Original anthologies of horror fiction don’t come any more attractively packaged and well-stuffed with quality work than The Dark Horse Book of the Dead (hardcover, $14.95, 103 pages, ISBN 1-59307-281-3), edited by Scott Allie. This array of creepy comics—plus one illustrated prose piece—is guaranteed to send shivers up your backbone in a classy manner.
“The Hungry Ghosts” features story and art by Kelley Jones. Jebediah Kyle is a mountain man fighting a forest full of ghouls. Help seems to be on the way from a couple of passing hunters. But then the bottom drops out from under our expectations. Jones’s art is in high-EC-comics, Jack Davis style, reveling in comedic grossness.
Mike Mignola, of Hellboy fame, contributes one of his typically atmospheric tales with “The Ghoul,” in which Mignola’s famous big-fisted, brick-red hero must battle a poetry-spouting corpse-eater. As usual, Mignola’s uncluttered linework and perfect pacing make for a taut, melancholy tale.
Robert E. Howard shows up with a seldom-reprinted tale, “Old Garfield’s Heart,” about an immortal cowpoke with a secret buried literally in his chest. Elegant B&W art from Gary Gianni—who has illustrated entire books of Howard’s stories—perfectly mimics classic pulp illos with an even higher degree of artistry.
David Crouse scripts “The Ditch,” and Todd Herman brings it to full-color life. A meditation on death through the ghost of a dead dog, this moody parable reminds me of Phil Dick’s famous line, that the secret of life is contained in a dead dog by the side of the road.
The notion of a mortal taking over for the Grim Reaper is a common one, but it’s seldom gotten as funny a workout as in “Death Boy,” which Bob Fingerman wrote and Roger Langridge drew in antic style. Is there any upside to being able to cause death with a touch? Our hero is eventually inclined to answer yes, but only after many awkward trials of his new power.
Eric Powell, whose ongoing comic The Goon is Big Dumb Fun, surprises his audience with “The Wallace Expedition,” which is more in a Love-craftian vein, detailing the horrible experiences of some Arctic explorers in the year 1892. His conceit of a lone carnivorous tree amidst ice and snow is a particularly vivid and spooky notion.
“Queen of Darkness,” by Pat Mc-Eown is a kind of Tim-Burtonish excursion into the lives of a boy and a girl who play an intimate part in the apocalyptic destruction of our world. McEown’s delicate linework is perfect for conveying both vast architectural vistas and close-up character expressions. The surreal nature of this tale is well maintained throughout.
“Kago No Tori”—scripted by Jamie S. Rich and drawn by Guy Davis—creates a feudal Japanese myth of potent resonance, about being careful what you wish for. One scene, where a drowned princess returns, will stick with you for a long time.
In “The Magicians,” with story by Scott Allie and art by Paul Lee and Brian Horton, a middle-aged wizard decides to reanimate his dead father for the heart-to-heart chat they never had when Dad was alive. Needless to say, the procedure is curiously unsatisfying for the son.
Finally, my favorite tale: “Let Sleeping Dogs Lie,” by scripter Evan Dorkin and artist Jill Thompson. This adventure of a pack of mundane dogs who happen in their secret lives to be a canine X-Files squad is part of a series that Dorkin and Thompson are doing, and they hit the mark every time. The mix of doggy logic and feelings with occult McGuffins never fails to charm. And did I mention a feline evildoer as well?
Handsomely presented (the endpaper etching is a nice touch), thoughtfully assembled, and modestly priced, this book is a perfect showcase for the immense talent within.
I love SF from the thirties and forties, especially the overlooked gems still moldering in the pages of old zines. The best of this work possesses an insane bravura zest for ide-ation and action that’s all too often missing from today’s more cerebral, mannered, and rational works.
Readers like me can now get a whopping dose of such thrills, thanks to Night Shade Press and its revival of the work of Manly Wade Wellman (1903-1986). A consummate pro who wrote in all genres, Wellman had a long career and his output includes lots of lost gems.
We’ve already had five massive volumes reprinting many of Wellman’s short stories in thematic groupings. Now come two books more, each featuring a novella and a short story.
Giants from Eternity (hardcover, $25.00, 158 pages, ISBN 1-892389-96-7) features the short novel “Giants from Eternity” (originally published in Startling Stories in 1939) and “The Timeless Tomorrow” (Thrilling Wonder Stories, 1947). We’ll discuss the latter first, since it’s the lesser.
We’re back in the year 1547, watching over the shoulder of Nostradamus as he writes his famous prophecies, which are brought to him thanks to a genuine ability to see the future. A woman named Anne convinces Nostradamus to extend his powers to actually dip physically into the timestream and change some of the events he witnesses. The story concludes with a vision of 1947, making our world seem a veritable hell to the Renaissance mind.
Nostradamus’s verses are deftly woven into the tale, and the characterization and pacing is intriguing. A charming and poignant little story.
But “Giants from Eternity” is something else altogether. It’s a badass super-science tale that barrels along like a Tom Swift rocketship, mixing Lovecraftian riffs (specifically, from “The Colour Out of Space”) with Julian Huxley bio-speculations and Campbellian lone genius derring-do.
A strange meteor falls to the earth in Kansas, discharging a deadly organic substance that begins consuming everything in its path. Soon, many square miles of territory are covered in this alien monoculture, a seething scarlet plain of death. Oliver Noll Norfleet, boy genius, his sardonic buddy Spencer DuPogue, and beautiful government agent Caris Bridge are the world’s only hope against eventual total inundation by the plague.
The first thing Norfleet does is use the plague itself to create a revivifying tonic that can literally bring back the dead from any scrap of their substance. He promptly resurrects famous scientists—Pasteur, Newton, Darwin, Edison, and Madame Curie —to help in the battle. DuPogue dies in a lab accident and is brought back to life as well. The alien substance begins to exhibit intelligence. DuPogue goes over to the dark side. The famous scientists begin to decay. Bridge and Norfleet fall in love. And so on, to the rousing climax. (And I’m leaving a lot out here.)
Wellman rollicks along in blithe fashion, never parodic, always taking his wild premises seriously but not in any way dull. The writing is top-notch, with surprising hints of poetry: “. . . the silenced guns coughing croupily.” Brilliant!
The way this story prefigures the film The Blob (1958), as well as Charles Sheffield’s “Out of Copyright” and Greg Bear’s Blood Music (1985) is uncanny, proving there’s nothing new under the sun.
If you don’t get your full complement of sensawunda from this tale, you’ve been tamed and declawed by too much literary canoodling.
The two items in Strangers on the Heights (hardcover, $25.00, 157 pages, ISBN 1-892389-95-9) are of nearly equal length, and of nearly equal merit. The first piece, which gives its title to the volume, appeared in a 1944 issue of Startling Stories. The second tale, “Nuisance Value,” saw publication first in Astounding, split in two parts running through 1938 and 1939.
“Strangers on the Heights” begins at an American college, where three older students form a bond of friendship. Will Gardestang, Tommy Gat-chell, and Rico Challoner find each other simpatico, being more mature than the younger students. Naturally, then, when Rico suddenly dies in a seemingly occult fashion, the remaining chums are motivated to journey to his home country of Chile to investigate. There, they meet Rico’s beautiful sister, Theolinda, and a fellow spook-chaser named Dr. Parr. Gatchell and Gardestang learn of a mysterious evil cult to which Rico once belonged, before experiencing a change of heart. Led by a fellow named Eaker, this cult worships malign living deities known as the Others. Tussling several times with Eaker and his cronies, the Americans eventually come face to face with the Others, who prove to be alien invaders living atop the highest peak of South America, Mount Cachacamool. Now the chums are set to take the final battle to the home territory of the aliens.
The sense of ancient conspiracies and unhuman intelligences that Wellman conveys here brings to mind work by Philip José Farmer and Colin Wilson. Piling one outré revelation atop another at breakneck speed, Wellman hustles the reader up a steep staircase of marvels, culminating in an overturning of expectations as to the motivation of the Others. The never-say-die heroism of Gatchell, Gardestang, Theolinda, and Parr recalls the verve exhibited by such comic-book heroes as the Challengers of the Unknown, and in fact the Challs’ motif of living on “borrowed time” is also found here. This tale just zips along blithely and excitingly from one bang-up battle to another.
“Nuisance Value” exhibits a further range to Wellman’s skill-set, being an invasion-of-Earth saga. Fifty years after snail-like aliens from the moons of Jupiter have subjugated humanity, a young man named Mark Darragh vows to liberate the planet. Venturing into the fortresses of the invaders, he uncovers their weaknesses, rouses his people, and embarks on a guerrilla war fated to succeed after some twenty years (as an epilogue informs us).
The fluxity in real-world science of this era, when dominant physical paradigms were being overturned daily, allows for lots of wild science such as “ray mechanics.” The typical pulp plot construction of plunging the protagonist into ever deeper holes serves the story well. And, as before, Wellman’s descriptive writing is top-notch. Here’s how the Cold Ones perambulate: “. . . moving by a hitch-and-hunch upon a rubbery pedestal. . . .” I can see them before me now!
Breaking the thematic ground for successors such as Thomas Disch, William Tenn, and Eric Frank Russell, Wellman plainly derives as much fun from the writing of this tale as we do from the reading of it.
Besides simply re-presenting this glorious work for us, the Night Shade folks do it in handsome form. Their books are sturdy, well-designed artifacts, and the cover art—by Vincent Di Fate and Colleen Doran—really does justice to the fiction.
Buy these books, and you’ll have your own ticket to SF’s frontier past.
Reprise, Rethink, Rewards
The desire to recreate—for oneself and for others—the pleasures associated with one’s earliest joyful reading experiences is a stronger motivation for the professional writer than is often acknowledged. I know that I myself have begun composing many a story with no more impetus than the desire to re-experience anew the thrills I derived from reading, say, Phil Dick or Brian Aldiss or Andre Norton.
Damien Broderick says as much in the afterword to his new novel, Godplayers (Thunder’s Mouth Press, trade paperback, $14.95, 328 pages, ISBN 1-56025-670-2): “Nostalgia is a virtue oddly overlooked in most moral catalogs. For the traditional science fiction fan, it’s an unlikely key to the fullest enjoyment of this fertile mode of storytelling.” After lamenting that much of the original inspirational seed material he worshipped and which newer generations might also find stimulating is out of print, Broderick goes on to distinguish between mere sterile pastiche and truly creative reworkings. “But it’s also true that traditions need refreshing, as those good writers and their peers, forty or sixty years ago, renewed the imaginative narrative forms bequeathed by both science and fiction of SF’s Golden Age.”
Judging Broderick’s novel by his own impeccable standards—and recall that Broderick is also a critic of note, able to apply way-above-average intelligent forethought to his own writing—I have to say that he’s fulfilled his mandate wonderfully. Here we have a book that harks back to certain classic works with as much vigor as the originals, yet which also lays a fresh foundation for the nostalgic narrative superstructure.
I’m not sure that there’s a one-word genre label for the kind of story Broderick is building here, but it’s a familiar trope. The most famous series to employ this template is Zelazny’s Amber books: an unsuspecting average Joe on our Earth discovers he’s one of the privileged heirs of the multiverse. (Note that Charles Stross’s new series, The Merchant Princes, derives from this same model. Must be steam-engine time.) Broderick also explicitly cites Fritz Leiber’s Destiny Times Three (1956) as an influence. I suspect he’s well aware of, but omitting, Philip José Farmer’s glorious World of Tiers cycle. We might toss in Laumer and van Vogt on general principles. And lastly, I’d posit Heinlein’s Glory Road (1963) as a seminal instance of this trope, lurking somewhere in Broderick’s hindbrain.
Given these heady, heroic forebears, Broderick’s book is going to have to be mighty fine stuff to join their ranks. And it is.
August Seebeck is a young man of no particular ambition. (His Earth, by the way, turns out to be not precisely ours.) His parents, Angelina and Dramen, died in a plane crash some years ago, leaving him under the care of his great-aunt Tansy. One night at Tansy’s, mysterious intruders carrying a corpse invade the Seebeck bathroom via an interdimensional doorway known as a Schwelle. August tangles with them, but they escape. His life is now perturbed out of all normality.
To simplify a complicated and thrilling series of events: August eventually discovers that he has many brothers and sisters, and that his clan has the power to jump among the strands of the multiverse. They are engaged in a vast Contest against opponents known as the K-Machines, the prize being nothing less than the right to determine cosmic evolution.
At first, August is all at sea, as he is whisked by his kin—“lunatic demigods”—from one baffling venue to another. (He’s never helpless, though, always opting for bold and clever tactics.) After a time, he assumes his rightful place in the family trade, becoming master of the legendary Vorpal Sword. The stage is set for further adventures, in a sequel to be titled K-Machines (Spring 2006).
Broderick does many fine things here. He crafts a style, like Zelazny’s, that blends colloquialisms, high diction, and scientific jargon in equal measures. His dialogue is always crackling, funny, and informative. His characterizations of the various Seebecks is clear-eyed and individually distinctive. His plotting is hurly-burly yet vectored toward ultimate revelations. He has a lot of fun alluding to past classics of SF. (A sect that espouses “Valisology” is known as the “Fat Boys,” after PKD’s alter-ego Horselover Fat.)
But possibly the best, most important thing here is how he underpins his action and concepts with solid scientific and philosophical chunks from cutting edge information theory, cosmology, physics, and biology. A talented but less scrupulous writer might have come up with this concept and plot, but set it down on a foundation of sand. Broderick ensures that the ideational density is there to support the action and increase its plausibility.
Any reader who wishes his or her own life could crack open into a realm of glorious adventuring among unlimited possibilities—and isn’t that practically the definition of all fiction fanatics?—will find in this book the fulfillment of their wildest daydreams.
White Blanket Over the Earth
It’s an inexplicable, criminal shame that none of Adam Roberts’s novels are available in US editions. In fact, the only one of Roberts’s eight books issued to date in a domestic edition is his short-story collection, Swiftly (Night Shade Press, 2004). This means that US readers are missing out on Salt (2000), the tale of an ideological interstellar colonization effort; On (2001), in which gravity goes wonky; Stone (2002), a dark space opera; Polystom (2003), a kind of skewed steampunk; and two novellas, Park Polar (2001) and Jupiter Magnified (2003). Each of these has been a unique treat, rich, well-crafted, provocative, memorable, and full of thought.
True, dedicated US readers can still get these books fairly easily from Amazon UK. But at some extra cost. And no bookstore browser in the US will ever have the pleasure of stumbling upon Roberts’s work in a serendipitous fashion. Nor will most US media outlets review him.
All of the foregoing sad details apply to his latest as well, The Snow (Gollancz, hardcover, £17.99, 297 pages, ISBN 0-575-07180-X). Once again, US audiences are being deprived of a magnificent read.
One day in the near future it begins to snow. And it simply doesn’t stop. Soon the entire surface of our planet is buried several miles deep in white stuff.
From this simple premise—notably less arcane than that of, say, On—Roberts builds a tale of emotional and physical struggle for survival in the grand tradition of the British disaster novel. Think of The Day of the Triffids (1951), or On the Beach (1957), or any of Ballard’s early books. But this novel is also completely contemporary in its themes of political freedom in a terrorist age, and in its depiction of mankind’s precarious place in the cosmic ecology.
Roberts’s vehicle for telling his tale is a deeply drawn average woman named Tira. Her first-person narrative—sometimes in the form of re-dacted documents, which are interspersed with other official material —carries us from the first days of the disaster to the society that is cobbled together in the years when the snow finally stops, and all the way to twenty years beyond that.
Tira’s above-average sensitivity and brusqueness of character make for a fascinating narrator. She’s unwilling to accept the situations and positions that others try to limit her to, and it’s this stubborn perseverance to live freely that drives her and the plot. Roberts does not paint these qualities as unmitigated virtues, however, since they lead Tira into dire situations.
The main theme of the book can perhaps be found in Tira’s pointed observation: “I sometimes think that a human being is a machine designed to take the extraordinary and make it ordinary, habitual, banal.” The grand civilization that preceded the snow, with all its liberties and privileges and comforts, was never appreciated by the mass of mankind. Likewise, the equally titanic collapse is rendered bathetic by the persistence and expansion of a piddling bureaucracy run by blinkered military men. Roberts is at his finest depicting the insane rigmarole that passes for intelligence in this new scenario.
But he does not neglect one of the finest attributes of the disaster novel: estrangement. Consider this passage, which relates the popularity of videos of the buried world.
Some videos were made—freaky things, really. They were, effectively, films of the life you remember, only yellowed and gloomy in white-walled tunnels. I understand they cleared the bodies away before shooting the videos, but the Pompeian evidences of death-interrupted lives were all around. To follow the miner, vicariously, video-linked, through these bizarre tunnels . . . to watch the TV footage of men trudging down nondescript shafts and turn a corner to see a shopfront, a house, and to realize that this strange, urinous-colored stubble underneath their feet had once been green grass, that this oddly short metal fence was actually the radiator grille of a car still almost wholly buried in the snow. It was spooky.
Roberts also utilizes snow (and the clouds from which snow descends) in many metaphorical ways, as when he has a character recall his past addiction to cocaine: “I was just dying under a massive drift of the white powder, crushed and killed and buried and dead.” This literary flair is typical of Roberts’s finely crafted prose in all his books.
In the book’s coda, Tira recognizes that civilization is on the mend: “Yesterday I read a new science fiction novel, a sure sign that things are increasingly returning to some sort of pre-Snow normality.”
I’ll think better of our own civilization’s prospects when Adam Roberts is published in the US.
Prodding, Listening,
Transcribing
The qualities that go into the character of a fine interviewer are many and various, as well as contradictory. Interviewers must be tenacious, yet know when to let a dead-end question go. They must direct the dialogue, yet also allow it to roam down unplanned paths. They must consistently ask certain important universal questions of everyone, yet tailor many of their questions specifically to the individual. They must be engaged and intimate with their subjects, yet also aloof. They must be respectful yet also bold, fans yet also investigative journalists.
All in all, an expert savvy interviewer is a rare beast.
Jayme Lynn Blaschke is just such a paragon, as illustrated by his excellent collection of interviews titled Voices of Vision (Bison Books, trade paper, $14.95, 194 pages, ISBN 0-8032-6239-6). Many of these first appeared online or in Interzone, yet are here expanded or otherwise modified, making these the essential versions of these pieces.
Blaschke divides his book into four sections: one on editors, one on “unique [newer] voices” in SF, one on comics creators, and one on “masters” of the form. In each section, he follows certain recurring threads while winkling out the essential uniqueness of each interviewee. He exhibits a depth of knowledge about each subject’s career and oeuvre, and a willingness to learn on the fly. Whether discussing twenty years of editing with Gardner Dozois, the history of Green Arrow with Brad Meltzer, or Babylon 5 with Harlan Ellison, Blaschke displays reverence, passion, and curiosity. He manages to elicit quotable moments from everyone, and dredges up insightful apercus from such interesting folks as Gene Wolfe, Jack Williamson, Samuel Delany, and Charles de Lint. About the only thing missing from this stimulating salon-on-paper is an index. But most of the talk is so memorable, you can probably compile one easily in your head.
SF novels that feature parallel milieus and parallel narratives that eventually map onto each other in curious intersections are an honorable and fascinating tradition. Ideally, each set of events, each set of characters, each environment plays off meaningfully against the other, establishing ironic, weird, and affecting correspondences. I can’t say I’m a big fan of Stephen King, but I enjoyed that aspect of the two Dark Tower books of his that I managed to read somewhat more than I enjoyed the rest of his tedious, bloated tale.
King’s shortcomings are made even more clear when a truly gifted author works in this vein. That’s the case with Paul Witcover’s Tumbling After (Eos, hardcover, $24.95, 328 pages, ISBN 0-06-105285-X), the elegant, haunting story of startling events in our mundane world and even more outré ones in the cosmos next door.
Or is it?
Let’s examine the brother and sister stories.
Jack and Jilly Doone are twelve-year-old twins in the year 1977. They’re staying at a Delaware beach house one summer with their older sister Ellen and the adult in charge, their Uncle Jimmy. (The Doone parents pop in and out as work allows.) One day Jack nearly drowns, being rescued in the nick of time by his sister. Or rather, he comes to believe, he actually did drown, and some strange power resurrected him, shifting his consciousness onto a different, more favorable timeline. (Shades of Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven [1971] and certain Greg Egan stories.)
As the summer progresses, Jack gets more and more evidence that his theory is true. The world skips a beat several further times, before resettling into a more Jack-friendly groove. Of course, all of this mysterious action is nearly overshadowed by more quotidian matters, such as the potent incestuous sexual stirrings between the siblings, as well as the situation between Ellen and Uncle Jimmy.
Youngish Uncle Jimmy is a bit of a rogue. He smokes pot (which he shares with Ellen) and he’s a game designer. His latest creation, which he almost forces the children to field-test, is called Mutes and Norms. In this gameworld, a postapocalyptic Earth boasts five mutant races whose members create “pentads” that function as gestalt personalities. The Mutes are locked in a war against the Norms. But they’re also struggling against a mutant elite that rules their lives according to stochastic formulae.
This happens to be both a Jimmy-designed board game and the exceedingly tangible world that also hosts the parallel narrative. (Jimmy’s role as possible demiurge is a further complication for Jack.) We witness up close and first-hand the formation of a novice pentad, through the eyes of a young “airie” named Kestrel. Kestrel and his four mates will eventually take part in historic developments that will change their world forever.
As the two narratives proceed, the parallels between Kestrel’s life and Jack’s accumulate, until finally each youngster reaches a decisive crisis. Jack flubs his, while Kestrel triumphs.
As a neatly braided duology, the two narratives function perfectly. But Witcover also leaves open the alternate interpretation alluded to above: that all of Kestrel’s world might merely be a crazed delusion on Jack’s part. I tend not to favor this interpretation, as it undercuts any salvation for the characters, but it’s still neat of Witcover to have constructed this trapdoor.
Witcover excels at rendering each world in its own most appropriate style. The world of the Mutes is all comic-book brio and action. (Witcover, who once penned comics himself, alludes to comics more than once as a touchstone. You might think of Kestrel and his crew as Marvel-style Inhumans.) And the “mundane” world that Jack and Jilly inhabit is limned with aching, Crowleyesque delicacy and insight. For instance, when Jilly’s tanned, sweaty face is described as a golden mask with drops of condensation on it, the metaphor is perfect for the circumstances. The period details of the era are neatly chosen as well: when else but in 1977 could a Peter Frampton song trigger a minor epiphany? And despite the transgressive nature of the twins’ sexuality, Witcover never leers or points a finger, but instead inhabits their desires like a nonjudgmental deity.
This novel seems to have been deposited in our world by the same kind of procedure that rescued Jack from drowning: a supreme mental effort to hunt down the finest instance of any Platonic object.
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