One Quick Review

The Space Vampires (1976) by Colin Wilson is a strange kind of throwback novel.  It starts out engagingly, with a captain of a space ship discovering a huge derelict spacecraft hiding in the asteroid belt.  Three humanoid aliens are removed from it and taken to Earth, where they turn out to be a kind of vampire that devours the lifeforce of their victims, and they able to move from one victim to another. From there the book loses focus, as Captain Olaf Carlsen and his psychiatrist friend (and vampire specialist) Hans Fallada turn detective as they try to track down the creatures who are leaving a trail of corpses. There are hints of M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft, and even Clark Ashton Smith, but this is essentially a pulp novel of the 1970s.  It even recalls the original 1960s Star Trek television series in the conclusion where the aliens are basically talked into suicide.

The book was filmed as Lifeforce (1985), which Colin Wilson regarded as the worst film ever made.  Though it differs considerably from the book, it captures the cheezy pulpy feel of the novel, and stands beside it, rather than in its shadow. News has recently come that Lifeforce is to be remade, as a made-for-TV movie for Chiller channel, due for broadcast in late 2015. 

More Books

Fractured Fairy Tales (1997), told by A.J. Jacobs.  This is an odd production. “Fractured Fairy Tales” was an independent segment of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, which ran on American television for five seasons from 1959-64. Some ninety-one short episodes were produced, narrated by Edward Everett Horton. Just what this collection is supposed to be is not clearly defined. The authorship is credited to A.J. Jacobs, who was born in 1968, after the series had aired.  But the book is copyrighted to Ward Productions, and Jay Ward gets a kind of author blurb on the rear flap despite the (unstated) fact that he died in 1989. The book contains twenty five stories, each usually only four or five pages long, and they are much in the style of the original productions, but there are a good number of pop culture references (to “action figures,” “jazzercise,” to the zip code “90210”)  that date to the 1990s rather than the early 1960s.  Most of the stories are moderately amusing, but one misses the velvety narrative voice of Edward Everett Horton, and the simple visual style, and the familiar character voices of people like June Foray or Daws Butler. Reading these stories on their own seems like a one dimensional experience compared to the much more appealing animated episodes. 

How to Fake a Moon Landing: Exposing the Myths of Science Denial (2013), by Darryl Cunningham.  This small book, in graphic novel format, exposes the scientific illiteracy that is rampant in modern popular culture, covering eight topics in particular:  the idea that the moon landing was a hoax; that (1) homeopathy or (2) chiropracty are worthwhile medical treatment options; that vaccines cause autism; as well as taking on the supporters of fracking and the deniers of evolution, climate change, and science. 

            I can’t recommend this book enough.  It should be taught in every elementary school in the United States. Darryl Cunningham has done another similar book The Age of Selfishness: Ayn Rand, Morality, and the Financial Crisis, which I’m looking forward to reading. 

The Prince of the Aquamarines & The Invisible Prince (2015) by Louise Cavelier Levesque, translated by Ruth Berman. These two fairy tales date from the first half of the eighteenth century, during that flowering of interest in the writing of fairy tales in France.  Neither has appeared before in full in English—the second tale, “The Invisible Prince,” was included by Andrew Lang in much abridged form in The Yellow Fairy Book. They are primarily of historical interest, but it’s good to have them available, and the translator Ruth Berman does a fine job in an afterword of discussing the historical context of the two tales. 

Written in Darkness (2014) by Mark Samuels. A collection of nine new stories by Samuels, with an introduction by Reggie Oliver. Samuels first collection The White Hands and Other Weird Tales (2003) was a very promising debut, but it was followed by some much less interesting work (perhaps early work?), including Black Altars (2003) and the novella The Face of Twilight (2006), so that by the time Glyphotech (2008) came out I’d ceased paying attention to Samuels’s work.  The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Stories (2010) didn’t seem attractive either, but I thought I’d check in again when Written in Darkness came out. And I’m glad I did. This is Samuels at the top of his form, and seeing that The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Stories is out in an affordable trade paperback edition, I plan to try it out too.  

These Last Embers (2015) by Simon Strantzs, with wraparound cover art by Drazen Kozjan. Simon Strantzas is a Canadian author of four collections of stories, and Drazen Kozjan is a Canadian illustrator. This is the first of a series of chapbooks from a Canadian small press. Strantzas story is good, but not amongst his best; it is too short (a mere ten pages of text) to be really effective. Kozjan’s wraparound cover is outstanding. Yet the story and illustration seem mismatched in tone. Still I look forward to future chapbooks from this publisher.  

A New Batch of Reads

Undiluted Hocus-Pocus: The Autobiography of Martin Gardner (2013).  Written not long before his death in 2010 at the age of ninety-five, this autobiography of the legendary writer on pseudoscience is a mixed bag.  Personally, I’ve preferred Martin Gardner writings on literary subjects like Lewis Carroll and L. Frank Baum above most of his other writings.  But to get an overview of his life and works, as is found in his autobiographical reflections, is good too.  Yet along with such clear-headed insights like this:  “Not only is there no evidence for God or another life, but the evidence strongly suggests the nonexistence of both. The enormity of irrational evil implies the absence of a just God;” there comes the contradictory revelation “I managed to retain faith in a personal God and a hope for an afterlife,  I’m what is called a ‘philosophical theist’.”  Why?  Gardner admits:  “Shortly before he died, Carl Sagan wrote to tell me he had just reread my Whys, and was it fair to say I believed in God only because it made me happier? I responded by saying, in effect, ‘You’ve got it!’ My faith rests entirely on desire.”  Sadly, this admission leads one to place Gardner--at least with regard to his faith--among the uncritical cranks (whose wackiness was equally rooted in their personal desires) he so easily and thoroughly dissected. 

Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction (2012), edited by Brit Mandelo, is a reprint anthology of seventeen stories, originally published between 1996 and 2011.  Most of the stories are interesting and readable (there are a few duds), but overall I found the collection as a whole to be rather tame. I expected much more boundary-stretching, but it just isn’t to be found here.  Also, there seems to be an imbalance in that only two of the seventeen stories are by men. The best story, handsdown, is “Fisherman” by Nalo Hopkinson.

Letters to Arkham: The Letters of Ramsey Campbell and August Derleth, 1961-1971 (2014), edited by S.T. Joshi.  Here is the extensive correspondence between an old pro and editor at Arkham House, August Derleth, with young writer-to-be Ramsey Campbell, beginning at a time when Campbell was aged fifteen.  Kudos to Campbell for allowing this interesting correspondence to be published, despite any potential embarrassment in the exposure of his much younger self. Many topics are covered in these letters between two people who never met:  H.P. Lovecraft, prominently; and weird fiction, also prominently; but also films (a growing topic as the time progressed), and sexuality, including discussions of banned literary works (often via copies traded).  There are extensive notes by editor Joshi, with a number of errors and a few howlers (e.g., the well-known bibliophile and writer Timothy d’Arch Smith is said to have died in 1997—he is still happily with us, and has produced a number of new books since his presumed death).  Despite such problems (surely a good copyeditor could have caught these mistakes and the typos), this is still an interesting read. 

Literary Rogues: A Scandalous History of Wayward Authors (2013), by Andrew Shaffer.  This book sounded like a good idea, and I was expecting to enjoy it a lot.  Alas, the end-result is so snarky and smarmy that in this instance I would relax my disgust at the idea of book-burning to see this paper turd go up in smoke. If you have any respect for authors and their actual history and context, avoid this book.  (If you like listening to inebriated dim-witted know-it-alls pontificate in a bar, this book might be for you.) The style is glib and exaggerated.  On Lord Byron, Shaffer writes: “Unsurprisingly, Byron’s lifestyle of ‘bling, booze, and groupie sex’ proved to be incompatible with married life…. His wife may have preferred eternal damnation.”  Of Poe he tells us, “He was fiercely opinionated, a trait that would come back to bite him on the ass. He was also an alcoholic who drank for the same reasons he wrote: to push back the depression that he was constantly waging a war against.” Such pearls of cliche appear regularly. The main thing I learned from this book is to avoid any future writings by this author. 

Pybrac, by Pierre Louys, comes from a mass of erotic manuscripts left behind at the author’s death in 1925.  Here, newly translated by Geoffrey Longnecker, are over three hundred quatrains that all begin “I do not like . . .” and pass through a litany of encouraged various sexual acts, though predominantly of heterosexual anal sex. The form is limiting, and the reading becomes monotonous rather quickly.  This is the kind of book one supports because it will outrage small-minded moralists, and for that reason it must be applauded.

More Recent Reading

Dark Matter: A Ghost Story (2010), by Michelle Paver.  This is basically the journal written by one man of a doomed 1937 expedition to an imagined isolated place called Gruhuken in the Arctic, north of Norway.  While it is a ghost story, the ghost takes the form of a haunted figure in the icy landscape.  What’s far more real and significant to the men of the expedition, at first, is the barren landscape itself, the frozen world, and how to survive in it.  By authorial sleight of hand, giving out only selective details of the failed mission at the very beginning, one is left with a well-written page turner that draws you to the end.  With the right director and screenwriter, there is just enough material here, as well as mood and character, to make an interesting and artistic film.  

Red Delicious (2014), by Caitlín Kiernan writing as Kathleen Tierney, is the second of Kiernan’s novels about the half-werewolf, half-vampire Siobhan Quinn.  The first was Blood Oranges (2013), which also appeared as Kiernan writing as Tierney. When an established author uses a pseudonym, it’s often to do something quick for money, or something very different from their usual style.  Either may be true in this instance, but Kiernan really should have hid behind a pseudonym.  The book is a basically an extended exercise in attitude and cliché.  And it is basically a monologue by Quinn (who hates her first name Siobhan, so everyone calls her that at least once so the author can insert some boilerplate text about Quinn hating it). The whole is filled with unnecessary wordage, not always as wise as this bit from late in the book:  “Those of you who find this annoying, go read another book, instead. I won’t mind.”  I finished the book primarily to see if the author might do something interesting for an ending. Nope.  Just the same ole same ole. To use an appropriate critical cliché, this book isn’t writing, it’s typing.  

The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure (2014), edited by C.D. Rose. This book is basically a slim encyclopedia of biographies of some fifty-two failed writers.  I presume that they all lived only in the mind of the supposed editor, whose imagination was apparently given free reign at a website, from which these are collected.  Add a rather pretentious introduction by one Andrew Gallix.  Some readers may find this book clever.  I found it merely boring. One could, I suppose, build short stories around this kind of exercise, but what’s present here is just the invention, without artistry. I’d much rather read Borges than crap like this.   

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (2001), by François Augiéras, translated by Sue Dyson.  The original French edition “L’Apprenti Sorcier” appeared without the author’s name in Les Cahiers des Saisons (Éditions Julliard, 1964), where it is listed as by the author of Le Vieillard et l’Enfant (1949), which had appeared at the author’s expense under the pseudonym of Abdullah Chaanba.  It is a bizarre narrative, written as though by a teenage boy who is sent to live with a priest in his mid thirties. The nameless narrator is used sexually by the priest, and comes to love the pain of flagellation. Meanwhile he falls in love with a younger boy, and they have their own warm and open sexual relations, in contrast to those with the priest, and they cause consternation in the small village. The boy decides to write a small book (presumably the one that is being read):  “a tissue of weaknesses run through with follies and naïvity, that was the sort of book I could be the author of.” And that’s a reasonable description of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. A handful of poetic observations and keen turns of phrase, scattered throughout this short book, are just enough to help the reader make it to the end. 

Passion  (L’Appasionata): A Tale of Venice (2014), by Stefan Grabinski, translated by Miroslaw Lipinski.  Those familiar with the work of the Polish fantasist Grabinski will be intrigued by this novelette, his longest short prose work.  It starts out quite different from Grabinski’s usual, being first a kind of travelogue of Venice, and second a tale of romantic infatuation. Grabinski slowly sets the stage, and then his usual magic begins.  A very fine tale is the result.  

Recently Read

Book Talk: Essays on Books, Booksellers, Collecting, and Special Collections (2006), edited by Robert H. Jackson and Carol Z. Rothkopf, collects essays that were originally talks sponsored by the Fellowship of American Bibliographic Societies from 1997 to 2005.  The topics range from general considerations such as Jason Epstein’s “The Past, Present, and Future of the Book” to Martin L. Greene’s discussion of the first book published on the Antarctic Continent.  The most interesting sections of this collection cover the changes in modern bookselling, and the considerations involved in book collecting, from the perspectives of both special collection librarians as well as individual collectors.  The theme that is interwoven all throughout these essays is the recognition that things are changing, and there is a palpable nervousness about the future of all aspects of bookselling and book collecting.  Reading these essays a decade after the last was written offers an even more depressing scenario, and one would really like follow-up essays by many of these authors to see if they still view the field through hopeful or rose-tinted glasses.  Thus the feelings evoked by the present collection is primarily that of nostalgia---nostalgia for the lost book world, as it existed as recently as the 1980s and early 90s. Compared to now, we never knew how good we had it back then.  

The Old Knowledge & Other Strange Tales (2010) by Rosalie Parker is a collection of eight “strange tales”—presumably after the manner of Robert Aickman, who preferred to call his efforts "strange stories".  The writing style is assured and shows talent, but the endings are all too abrupt and unsatisfying.  It’s not that the stories need explanations or resolutions, but that the endings given do not seem to develop naturally from what has gone on before. Twists in the tale are difficult to pull off, and here the twists seem designed as excuses for the author to cease writing. 

A more recent tale by Parker,"Selkie - A Scottish Idyll", will appear in the forthcoming issue of Supernatural Tales. As a promotional preview, it is read here by editor David Longhorn.  It shows the same strengths and weaknesses as the tales in Parker's collection.  

Cry Murder! in a Small Voice (2013) by Greer Gilman is a novella published as a chapbook.  In her usual dense prose style, Gilman uses Shakespearean London (and Venice) as the backdrop for a tale of Ben Jonson acting as detective to solve the murder of a boy actor.  It takes a bit of effort to get into it, but it’s a very rewarding read, especially for those with expansive reading tastes. Recommended. 

Gilman has published a second Ben Jonson adventure in booklet form, Exit, Pursued by a Bear (2014).  I look forward to getting a copy.  

The Starry Wisdom Library: The Catalogue of the Greatest Occult Book Auction of All Time (2014), edited by Nate Pedersen, contains contributions by nearly fifty people, many names well known in the modern small press for literary horror, ranging from Ramsey Campbell, W.H. Pugmire and Darrell Schweitzer to Matt Cardin, Michael Cisco and Simon Strantzas.  The conceit of the volume is that in 1877 a book auction catalogue was compiled for a sale of occult library that never took place. In the entries there are a good number of in-jokes (related to Robert W. Chambers, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and others) but overall the book is contrived to the point of complete dullness.