OTHER DIMENSIONS

By Clark Ashton Smith

This collection from Arkham House showcases short stories by Clark Ashton Smith over a period ranging from the 1910s to the 1950s. The tales are apparently arranged by length with some long space opera yarns up front and shorter Oriental fantasies in the back.

If you are a CAS fan, then this is a must read. The sf tales are fairly basic stuff. They are picaresque shoot-‘em-ups on strange planets. They don’t compare to his much more polished fantasy and horror, though "The Immeasurable Horror" is a good sf-action thriller.

The shorter works manage to pack a punch (not surprising since they lean and mean). The standouts in this collection are "Told in the Desert", "An Offering to the Moon", "Monsters in the Night", and "A Tale of Sir John Maundeville". CAS is rather hard to find these days and relatively little of his work is in print. That’s a pity, but as long as libraries still have copies of his books, you’ll be able to get ‘em on interlibrary loan.

-Dave Hardy

 

 

THE GHOST LIGHT

By Fritz Leiber

Fritz Leiber was one of those freight trains, not easy to start, possible to derail, but hard as hell to stop. This collection showcases some of his best stories, reaching back to work he did in the 1950s and sweeping forward to "The Ghost Light", written in 1984.

The collection is really a curio cabinet of Leiber’s idiosyncrasies, hobbies, and nightmares. His world was part funhouse, part haunted mansion, with large suites dedicated to cats, chess, acting, sex, and alas, alcoholism.

"Space-Time for Springers" is a science-fiction cats & chess fantasy (it won a Hugo, deservedly) featuring Gummitch the kitten (who merited his own series). "A Deskful of Girls" from the Changewar series provides the sex with a creepy scientist who uses the soul-stealing technology of the Spiders and Snakes (mysterious, time-spanning enemies) to create his own personal collection of girlfriends. "Midnight by the Morphy Watch" tells the secret history of why chess-masters are really nuts (Bobby Fischer notwithstanding. Yes I know, playing chess is not really a crime.) Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser have their home at "Bazaar of the Bizarre", one of their best tales ("Lean Times in Lankhmar" edges "Bizarre", IMHO, but isn’t the most typical F&GM story).

The title story is the hardest hitting of the bunch. I believe it is deliberately the opening in order to balance the autobiographical essay "Not Much Disorder and Not So Early Sex" which closes the book.  While I have seen many writers place themselves into stories, I have seen none who did so with such brutal effect. There are tragedies and there are tragedies, and many writers seem better able to express themselves in fiction than is bare, reductive fact. Leiber’s autobiography, while very revealing in mnay ways leaves much left unsaid. I'm not at all claiming that "The Ghost Light" is autobiographical, but I do beleive it is an act of exorcism, chilling and redemptive in its own way. I am left hoping that Leiber’s brilliant, tormented self found some pain-ease, at a price that could be borne.
 

-Dave Hardy

 

THE EARLY LONG

By Frank Belknap Long

I’ve always been a sucker for collections like this. Anthologies of tales from the pulps are the lands I go prospecting for fiction gold. Sometimes I strike pay dirt and sometimes I find rocks. There is a bit of both in The Early Long.

Although he is often recalled as HP Lovecraft’s friend, Frank Belknap Long had a very long career in science fiction and fantasy writing. This collection begins with some of his earliest sales to Weird Tales in the 1920s and winds up with stories he sold to Unknown in the mid-1940s.

It’s an interesting set, particularly regards the aspect of watching a writer develop. While never a Lovecraft clone, his early work shows some affinities with HPL’s style and preoccupations. The "Hounds of Tindalos" is one of Long’s best known tales and is generally considered a part of the larger Mythos cycle of stories. It is a good example of cosmic horror deployed effectively, although Long was still polishing his writing style. It’s not everyday one finds a tale in which a character writes his death-scream.

Later tales manage to combine science fiction with fantasy to create a modern type of horror story (much as HPL’s critical theory called for) but on a human scale. Long’s tales from the ‘40s are memorable and polished. "Grab Bags are Dangerous" is a fine exercise in dark-fantasy leavened with humor and "Step into my Garden" mixes fantasy, myth and fear for a memorable tale.

If you come across this one, it’s well worth a read.

-Dave Hardy

 

 

THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD

By H.P. Lovecraft

HP Lovecraft was a Rhode Islander and a Providence native. His settings are invariably the towns and countryside of New England and especially the imaginary area around Arkham, Massachusetts. But in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward he used his beloved Providence to give this tale a very real backdrop.

This story is really a novella issued in a single volume by Del Rey back in 1982 (it’s assuredly still in print, but I’ve still got the Del Rey edition on my shelf). It tells of young Charles Dexter Ward who takes a deep interest in genealogy, much to everyone’s regret. It seems Ward is a descendant of a certain Joseph Curwen, an old RI settler of dubious and disturbing repute. The reader is led through Curwen’s biography and Ward’s descent into madness with a chillingly clinical precision, heightened by the loving references to Providence landmarks (my brother and sister live in Pawtuxet which Lovecraft describes as the site of Curwen’s farm, check your basement kiddies!).

Compared with better known tales such as “The Dunwich Horror” or “The Shadow over Innsmouth” Charles Dexter Ward is low-key. The antiquarian references may sometimes be a bit overwhelming. For me these quirky touches are what make reading Lovecraft’s work enjoyable. He truly poured himself into his stories. I recommend you sit down on a dark night and pour yourself into The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

 

-Dave Hardy

 

 

BLOOD IS NOT ENOUGH

Edited by Ellen Datlow

This collection of vampire tales was issued by Berkley in 1990 and edited by Ellen Datlow. The goal here seems to be to cast as wide a net as possible and sample every possible variation on the vampire tale one can find. There are blood drinking vampires and emotion drinking vampires and time wasting vampires and kids who think they are vampires, etc…

Some of these tales just misfire for me. Tanith Lee’s “The Janitha Tree” is a good example of her subtle and enigmatic style of weird tale that is so subtle and enigmatic I’m not too sure what happened. Other tales here just aren’t my cup of tea, “A Child of Darkness” by Susan Casper is a decent portrait of a young woman who believes she is a vampire, but ultimately the character comes across as more a pathetic loony than someone interesting in her own right.  

On the other hand there are some true standouts. Fritz Leiber’s tale of blood-sucking advertising “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” appears here. It is subtle and enigmatic, but not too subtle. The best in the collection is Scott Baker’s “Varicose Worms”. This is a tale full of surprises! It tells of a Romanian immigrant in Paris who discovers the secret magic world of Shamanism and his epic battle to hold his place in it. Along the way Baker satirizes psychiatrists, politicians, Mircea Eliade, and homeless beggars, not necessarily in that order. I finished that one and was left begging for more, though I daresay Mr. Baker knows how to wrap up a yarn. If you ever run across this book, read “Varicose Worms”!

-Dave Hardy

 

 

THE LECTURER’S TALE

By James Hynes

The Lecturer’s Tale is a satire on academia’s culture wars dressed up in the Horror Genre’s kit. Nelson Humbolt is a lowly lecturer in the literature department at a prestigious university. When he loses his job and his index finger on the same day, he seems to have hit rock bottom. But mysterious forces swirl about Nelson’s re-attached digit. He gains the power to control minds.

Nelson’s new found powers take him on an unlikely bulldozer ride through campus politics. Nelson’s principal object of interest, other than his own, is helping his office-mate Vita Deonne advance her career. But nice-guy Nelson has a running battle with angry son-of-a-bitch Nelson. Meanwhile, Vita’s dark secrets threaten to undo any altruistic good Nelson’s evil sorcery might provide.

I rather liked The Lecturer’s Tale, but I freely admit I find French Theory a lot funnier than many other folks. The comedy is broad, at times a bit much. But the spirit of satire and the demolition of pomposity and folly works in any setting, even one as odd as the ‘90s Culture Wars. A special treat is the synopsis of Elvis Presley’s lost cinematic masterpiece Viva Vietnam!

-Dave Hardy

THE BLACK STRANGER AND OTHER AMERICAN TALES

By Robert E. Howard

Steve Tompkins has an unusual way of looking at Robert E. Howard’s tales of horror and adventure. Tompkins makes grand leaps that pull in unexpected connections, his appraisal of REH is as likely to include critical tools taken from D.H. Lawrence and Leslie Fiedler as from H.P. Lovecraft.

In this collection Tompkins looks for the essential American soul in REH. It makes for an eclectic collection. The work has about as much Gothic horror (“The Horror from the Mound”, “Pigeons from Hell”) as pure Sword & Sorcery fantasy (“Marchers of Vallhalla”, “The Thunder-Rider”). The settings are eclectic as well. This collection sometimes seems like a core sample of a hidden history of Texas: pre-historic (“Marchers”), pre-Spanish (“Nekht Sermerkeht”, high-Comanche (“Thunder-Rider), Reconstruction (“Black Canaan”), frontier-cowboy era (“The Valley of the Lost”), to Howard’s own day (“Pigeons”). The center-piece is a tale of pirates, curses, Indians, and treasure set on the California coast in the 1600s (why not Texas one wonders, given La Salle’s interest in this land at the same time as the setting of “Stranger”).

REH collectors may well have all these tales in other volumes, but Tompkins’ unique observations of REH and what it means to be an American writer are to found nowhere else. If I have a criticism of this set, it is that Tompkins did not at least make a nod to the corpus of REH’s tall-tale westerns. While they are ably represented in such volumes as The Riot at Bucksnort and A Gent from Bear Creek, a taste of the rip-snortin’, half-horse-half-alligator craziness of REH’s gigantic hillbillies coupled with Tompkins’ consciousness-expanding lit-crit would have made a fascinating combination. That aside, I’m very proud to have this volume in my collection.

-Dave Hardy

SCARLET DREAM
By C.L. Moore

Northwest Smith is Jirel of Joiry’s outer-space companion. Both were created by C.L. Moore in the ‘30s and made regularly appeared in Weird Tales alongside Conan the Cimmerian, Cthulhu, and many other notable creations of Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith. Moore definitely should be mentioned in that context because here work explores similar ground as the three greats, but with some rather different results.

Northwest Smith is a regulation space-opera hero, a smuggler and outlaw who shuttles from the lawless drylands of Mars to the reeking jungles of Venus. His best friend is Yarol, a handsome and deadly Venusian adventurer. In his spaceman’s leathers and with the fastest ray-gun this side of the asteroid belt, Smith might seem to be a precursor of Han Solo or Mal Reynolds. Smith doesn’t really encounter the same kind of situations they do though. Moore turned the space-opera adventure formula on its head even before it had really begun to harden into cliché.

One can reduce Moore’s formula to a simply equation: an action hero is transplanted into a horror story. That is not to say the stories are simplistic. Moore eschewed the straight-ahead violence and fast paced action of REH or Doc Smith. She gave her hero a hard-edged attitude and a man-of-action simplicity that contrasts with the often passive qualities of horror-story protagonists.

What Smith encounters are dreamworlds of great beauty and even greater terror. In “Shambleau” an act of selflessness on Smith’s part plunges him into a nightmare embrace that threatens to destroy his soul. Vampirism, whether for blood, or the soul, or beauty, or the spirit is a recurring motif in Moore’s stories. Everything that lives does so by taking, irrevocably, from the essence of others. “Shambleau”, “Black Thirst”, “The Tree of Life”, “Scarlet Dream”, and “Julhi”.

Moore’s other great motif is that of gods that have been forgotten or lost. “Dust of Gods” and “The Cold Gray God” both feature deities who have been forgotten by man but may forcefully return to this universe. “Lost Paradise” and “Yvala” put Smith and Yarol into head on confrontation with mythic powers.

While Moore’s plots may be simple, her imagery is vivid and filled with moments of great beauty and a rich language of symbolism that would keep a more psychoanalytically minded critic scribbling for months. Suffice to say that Moore’s unique blend of space-opera and horror will be of interest to fans of both genres.

-Dave Hardy

KINGS OF INFINITE SPACE
By James Hynes

Speaking as a six-year veteran state employee, I’d like to say that James Hynes novel, Kings of Infinite Space, is pretty much true. Not the part about overbearing co-workers, ill-paid temps, or difficult parking. I meant he part about blood sacrifices in the unexplored network of pre-human caves under our offices.

Oops, I wasn’t supposed to tell about that. Anyway, the story is about Paul Trilby, formerly a professor at a prestigious Midwestern university, now a temp-worker for the Texas Department of General Services, TxDOGS. The guy in the cube next to Paul is dying, his work is mind-numbingly pointless, and he’s haunted by the ghost of the cat he murdered. Paul lives alone and friendless at the Angry Loner Motel.

Fortunately Paul has got co-workers. There’s Olivia Haddock, former beauty queen turned soul-sucking bureaucrat, Callie the Mail girl with a budding interest in literature, and Colonel Travis Pentoon and his sinister lunch-time cabal. The people outside the office are even odder: Boy G the homeless guy with the mantra “Are we not men?” and Stanley Tulendij the dark angel of TxDOGS and sole-survivor of a fateful outing to the dread Lonesome Knob.

Kings of Infinite Space is part Office Space, part Lovecraft, part Worms of the Earth. There are hilarious sideswipes at the text-book industry, SUVs, and enough weird movie references to make Harry Knowles’ eyes bug out (see if you can find the bit from Ben Hur, it had me laughing pretty hard). The tale also plays with the rivalries between classes and sexes, in particular it gnaws on the notion that men can re-gain paradise if they just get the women back in line. I certainly don’t think that we are supposed to take Paul’s PC, holier-than-thou, gender-constructionism at face value. I did find myself laughing out loud quite frequently, which few comedic novels can make me do.

And now for the part I was warned by a former Purchaser-IV not to tell anyone about. It appears that the author in fact found the true story crammed into the pages of a GSA Employee’s Manual. As foretold in the Book of Eibon and the prophetic Agency Strategic Plan FY2002-2005, there will come a great…

What is that scratching noise from beneath the house? The floor is falling away! Dear Lord! Those pale faces and clawed hands! ARE WE NOT MEN! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

THE BEST OF HP LOVECRAFT: BLOODCURDLING TALES OF HORROR AND THE MACABRE
By H.P. Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft is undoubtedly the most significant writer of horror fiction to come out of the pulps, if not the most significant horror writer of his generation. Even so, the magazines he wrote for rejected many of his best stories. Although he is often imitated, few have been able to create the cosmic fear his literary theory called for.

The Best of H.P. Lovecraft brings together his most developed stories of what is often called “the Mythos”. They range from the very simple and effective “Pickman’s Model” (a story about just where a certain artist derives his inspiration) to the complex and far-reaching implications of “The Call of Cthulhu” where all of the history of life on this planet is called into question.

“The Dunwich Horror” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” bring the nightmare of miscegenation with non-human entities home to the tidy New England countryside with chilling effect. “The Shadow Out of Time” is in some ways less a horror story than a science fiction “secret history” that reaches deep into pre-history to relate the rise and fall of undreamed of star-travelling races. “The Colour Out of Space” is also science fiction, but in a more truly horrific vein. It relates the strange doom that overtakes an isolated farm family when a meteor strikes their farm.

The title is a bit of a misnomer, not that any of these tales are a bit less than the best, it is simly that I think a few of his best works were left out. Only “The Silver Key” represents his Dreamlands tales. I’d put my money of “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath” as not just one of Lovecraft’s best stories, but as one of the best fantasy short stories of all-time.

If you want to see just why Lovecraft is still remembered nearly seventy years after his passing, then read The Best of H.P. Lovecraft.

-Dave Hardy

THE TOMB AND OTHER TALES
By H.P. Lovecraft

This collection provides a look at Lovecraft’s early tales. It is a grab bag of HPL’s work, and shows some of the various directions he went in.

The title tale and “The Festival” are vintage HPL, obsessed with ancestral curses and an unhealthy interest in the past on the part of the young. These themes would later bloom in the form of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. “In the Walls of Eryx” is a straight up science fiction tale, set on an old-school Venus filled with jungles and hostile natives. “Imprisoned with the Pharoahs” is an example of HPL’s ghost-writing, it is an adventure tale featuring none other than Harry Houdini in the starring role.

“He” and “The Horror at Red Hook” come from HPL’s New York phase. In the most ultra-modern of American cities HPL searched for the antique. In “He” he revealed it, giving the settling of America a very dark turn. “The Horror at Red Hook” is a good story, but so pervasive is the loathing of immigrants and Middle-Eastern types that it falls only slightly short of Ann Coulter.

The Tomb and Other Tales is a good set of stories, but probably most of interest to an HPL collector.

-Dave Hardy

THE LURKING FEAR AND OTHER STORIES
By H.P. Lovecraft

While Lovecraft is best known for his tales of Cthulhu and other beings that might have been demons, extra-terrestrials, gods or all three, he wrote many stories that defied genre limits by mixing fantasy, horror, and science fiction.

This collection pulls together quite a few of these. “The Lurking Fear” is classic HPL with a strange race of inbred hill-billies in an even stranger part of New York. “Dagon” and “The Temple” both mix allusions to classical civilization with u-boat warfare in the Great War.

HPL was a genealogist by avocation and an antiquarian at heart. His own family had had been destroyed by corruption of the blood (literally, his father contracted syphilis and later passed it to his mother). Tainted bloodlines and ancestral degeneracy figure prominently in “Arthur Jermyn”. HPL moved from looking down on the freaks of “The Lurking Fear” to finding them in the most refined company. “The Outsider” takes adolescent angst to a new level, with one of HPL’s most poignant tales and most appealing narrative voice.

The book winds up with a very strong closer: “The Shadow over Innsmouth” surely one of HPL’s all-time best tales, reprising the horror of “The Lurking Fear”, but in a far more advanced and challenging way. It just might have the reader looking at his own family tree.

While few of these stories will make the top ten list of HPL stories, they are all effective in their own ways, little windows on the creative, multi-faceted mind of H.P. Lovecraft.

-Dave Hardy

THE DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH
By H.P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft’s fantasy is, in my opinion, a greatly underestimated area of his work. Surely if one were listing the best American fantasy stories, Lovecraft’s novelette, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath would surely rank high. Lovecraft’s fantasy was indebted to the work of Lord Dunsany, but Lovecraft sculpted his own vision of wonder and fear.

The tale is part of a cycle concerning Randolf Carter, a dreamy, New England gentleman of distinguished lineage and fantastic imaginings. He accesses the “Dream Lands”, a truly fantastic land that Lovecraft evokes with that overused and seldom merited epithet, dreamlike. Carter is searching for a beautiful city, glimpsed in dream, and now hidden by jealous gods. His quest takes him through the many realms, cities, and haunted ruins of the Dreamlands.

The ways of Ghouls and the nature of the cats of different planets are explored. Carter explores the mountain known as Ngranek and the Plateau of Leng. Strange battles between even stranger creatures are fought. In the process Carter discovers much about the Dreamlands, and somtething about himself.

This volume is ably rounded out by other Dreamlands short stories, “The Silver Key”, “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”, “Celephais”, “The White Ship”, and “The Strange High House in the Mist”.

Lovecraft’s output of fantasy (as opposed to his very closely related field of horror) was small compared to Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, or J.R.R. Tolkein. But Lovecraft’s fantasy was something distinct, and seldom imitated. It is all the more valuable for it.

-Dave Hardy

THE DOOM THAT CAME TO SARNATH
By H.P. Lovecraft

While H.P. Lovecraft’s name is indissolubly linked with tales of ancient, extraterrestrial races and the strange traces they left in antique New England towns, there was a bit more to his literary corpus. The Doom that Came To Sarnath collects a broad spectrum of Lovecraft tales, prose and poetry.

The title tale is a fantasy set in Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, a world that takes its existence in the dreams of Earth-bound dreamers. But here it pulses with life as Lovecraft ignores the “dream” aspect to bring a slice of Dreamlands history to eldritch life. The Dreamlands tales are well represented: “The Cats of Ulthar”, “The Other Gods”, “Polaris”, “The Quest of Iranon” are present, though some of the best Lovecraft fantasies are to be found in The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. “Cats” is a fantasy based on Lovecraft’s feline obsession. “Polaris” travels the borders of dreams to ask what reality truly is.

Many of the others, such as “The Festival”, may be considered as minor “Mythos” stories, with its delicious imagery of wonder and terror from the deeps of time in an old New England town. “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” develops the science fiction element that marked the best-known of Lovecraft’s work.

There is also straight up sf, “In the Walls of Eryx”, a planetary adventure in the vein of early scinetifictioneers like Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton, and Clark Ashton Smith. Brief vignettes and poetry round out the collection.

While few of these tales are well-known, they are a broad selection of Lovecraft work, a mosaic of HPL’s moods and interests. The Doom that Came to Sarnath is a must have for any collector of Lovecraft’s work, and worthy addition to the collection of any fan of fantasy and horror.

-Dave Hardy

AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS
By H.P. Lovecraft

At the Mountains of Madness is one of H.P. Lovecraft’s best novellas. It is also the title of this collection of some of his minor masterpieces.

The title tale concerns an expedition to a mysterious region of the Antarctic. When they discover evidence of strange life forms and an unknown civilization, things go terribly wrong. Some readers may find Lovecraft’s pseudo-history overlong, but HPL wasn’t about splatter effects (though “Mountains” has its share of gruesome sights) he was fascinated with man’s place in the universe. The book includes the pre-Cthulhu “The Shunned House” and the later “Dreams in the Witch House”. “Shunned House” shows HPL making very effective use of traditional horror material in creative fashion. “Witch House” comes more form his “cosmic horror” phase when he freely mixed science fiction elements with horror (much as in “Mountains”).

This is a very good small set of novellas. It is essential reading for horror fans and not a bad place to start for newcomers trying to get a handle on the strange appeal of Rhode Island’s master of the weird.

-Dave Hardy

NAMELESS CULTS
By Robert E. Howard

This is a nice little collection in the style of Cthulhu, an earlier REH anthology of horror stories. The premise is that REH wrote horror tales in the same vein as H.P. Lovecraft. Indeed the subtitle is “The Cthulhu Mythos Fiction of Robert E. Howard”.

Well, not exactly. Editor Robert M. Price does a fine job of tracing the background of these stories in letters to friends (especially HPL himself), literary allusions, and REH’s personal interests. He rides the thesis a bit hard in figuring out exactly where each of REH’s beasties, cults, lost cities, and foul sorcerers fits into the grander “Cthulhu Mythos”. Of course one can take that as a literary in-joke as much as anything else (Namelesss Cults is a Chaosium publication, so Call of Cthulhu gamers are the tome’s special audience).

Be that as it may, Nameless Cults is a solid collection of REH’s horror fiction. Some of REH’s best-loved series characters are represented: Bran Mak Morn, Turlogh Dubh, and Kull (sorry, no Conan). The collection boasts eighteen tales. The top entry is “Worms of the Earth”, undoubtedly one of the best American fantasy stories ever written. Action-oriented tales such as “The Shadow Kingdom” and “Gods of Bal-Sagoth” show that REH could use violent conflict as well as moody horror to create unforgettable tales. “Shadow Kingdom” pits Kull against a hidden race of demons, while “Bal-Sagoth” is a classic lost-city tale.

Another mix of action and horror is “The Fire of Asshurbanipal”. This tale is essentially an El Borak adventure (a Texan gunslinger and his Afghan buddy are the heroes) with a nicely executed Lovecraftian monster in a lost city. It’s an overlooked gem. The ever-popular “Skull Face” (an ancient sorcerer has a plan for the modern world) and “The Black Stone” (a very creepy tale of Balkan horror, where the Turks are the GOOD guys) are included.

There are a few “posthumous collaborations” included. While some misfire, they don’t detract form the overall value of the set. To be honest, most of what is in this book can be found elsewhere. But if you haven’t found it, then this is a good place to start.

-Dave Hardy