwest (perhaps a bit too much like today's), struck a chord, and that's on offer with "The Return of a Private"; it's not subtle, but, as Gorman notes, Garland had an excellent eye for the small details and challenges of life.

"The Idyl of Red Gulch", being as it is a Bret Harte story, tries to couch itself as a fable perhaps a bit too much more than is good for it, but nonetheless gets across a fine account of how even in the far western U. S., the unfortunate prejudices can shoot through society once it asserts itself as post-pioneering country. Definitely romanticized, but also making its points. 

"The Lonesome Road", being as It is an "O. Henry" story, is also not quite a fable, but doesn't, unlike the Harte, call attention to its attempt at being of Great Import with every line, but rather more casually and mildly humorously gives the account of two old hell-raising friends, one of whom has now settled into a happy marriage and a more quiet life, finding themselves together having to deal with old adversaries. An interesting weighing of what makes for an actually good life, with a  rather straightforward account of what a chaotic, unromantic thing a gunfight tends to be. Gorman is particularly annoyed in his headnote about how readily Porter's work these years is condescended to as glib and mechanical, and this story helps make his case (and, fwiw, the Doubleday/Anchor folks are still branding their best stories of the year annual in his memory).

More to come. (More distractions as other parts of the ever-collapsing  house and life demand attention, not least the cat. Don't buy a century-old house. Just don't. Unless you have the money, skill or both to keep replacing everything.)




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Friday, November 30, 2018

Friday's "Forgotten" Books (and Magazines, Short Fiction, Comics and Audiobooks): the links to the reviews and more: 30 November 2018

This week's books, 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.  Founder Patti Abbott is on hiatus this week...so if I've missed yours or someone else's, please let me know in comments...

Patti Abbott: favorite books of 2018

 Les Blatt: Before Midnight by Rex Stout

 John Boston: Amazing: Fact and Science Fiction Stories, November 1963, edited by Cele Goldsmith

Brian Busby: The Thread of Flame by Basil King
Martin Edwards: Singled Out by Simon Brett

 Peter Enfantino: Atlas/Marvel horror comics May-June 1951

Peter Enfantino and Jack Seabrook: EC Comics December 1955

 Will Errickson: Miss Finney Kills Now and Then by Al Dempsey

 Curtis Evans: Charlotte MacLeod and "Whitey" Bolger

 Paul Fraser: New Worlds SF, May 1965, edited by Michael Moorcock

 John Grant: Mrs. Murphy's Underpants by Fredric Brown; The Front Seat Passenger by Pascal Garnier (translated by Jane Aitken)

 Rich Horton: The Cobbler of Nîmes by M. Imlay Taylor; The Planet Killers by Robert Silverberg; We Claim These Stars! by Poul Anderson; short fiction by Sarah Monette; The Body Artist and Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo

 Jerry House: Abu and the Seven Marvels by Richard Matheson

 Kate Jackson: The Beast Must Die by Nicolas Blake; The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie

 Tracy K: And Be a Villain by Rex Stout

 Colman Keane: Route 12 by Marietta Miles; How Like an Angel and Ask for Me Tomorrow by Margaret Millar

 George Kelley: The Big Book of Female Detectives edited by Otto Penzler; Blood Work edited by Rick Ollerman

 Joe Kenney: The Mexican Connection by "Alexander Mason"

 Margot Kinberg: Rumpole of the Bailey by John Mortimer

 Rob Kitchin: Takoro Gorge by Jacob Ritari

 B. V. Lawson: A Different Kind of Summer by "Jennie Melville" (Gwendoline Butler)

Evan Lewis: Will Eisner's The Spirit Archives, Volume One by Will Eisner, et al.

 Steve Lewis: The Clue of the Second Murder by John Stephen Strange; Two Pistols South of Deadwood by Merle Constiner; A Secret Singing by Richard C. Smith

Mike Lind: Bombay Ice by Leslie Forbes

 Gideon Marcus: Gamma, November 1963, edited by Charles Fritch

 Todd Mason: Women Should Be Allowed and other writings by Wilma Shore

 John F. Norris: Don't Open the Door by "Anthony Gilbert" (Lucy Malleson)

 John O'Neill: Terra Incognita: Three Novellas by Connie Willis; Outside the Gates by Molly Gloss; buying paperbacks at a Dreamhaven Books convention table

 Matt Paust: Troubled Deaths by Roderic Jeffries

 James Reasoner: No Business of Mine by James Hadley Chase; Startling Stories, July 1952, edited by Samuel Mines

 Richard Robinosn: The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries edited by Otto Penzler; The Consuming Fire by John Scalzi 

 Gerard Saylor: Double Cross by Ben McIntyre; "Revival" by Stephen King

 John Scoleri: Screen Stories, October 1971 (featuring a "The Omega Man" short story adaptation, by Jean Francis Webb, of the screenplay based loosely on I Am Legend by Richard Matheson)

 Steven Silver: "The Figurine" by L. Sprague de Camp; "Bialystock Stronghead and the Mermen" by Frederik Pohl; "The Valor of Cappen Vara" by Poul Anderson; "The Centipede's Dilemma" by Spider Robinson

 Victoria Silverwolf: Fantastic: Stories of Imagination, December 1963, edited by Cele Goldsmith

Kerrie Smith: The Storm Sister by Lucinda Riley

Kevin Tipple: On the Inside by Ted Wood

 "TomCat": Murder for Christmas by "Francis Duncan" (William Underhill)


 Danielle Torres: Attachments by Rainbow Rowell

 David Vineyard: The Exploits of Beau Quicksilver by Florence M. Pettee


































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Friday, October 19, 2018

FFM: MYSTERY SCENE, November 1986, edited by Ed Gorman and Bob Randisi; SCIENCE FICTION EYE, March 1988, edited by Steve Brown and Dan Steffan; NEW ORLEANS STORIES, Winter 1993, edited by O’Neil De Noux


Three magazines from a wealth passed along by Phil Stephensen-Payne, who was trying to streamline his library/storage set. I already had a copy of the fiction issue of Science Fiction Eye in storage somewhere in the boxes, but haven't laid eyes on it recently, a large-format (in the size that Life, Look, Ebony and The Saturday Evening Post would favor in their heydays) issue unlike the others of that fondly-remembered magazine; Mystery Scene is still very much with us, but this issue (#6, I believe, but it doesn't make that explicit anywhere that I can find; nor can I find a copyright note nor true colophon) is from the early years, as founders Ed Gorman and Bob Randisi were still shaking down what they hoped to make of this crime-fiction answer to Locus...and with this issue boldly laying claim to territory closer to that of Locus, "including Horror Scene" and adding a new, meant-to-be-regular section on comics/graphic literature, with Denny O'Neil as columnist.  Also included, a short story by Ed Hoch.  And New Orleans Stories, which would produce three slim issues in its run starting in 1993, begins with some bold claims from editor and apparent publisher O'Neil De Noux about not being a home for trivial stories set in the Big Easy, but stories by and about those who live and know the city. De Noux would get two issues out, and a third would be released by another staff...the not altogether different approach of Philadelphia Stories, some years later but with a giveaway approach and better production and apparently firmer financing, would prove hardier. 

The Mystery Scene issue is packed, almost scrapbook style, with short articles, reviews, interviews and more; not hard to read and not altogether unstylish, but one gets the sense that where there's white space, it wasn't so much an esthetic decision as there simply wasn't something else to cram into that spot. A good, short interview with Robert Bloch is part of the crossover attempt to reach the then-still-booming (or only starting to recede) horror market, though of course Bloch is and was best-known for his crime-fiction work, and had been a president of the Mystery Writers of America. This was apparently the first issue of MS to receive at least regional professional newsstand distribution (and the prospect of appearing in at least some of the once-flourishing B. Dalton chain of bookstores, as Randisi mentions in his editorial--B. Dalton eventually absorbed by Barnes & Noble), and the number of professional book display ads in the issue is impressive. The Simon Ark story by Edward Hoch, part of a series mostly from early in his career (about an investigator of psychic and particularly Satanic activity), feels a bit like a trunk story, and a bit like a jape on the publishing industry, hence likely the fact of its appearance in this context. (And the evidence of things still shaking down at MS is clear in the typos that riddle the story, more than in most of the nonfiction I've read, and that the table of contents of the issue doesn't mention either Hoch nor the story's title...perhaps a last-minute addition, though mentioned on the cover.)

The SF Eye issue was ambitious even by the consistently ambitious attempts of that magazine to break ground and look good doing so. (It wasn't alone in this in this era, but it was one of the first of the small-press magazines in its field to take advantage of desk-top publishing advances, as opposed to the older fannish engagement with earlier forms of DIY publishing.) The large format, notes John Clute in the SF Encyclopedia, was not favored by the relatively few newsstands that were already carrying the magazine by its third issue, but it was a novelty, at least, in sf circles...I think only the last Arts Council-funded issues of the British magazine New Worlds and the also-British poster-heavy/fiction-light Science Fiction Monthly had published in those dimensions within the field (perhaps no one in the US, with the weak exception of the tabloid newsprint final issues of Vertex), and the latter two had seen their last issues in 1975 and '76. Along with some of the already-regular columns, an assortment of short fiction, by veterans such as Richard Lupoff (whose wife and occasional publishing partner Patricia Lupoff has apparently just died, after debilitating illness) and up and comers such as Kathe Koja, very much reflecting the esthetic of the "edginess" and sophistication the magazine sought...and co-editor Dan Steffan, a cartoonist and illustrator, was able to put his stamp on the issue to greater extent than he would any other (he had to step away from the magazine shortly thereafter). 

Emerging a half-decade after these other pivotal issues for their respective titles, the first New Orlean Stories appeared, I believe, in the wake of Pulphouse Publishing's efflorescence as a source of interestingly-focused projects, many "mixing genres" and published in a sudden flood in many different formats, from magazines in the form of fat hardcovers (reasonably inexpensively printed through high-grade photocopying) on over through paperback chapbooks to thin, newsprint magazines such as this one...which apparently wasn't actually published by Pulphouse, but much in its spirit...founder O'Neil De Noux had worked with the Pulphouse folks in several ways. Featuring in its first issue a reprinted, recent story by George Alec Effinger (a pleasant if slight fantasy about a CIA-recruitment program of a very specialized nature) and a new story by less well-known authors, even a relatively small $1.50 price tag (in his editorial, De Noux notes he apparently expected to be able to price it at a dollar) probably didn't encourage newsstand purchase of such a slim product. But a good basic notion...

For more of today's books (and perhaps other magazines), please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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Friday, September 28, 2018

FFB: THE DARK SIDE edited by Damon Knight (Doubleday, 1965)

from 1 January 2009:

How to label a horror anthology as sf:
Not too long ago, I encouraged Patti Abbott nee Nase (of pattinase --the collection locus for these Forgotten Books entries) to pick up one of the many cheap copies of Terry Carr and Martin Harry Greenberg's A Treasury of Modern Fantasy, a 1981 anthology of stories from the fantasy-fiction magazines. (I'll note that I had given away my copy a quarter-century ago to a very nice woman named Deanna Chang, whom whenever I ran into her on random occasions after our high school graduation I had a book in hand and felt generous...she also got a copy of Judith Merril's annual SF 12 that way, and I hope she enjoyed them). I have since picked up a cheap copy likewise, and recently reread the introduction of that fine if not superb anthology, wherein the editors, the late Mr. Carr and the [then] still very active [since, alas, late] Prof. Greenberg congratulate themselves for producing the first fantasy-fiction anthology to draw entirely from the fantasy fiction magazines...and attempt at being comprehensive while doing so. (It wasn't, exactly, the first, but it was a pretty impressive example...if less comprehensive than it could've been.)

While there had been best-ofs of various magazines at that time--quite a number of nondefinitive collections from Weird Tales, at least three from Unknown, at least one from Fantastic, one each surveying Beyond and Fantastic Universe, and a long and up till then fairly regular series from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, there hadn't been (arguably) a volume which concentrated on fantasy, rather than horror or more eclectic assemblies, through the decades of the fantasy magazines.

But there had been predecessors for which one can make the case that they were meant to do something very similar, and this book, the first fantasy anthology Damon Knight edited (although his magazine Worlds Beyond in 1950 had stressed fantasy in its mix of fantastic fiction), is certainly one of them. Fortunately or unfortunately, it was published by Doubleday in 1965 in its Doubleday Science Fiction line, which meant it was plastered with indicators that it was really an sf book, which it largely is not, and given a perfunctory cover and a claim on its jacket flap copy to contain "The October Game" by Ray Bradbury, rather than, as it does, RB's "The Black Ferris" (one of two stories it shares with the Carr/Greenberg antho from a decade and a half later).

Knight himself, perhaps unsure that the sf audience that the book's being sold to won't simply snort or reflexively reject any collection of fantasy stories (this being the marketing dilemma for fantasy so labeled as Tolkien was only beginning to sell in the millions), at various points in the headnotes to each story the reader is reassured that these stories aren't Just fantasy, or, more foolishly, that they are Just fantasy and can be enjoyed as such, as if any but the most blockheaded readers (of which there were, and are, more than a few in the sf audience) couldn't figure that out for themselves.

But, then, Knight seems to want to readers to know from the general introduction on in that his book is devoted to fantasy that follows the (uncredited) H.G. Wells rule for fantastic fiction, that there be only one miracle per story, and all must be rationally extrapolated from that anomaly. This was also the Party Line at Unknown (later Unknown Worlds), the fantasy magazine edited by the hugely influential science fiction editor John W. Campbell, Jr (whom it is widely suggested preferred editing Unknown during its four year run, and who ran some Unknownish fantasy in his Astounding SF, later Analog, after the companion folded).

Having established that, Knight leads off with the Bradbury story, which he slights the rest of Weird Tales's entire inventory in favor of. While "The Black Ferris" is the seed of Something Wicked This Way Comes, it probably isn't even the best story Bradbury published in Weird Tales, and Knight's review of Dark Carnival, the first Bradbury collection, suggests as much (that review can be read in Knight's collection of reviews, In Search of Wonder, a touchstone of SF criticism and a book I reread several times as a youth). It's written in Bradbury's usual slightly too lush style of his early mature work, but in doing so shows the influence of two of his great models, more blatantly so in this story than in many, the more precise Theodore Sturgeon and the progenitor Nathaniel Hawthorne (I can see this being written in part as a response to "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment").

Courtesy of the William Contento online indices, here is the contents of the volume:
The Dark Side ed. Damon Knight (Doubleday, 1965, $4.50, 241pp, hc) 
ix · Introduction · Damon Knight · in 
1 · The Black Ferris · Ray Bradbury · ss Weird Tales May ’48 
13 · They · Robert A. Heinlein · ss Unknown Apr ’41 
36 · Mistake Inside · James Blish · nv Startling Stories Mar ’48 
65 · Trouble with Water · Horace L. Gold · ss Unknown Mar ’39 
96 · c/o Mr. Makepeace · Peter Phillips · ss F&SF Feb ’54 
112 · The Golem · Avram Davidson · ss F&SF Mar ’55 
121 · The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham · H. G. Wells · ss The Idler May, 1896 
144 · It · Theodore Sturgeon · nv Unknown Aug ’40 
179 · Nellthu · Anthony Boucher · vi F&SF Aug ’55 
182 · Casey Agonistes · Richard M. McKenna · ss F&SF Sep ’58 
198 · Eye for Iniquity · T. L. Sherred · nv Beyond Fantasy Fiction Jul ’53 
232 · The Man Who Never Grew Young · Fritz Leiber · ss Night’s Black Agents, Arkham, 1947 

courtesy Piet Nel

So, one can see that there's one story from Weird Tales, three from Unknown, one from the primarily sf magazine Startling Stories, four from Fantasy and Science Fiction, and one each from Beyond Fantasy Fiction and the general-interest magazine The Idler (a solid Wells market), and a story Leiber published in his first collection, Night's Black Agents, which was otherwise drawn from magazines...pretty darn close to a survey of the fantasy magazines, even if limited to a slice largely through the same sort of thing that is often called "urban fantasy" or contemporary fantasy today.

Knight was a not-uncritical but generous fan of Robert Heinlein, and overstates the effect of RAH's "They" on the reader (at least this reader, and I suspect most who were not introduced to the notion of solipsism by this story, as perhaps the young Knight was...a comic-book ripoff of Theodore Sturgeon's earlier "The Ultimate Egoist" was my first experience of same), but it remains an enjoyable story. Which is arguably science fiction, in this ostensibly non-sf anthology.

James Blish's "Mistake Inside" is an improvement, an early display of Blish's lifelong Anglophilia, fascination with history and with the basic questions of religious faith and the necesary grappling with morality and ethics that springs from that questioning...a mostly giddy alternate reality adventure with a deft ending. Not a major story, but certainly working up to one.

H. L. Gold's "Trouble with Water" is the other story shared by the Carr/Greenberg, and is certainly the best story I've read by Gold, though several others come close. Gold, like Alfred Bester, was a man with his finger on the pulse of popular culture of his time to a degree that no current person in the SF world can quite match, as far as I can tell...and in Gold's case, as Algis Budrys suggested at least once, that degree of understanding inhibited his best work (and Knight himself, in a review of a Gold collection that included How I Wrote This notes from Gold, quotes bits of his thought process that would've improved the story if more fully incorporated)...even here, the stereotypical shrewish wife, as cleverly as she's drawn, is not redeemed from cardboard by her eventual change of heart, in large part due to how well Greenberg the protagonist is presented as a full human being, and how the other characters are gracefully sketched in as much as needed. It's a story of a man who incautiously offends a "water gnome," and is in turn cursed by the supernatural creature with being unable to touch water. It's a classic, if not a perfect one, but eminently worth reading.

Peter Phillips is everyone's favorite near-forgotten writer of fantastic fiction in the 1950s, showing up also in such anthologies as Ramsey Campbell's Fine Frights, and "C/O Mr. Makepeace" is another fine if not superb, and elaborate, exercise in linking the notion of poltergeists to older forms of haunting. Knight helpfully (or not) keeps noting how many of the stories he's chosen loop back to either time-travel or solipsist/identity-question themes.

Avram Davidson's funny and widely anthologized borderline sf piece "The Golem" follows, wherein the stereotypical elderly Jewish couple, who are faced with a new sort of Frankenstein's monster, are wonderfully fleshed out, as is the ineffectually menacing automaton. Not Davidson's best story in this mode, but good and probably his most famous.

H. G. Wells's "The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham" is very well-written, rigorously worked out, and too long, given that even in 1896 this story of an older man possessing the body of a younger one would not be terribly fresh. But, like every other story in this book, it uses its excellent detail tellingly.

Theodore Sturgeon's "It" was probably his masterwork, in the sense of his first fully worked-out story that can't be notably improved in any particular. I've been surprised in recent years to learn that some folks aren't too impressed by this persuasive horror story, which could be called sf only by stretching that term to its breaking point, but which is utterly convincing as horror fiction to its devastating last lines.

Anthony Boucher's "Nellthu" is simply the most memorably funny deal with a devil vignette that I've read, one which has stuck with me through the decades.

Richard McKenna's "Casey Agonistes" was his big splash in fantastic fiction, and Knight wants to warn us that it's arguably not fantasy at all, and it is a borderline case...which makes more sense on the fantasy side of the fence, dealing as it does with the shared hallucination of a ward full of dying men. McKenna made a bigger splash with the bestselling historical novel The Sand Pebbles and died too young shortly after.

T. L. Sherred's "Eye for Iniquity" is a brilliant contemporary fantasy about a man who learns he can duplicate money by simple concentration on the bills as they lie on his coffee table. Sherred was never prolific, but more than nearly anyone else in the magazine field could make one feel the lives of the working people in his stories. 

And Fritz Leiber's "The Man Who Never Grew Young" is another (deservedly) much-reprinted story, dealing as the title suggests with an anomalous man who remains the same age as those around him are born from their graves, grow less wrinkled and eventually go from adult to adolescent to infant and are absorbed back into their mothers...a rather more imaginative reworking of the reverse aging concept shared by a widely advertised film based on a certain F. Scott Fitzgerald story. (I see "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is widely posted online, I have to wonder with what copyright provisions being violated.)

So, basically, this is not a definitive anthology, but one which contains not a few brilliant or near-brilliant stories, and no actively bad ones. The second half is better than the first, but I have to wonder if I'm letting nostalgia overtake me in at least a case or two, as Knight does with "They." I doubt it. 

A fine thing to seek out in the secondhand market or interlibrary loan, perhaps along with Knight's horror/suspense/sf anthology A Shocking Thing, published a decade later...the two of them together might make an interesting comparison to the Carr/Greenberg, or Robert Silverberg (and Greenberg)'s poll-driven The Fatasy Hall of Fame.


More Contento:

A Shocking Thing ed. Damon Knight (Pocket 0-671-77775-0, Nov ’74, 95¢, 245pp, pb) 
1 · Man from the South [“Collector’s Item”] · Roald Dahl · ss Colliers Sep 4 ’48 
13 · The Snail-Watcher · Patricia Highsmith · ss Gamma #3 ’64 
21 · Bianca’s Hands · Theodore Sturgeon · ss Argosy (UK) May ’47 
31 · Poor Little Warrior! · Brian W. Aldiss · ss F&SF Apr ’58 
39 · The Hounds · Kate Wilhelm · nv * 
65 · The Clone · Theodore L. Thomas · ss Fantastic Dec ’59 
79 · The Touch of Nutmeg Makes It · John Collier · ss New Yorker May 3 ’41 
89 · Casey Agonistes · Richard M. McKenna · ss F&SF Sep ’58 
101 · The Abyss · Leonid Andreyev · ss, 1943 
117 · A Case History · John Anthony West · ss, 1973 
121 · Fondly Fahrenheit · Alfred Bester · nv F&SF Aug ’54 
143 · Lukundoo [1907] · Edward Lucas White · ss Weird Tales Nov ’25 
159 · The Cabbage Patch · Theodore R. Cogswell · ss Perspective Fll ’52 
165 · Oil of Dog · Ambrose Bierce · ss Oakland Daily Evening Tribune Oct 11, 1890 
171 · The Time of the Big Sleep [France, Fiction 1971] · Jean-Pierre Andrevon · nv * 
195 · The Right Man for the Right Job · J. C. Thompson · ss Playboy Jul ’62 
207 · The Year of the Jackpot · Robert A. Heinlein · nv Galaxy Mar ’52 


A Treasury of Modern Fantasy ed. Terry Carr & Martin H. Greenberg (Avon 0-380-77115-2, Mar ’81, $8.95, 588pp, tp) 
xiii · Introduction · Terry Carr & Martin H. Greenberg · in 
1 · The Rats in the Walls · H. P. Lovecraft · ss Weird Tales Mar ’24 
19 · The Woman of the Wood [earlier version of “The Woman of the Wood”, Weird Tales Aug ’26] · A. Merritt · nv The Fox Woman & Other Stories, Avon, 1949 
45 · Trouble with Water · Horace L. Gold · ss Unknown Mar ’39 
63 · Thirteen O’Clock [as by Cecil Corwin; Peter Packer] · C. M. Kornbluth · nv Stirring Science Stories Feb ’41 
85 · The Coming of the White Worm · Clark Ashton Smith · ss Stirring Science Stories Apr ’41 
97 · Yesterday Was Monday · Theodore Sturgeon · ss Unknown Jun ’41 
113 · They Bite · Anthony Boucher · ss Unknown Aug ’43 
123 · Call Him Demon [as by Keith Hammond] · Henry Kuttner · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Fll ’46 
145 · Daemon · C. L. Moore · ss Famous Fantastic Mysteries Oct ’46 
165 · The Black Ferris · Ray Bradbury · ss Weird Tales May ’48 
173 · Displaced Person · Eric Frank Russell · vi Weird Tales Sep ’48 
177 · Our Fair City · Robert A. Heinlein · ss Weird Tales Jan ’49 
193 · Come and Go Mad · Fredric Brown · nv Weird Tales Jul ’49 
227 · There Shall Be No Darkness · James Blish · nv Thrilling Wonder Stories Apr ’50 
259 · The Loom of Darkness [“Liane the Wayfarer”; Dying Earth] · Jack Vance · ss The Dying Earth, Hillman, 1950; Worlds Beyond Dec ’50 
269 · The Rag Thing [as by David Grinnell] · Donald A. Wollheim · ss F&SF Oct ’51 
275 · Sail On! Sail On! · Philip José Farmer · ss Startling Stories Dec ’52 
285 · One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts · Shirley Jackson · ss F&SF Jan ’55 
295 · That Hell-Bound Train · Robert Bloch · ss F&SF Sep ’58 
307 · Nine Yards of Other Cloth [John] · Manly Wade Wellman · ss F&SF Nov ’58 
323 · The Montavarde Camera · Avram Davidson · ss F&SF May ’59 
335 · Man Overboard · John Collier · nv Argosy (UK) Jan ’60 
355 · My Dear Emily · Joanna Russ · nv F&SF Jul ’62 
375 · Descending · Thomas M. Disch · ss Fantastic Jul ’64 
387 · Four Ghosts in Hamlet · Fritz Leiber · nv F&SF Jan ’65 
417 · Divine Madness · Roger Zelazny · ss Magazine of Horror Sum ’66 
425 · Narrow Valley · R. A. Lafferty · ss F&SF Sep ’66 
437 · Timothy [Anita] · Keith Roberts · ss sf Impulse Sep ’66 
449 · Longtooth · Edgar Pangborn · nv F&SF Jan ’70 
479 · Through a Glass—Darkly · Zenna Henderson · nv F&SF Oct ’70 
501 · Piper at the Gates of Dawn · Richard Cowper · na F&SF Mar ’76 
547 · Jeffty Is Five · Harlan Ellison · ss F&SF Jul ’77 
565 · Within the Walls of Tyre · Michael Bishop · nv Weirdbook #13 ’78 


The Fantasy Hall of Fame ed. Robert Silverberg (HarperPrism 0-06-105215-9, Mar ’98 [Feb ’98], $14.00, 562pp, tp); Anthology of 30 fantasy stories from 1939 to 1990, chosen by SFWA members. Introduction by Silverberg; individual story introductions by Martin H. Greenberg. 
vii · Introduction · Robert Silverberg · in 
1 · Trouble with Water · H. L. Gold · ss Unknown Mar ’39 
21 · Nothing in the Rules · L. Sprague de Camp · nv Unknown Jul ’39 
47 · Fruit of Knowledge · C. L. Moore · nv Unknown Oct ’40 
77 · Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius [1941] · Jorge Luís Borges · ss Labyrinths, New Directions, 1962 
91 · The Compleat Werewolf [Fergus O’Breen] · Anthony Boucher · na Unknown Apr ’42 
137 · The Small Assassin · Ray Bradbury · ss Dime Mystery Magazine Nov ’46 
153 · The Lottery · Shirley Jackson · ss The New Yorker Jun 26 ’48 
161 · Our Fair City · Robert A. Heinlein · ss Weird Tales Jan ’49 
177 · There Shall Be No Darkness · James Blish · nv Thrilling Wonder Stories Apr ’50 
211 · The Loom of Darkness [“Liane the Wayfarer”; Dying Earth] · Jack Vance · ss The Dying Earth, Hillman, 1950 
221 · The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles [as by Idris Seabright] · Margaret St. Clair · ss F&SF Oct ’51 
225 · The Silken-Swift · Theodore Sturgeon · nv F&SF Nov ’53 
243 · The Golem · Avram Davidson · ss F&SF Mar ’55 
249 · Operation Afreet [Steven Matuchek; Ginny Greylock] · Poul Anderson · nv F&SF Sep ’56 
277 · That Hell-Bound Train · Robert Bloch · ss F&SF Sep ’58 
289 · Bazaar of the Bizarre [Fafhrd & Gray Mouser] · Fritz Leiber · nv Fantastic Aug ’63 
311 · Come Lady Death · Peter S. Beagle · ss Atlantic Monthly Sep ’63 
327 · The Drowned Giant · J. G. Ballard · ss The Terminal Beach, London: Gollancz, 1964 
337 · Narrow Valley · R. A. Lafferty · ss F&SF Sep ’66 
349 · Faith of Our Fathers · Philip K. Dick · nv Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967 
379 · The Ghost of a Model T · Clifford D. Simak · nv Epoch, ed. Roger Elwood & Robert Silverberg, Berkley, 1975 
393 · The Demoness · Tanith Lee · ss The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories #2, ed. Lin Carter, DAW, 1976 
405 · Jeffty Is Five · Harlan Ellison · ss F&SF Jul ’77 
423 · The Detective of Dreams · Gene Wolfe · nv Dark Forces, ed. Kirby McCauley, Viking, 1980 
439 · Unicorn Variations · Roger Zelazny · nv Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (IASFM, now Asimov's Science Fiction) Apr 13 ’81 
461 · Basileus · Robert Silverberg · ss The Best of Omni Science Fiction, No. 5, ed. Don Myrus, Omni, 1983 
477 · The Jaguar Hunter · Lucius Shepard · nv F&SF May ’85 
501 · Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight · Ursula K. Le Guin · nv Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, Capra Press, 1987 
527 · Bears Discover Fire · Terry Bisson · ss IASFM Aug ’90 
537 · Tower of Babylon · Ted Chiang · nv Omni Nov ’90

[and the earlier different volume with the same title:]
[and then there was this:]

The Horror Hall of Fame ed. Robert Silverberg & Martin H. Greenberg (Carroll & Graf 0-88184-692-9, Jul ’91, $21.95, 416pp, hc) Anthology of 18 classic horror stories. There is an uncredited introduction by Stefan Dziemianowicz.
  • 9 · Introduction [by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz] · Anon. · in
  • 17 · The Fall of the House of Usher · Edgar Allan Poe · ss Burton’s Gentlemen’s Magazine Sep, 1839
  • 36 · Green Tea [Martin Hesselius] · Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu · nv All the Year Round Oct 23-Nov 13, 1869
  • 69 · The Damned Thing · Ambrose Bierce · ss Tales from New York Town Topics Dec 7, 1893; Weird Tales Sep ’23
  • 79 · The Yellow Sign · Robert W. Chambers · nv The King in Yellow, New York & Chicago: F. Tennyson Neely, 1895
  • 101 · The Monkey’s Paw · W. W. Jacobs · ss Harper’s Monthly Sep ’02
  • 113 · The White People · Arthur Machen · nv Horlick’s Magazine Jan ’04
  • 152 · The Willows · Algernon Blackwood · na The Listener and Other Stories, London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907
  • 202 · Casting the Runes · M. R. James · nv More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, Arnold, 1911
  • 224 · The Graveyard Rats · Henry Kuttner · ss Weird Tales Mar ’36
  • 234 · Pigeons from Hell · Robert E. Howard · nv Weird Tales May ’38
  • 263 · It · Theodore Sturgeon · nv Unknown Aug ’40
  • 289 · Smoke Ghost · Fritz Leiber · ss Unknown Oct ’41
  • 306 · Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper · Robert Bloch · ss Weird Tales Jul ’43
  • 324 · The Small Assassin · Ray Bradbury · ss Dime Mystery Magazine Nov ’46
  • 341 · The Whimper of Whipped Dogs · Harlan Ellison · ss Bad Moon Rising, ed. Thomas M. Disch, Harper & Row, 1973
  • 360 · Calling Card · Ramsey Campbell · ss Dark Companions, Macmillan, 1982
  • 367 · Coin of the Realm · Charles L. Grant · ss Tales from the Nightside, Arkham House, 1981
  • 380 · The Reach [“Do the Dead Sing?”] · Stephen King · ss Yankee Nov ’81
  • 402 · Biographical Notes · Misc. · bg
[and that was succeeded, in SFWA-style, by HWA's...]

The Horror Hall of Fame: The Stoker Winners  
Editor: Joe R. Lansdale
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