Introduction

I’m writing this column at Harvest Season, so I suppose it’s fitting to say that a bumper crop of exciting titles from the indie presses awaits inspection. Let’s dig in.

Guardian Angel
by Stephanie
Bedwell-Grimes

trade paper,
£9.99,
201 pages,
ISBN 1903889626

Novels and Novellas

A newish U.K. firm, Telos Publishing, which appears to have gotten its start in the field of Dr. Who books, has begun to issue some very attractive novellas and novels unrelated to the be-scarfed Time Lord. Paul Finch brings us Cape of Wrath (trade paper, £8.00, 128 pages, ISBN 190388960X), the bloody tale of a creepy archaeological excursion. On the isolated, storm-wracked island of Crae-ghatir, off the farthest coast of England, a university expedition led by the glamorous Professor Mercy and composed of various grad-student types finds an ancient barrow that contains the remains of a Viking berserker. Although they should have been forewarned by the rune-inscribed stone blocking the entrance, they disinter the fellow’s bones, initiating a rash of arcane deaths that ends with the last two survivors battling the Viking in his borrowed flesh.

Single-Author Collections

Opening and closing with wistfully beautiful prose poems, Mark Rich’s new collection, Foreigners, and Other Familiar Faces (Small Beer Press, chapbook, $5.00, 66 pages, ISBN unavailable), is a sharp slice of this fine writer’s work, featuring several stories seeing print for the first time. Rich writes like a combination of James Thurber and Franz Kafka, evoking ruefully comic domestic situations that partake of the essential absurdity of the universe and human strivings. In a story like "Mrs. Hewitt’s Tulips"–where a nebbishy, cuckolded husband finds his life turned around after the arrival of miniature humanoid "little gardeners" in a pack of green hotdogs–we see Rich mining some of the same vein of quotidian miracles that James Blaylock also exploits.

A wealth of bite-sized wonders awaits the reader in Michael Swanwick’s Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures (Tachyon Publications, trade paper, $14.95, 94 pages, ISBN 1892391074). Over the last several years, Swanwick has produced a number of fabulist vignettes, ranging from transcribed dream prose ("Writing in My Sleep") to japes on the whims of editors ("The Madness of Gordon Van Gelder"). All are informed by his trademark ingenuity and wit, although each of them exudes a different perfume: some are almost dada-like, while others boast intricately constructed plots within their small spans. Here is proof that Swanwick is fractally self-similar on all levels.

The trouble with so much modern horror is its crudity of approach and its limited sensibilities. Bludgeoned into feeling only the single emotion of revulsion, we end up numb and feeling nothing. Subtle, modulated writers such as Graham Joyce and Jonathan Carroll are drowned in a sea of mediocrity. To refresh your palate with a taste of horror’s roots, from a day when the gradations of terror were infinite, turn to Algernon Blackwood’s Pan’s Garden (Stark House, trade paper, $17.95, 253 pages, ISBN 0966784855). Blackwood was a consummate cataloguer and dissector of the many shades of uncanny experience, the equal of M.R. James in evoking frissons of weirdness from everyday events. These fifteen stories range from small evocative instants to long, gorgeously detailed, unstoppably cumulative tales of men and women caught up in the larger forces of Blackwood’s beloved Nature. From the opening blast of "The Man Whom the Trees Loved" to the closing trumpets of "The Temptation of the Clay," you’ll encounter proof that there are more forces in the universe than accounted for by science. An introduction by Mike Ashley, whose recent biography of Blackwood affirms Ashley’s valuable expertise, declares these stories to be "the quintessence of inspired creativity." It’s a claim that the book strongly upholds.

Robert Hood might not be the exact modern equivalent of Blackwood, but the ghost stories in his Immaterial (Mirror Danse Books, trade paper, Aus$19.95, 191 pages, ISBN 0958658366) are all clever, well-constructed, and (mostly) subtle, offering a variety of voices and tones, from the wit of Dahl or Collier to the unflinching nihilism of Ligotti. Although some partake of splatterpunk’s excesses–a vengeful skeleton gruesomely dissects a thug in "Dem Bones," for instance–most of these pieces mix humor with understated creepiness. I particularly enjoyed "Blurred Lines," in which a blind man’s hearing becomes so acute as to shatter the normal barriers of space and time, much in the manner of the great horror flick X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963).

If you’re like me, the name Jerry Sohl conjures up only memory of the scathing review Damon Knight gave to Sohl’s Point Ultimate (1955) in In Search of Wonder (1956). If so, that’s a shame, because Sohl was a talented writer in many ways, including the scripting of some classic Twilight Zone episodes. Now we all have a chance to remedy our ignorance by reading Filet of Sohl (Bear Manor Media, trade paper, $16.95, 261 pages, ISBN 0971457034). This volume includes ten stories, several appreciations (by William Nolan, Richard Matheson, George Clayton Johnson, and Sohl’s children) and two never-before-seen scripts for Twilight Zone that were purchased but never produced. In a story such as "Death in Transit," Sohl exhibits some real emotional depth, while "The Ultroom Error" delivers surreal thrills stemming from the strange, unprovoked attacks on an innocent child. Editor Christopher Conlon deserves a lot of credit for compiling this volume and keeping fresh the memories of one of the many journeyman writers whose work accreted the corpus of SF.

John Wyndham, who achieved fame with The Day of the Triffids (1951), was a more talented writer than Jerry Sohl by orders of magnitude–yet today, both are in the same boat, with their short fiction generally unavailable. In Wyndham’s case, I’m happy to report that Darkside Press is planning to issue four or five volumes of his work, the first of which is No Place Like Earth (hardcover, $40.00, 285 pages, ISBN 097405890). This handsome, well-designed limited edition, compiled by John Pelan with scholarly input from Phil Stephenson-Payne, is a joy to hold and read. The stories represent a sampling of Wyndham’s whole long career, ranging in date from 1932 to 1967. Wydham’s sophistication and cosmopolitanism are on display even in an early space opera such as "Derelict of Space." In "Una," his brilliance reaches heights of hilarity as the first artificial lifeform–a conical monstrosity that happens to consider itself a woman–falls in love with a representative of an anti-vivisectionist group. This book and its future companions will consort nicely on your shelf along with the Sturgeon and Wellman career sets.

E.C. Tubb sold his first story in 1951 and is still going strong. Yet till now, there has been no handy retrospective of his career in short fiction, his novels–such as the Dumarest cycle–having overshadowed the two hundred plus stories he’s produced. But with The Best Science Fiction of E.C. Tubb (Wildside, hardcover, $35.00, 203 pages, ISBN 1592240720), you have a chance to acquaint yourself with his formidable accomplishments. Tubb writes a quick-paced, philosophically lively, bracingly grim kind of short fiction. There’s nothing whimsical about the tale of a man forced to murder an unlikely victim via temporal shifts ("Time to Kill") or in the portrait of a world under the domination of alien conquerors bent on transforming mankind through pain ("There’s No Tomorrow"). Tubb is almost noirish at times, facing squarely the sins and limitations of the human race. Yet his swift-paced, clean-lined tales always offer grace notes of redemption as well.

Breaking Windows
edited
by Luis Rodrigues,

Album Zutique #1

Anthologies

Helen of Troy
by Andrew Lang

Primary Ignition
by Allen M. Steele

Heroes and Monsters
by Jess Niven

Boneyard: Volume Two
by Richard Moore

Miscellaneous Titles

On the poetry front, we find both old and new. Andrew Lang’s 1892 long narrative poem, Helen of Troy (Wildside, trade paper, $13.95, 104 pages, ISBN 1592240879), was once an attempt at modernizing this ancient epic material, but now after the passage of a century has itself become an antique. Yet it is a beautiful and stirring antiquity, whose elegant, unstrained verses will convey much of the pathos of Helen’s plight. Cast as a playtoy of the jealous gods, Helen still comes off as a fully rounded character, as do all her suitors and ancillary personages, especially Cassandra. By the closing stanza, which imagines Helen’s posthumous shrine– ". . . the symbol of all loveliness, / Of Beauty ever stainless in the stress / Of warring lusts and fears . . ." –you will have a keener sense of the humanity of these ancient warriors and lovers than many a contemporary translation could provide.

Mike Allen’s Petting the Time Shark and Other Poems (DNA Publications, chapbook, $6.50, 48 pages, ISBN unavailable) catches this fine poet in a mostly solemn mood. "Funeral Pie," for instance, reminds me of Robert Frost’s homely melancholy. Yet so varied is the subject matter–SF, fantasy, and horror tropes alike proliferate–that the sheer variety of contexts and approaches will insure an emotional and intellectual roller-coaster ride for the lucky reader.

At the opposite end of the tragicomic spectrum is Mark McLaughlin’s The Spiderweb Tree (Yellow Bat Press, chapbook, $3.00, 31 pages, ISBN 0971821569). The first poem evokes the titular spooky motif, which then figures in nearly every other entry, the majority of which riff playfully on fairy tales and fables. "Ratpunzel," for example, substitutes a giant rodent with climbable tail for the lovely original tower dweller, with amusing results.

In 1971, Arkham House issued Donald Sidney-Freyer’s landmark volume Songs and Sonnets Atlantean. Now, thanks to Wildside, there’s an expanded version: Songs and Sonnets Atlantean: The Second Series (trade paper, $15.00, 152 pages, ISBN 1592241484). A friend to Clark Ashton Smith, Sidney-Freyer and his work partake of that same eldritch ambiance. Many of the poems purport to be translations from the Atlantis originals, and certainly do convey a Dunsan-yian otherworldliness. "In an Atlantean Bath" reminds me of Eddison’s lush vistas. At the heart of the book is a sixty-page poem, "A Vision of a Castle Deep in Averonne," which strikes Poe-like notes from the wanderings of two people in search of a dream.

Although shorter and generally less probing and more fannish than the interviews of Darrell Schweit-zer, the dialogues conducted by Michael McCarthy with various prominent authors and now collected in Giants of the Genre (Wildside, trade paper, $15.95, 173 pages, ISBN 159224100X) still offer lots of meat. Well-established writers (mostly in the horror field) like Dean Koontz and Ray Bradbury consort with relative newcomers such as Charlee Jacob and P.D. Cacek. All discuss their methodologies, their goals, their struggles to do good work and get published. Some are quite blunt–Poppy Brite and Bentley Little–while others are more gentlemanly (Charles de Lint) or jokey (Forrest Ackerman). Handy bibliographies accompany each talk, but I’d be careful of some of the info given. Fred Pohl’s The Age of the Pussyfoot (1969) is transformed to The Age of the Pussycat (1967).

Collecting his columns from Absolute Magnitude and Artemis magazines, along with a few other scattered non-fiction appearances, Allen M. Steele offers us Primary Ignition (Wildside, trade paper, $19.95, 252 pages, ISBN 1587153483). Using all his novelist’s talents, Steele produces narrative-rich essays that conform to three broad areas: "Space," "Science Fiction," and "Destinations." Whether chronicling shuttle launches, the death of a beloved dog or the high weirdnesses of Las Vegas, Steele is always entertaining and informative. These personable essays go down smooth and easy.

Essays of a vastly different stripe are to be found in A Tea Dance at Savoy (Savoy Books, hardcover, £20.00, unpaginated, ISBN 0861301129), by Robert Meadley. Part of the New Worlds circle in the sixties (Michael Moorcock contributes the introduction here), Meadley possesses a flighty, skewed, acidic, voracious intellect that makes connections among a thousand and one different topics, weaving the most incongruous themes into fascinating riffs on literature, art, and life. If Lester Bangs had been part of the SF community, this is what his output might have come to resemble. In a piece such as "Gone to Tesco’s," which investigates the genre of westerns to draw astonishing conclusions about film and books and their intersection, Meadley sounds like the most captivating pub-philosopher in the world. How can you not immediately fall in love with an essay that begins, "This piece will be messy"? Moreover, John Coulthart has turned this collection into a glorious objet d’art, stuffed with B&W illustrations in eye-popping layouts. Although I still do wish these approximately two hundred pages were numbered.

Joining a series on contemporary authors from the University of South Carolina Press, the volume Understanding Robert Coover (hardcover, $34.95, 192 pages, ISBN 1570034826) by noted fantasist Brian Evenson exhibits a perfect fit between critic and subject. In four extensive sections–"Understanding Robert Coover"; "Early Works"; "The Public Burning"; and "Later Works"–Evenson thoroughly and sympathetically and intelligently dissects Coover’s brand of surreal metafiction. Employing a mass of historical material–from old reviews and interviews to prior critical studies–Evenson draws illuminating conclusions about every last publication from the prolific Coover pen, right up to the most recent book, The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (2002). Evenson’s own prose is scholarly yet inviting, with nary a shred of off-putting "hermeneutics" or "semiotics" to be found anywhere. Evenson’s conclusion that "Robert Coover remains one of the most original and unique writers of his generation" will be attested to by anyone lucky enough to make this critical journey with these two writers.

On the comix front we encounter a lavish book scripted and drawn by the inimitable Paul Pope, whose recent series 100% for DC Comics was fine near-future SF. Pope’s new book might very well bring back fond memories of the Warren and Marvel oversized B&W titles. Giant THB 1.V.2 (Horse Press, saddle-stapled, $6.95, 96 pages, ISBN unavailable) concerns the adventures of a young woman named HR Watson and her deadly android bodyguard, THB. The pair live on a terraformed Mars inhabited by a bewildering array of human tribes, as well as some intimidating aliens called bugfaces. Pope has created an intricate backstory, as dense as that of Dune (1965), to complement the present-day action, which is fascinating on its own merits, a blend of politics and chase scenes, boho conversations and dramatic fights. Pope’s punkish yet high-tech artwork, with its glorious chiaroscuro and dense lines, astounds on every page. This is truly an SF comic that is as rich and bizarre as, say, an Attanasio novel.

Forget the trauma of watching the inferior film version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and return to the first sequence of the Alan Moore/Kevin O’Neill comic that inspired it. Now, be prepared to double your original enjoyment by picking up Jess Nevins’s Heroes & Monsters (Monkey Brain Books, trade paper, $18.95, 239 pages, ISBN 193226504X). This is an exhaustive and enlightening annotation of all the sources, literary, cultural, and visual, which Moore and O’Neill employed in their creation. Nevins has amazingly ferreted out hundreds of obscure Victorian icons and other allusions that went into the composition of this steampunkish comic. On top of this feast of referentiality, Nevins also delivers cogent essays on "Archetypes," "Crossovers," and "Yellow Peril," as well as a fascinating interview with Moore, in which the scripter reveals, for instance, his indebtedness to Philip José Farmer. This book is so lively it almost breaks the umbilical linking it with the original creation, becoming fine reading on its own merits.

In what comically creepy series would a walking, talking, cigar-smoking skeleton demand that others address him as "flesh-challenged"? Only in Richard Moore’s Boneyard: Volume Two (NBM, trade paper, $9.95, unpaginated, ISBN 1561633690). If you recall my review of the first book in this saga, you’ll remember that a young man named Paris inherited a cemetery filled with a female vampire, a gear-head werewolf, a lecherous mermaid, and a gaggle of other unlikely spooks. Having gotten friendly with his undead neighbors and the local humans, Paris now finds himself about to lose his new home due to a large bill from the IRS. How to raise money? Would you believe Celebrity Ghoul Boxing? No? Then how about a Spectral Swimsuit Issue? All these possibilities and more are explored through the medium of Moore’s fluid B&W artwork and his boffo dialogue.

 

Publisher Addresses

Agog! Press, POB U302, University of Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia. Bear Manor Media, POB 750, Boalsburg, PA 16827. Cosmos Books, see Wildside. Darkside Press, 4128 Woodland Park Avenue North, Seattle, WA 98103. DNA Publications, POB 2988, Radford, VA 24143. Endeavor Press, 1515 Hickory Wood Drive, Annapolis, MD 21401. Fables and Reflections, POB 979, Woden, ACT 2606, Australia. Golden Gryphon, 3002 Perkins Road, Urbana, IL 61802. Horse Press, POB 285, Bowling Green, OH 43402. Ministry of Whimsy Press, POB 4248, Tallahassee, FL 32315. Mirror Danse Books, POB 3542, Parammatta, NSW 2124, Australia. Monkey Brain Books, POB 200126, Austin, TX 78720. NBM, 555 Eighth Avenue, Suite 1202, NY, NY 10018. Prime Books, POB 36503, Canton, OH 44735. PS Publishing, 1 Ham-ilton House, 4 Park Avenue, Harrogate HG2 9BQ, U.K. Savoy Books, 446 Wilmslow Road, Withington, Manchester M20 3BW, U.K. Small Beer Press, 176 Prospect Avenue, Northhampton, MA 01060. Stark House, 1945 P Street, Eureka, CA 95501. Tachyon Publications, 1459 18th Street, #139, SF, CA 94107. Telos Publishing, 61 Elgar Avenue, Tolworth, Surrey KT5 9JP, U.K. Tesseract Books, 214-21 10405 Jasper Avenue, Edmondton, Alberta T5J 3S2, Canada. University of South Carolina Press, 718 Devine Street, Columbia, SC 29208. Velocity Press, POB 28701, St. Paul, MN 55128. Wildside Press, POB 301, Holicong, PA 18928. Yellow Bat Press, 1338 West Maumee, Idlewilde Manor #136, Adrian, MI 49221.