Not quite random picks from the US fantasy(+) magazines of that half-decade (subtitle phrase inspired by Irene Hunt).
1949: Fritz Leiber: "The Man Who Never Grew Young" (first mass-market reprinting from original 1947 publication in the Arkham House small-press collection Night's Black Agents); and Robert Bloch: "The Unspeakable Betrothal" Avon Fantasy Reader #9 (February?), edited by Donald A. Wollheim
1950: Mack Reynolds: "Isolationist" Fantastic Adventures April 1950, edited by Howard Browne; Robert Arthur: "The Flying Eye" (reprinted from Argosy 18 May 1940); and Cornell Woolrich: "Speak to Me of Death" (reprinted from Argosy 27 February 1937) Fantasy Fiction May 1950, edited by Curtis Mitchell; Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl (as James MacCreigh): "The Little Man on the Subway" Fantasy Book early/January? 1950, edited by Margaret and William L. Crawford
1951: Margaret St. Clair (as Idris Seabright): "Brightness Falls from the Air"; and Richard Matheson: "Through Channels"; and Manly Wade Wellman: "Larroes Catch Meddlers" The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction April 1951, edited by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas; Allen Kim Lang: "An Eel by the Tail" Imagination April 1951, edited (and packaged almost insanely poorly) by William Hamling; Theodore Sturgeon: "Ghost of a Chance" Suspense Spring 1951, edited by Theodore Irwin (reprinted, for the first time, from Unknown Worlds June 1943, edited by John W. Campbell, where it appeared as "The Green-Eyed Monster"); C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner (as by "C. H. Liddell"): "Golden Apple" Famous Fantastic Mysteries March 1951, edited by Mary Gnaedinger; Jack Vance: "The New Prime" (as "Brain of the Galaxy") Worlds Beyond February 1951, edited by Damon Knight; Fritz Leiber: "Cry Witch!"; and Kris Neville: "Seeds of Futurity" 10 Story Fantasy Spring 1951, edited by Donald A. Wollheim
1952: August Derleth: "The Night Road" Weird Tales May 1952, edited by Dorothy McIlwraith
1953: Shirley Jackson: "Root of Evil" Fantastic April 1953, edited by Howard Browne; Margaret St. Clair: "The Espadrille" Famous Fantastic Mysteries April 1953, edited by Mary Gnaedinger; Algis Budrys: "The Weeblies" Fantasy Fiction (first issue as Fantasy Magazine) June 1953, edited by Lester Del Rey
1954: Miriam Allen deFord: "Gone to the Dogs" (aka "Henry Martindale, Great Dane") Beyond Fantasy Fiction March 1954, edited by H. L. Gold; Charles Carroll Muñoz (as T. P. Caravan): "The Soluble Scientist" Universe Science Fiction March 1954, edited by Bea Mahaffey; Mann Rubin: "The Other Voice" Fantastic Universe March 1954, edited by Beatrice Jones; Robert Bloch: "The Goddess of Wisdom" Fantastic Universe May 1954, edited by Leo Margulies
A small panoply of stories I've been meaning to read or reread or in a couple of instances have stumbled across while looking up the others. Most notable for how little-discussed they are of late...a few understandably, if not necessarily deservedly. All more or less what might've been on newsstands in April of 1949-54, arbitrarily enough.
The 1949 entries, from an issue of Avon Fantasy Reader, include one of Fritz Leiber's best-known early stories and a reasonably well-known item from Robert Bloch's bibliography (the Bloch was bumped from another Donald Wollheim project at Avon, the notable 1949 original-fiction anthology The Girl with the Hungry Eyes and Other Stories, the title story being another major Leiber story). The Reader having been Wollheim's attempt to recreate the flavor of Farnsworth Wright's Weird Tales, as opposed to the less gothic and more modernist approach of Dorothy McIlwraith's issues, the spirit of the Bloch and its Lovecraftian elements made it at least as at home in the magazine.
"The Man Who Never Grew Young" is a lovely work, as many readers here will already know, that takes the concept of time-regression away from the single-person or similar "small-batch" examples, most famously of late F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button", and, in a sense at least, of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment", and posits a world in which some sort of barely-remembered (by the protagonist) near-Doomsday weapon has caused, as a result of detonation, the regression of time for everything on the Earth...except, apparently, for the protagonist, who remains pretty much as he has been as those people and other things around him tend to flow backwards, as it grows more difficult to remember just how things once were for him and his world (he is thus a sort of immortal, as he watches his lovers and friends eventually find their mothers and be reabsorbed, and civilizations become less complex over time). The elegiac quality of the story is beautifully maintained. It's sadly less than remarkable that Leiber couldn't find a periodical market for the story, which first appeared in his first collection.
"The Unspeakable Betrothal" by Robert Bloch is nearly the last of his blatantly Lovecraftian works, before his stated (vain, but knowingly so) hope to put Lovecraftian pastiche to bed permanently with his 1979 novel Strange Eons. (Bloch, as I've noted here on the blog before, was a student and protégé of Lovecraft's, as was, much more briefly, Leiber, and they were the most notable writers to emerge from the Lovecraft Circle of corresponding friends, and did the most to expand and refine Lovecraft's innovations.) It's also, I see on rereading, a harbinger of the increasing turn toward explicitly psychological analysis in his storytelling, while in this case retaining the supernatural element...which would continue, without supernatural elements, through such stories as "Lucy Comes to Stay" and "I Do Not Love Thee, Dr. Fell", both clearly leading up to the novel Psycho, and such other earlier crime fiction as The Scarf and subsequent work such as Firebug and "A Home Away from Home"...
1950: Fantastic Adventures, under the editorship of Howard Browne for three years before it was merged with the new and rather more modish Fantastic, had a brief spell of featuring no little first-rate work (such as Leiber's You're All Alone and Theodore Sturgeon's The Dreaming Jewels), at least some purchased for a mooted 1950 upgrade of companion magazine Amazing Stories, but mostly was treated as a repository of so-so pulp fantasy and sf adventure fiction, much of it published under house names, even if some of it had suggestions of better work to come from such writers as William McGivern and, in this case, the young Mack Reynolds, the son of Verne Reynolds, a presidential candidate for the very doctrinaire Marxist, and first US socialist, political party, the Socialist Labor Party (founder Daniel De Leon had criticized his contemporary Karl Marx for deviation from the latter's own early proposals). Political considerations would find interesting ways to inform nearly if not all of Reynolds's fiction, and "Isolationist", while an early and not completely successful example, is a forerunner building toward such better stories as "Pacifist" and "Compounded Interest"...in this case, a misanthropic farmer has his day, and an acre of good corn, ruined by the unwelcome visit of some condescending aliens, in a spaceship which reminds the protagonist of children's toys that have led to weapons of mass destruction. (Reynolds has another story in the same issue, "He Took It With Him", under a pseudonym, likewise taking a concept...in this case "You can't take it with you" as in any material wealth into what afterlife there might be...and putting forth a literal reconsideration of the terms in question.)
Reasonably prolific pulp-magazine contributor (largely to aerial-combat fiction titles) Curtis Mitchell's undercapitalized Magabook, Inc. offered two issues only of Fantasy Fiction (the second retitled Fantasy Stories for no obvious reason), and the magazine relied heavily on reprints from the eclectic fiction magazine Argosy and its competitor Adventure (often given new and intentionally crude new titles), interlarding them with short new pieces that often were tagged "true fantasy stories"--about mildly or less mildly bizarre supposed actual occurrences with some sort of uncanny element. My eye was drawn by the first issue containing older stories by Robert Arthur, Richard Sale and Cornell Woolrich I hadn't read.
The Arthur, from Argosy's 18 May 1940 issue, is what I'd call an almost-good example of his work, and I can understand his not rushing it back into print...a camera with an unintentionally-created magical lens which photographs the thoughts of its subjects at the time the shot was taken. It plays out reasonably cleverly, if not too surprisingly. To be continued...
for more of today's short fiction reviews, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
