Lee Brown Coye

Recent years has seen a resurgence of interest in artist Lee Brown Coye (1907-1981).  First there was the illustrated biography Arts Unknown: The Life and Art of Lee Brown Coye (2005), by Luis Ortiz. In 2011, Centipede Press published a large retrospective of Coye's art.  And more recently, Mike Hunchback and Caleb Braaten have published Pulp Macabre: The Art of Lee Brown Coye's Final and Darkest Era (2015).  All three of these volumes have their attractions. 

Coye's macabre artwork is perhaps best known from its appearance in three anthologies edited by August Derleth in the 1940s—including Sleep No More (1944), Who Knocks? (1946), and The Night Side (1947)—and in Weird Tales magazine from 1945 through 1952.  Coye also did illustrations for Arkham House books, including Three Tales of Horror (1967) by H.P. Lovecraft. 

Pulp Macabre focuses on the Coye's projects from the 1970s, including work published in Carcosa Press books and Whispers magazine. Coye had a stroke in the late 70s, and tried to turn back to art, but the examples shown here are sketchier than was Coye's wont, though their style is still characteristically Coye's. Still Pulp Macabre makes for another fine Coye collection. 

The Prozess Manifestations

The Prozess Manifestations (2018) is Mark Samuels' new collection of six stories, all but one of which is explicitly connected by some mention of an offstage character named Doctor Prozess, who is involved in some way with some very odd and dark happenings. 

Most of the stories are quite engaging, save for the final tale, "In the Complex," which I found rather diffuse.  The best tale, for me, was the longest, the novella "The Crimson Fog," in which a military rescue mission heads into an enlarging area covered by a mysterious and deadly crimson fog. The idea is reminiscent of some aspects of the Tarkovsky film Stalker (1979)--which was clearly also the inspiration for Jeff VanderMeer's irritatingly context-less novel Annihilation (2014), bettered in its recent film adaptation. Yet whether Samuels' novella descends from Tarkovsky or VanderMeer I cannot guess. Samuels' novella is certainly much more interesting than VanderMeer's novel, and one wishes it went on a lot longer.

I'd Rather Be Reading

I'd Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life, by Anne Bogel, is a small book of short essays about reading.  I normally like books about books, and books about reading, but each of these twenty-one short pieces seems designed to be just perfect reading timewise for a quick sit-down in the smallest room in one's house.  That isn't such a bad thing on its own, but the tone and style of the essays are that of a fatuous blog of a middle-aged person who rambles on while saying nothing. A complete waste of time.