Miscellaneous Titles

The English-language SF and fantasy and horror genres offer so many riches that Anglophone readers are often disinclined to search out the stories of other tongues. Our ignorance of many foreign traditions that would enrich our literary lives is sad. But now, thanks to Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier and their new Black Coat Press, we can dip into a fertile stream of French fabulism in translation. Their first book (more are referenced below, under "Novels") functions as a kind of survey, as its subtitle indicates. Shadowmen: Heroes and Villains of French Pulp Fiction (trade paper, $19.95, 304 pages, ISBN 0974071137) is an encyclopedia that’s as much fun to read as a fine novel. Organized alphabetically by the names of the characters under discussion, the volume is replete with author biographies, plot synopses, discussions of media representations of these works, and a host of fascinating trivia. To learn about such fairly famous characters as Fantômas and such obscure ones as Belphégor via the breezy yet scholarly prose of the Lofficiers (well-known for their comic-book scripts and some other reference works) is to acquire a painless education in cosmopolitanism.

Jeff VanderMeer’s The Day Dali Died (Prime Books, trade paper, $9.99, 122 pages, ISBN 1894815920) combines poetry with "flash fictions," vignettes that also concentrate on depth of textured language. As is to be expected from the mushroom-fertile mind of VanderMeer, these offerings evoke gorgeous word-pictures of odd and affecting events and places. An enormous beached whale gutted by gawkers; a retired Kissinger in Cambodia; a prisoner under torture who learns to fly–these and many more startling concatenations make this book a hallucinatory joy. The poem "The Ship at the End of the World," appearing in print here for the first time anywhere, is equal to any gem by Dunsany.

George Sterling (1869-1926) is a poet whose name is more familiar than his actual work to modern readers of the fantastic. "The pupil of Ambrose Bierce and the mentor to Clark Ashton Smith," as editor S.T. Joshi classifies him, Sterling once had a mainstream reputation of some small notoriety. But his verse has been generally inaccessible till now, a failing remedied by the issuance of The Thirst of Satan (Hippocampus Press, trade paper, $15.00, 215 pages, ISBN 0972164464). Whether extracting ornate, metaphysical stanzas from cosmological vistas, as in "The Testimony of the Suns," or conducting a tour of exotic archaic wonders as in "A Wine of Wizardry," Sterling could be counted on for startling metaphors, sardonic insights, and impeccable verse construction. This book, carefully assembled and annotated by Joshi, restores to twenty-first-century readers an important missing link in the history of weird literature.

Fantagraphics Books bills the newest installment (Number 14) of its regular series Blab! (trade paper, $19.95, 120 pages, ISBN 1560975571) as "the preeminent anthology of graphic design and illustration arts," and it would be hard to disagree with this proud description. The oversized color volume features so many fine stories and eye-popping illustrations from alternative-comics auteurs–many of the entries employing the fantastical imagery beloved of SF readers–that one would be hard-pressed not to find manifold pleasures within its pages. Greg Clarke’s "The Forlorn Fungus" tells the witty story of a sentient truffle and its misuse by a diverse cast of humans. "I Built You First," by Hoey and Freund, depicts with geometric exactitude a pair of rival robots conducting their war amid Escheresque landscapes. "Enfer-de" by Blanquet is a Boschian two-page spread that would give Charles Burns nightmares. Mark Landman’s "Fetal Elvis" manages to satirize the notion of Homeland Security by using a most unlikely protagonist. And Elvis crops up again to battle mutant Martian teddy bears (with the aid of Finland’s president!) in the bizarre "Hard-boiled Kekkonen," by Matti Hagelberg. And these are only a few of the over two dozen gems within this superb showcase.

The French musician Richard Pinhas has long been a partisan of SF, from the moment his band Heldon (1974-1979) took its name from the writings of Norman Spinrad. In his latest CD, Tranzition (Cuneiform Records, $13.00, 62:28 minutes, Cuneiform Rune 186), Pinhas creates eerie yet soothing soundscapes that could serve as aural accompaniments to either subatomic or interstellar (or even intrabody) journeys. Alternately ethereal and jagged, hypnotic and aggressive, these five tracks feature Pinhas on guitar and various electronics; Philippe Simon on violin; Antoine Paganotti on drums; and Jérôme Schmidt on "laptop." Track 2, "Moumoune girl (a song for)" is layered with samples from a tape of Philip K. Dick reading one of his own essays, a tape which Dick himself gave to Pinhas. The effect of hearing Dick over Pinhas’s rarefied electronic warbling is both tonic and spooky. This sprightly, somber music will surely appeal to anyone who has ever enjoyed the work of Robert Fripp and Brian Eno, melodies which reflect both intellectual agendas and emotional assaults.

A lively, handsome little theme anthology is to be found in the form of Intracities (UnWrecked Press, chapbook, $5.00, 54 pages, ISBN unavailable). Editor Michael Jasper here arrays a baker’s dozen of tales focusing on the odd and uncanny niches to be found in such diverse cities as Phoenix, Montreal, Oakland, and London. With slipstreamy verve, the fourteen writers (there’s one collaboration) present narratives about a spectral car mechanic (Mark Siegel’s "Heat"); a reluctant Dalai Lama (Jason Erik Lundberg’s "Enlightenment"); and a mythic railroadman (Jay Lake’s "Iron Heaven"), among many other themes. And a striking wraparound collage by Frank Wu complements the whole package nicely.

The "spicy pulps" were a line of fiction zines in the 1930s that specialized in the risqué. Sequestered under counters, with their crude B&W illos of undraped maidens and their over-the-top narratives of lustful monsters, human and otherwise, they represented the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Pulp Entertainment. To purchase an original issue today would set you back hundreds of dollars. Or you could simply opt to pick up a highly entertaining facsimile edition from Wildside, Spicy Mystery Stories for August 1935 (trade paper, $19.95, 128 pages, ISBN 0809592290 no image available). Reading these stories in a concentrated burst functions as a veritable time machine. From Robert Leslie Bellem’s tale of Nazi fraternal mind-swapping, "The Executioner," to E. Hoffman Price’s sophisticated and fairly restrained adventure with a snake-woman, "Naga’s Kiss," these tales serve up a perverse banquet of nostalgic thrills. Never has the female breast–aka, the "vibrant mound"–played such an intrinsic role in fiction before or since. Yet perhaps, as certain televised "wardrobe malfunctions" show us, our culture has barely changed at all.

Cecilia Tan’s Circlet Press celebrates its tenth anniversary with Erotic Fantastic (trade paper, $19.95, 356 pages, ISBN 1885865449), a sampler culled from the more than forty books they’ve published in that span. This volume functions as an excellent introduction to the vast range of material that Circlet offers. From whimsically libidinous to hardcore, from contemporary settings to outré kingdoms of the imagination, utilizing tropes from SF, fantasy, and horror, these stories embody nearly every sexual persuasion possible. Familiar names such as Francesca Lia Block, Catherine Asaro, and Shariann Lewitt consort with writers of equal talent yet lesser prominence. If you’re looking for erotica mixed with speculative elements, or speculation flavored with sex, this is the place to be.

With Island Dreams: Montreal Writers of the Fantastic (Véhicule Press, trade paper, $12.95, 240 pages, ISBN 1550651714), editor Claude Lalumiere has assembled one of the best original anthologies of the year. Pleasingly heavy on cyberpunk visions of the future, yet with a fair smattering of slipstream and fantasy, this book strikes a beautiful balance among fabulist modes. Yves Meynard hits notes of Ballardian excellence in "In Yerusalom," his tale of an alien city plonked down in the middle of North America, while Glenn Grant roars on overdrive through his future police procedural, "Burning Day." Melissa Yuan-Innes delivers a Bradburyian shocker in "Mrs. Marigold’s House" and Mark Shainblum does military SF intelligently and gracefully in "Endogamy Blues." The other eight contributors are no dull mooseheads either. Highly recommended.

Under the editorship of Deborah Layne and Jay Lake, Polyphony 3 (Wheatland Press, trade paper, $17.95, 386 pages, ISBN 0972054731) practically explodes with superlative stories. This is one series of anthologies that just keeps getting better and better. A mix of award-winning authors (Michael Bishop, Barry Malzberg, Jack Dann, Don Webb) and talented newbies, and a blend of different modes of fabulism and different tones, all insure that just when the reader imagines he knows where the volume is headed, he’s proved delightfully wrong. Perhaps the single story that best encapsulates the spirit of the whole volume is Jeffrey Ford’s "Coffins on the River," which veers organically all over a map that includes frustrated artists, drug-induced visions, kidnapped children, and suburban ennui. This collection demands and deserves a place of honor on your shelves.

Known today almost entirely for his most famous story, "Deadline," which brought down the wrath of the FBI on John W. Campbell for its detailed description of an A-bomb in the midst of Manhattan Project secrecy, Cleve Cartmill was in his time a prolific and deft contributor to the SF zines. Now we can all sample his work, thanks to Darkside Press’s volume, the first of five of his collected fantastic fiction, titled Prelude to Armageddon (hardcover, $40.00, 276 pages, ISBN 097405892). On display here are several Unknown-Worlds-style stories, two of which– "No Graven Image" and "Youth, Anybody?"–prefigure Ron Goulart’s comic Hollywood-occult tales, while the third (the title piece) seems to me to be a lineal ancestor to Philip K. Dick’s The Cosmic Puppets (1957), with its heavenly forces battling through human intermediaries. Eight other stories–including "Deadline," of course–traverse a wide spectrum of writing, proving in total that Cartmill had a lot to offer beyond the single piece that’s most attached to his name. Editor John Pelan provides a knowledgeable introduction, and the entire handsome package testifies to the loving care invested in this effort to rescue Cartmill from undeserved oblivion.

W.H. Pugmire is upfront about his idols: Lovecraft and his circle, and William Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde. His desire is to produce works that pay stylistic and thematic homage to these men, while still attaining a unique voice. I think he succeeds admirably in the linked stories of Sesqua Valley and Other Haunts (Delirium Books, hardcover, $50.00, 242 pages, ISBN 1929653379). Sesqua Valley is the West Coast sister city, more or less, to Arkham and Dunwich and environs, and the ghastly doings there are fully as eldritch as anything Massachusetts has to offer. Characters appear and disappear throughout these narratives–one standout figure is the wizardly Simon Gregory Williams–most of them meeting grim yet somehow elegant endings. Pugmire’s devotion to his sources transcends mere pastiche, and his style is neither overwrought nor too sparse. And his generous afterwords to the stories–several tales are original to this volume, by the way–are an endearing window onto his literary theory and motivations.

The mission of Black Coat Press is to introduce under-appreciated French titles of a fantastic bent to an English-speaking audience. As their first fiction entry, Doctor Omega (trade paperback, $19.95, 257 pages, ISBN 0974071110) does an admirable job of enticing readers into the Black Coat enterprise. Written by Arnould Galopin and released in 1906, the book has been "adapted and retold" by Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier. To my eye, they’ve done a subtle job. Modern terms such as "black hole" and "quark" have been introduced, but the rest of the book remains resolutely Edwardian, in a Gallic fashion. The titular doctor, a mysterious figure from another time and place, recruits two Frenchmen to accompany him on the first trip to Mars in his rocket clad in gravity-defying "stellite." Once there, they encounter a host of wondrous creatures and become involved in a local war. Reminiscent both of Stanley Weinbaum and Doc Smith, this rollicking tale never disappoints.

Black Coat’s other three offerings all revolve around the work of Paul Féval (1816-1887), a prolific author whose series of books under the heading Les Habits Noirs provides the derivation for this press’s name. Masterfully translated, annotated, and introduced by Brian Stableford, these three novels illustrate the nascent "cloak and dagger" school of serialized fiction, a format that fed into the roots of modern SF and fantasy. Published in 1855, The Vampire Countess (trade paperback, $22.95, 351 pages, ISBN 0974071153) follows the efforts of a hunter of the undead named Jean-Pierre Sévérin as he strives to thwart the evil vampire known as the Countess Marcian Gregoryi as she stalks Paris not for mere blood but for the raw scalps of her victims, which confer on her everlasting life. The book is full of secret chambers, daring flights and lovesick protagonists, a veritable catacomb of shivers. In Knightshade (trade paperback, $16.95, 176 pages, ISBN 0974071145), first published in 1860, we witness the sometimes comic depredations of two supernatural brigands, the Brothers Ténèbre, as they plunder the nobility in an insouciant manner. Stableford in his afterword makes a good case for this pair being unacknowledged prototypes for many future pulp villains, but even if their lineage had ended here, they would still be worth reading. But surely the most enticing of the three volumes, the most over-the-top and proto-postmodern, is 1867’s Vampire City (trade paper, $19.95, 199 pages, ISBN 0974071161). With demented genius, Féval takes as his heroine the real-world literary figure Ann Radcliffe, whose Gothic novels inspired him. He sets Ann and her manservant Grey Jack on the trail of a vampire known as Otto Goetzi, a trail that leads straight to Sepulchre, the city of the undead. In his bizarre, pre-Dracula formulation of what it means to be a vampire, Féval creates a figure of weird menace. The contrast with Ann’s simple yet dogged virtues makes for a wild, knockabout farce that will leave you alternately chuckling and shaking your head.

In Prometheus: the autobiography (Crossquarter Publishing, trade, $13.50, 165 pages, ISBN 1890109770), Uncle River has produced a challenging, stimulating hybrid of fictional memoir, philosophical tract and invigorating rant. Narrated in the first person by the fire-bringer god himself, the book sweeps across all of history to examine the roots of our current malaise. Like H.G. Wells in his latter period, River has pondered long and hard on the intractability of the human race, its own worst enemy. River and Prometheus raise more questions than answers–only suitably, since Prometheus says, "As my name . . . means ‘Foresight,’ that job is not to decree the future but to look ahead." And look the god does, oftentimes in the classic humorous American manner of a Mark Twain or sometimes like Robert Heinlein at his most platitudinous. This is a book with psychological, spiritual, and practical depths, that should spark much thought in the reader who cares about humanity’s origins and destination.

Horror writers Simon Clark and Tim Lebbon, both formidable in their own right, join forces in their first large-scale venture to produce Exorcising Angels (Earthling Publications, trade paperback, $35.00, 87 pages, ISBN 0972151885), and the resulting collaboration is equal to any of their solo works, and perhaps even indicative of some new plateau for both men. Their tale features as protagonist none other than the famed fantasist Arthur Machen, and revolves around what is arguably Machen’s most famous work, "The Bowmen." Published at the nadir of Great Britain’s fortunes during World War One, Machen’s story went on to become a national legend that influenced the course of history. In their tale, Clark and Lebbon construct a visitor named Delamere Smith who seeks out the aged Machen at a similar crisis point in British history: the Blitz of London by the Nazis. Having survived a WWI battle in a manner related to Machen’s story, Smith is now convinced that Machen holds the key to Britain’s survival under the present bombardment. The two men quest through the shattered streets of London, encountering ghosts and mysteries and dangers, until a final revelation strikes each quester separately. Elegaic, restrained, cinematic yet literary, this novella delivers plenty of punch for its size. Additionally, each author contributes a solo story and some critical matter. And the limited paperback is accompanied by an even more exclusive hardcover ($175.00, ISBN 0-9721518-9-3 no image available).