Showing posts with label small press. Show all posts
Showing posts with label small press. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 17, 2024

SSW: DARK AT HEART edited by Karen and Joe R. Lansdale (Dark Harvest 1992); LORD JOHN TEN edited by Dennis Etchison (Lord John Press 1988); STALKERS edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg (Roc/New American Library 1993)




Two gray books. Or, at least, two 
gray jackets. 


Lord John Ten ed. Dennis Etchison (Lord John Press 0-935716-43-2, 1988, $25.00, 240pp, hc) Largely original anthology of 35 stories, poems, articles, and other items, celebrating the publisher's tenth anniversary.

Dark at Heart ed. Joe R. & Karen Lansdale (Dark Harvest 0-913165-64-6, Apr ’92 [Mar ’92], $21.95, 307pp, hc, cover by Peter Scanlan) An original anthology of 20 crime and suspense stories, many by writers also of fantasy and horror fiction.

And another in mostly darker tones:

Stalkers ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg (Penguin/Roc 0-451-45048-5, Dec ’90 [Nov ’90], $9.95, 386pp, tp) Reprint (Dark Harvest 1989) original anthology of 19 horror stories. This edition adds a story by Barry N. Malzberg.
  • 1 · Introduction · Ed Gorman · in Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 2 · Trapped · Dean R. Koontz · na Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 59 · Flight · John Coyne · nv Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 99 · A Day in the Life · F. Paul Wilson · nv Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 145 · Lizardman · Robert R. McCammon · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 158 · Pilots · Joe R. Lansdale & Dan Lowry · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 175 · Stalker · Ed Gorman · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 193 · Getting the Job Done · Rick Hautala · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 209 · Children of Cain · Al Sarrantonio · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 229 · A Matter of Principal [Quarry] · Max Allan Collins · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 242 · Miss December · Rex Miller · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 264 · A Matter of Firing · John Maclay · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 271 · The Sacred Fire [Newford] · Charles de Lint · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 285 · The Stalker of Souls · Edward D. Hoch · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 306 · Darwinian Facts · Barry N. Malzberg · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Penguin/Roc, 1990
  • 321 · The Hunt · Richard Laymon · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 340 · Mother Tucker · James Kisner · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 350 · Jezebel · J. N. Williamson · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 361 · What Chelsea Said · Michael Seidman · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
  • 375 · Rivereños · Trish Janeshutz · ss Stalkers, ed. Ed Gorman & Martin H. Greenberg, Arlington Heights, IL: Dark Harvest, 1989
































This is a trio of impressive volumes that I've been meaning to review in depth for several years, now, and perhaps with this posting, I will compel myself to get off the starting point. I hope that you're already familiar with all three, but suspect that's least likely in the case of Etchison's Lord John Ten...but they are all worth the effort to find. (I have a number of relatively ambitious multi-item reviews as yet unfinished, but several of them are at least a bit further along than this one...but not yet enough to justify the posting.)

For more of today's short-story posts, please see Patti Abbott's blog.



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Wednesday, December 27, 2023

SSW: Jeff Segal and Todd Mason on David Drake, 24 September 1945-10 December 2023



Drake's portrait on his website;
his blog/newsletters



Todd Mason:

As readers of this blog might've seen before, the fifth volume of The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series V edited by Gerald W. Page, was a kind of revelation to me...evidence that such favorite writers of mine already as Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Manly Wade Wellman, Harlan Ellison and Joseph Payne Brennan were still actively writing new work...and look at all their similarly-active peers, whose work I would read in this volume for the first time (hell, Tanith Lee, Arthur Byron Cover, H. Warner Munn and Charles Grant had new, previously unpublished stories in the book). And one of the writers new to me, with an elegant dark historical fantasy (reprinted from F&SF), was David Drake...and I would come to welcome his short stories in this mode and related ones over the next decade as I found and read them, in YBHS, in the First World Fantasy Awards volume edited by Gahan Wilson, in Whispers anthologies (and, eventually, in issues of the magazine the anthologies were mostly drawn from--which Drake helped put together), and in Fantastic and Ramsey Campbell's anthology Superhorror, in Kirby McCauley's anthology Frights...and the only non-fantasy/horror story in the materials I had at hand was a "Hammer's Slammers" story in an issue of Destinies, a paperback magazine edited by James Baen for Ace Books, which was the last sf magazine my father would buy for himself, into early 1979. It didn't make as much of an impression on me. Eventually, I had a secondhand copy of the first Hammer's Slammers anthology, but only read some of it, without getting caught up in it--Jeff Segal had a much more engaged (and sensible) response.

David Drake continued to do interesting work in likely and unlikely places over the next several decades, until recent ill-health kept him from writing fiction any longer, but I had lost track of his work, while being aware of it being in the marketplace. I should still pick up some of his anthologies along with some of his novels and certainly his collections I let slip by. (I was a bit late on the scene to buy most of his and Karl Wagner's Carcosa collections of Manly Wade Wellman's work and others when they were new.)

Unsurprisingly, he has been remembered as a gracious friend and acquaintance by many, even those who might never, say, take part in, nor read, his collaboration on one book with Newt Gingrich and Marianne Ginther (at the time, still married to Gingrich). And among his fans who got to know him rather better than I did is my old friend Jeff Segal:



Jeff Segal:

An especially important author, and sometimes-editor, in my reading evolution, along with his late friends and associates Karl Edward Wagner and Manly Wade Wellman (though my appreciation of Wellman really kicked-in later, as I matured enough to appreciate the authentically Appalachian settings of a lot of his horror and fantasy fiction).

The first Drakes that ripped into my awareness were: one of his I-was-there Vietnam War-set horrors, the vignette "Best of Luck"; and the historical axe & sorcery (or is it sorcery?) chiller "The Barrow Troll", a tale with one of Drake's bitterly ironic finales.

Drake was a vocal advocate for fantastic fiction, especially pulp magazine-era stories, and both his short fiction and novels often served as tributes to neglected books. Publishers Tor and Baen Books have repackaged his short fiction in many combinations, but also encouraged him to promote and harken back to worthy novels and stories by other hands, which too often had been half-forgotten over the decades. For example, his dark tale "The Automatic Rifleman" was inspired by Fritz Leiber's "The Automatic Pistol", which he also heartily recommended to his readers, and I would finally track it down some years afterward (Leiber's classic Weird Tales story opts for a supernatural premise, rather than the apocalyptic-sf direction Drake employed). 


I wrote to him, and eventually we corresponded about failed military missions; he steered me toward a classic, The March Up Country: A Translation of Xenophon's Anabasis, a primary-source historical and inspirational work (which the multi-lingual Drake likely read in its original Greek), and I dipped into it recently when studying the evolution of Walter Hill's movie The Warriors (1979) (Anabasis inspired both the Sol Yurick source-novel and the film).
My first exposure to the "Hammer's Slammers" mercenary yarns which made Drake famous...or notorious...was in a secondhand copy of the 1979 Ace paperback collection with that title. The stories, reinforced with contextual essays, displayed the universe from the POV of a far-future frontline warfighter. One of them, "Cultural Conflict", reads like a critique of the film Aliens, except it was published half a decade before that movie dominated the 1986 summer boxoffice (I saw it three times in theaters). I read the collection too swiftly and the effect of its concentrated violence was somewhat sickening at first, until I broke down how Drake achieved his effects on a literary level. The Slammers stories, and eventually novels and role-playing games, hammered Drake's name into the world of science fiction, though I'd argue that his finest military-oriented sf novel was the standalone Redliners (1996), which he admitted was a cathartic experience to write, allowing him to expel the toxins of war he hadn't known he still carried. It is also a magnificent achievement in creating, to borrow Harry Harrison's term, a "deathworld".

Drake's writing style, distinctly lean and ruthlessly efficient, and his raptor's eye for detail, plus his obsessions and quirks, would often stretch creative muscle over simple or awkward plotting. A case in point is The Dragon Lord, one of my favorite novels of his, a savage take on historical myth with the Camelot crowd, warts and all, serving as supporting players--its wonky back-and-forth traveling plot-structure was more than balanced by the quality of the writing, the research and some engaging characters (traveling and quests are often a part of Drake's longer works regardless of genre; for instance, his Lord of Isles cycle, an epic set almost a 1000 years after a fantasy world's apocalypse, is charmingly told, for all its ambition, in the kind of simple structure that Edgar Rice Burroughs built a successful career around--scatter your protagonists and send them off on separate adventures, while having them attempt to find one another). And The Dragon Lord demonstrated another of the author's talents: the ability to craft credibly menacing creatures with genuine impact and weight; the epic's maturing wyvern, conjured into the world by the scraggly Merlin at the behest of a typically cynical and Drake-esque King Arthur, intended to be employed as a WMD against those pesky Saxons, is used sparingly throughout the book...but it comes across as one helluva intimidating threat by the climax of the story.
Drake was adept in writing horror (primarily in short stories), fantasy (often based in realistically-rendered historical backdrops, though some of his work thus was set in newly-created worlds), and science fiction, the last in harsh military-sf or similarly rugged space opera. He had no qualms about mixing genres. The first and stronger of his two Tom Kelly espionage novels, Skyripper, is as devotedly a Cold War pursuit-thriller as any of its early-Reagan-era ilk, the McGuffin involving a cracked, ingenious Soviet scientist who wants to defect to the US in order to share his conceptual space-warfare plans with Uncle Sam to ward off "an alien invasion" he claims will occur...but there are hints that something is "off" during the brutal multi-threat spy hunt, which results in a hell of an ending, in the tradition of "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean THEY aren't after you.”
Drake had many interests I share, which would continuously come roaring into his fiction (paleozoology, for instance). History, myth and classical-era literature were integral to much of his bibliography, rather like a bloodthirsty Roger Zelazny (Zelazny's 1969 novel Damnation Alley offered a proto-Drake hardman in a killer vehicle on a nightmare-filled deathworld road-trip). Drake also demonstrated some fascinating contradictions, such as delight in battle-glory action-filled sword & sorcery stories by Robert Howard, and Fritz Leiber (whose Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser bromance tales were repeatedly a big influence on Drake's own characters, fantasy and otherwise) but...Drake's own haunted Vietnam War service acquainted him with the effects of genuine brutality, where there is little glory. [And Leiber, who leaned toward pacifism, was very aware of this in a way that Howard was not. --tm]

Karl Edward Wagner and Drake cowrote a short story that was published in the 1974 first issue of the "little"/"semi-pro" fantasy-fiction magazine Midnight Sun. The tale predated the cult films Without Warning (1980) and Predator (1987) but anticipated something of the alien hunter/predator-on-Earth scenario, though set in ancient Rome. In the '80s, Drake and Wagner nursed the tale into a full-length novel, Killer, which I enjoyed, despite Drake's bad experience with this particular project. The Roman Empire and its frontiers provided a backdrop for his cycle of short bromance historical fantasies featuring the lethal Centurion, Vettius, and his cunning two-fisted merchant pal Dama, as they confront menaces both human and unnatural. Rome also was the setting or inspiration for some of his other short and long fiction. He may have gained a larger audience with the short tale "Ranks of Bronze", which, along with Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game", I first encountered in the initial volume of Jerry Pournelle's anthology There Will Be War. "Bronze" was expanded into a well-received Bildungsroman novel, which inspired some follow-up books (I first learned about Bildungsromane on his website, an invaluable resource for his fans and scholars).

Not all of Drake's work "popped" for me. For instance, the first and only novel in his proposed "Crystal Walls" series, The Sea Hag, displayed some lively imagination but fell short of the Jack Vance-ian heights he was aiming for. And the follow up to Skyripper seemed to be set in an alternate universe where the conundrum the first book had been building up to was erased. However, a lot of his odd experiments rocked. I warmed up to his "RCN" space-opera series, based, sometimes literally, on Patrick O'Brian's historical Aubrey/Maturin novels. His expansion of Jim Kjelgaard's 1951 paleolithic novel Fire Hunter, The Hunter Returns, enthralled me as much as the original had. His two novels based on Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's "Clash By Night", The Jungle and Surface Action, were crammed full of terra-formed Venusian future-naval dreadnaught engagements and horror-choked jungles and seas, another striking deathworld. His take on the Cthulhu Mythos, by way of Joseph Conrad, "Than Curse the Darkness",
was a uniquely feral entry into the pantheon and provided a frightening and absolutely inhuman interpretation of Nyarlathotep, the Dweller in Darkness itself; no chatty Dark Man avatar for this version of the Crawling Chaos (unlike the walking dudes of Robert Bloch's early "The Shadow from the Steeple" and Stephen King's much later The Stand)--Drake's Nyarlathotep was an other-dimensional alien cancer attempting to metastasize throughout our world, summoned to the Congo by those who had been maimed by the Colonials. After humanity has been granted a breather to continue existing, the survivors reflect upon the situation; an American gunslinger, retained as a bodyguard, realizes that he and the singularly unempathic party he is with are the "good guys" and has himself a good laugh. A patented David Drake approach to their victory. That yarn scarred me quite deeply as did a lot of Drake's other efforts.
Finally, he could be quite prescient. His three "Jed Lacey" stories, involving a diagnosed sociopath who is subjected to a behavior-modifying aversion/Ludovico Technique due to his crimes, but who is subsequently "repurposed" as an investigator because he's useful to his AI-governed society, is set in a "Nation without Walls," a near-future United States riddled with omnipresent surveillance technology...a reality accepted by much of the population. When these stories began appearing in the 1970's, a Nation without Walls must have seemed comfortably like fanciful speculative fiction to most readers... 
David Drake and his contributions won't be forgotten by me.

--Jeff Segal

For more of today's short-story posts, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

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Friday, June 15, 2018

FFB: ADVENTURES IN THE SPACE TRADE: A Memoir by Richard Wilson (Drumm 1986); FANTASTIC WORLDS Nos. 3, 4 & 5, edited by Sam Sackett (Sackett/Kemble 1953); COLD SNAP by Thom Jones: Limited Promotional Sampler (Little, Brown 1995}

The Very Small Press, and a Brief Form of a Little, Brown Book


Richard Wilson isn't  "The Forgotten Writer" of the 1950s and '60s, but he'll do till another unjust example asserts her or himself (next week, no doubt). In his youth one of the NYC-based Futurian Society group of fan writers, editors, artists and more, Wilson wasn't ever the flashiest nor most prolific of the bunch, but his wry and empathetic approach was notable early on...and that he was not too prone to pomposity might be suggested by his most sustained series of works being the stories about the protean Harry Protagonist (with the first two stories meant to be retro-fitted into the series in a mooted collection that has not yet appeared):
Even more remarkable, even given his primary career, more than simply his day job, for most of his adult life was as a wire-service journalist (first for the small Trans-Radio Press, as the primary staffer in Chicago, then for Reuters in NYC--sometimes working with his wife, Doris "Leslie Perri" Baumgardt, and his old friend and collaborator Cyril Kornbluth), he published only three novels, the last in 1960 and that a short one, released as half of an Ace Double with one of Andre Norton's novels, and a novella, "The Story Writer", in 1979. But when he did publish, he was often collected in the year's best volumes and on the shortlist for or winning the SFWA's Nebula Award, and at least two of his stories from the late '60s, "Mother to the World" (1968) and "A Man Spekith", were widely hailed and (it was perhaps hoped) suggested a newly sustained re-engagement with writing new fiction. As it turned out, not so much, till after his retirement from a position as instructor and archivist at Syracuse University...and those stories were not collected in a Wilson volume till well after his death in 1987, in a pair of volumes edited by John Pelan, collecting his best short work, issued by Ramble House with the unfortunate amateurish packaging that well-meaning imprint tends to offer. 

The late Thom Jones, best known still for his first collection The Pugilist at Rest, is not a forgotten writer at all, though he's not a name to conjure with at this point...he apparently wished to have readers (and editors such as Joyce Carol Oates and Raymond J. Smith) forget what I think might be his first published story, "Brother Dodo's Revenge", a fine animal fantasy from a young writer which seemed to most embarrass him in its publication site, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1973, an issue where he shares space with Avram Davidson, the poet Walter Kerr, John Sladek, Edward Wellen, Dean McLaughlin, Waldo Carlton Wright, and, it's true, Andrew Offutt in one of his more presentable efforts in the 1970s, an unusually stag cast for the magazine, and what is probably still Harlan Ellison's best single shorter work, "The Deathbird", as the cover story, a cover by Leo and Diane Dillon. But, then again, one must keep up appearances, particularly if one is a pompous and ambitious up-and-comer in the 1990s. Hence my never actually purchasing a Jones volume, but I do have this expensively-produced, die-cut example of a promo sampler of stories from his second collection, as issued in early 1995 as an enticement to reviewers and particularly book-buyers, on the wholesale and perhaps even retail level (I don't remember if we had stacks of these to put out at our bookstore, but it seems likely).



And then, back in the earliest 1950s, there were (as there had been going back to the 1930s and would continue to be to the present) the more ambitious examples of the fannish small press, with few "semiprozines" (the mildly budgeted little magazines of the fantastic-fiction community, which made token payments to contributors) but a few more ambitious fanzines, which featured some notable contributors offering fiction and essays and other writing and art which was perhaps not quite right, or too eccentric or personal, for the paying markets. 
Fantastic Worlds, Summer 1953
as above
Fantastic Worlds, Fall 1953
as above

 Most of the reason these have caught my eye is the early publication of fiction by David R. Bunch, who would continue to be one of the more interesting if polarizing contributors to the field, mostly in the form of vignettes and short fiction, much of it set in a future human society of Moderan, where humanity has become increasingly flensed by literal as well as metaphorical and spiritual mechanization...the satirical variations he ran on this theme, and in other allied work in other settings, was usually deft and engaging. (To place him in the firmament, perhaps consider him as somewhere between Theodore Sturgeon and R. A. Laffterty, and pulled a bit toward the "Cordwainer Smith" orbit, but with the intensity of focus of some of Barry Malzberg's work.) And that these three issues, at least, are online, and ready for all to see. It's a useful service, being able to dip into the content, if not necessarily the context, of these productions of their time...and unlike the back issues of the professional magazines, copies of this and other fannish productions are even less likely to come to the open electronic or surviving bookstore market.

 More to come on all these items...but for more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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