The Karkadann Triangle

The Karkadann Triangle is a limited edition booklet (and ebook) containing two stories: "Unicorn Magic" by Patricia A. McKillip, otherwise unavailable; and "My Son Heydari and the Karkadann" by Peter S. Beagle, a story previously published in Beagle's collection The Overneath (2017).  McKillip's tale is very slight. It concerns a unicorn who had battled a sorcerer, and the sorcerer managed to change the unicorn into a young woman and send her into the future. There really isn't much story to it beyond that.  Beagle's story, on the other hand, is a real gem.  It concerns a young Persian boy who against all reason saves a dying karkadann, a monstrous one-horned beast known primarily for killing things.  Beagle's telling of the tale is near perfect.

Photographing Alice

Simon Winchester's small book, The Alice Behind Wonderland (2011), is deceptively titled and presented.  With the famous 1858 photograph by Lewis Carroll of six-year-old Alice Liddell (who was the inspiration of Carroll's famous Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) gracing the cover, and with the title as it is, one suspects a book more about the real Alice than anything else.  Yet this book turns out to be a potted biography of Lewis Carroll, emphasizing his hobby of photography, with only a short chapter at the end recounting the life of Alice Liddell Hargreaves when she visited America in 1932 at age eighty and was overrun by news reporters and photographers. Which wouldn't be a bad thing (there is a good chapter describing how the camera Carroll used worked), but even this coverage is hampered by the fact that there are no other photographs in the book, despite numerous descriptions and analyses of them. It left me resorting to the internet to find the examples that Winchester describes in order for his argument to register.  As an introductory biography of Lewis Carroll, this book seems okay, but if one wants something more thorough and rigorous (as I wanted) this book doesn't meet those larger expectations. 

The Other Side of Green Hills

The Other Side of Green Hills (1947) is a children's book by John Keir Cross.  It concerned five children who are staying at a house called Green Hills in Berkshire over a Christmas holiday. They discover that there is another dimension, an Other Side, to the house where things are very different. On the Other Side they encounter a strange pair, an old man and a young girl, who are called the Owl and the Pussycat after the famous nonsense poem by Edward Lear. (The British edition of this book is titled The Owl and the Pussycat. The title was changed presumably because American children wouldn't understand the reference.)  Owl has the very annoying tendency to burst into song. Later in the book things take a darker turn, as the children find out that an evil sorcerer, who controls the creepy Moon Folk,  is seeking to open further pages of the Book of All Wisdom, by which he can rule the universe. The Owl and the Pussycat and the children must find a way to stop him. 

This is an odd book, and the initial whimsicality doesn't mix well with the more serious later parts. Even the whole set-up doesn't seem very well thought-out, and the resultant story doesn't really engage the reader. And the illustrations by Robin Jacques are alternatively interesting or off-putting. The whole book is a misfire.

Paperbacks from Hell

There was a horror boom in mass market paperbacks that ran from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s.  The origins of the boom can be seen in the mainstream success of Rosemary's Baby (1967) by Ira Levin, The Other (1971) by Thomas Tryon, and The Exorcist (1971) by William Peter Blatty. These books were filmed in 1968, 1972, and 1973 respectively. Stephen King came along with Carrie in 1974 (paperbacked in 1975), but it wasn't until The Shining (1977), The Stand (1978) and The Dead Zone (1979) were becoming bestsellers that the floodgates really opened. For the next decade or so, horror as a publishing category was in boom. 

Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix chronicles those years, and is profusely illustrated with covers from the books published during that period.  Most of the cover art is decidedly cheesy, and Hendrix's text is often snarky, and one wishes he wrote more about the literary merit (or lack thereof) of more of these books, for among the cheesiest of covers there hides a number of worthy books that didn't deserve to be marketed the way they were.

But the comments and descriptions are still often helpful, especially when it spells out for me the quality and content of certain authors and books that, for whatever reason, I decided not to read in those years. Though tempted by some of the titles back then, in virtually every instance I find from Hendrix's comments that I'm better off not having read those books. This is a matter of interests and aesthetics, not of quality.  Occasionally Hendrix's commentary borders on too glib, but there is a lot to think about while reading this book, and I'm glad to have done so.