Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Overlooked A/V: 18 October 2017

Alice Chang:  "NC, Esq." on Titanic; Dark Souls 3

 A. J. Wright: Frances Bergen

the Allan Fish Online Film Festival 2017

Anne Billson:  Horror and Women; That Darn Cat  (1965 film)(Cat of the Day); Lav Story: Toilets in Film

The Big Broadcast: 15 October

Bill Crider: The True Story of Jesse James [trailer]; The Purple Mask [excerpt]; Harlan Coben's The Five [promo]; Black Bart [excerpt]; Solomon Kane [trailer]; The Third Man (NTA/BBC tv series); Phantom Lady [trailer];
This is Elvis [trailer]; Bulldog Drummond (1929 film); The Count of Monte Cristo (1956 tv series); Rock! Rock! Rock! [trailer]; Scaramouche (1923 silent film); The Face of Fu Manchu [trailer]; The Four Feathers (1939 film) [trailer]; The Prisoner of Zenda (1952 film) [trailer]; The Prisoner of Zenda (1937 film) [trailer]; In a Valley of Violence [trailer]








The Faculty of Horror: Gremlins (1984); 31 Days of Halloween: Andrea, and Alex; Cube

How Did This Get Made?: The Wraith


Much more to come...
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Friday, October 6, 2017

MAGAZINE OF HORROR, V.1 N.1, August 1963, edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes (Health Knowledge, Inc.); GAMMA V.1, N.1, July 1963, edited by Charles Fritch (Star Press, Inc.)

Two magazines which offered their first issues in the summer of 1963; both were on newsstands in July. Both would offer a mix of fantasy (very much including horror), some sf and (as has often been the case with fantasy-fiction magazines over the decades) some stories that were more fantastic-adjacent than departures from consensus reality.

 Both were produced on modest budgets, but Gamma featured a full-color cover and relatively good paper, if a saddle-stapled binding; the first issue of Magazine of Horror (the lack of article in the title has always seemed awkward to me) was on a lower grade of paper, but the first issue, at least, was perfect-bound (glued, with a spine), though not long after, the MOH would also go to staple-binding. 

 And, in their mix of new and reprinted content, the two magazines come off rather more similarly than one might expect, particularly as the Magazine of Horror was both economically but also by intent delving largely into public domain reprints from the pulps, most importantly Weird Tales, and earlier fiction from other sources, featuring reprints from Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Robert Chambers and H.G. Wells along with the WT crew, while Gamma (with some if limited visual art within) was devoted to showcasing the "Little Bradburys" of the Los Angeles area, many of whom were screenwriters and not a few in Rod Serling's stable of contributors to The Twilight Zone...hence the prominence, aside from commercial good sense, in highlighting Bradbury's (reprinted) contributions, the Serling interview, and a piece of juvenilia by Tennessee Williams first published in Weird Tales (and also conveniently in the public domain); the other reprints in Gamma include decade-old stories from other fantasy/sf magazines and one of the most prominent fanzines of the time, a poem from a regional magazine and one of a number of vignettes commissioned for an advertising series that ran in Scientific American. Chatty headnotes to the stories and other expressions of strong editorial presence are hard to miss in both issues. 

































Gamma [v1 #1, #1, 1963] (50¢, 128pp+, digest, cover by Morris Scott Dollens) Editors: Charles E. Fritch, Editor; Jack Matcha, Executive Editor; William F. Nolan, Managing Editor
































Magazine of Horror and Strange Stories [v1 #1, #1, August 1963] ed. Robert A. W. Lowndes (Health Knowledge Inc., 50¢, 132pp, digest) 
Both magazines lead off with stories by the kind of writers who would predominate throughout their runs; unfortunately neither is a first-rate story. Frank Belknap Long's "The Man with a Thousand Legs" is a remarkably tone-deaf attempt to emulate Lovecraftian overstatement (which Lovecraft himself wasn't so good at), clunking along through one clumsy turn of phrase after another (and exactly one good one, when it's suggested a shell game con-man will look upon a potential source of income as his oyster); Charles Beaumont, probably the most widely-respected of the group of writers dismissively tagged "little Bradburys" by some, but who notably could dig a bit deeper in his best work than Bradbury usually was able to, provides something very much like a Bradbury version of a Manly Wade Wellman story, set among rural folk coping with a very old and eyeless man, replete with pet raven and guitar, who serves as a harbinger (agent?) of death when he comes down the hill and plays and sings his "Mourning Song" in front of the houses of the soon-dead...for however many days till the death actually occurs. By 1963, Beaumont was probably already dependent on his friends to finish when not completely ghost his work for him, as the early-onset Alzheimer's which would kill him a few years later was already making its presence known. Long's story is among his earliest work, though he did make some judicious rewrites at Lowndes's request (presumably excising some though not all the racist language in the original)...but not nearly enough of them. 

Wallace West is next up in the MOH, with "A Thing of Beauty," a Weird Tales reject that presumably sat in a drawer for three decades, and perhaps deservedly, though it's certainly a better story than the Long; a hunchbacked functionary at a medical school becomes obsessed with the corpse of a young woman, a suicide-by-gas, one of those he's charged with preserving for purposes of med student dissection. His rhapsodies over her nude form allow West to have him recite no little Romantic poetry, the caretaker's other obsession. WT editor Farnsworth Wright supposedly rejected the story as too distasteful, though its frankness is one of its few strengths. In the Gamma issue, Fritz Leiber's "Crimes Against Passion" is a playlet, one of his surprisingly few explorations of that form (given his theatrical background and love of the work of Shakespeare and John Webster, among others). It's also an excuse to rummage about mostly in Shakespeare's plays and to a lesser extent those of Aeschylus, while making easy jokes at the expense of modern psychiatry...this piece is one of the weaker Leiber fictions I've read, and feels like the kind of thing that instead would've gone to one of the more literate fanzines normally. Leiber is a better artist than West, but neither is swinging for the fences in these, even given the indulgence in hat-tipping to their literary favorites. The West isn' t horror fiction or at least is non-fantasticated; the Leiber is so much a stage jape or sketch that it barely registers as fantasy. 

The next (reprinted) stories in the issues are Robert W. Chambers's "The Yellow Sign" (from his collection of linked stories The King in Yellow, so much with us in the popular culture a few years back when the first season of the HBO series True Crime tied the murders portrayed in its narrative to a psychopath's devotion to the book)...this is the best-written story so far in the issue, by some distance, far more deft and fresh in the telling than the West and vastly better and less clumsily dated than the Long, for all that it hails from the 1890s; I suspect it suffers a little from being excerpted from the book, but it can stand, if probably less effectively, on its own as the story of a sort of haunting; Ray Bradbury's "Time in Thy Flight' had been his contribution  to the first issue of Fantastic Universe a decade before, cover dated June-July 1953 (edited by Samuel Merwin, Jr., who had been one of Bradbury's editors at Thrilling Wonder Stories and who would, as would Charles Fritch after him, eventually edit Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine), and it's as ham-handed and precious as Bradbury at his worst ever was, with 11yo children, on a time-travel field trip to 1928 holidays from a highly-regulated and antiseptic future, choosing to stay where fun is to be had...because 1928 orphanages were piles of fun. 

 "The Vengeance of Nitocris" is also an early Weird Tales story, the first publication of a teenaged Thomas Williams not yet signing himself "Tennessee", and a narrative which is determined to not simply foreshadow but clumsily reiterate what was about to happen as an Egyptian pharaoh takes revenge on priests responsible for the death of  her brother, the previous pharaoh. The 1920s were a good time for working Ancient Egyptian settings into the ground, particularly in WT. While in the MOH "The Maze and the Monster" is a bit of throwing-back romp for Edward Hoch, harkening to "The Lady or the Tiger" and "The Most Dangerous Game" (and even the similarly retro "The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths" by Borges, which Hoch might've been able to read) as well as grim adventure fiction of an even older vintage. Hoch had been one of Lowndes's "discoveries" at the Columbia crime fiction and other magazines he'd edited from the early '40s to the folding of the chain in 1960, and perhaps his most literarily significant new writer along with Carol Emshwiller; Hoch, as I didn't know previously, also contributed to the (ostensibly) nonfiction magazine Lowndes was already editing for Health Knowledge, Exploring the Unknown.  The reprinted A. E. van Vogt vignette, "Itself!", is slight, easy to take in, and indicative of how well he can put across paralogical moods and rather singleminded predation. Also, as isn't uncommon in his work, it's a bit goofy.

 The new Silverberg and Wollheim stories in the MOH are good examples of what these writers can do, and I'm looking forward to the Ray Russell original and Kris Neville reprint in Gamma particularly, while holding out less hope for the Ackerman collaboration, never published with recognition of that collaborative authorship, and supposedly rewritten from a 1953 appearance in the literate fanzine Inside. The Wells story and Twain tall tale are good work, from my memory of them, decades ago...this review will be updated over the next day or so...

 The two established fantasy and sf magazines in the US had solid issues out in theoretical competition with these startups...
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction [v25 #1, #146, July 1963] (40¢, 132pp, digest, cover by Ed Emsh)


The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction [v25 #2, #147, August 1963] (40¢, 132pp, digest, cover by Ed Emsh)
While the only other fully professional fantasy/sf magazine in English, the British Science Fantasy, also had a pretty impressive issue:

 Science Fantasy [v20, #60, (August) 1963] (2/6d, 112pp+, digest, cover by Gerard Quinn)
For more of today's books (and perhaps more magazines or short fiction), please see Patti Abbott's blog. I will be hosting next week, as the Abbotts hit the Bouchercon.

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Thursday, October 5, 2017

Saturday Music Club on Thursday: Spirits

Suzanne Santo: "Ghost in My Bed"
 

Kasey Lansdale: "Ghost"


Judy Collins: "Pretty Polly"


 The Zombies: "Just Out of Reach"


The Zombies: "Come on Time"

"Come on Time" trailer cut

The Zombies: "Remember You" (soundtrack version)


 Serena Ryder: "Electric Love"


Jill Sobule and John Doe & co.: "Down by the River"


Planxty: "When First Unto This Country..."


The New Lost City Ramblers: "He's Coming to Us Dead"


Rainbow Quest: Pete Seeger with guests Doc Watson, Clint Howard & Fred Price 


Hazeline Coates & First Mt. Olive's Recording Choir: "Satan"

Beast: "Satan" (based musically largely on a riff/sample from Charles Mingus's "Hora Decubitus")
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Wednesday, October 4, 2017

links to texts: 2017 Best Short Story Anthony Nominees (crossposted from Bouchercon site)

2017 Best Short Story Anthony Nominees

by admin | Oct 3, 2017 | Anthony Awards | 

 With thanks to the authors and publishers, click below to check out the anthologies the nominated stories are in and to read each of the stories nominated for a 2017 Anthony Award for Best Short Story!
                
Click each link below to read the stories and click the covers above to buy the anthologies in which each story is published
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Friday, September 29, 2017

FFB: Kit Reed, 1932-2017 and some of her peers

Kit Reed died this past week; energetic up to the point where her inoperable brain tumor got the better of her over the last month or so, at age 85 she left us a final novel and a final short story (unless something turns up in papers that her kids think she might've wanted to see in print). 
  The New York Times obit:
Kit Reed, Author of Darkly Humorous Fiction, Dies at 85, though it manages to not mention her contemporary fiction, it does mention her work as a professor and writer in residence.

 Colette Bancroft in the Tampa Bay Times.
Locus magazine (unsigned)

Her new novel:
And her new short story, both on sale now:

 Reed, as noted here last year, started her writing career as a professional journalist, and made a mark, winning industry awards before selling her first short story to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1958, "The Wait" (collected in her first shorter works volume as "To Be Taken in a Strange Country")...one rather pathetic colleague at the New Haven Register, she recounted not too long ago, would make a point of pulling her office typewriter off her desk and taking it over to a corner where he would type out his own attempts at stories, and claimed, upon learning of her F&SF sale, to have sold a story to The New Yorker, which would be appearing Real Soon Now. Reed continued to place fiction with F&SF, and branched out to the Yale Literary Magazine, Robert Lowndes's  Science Fiction, Joseph Payne Brennan's Macabre, and by 1960 Redbook...while her colleague had slunk off somewhere to await his further stories' appearance in equally imaginary issues of The Dial and Scribner's, no doubt.

In the previous Reed review-essay, I noted that Reed was a member of an (in the latter 1950s) emerging school of women writers not too worried about sticking within expected boundaries in their writing, whether it terms of "genre" or attitude toward their subjects, which I suggest also included Kate Wilhelm, Carol Emshwiller, Lee Hoffman, Joanna Russ and, starting just a bit later, Joyce Carol Oates...all were publishing in several fields at once, and impressively so. The NYT obituarist  attempts to suggest Reed "evokes Stephen King" (as opposed to the other way around) as well as Shirley Jackson, a rather better guess, but Reed noted to me last year that Evelyn Waugh was perhaps her greatest influence. 

 Courtesy Kate Maruyama, who notes on FaceBook: "Mom mailed this to me, gleefully, noting 'I thought you'd enjoy this little artifact.'"
But that wasn't the only "celebratory" slight she would see in her early fiction-writing career, as the World Science Fiction Convention was moved to attempt a third award in the category best new writer...the first Hugo ceremony in 1953 bestowed Best New Writer or Artist on Philip Jose Farmer, apparently by fiat of the convention committee (though not unreasonably so); in 1956, "Most Promising New Author" was voted upon and Robert Silverberg took home the Hugo, with the rest of the shortlist composed of Harlan Ellison, Frank Herbert and a relatively obscure writer these days, Henry Still, apparently a friend of convention organizers; and in 1959, the Hugo ballot featured the following impressive set of nominees for Best New Author, listed alphabetically:

 Brian W. Aldiss
Pauline Ashwell (Pauline Whitby)
Rosel George Brown
Louis Charbonneau
Kit Reed

 ...and the ungrateful bastards voted "No Award" the winner. Which is perhaps why there was no more attempt at Best New Author-style awards till the establishment of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, itself never officially a Hugo but voted on and awarded at the same convention ceremonies, in the early 1970s. (The voters in '59 did have the flexibility to give an sf award to Robert Bloch's humorous dark fantasy "That Hell-Bound Train" for best short story, but also chose No Award rather than favor any of the three ballot choices for best sf/fantasy film: The Fly, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and The Horror of Dracula...worse A/V presentations have won before and since.)
All five went on to notable careers, even if Brown's was cut very short by cancer fifty years ago, when she was 41; Ashwell died two years ago, and Charbonneau and Aldiss both died earlier this year. Three women and two men on a ballot in 1959 might've bothered some idiots; Aldiss and Ashwell were British, which might somehow have offended Yankee chauvinists; who knows why the voting populace was so honest and/or churlish as to not  care enough about any of these reasonably new writers to vote for any  (Charbonneau had written some radio drama before becoming a professional journalist, which would be his primary work while writing novels on the side; Aldiss had been the literary editor for the newspaper The Oxford Mail; Ashwell had been precocious, publishing her first short story in the British, and misleadingly titled, magazine Yankee Science Fiction at fourteen and publishing a children's fantasy chapbook at 15). 

 Kit Reed (when not signing her suspense novels Kit Craig and publishing one horror novel as Shelley Hyde) and Brian Aldiss have been hugely prolific, often challenging (never more to the reader than to themselves) writers in the decades since; Rosel George Brown wrote increasingly impressive short fiction and a few novels before her early death; Pauline Ashwell, sometimes publishing as Paul Ash, was not hugely prolific but published consistently impressive work--her perceived audience was such that a short novel she saw published in Analog has never been reprinted in book form, but her work is widely respected and enjoyed by those in the know; Louis Charbonneau, not the Canadian Human Rights Watch executive and bilingualism advocate (IMDb currently confuses them), went on to write several sf novels in the 1960s, novelized at least one unproduced film script and wrote the treatments for two episodes of  the original series of The Outer Limits, published westerns as Carter Travis Young beginning in 1960, and eventually moved more in the direction of writing horror and particularly suspense novels in the 1970s, along with the westerns/historicals under his own name Down from the Mountain and Trail: The Story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition: A Novel.
Rosel George Brown, 1966
There is something to be said for honoring the work of living writers while they're living, and perhaps praising some writers too young will discourage growth, but somehow I suspect the encouragement will more often be worthwhile. I'm glad I got to meet Kit Reed and tell her how much I've enjoyed her work over the years; didn't seize what opportunity I had with the others (though of course Brown had died before I was reading much beyond Seuss and Golden Books). More to say soon. 

 For more typical book reviews this week, please see Patti Abbott's blog. 





































































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