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 The Wisdom of Father Brown (1929)
by G.K. Chesterton
200 pages - Penguin Books
 This book contains 12 stories featuring Father Brown, G.K. Chesterton's Catholic priest who always finds himself in the midst of some crime, mystery, or puzzle, and proceeds to uncover the truth about events which leave others confused and befuddled. Though there are some crimes involved, other cases are simply misunderstandings, and some others are apparent curses that are eventually debunked.
I think my favourite story here is "The Purple Wig", which is told in the form of an article that an editor is reviewing for publication, and you not only get the story in the piece, but Chesterton makes some funny and apt observations about editors trying to shape and mold the general public's view of reality. Not every story here is fantastic, but enough of them are good enough to make the book a quality read overall. There are some wonderful passages of prose that made me realize what a good writer Chesterton was. Also, these are the sort of mysteries that allow the reader to make an educated guess as to what the solution is, before it is revealed at the end, and that has always been my favourite type of mystery story (as opposed to say, the Holmes stories by Doyle which, for all their other merits, often only present the key clue to the reader at the same time that Holmes is providing his final conclusion).
As an example of the fine writing, the opening paragraph of "The Head of Caesar": "There is somewhere in Brompton or Kensington an interminable avenue of tall houses, rich but largely empty, that looks like a terrace of tombs. The very steps up to the dark front doors seem steep as the sides of pyramids; one would hesitate to knock at the door, lest it should be opened by a mummy. But a yet more depressing feature in the grey façade is its telescopic length and changeless continuity. The pilgrim walking down it begins to think he will never come to a break or a corner; but there is one exception - a very small one, but hailed by the pilgrim almost with a shout. There is a sort of mews between two of the tall mansions, a mere slit like the crack of a door by comparison with the street, but just large enough to permit a pigmy ale-house or eating-house, still allowed by the rich to their stable-servants, to stand in the angle. There is something cheery in its very dinginess, and something free and elfin in its very insignificance. At the feet of those grey stone giants it looks like a lighted house of dwarfs."
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Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen & Pre-Zen Writings
compiled by Paul Reps
175 pages - Anchor Books Gusan instructed his adherents one day: "Those who speak against killing and who desire to spare the lives of all conscious beings are right. It is good to protect even animals and insects. But what about those persons who kill time, what about those who are destroying wealth, and those who destroy political economy? We should not overlook them. Furthermore, what of the one who preaches without enlightenment? He is killing Buddhism." (pg.56) This book contains four separate works related to Zen Buddhism. The first, 101 Zen Stories, is the one I enjoyed the most. It consists of a collection of very very short stories, some thoughtful, some funny, some wise, some enigmatic. The section after that, The Gateless Gate, is a collection of koans, and I'm not sure if it's just too much of a cultural gap or something with my personal thought process, but I didn't get these at all. Well, apart from one, which I thought was wonderful, so maybe that makes slogging through the rest worthwhile? I feel like I didn't really understand what role these would play in Zen practice, or what a reasonable range of responses would be. The third section is 10 Bulls, which is a set of ten illustrations accompanied by text, which uses the metaphor of someone searching for a bull, finding it, taming it, transcending it, and entering back into the world. The fourth section is Centering, an Indian document from before the Buddha's time, which is an example of what Buddhism grew out of. Like the koans, I was mostly lost with this. A student of Tendai, a philosophical school of Buddhism, came to the Zen abode of Gasan as a pupil. When he was departing a few years later, Gasan warned him: "Studying the truth speculatively is useful as a way of collecting preaching material. But remember that unless you meditate constantly your light of truth may go out." (pg.47)
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The Spawn of Cthulhu (1971)
edited by Lin Carter
274 pages - Ballantine Books
This interesting anthology looks a some of the stories around the 'Cthulhu mythos', which originated in a series of stories by H.P. Lovecraft, which usually involved a person or persons becoming aware of terrible, ancient gods who had once ruled the earth and would come again. There was often something of a science fiction element to the stories, with the horror coming either from outer space or other dimensions. Also often involved was a mythical book called the Necronomicon, authored by the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred (I'm sure these days you couldn't call him 'the mad Arab' anymore, he'd be 'socially non-normative, unoptimally adjusted person of Middle Eastern descent'). Though Lovecraft wrote a series of stories with this same background, he was very encouraging towards other writers that wished to borrow and write stories with the same elements. And people have been writing them ever since.
This book includes the story "The Whisperer in Darkness" by Lovecraft, and then the editor introduces a series of stories (and even a few poems) by other authors, also providing context and some extra details before each piece. The introductions were actually one of my favourite parts of the book, as they're quite informative and distinguish the book from just another volume of stories. A couple of the stories actually precede Lovecraft and demonstrate some of his direct influences, and then there are many from his collaborators, and lastly a more recent one from the 60s. I think my two favourite works here were "The Inhabitant of Carcosa" by Ambrose Bierce, and "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" by Clark Ashton Smith.
I mentioned there's some poetry as well. Here is a sonnet by the editor, Lin Carter:
Black Lotus
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The Coven-master gave to me a phial
Of that dread opiate that is the key
To dream-gates opening upon a sea
Of acherontic vapours: mile on mile
Stretch ebon coasts untrod, wherefrom aspire
Pylons of rough-hewn stone ascending skies
Alien-constellated, where arise
Grey mottled moons of cold and leprous fire.
My dream-self roamed the cosmic gulfs profound,
Past daemon-haunted Haddath where, in deeps
Of foul putrescence buried underground,
The loathsome shoggoth hideously sleeps...
I saw--and screamed! And knew my doom of dooms,
Learning at last where the Black Lotus blooms
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The Locus Awards: Thirty Years of the Best in Science Fiction and Fantasy (2004)
eidted by Charles N. Brown and Jonathan Strahan
512 pages - Eos
I've always been a bit perplexed about Locus when I've seen it on the magazine racks -- it's a magazine about science fiction, but doesn't actually contain any science fiction. The introduction to this volume explains how the Locus Awards are selected: each year the editors compile a long list of candidates in each category, and the readers send in their votes from those lists. For this collection, the editors have made a selection of the winners in the short story, novelette, and novella categories since the founding of the magazine approximately 30 years ago.
Let me just say right off the bat that most of the stories here are quite bad and painful to read through. It's the sort of thing that made me wonder if I really like science fiction, or maybe I was wrong all along? Whatever you might call this kind of science fiction writing, I would say that I am not a fan of it at all. To be fair, the chance at getting a different author once you finish the particular story kept me reading, and there were some good stories: "The Death of Doctor Island" by Gene Wolfe, "Rachel in Love" by Pat Murphy, "Buffalo" by John Kessel, "Gone" by John Crowley, and the Ray Bradbury tribute "October in the Chair" by Neil Gaiman.
But the vast majority of the stories here were nowhere near the quality of those pieces, and made me, as the reader, feel like I was being assaulted. A lot of them have a very specific and hectoring political, social, or religious agenda, and many of them feature a point at which the ideal character, who is super-powerful and super-smart, and also usually super-attractive, takes several pages to make a speech about how people need to be, and how the world needs to be, and how anyone who disagrees with them is just stupid. There's very little of the elements that make us all human, and the stories seem to almost glory in creating cardboard characters that are totally disconnected from the reality of individual people, relationships, or even the behaviour of the natural world. This is the sort of thing that makes me seriously ponder if I ever want to pick up anything with the 'science fiction' or 'fantasy' label ever again. With stuff like this being acclaimed, it's no wonder a lot of people see genre writing as simplistic, shallow, and self-centred wish-fulfillment for people trapped in a retarded adolescent mindset.
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The Dark Descent (1987)
edited by David G. Hartwell
1011 pages - Tor
A huge anthology focused on the horror story. The editor splits the stories into three categories, which represent to him the three streams of horror.
The first section contains 'moral allegorical' stories, which present the characters as being in a struggle between good and evil, even if this is something that only becomes evident to them at the end of the story. My favourite story here (or perhaps in the entire collection) is "There's a Long, Long Trail A-Winding" by Russell Kirk, in which a drifter settles into an abandoned house in a ghost town during a snowstorm, and finds an opportunity for possible redemption. Other good stories here are "The New Mother" by Lucy Clifford, "Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, "John Charrington's Wedding" by E. Nesbit, and "Sticks" by Karl Edward Wagner.
The second section is focused on stories of 'psychological metaphor', in which events are a mirror of the psychological state of the characters. I have to say that this was my least favourite section, and a lot of stories here just seemed very flat or awkward. I think this is likely because something like psychology, especially after being filtered through popular culture and story writers, becomes a thing very dependent on trends and fashions in thinking. For example, you can write a story rooted in the theories of Freud, and people who agree with that thinking will praise it, but people that don't put any store in Freud will most likely think it nonsense. This section did still contain the excellent story "Three Days" by Tanith Lee, and after reading two excellent stories by her in two different anthologies, I really do need to track down more of her work.
The last stream of horror fiction highlighted is the "fantastic", where the usual everyday world dissolves and reality is seen as something far stranger, and often less reliable or knowable. Some of the best stories here were "Seven American Nights" by Gene Wolfe, "Night-Side" by Joyce Carol Oates, "Seaton's Aunt" by Walter de la Mare, "The Beckoning Fair One" by Oliver Onions, and "What Was It?" by Fitz-James O'Brien.
Probably the closest comparison to this anthology is the collection Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural which is also quite large and exhaustive, though it was published almost 50 years earlier. Neither collection is perfect, though I suppose if I had to choose one I would go with Great Tales, just because I think that sometimes The Dark Descent tries a little too hard to expand the limits of the horror genre, and seems to include some stories just because of the reputation of the names attached, when the story itself might just be merely potentially slightly unsettling (and really, couldn't you say that about almost any work of fiction?).
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Collected Stories
by Roald Dahl
850 pages - Everyman's Library
Though Roald Dahl is now known mostly for his books for children, he began his writing career with short stories for adults, and it was only as his inspiration for these mostly dried up that he moved on to write his material for children. Though all his writings share the same sort of twisted imagination, his adult stories can be quite macabre and cruel, and at times quite adult indeed. This book collects all of those adult stories, which were previously collected in the books Over to You, Someone Like You, Kiss Kiss, Switch Bitch, as well as a few other assorted stories. According to the introduction, the only material omitted was Two Fables from 1986, at the request of the family, and it would be interesting to learn more about the story behind that.
The first group of stories is based upon Dahl's experience as a pilot in the Air Force during WWII. Interestingly, Dahl once got lost while piloting a plane, ran out of fuel and crashed, but always told people in conversation that he had been shot down.
In a lot of these stories humanity can come across as quite repulsive. Though I do like Dahl's work, I think what made me refrain from mentally classifying this book as being in the top tier is that a lot of Dahl's stories are just a bit too sophisticated and refined, as evidenced by the publications they originally appeared in (New Yorker, Esquire, etc), and could do with being a bit rougher around the edges.
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The Best Science Fiction of J. G. Ballard (1977)
411 pages - Orbit
'Each of us is little more than the meagre residue of the infinite unrealized possibilities of our lives.' (pg.390) Seventeen short stories are collected here, selected by the author, spanning ten years, from 1957 to 1967. Some of the highlights are "Concentration City" about people who live in a city so massive they can't imagine anything beyond its borders; "The Waiting Grounds" about a secret on an isolated planet, and "Chronopolis", about a future in which timekeeping devices are banned. When J.G. Ballard is at his best, he brings a psychological intensity combined with narrative that edges on the border of surrealism. At his worst, his writing is very detached and self-indulgent and lacking in emotion or other human qualities. I would say both sides are on display in this collection.
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So, as part of my re-reading program, I decided on re-visiting a few short stories:
The Portrait - Nikolai Gogol - from The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
A two-part story concerning a mysterious painting. In the first part, a struggling artist buys the portrait for a cheap price, but he soon begins being tormented by the image of the person in the portrait. The portrait ends up bringing both good and bad luck to the artist. In the second part of the story, the son of the actual painter of the portrait tells the story of its creation and cursed history.
This is a fantastic story by Gogol, successfully evoking horror while also creating such wonderful characters in a fully living, breathing world. I can't think of any writer with which, as much as with Gogol, you get caught up in the sheer joy of storytelling, and every side-story or indulgence or endless paragraph is so welcome because it's all part of the unfolding of such a powerful, living vision. I really should re-read this whole collection. 'For artistic creation comes down to earth to pacify and reconcile all people.' (pg.391)
The Golden Flower-Pot - E.T.A. Hoffmann - from The Best Tales of Hoffmann
Quite a long story, really a novella, about a student who upsets the market-stall of an old woman, and becomes cursed. Typical Romantic theme of being torn between the real world and an ideal world of dreams. To be honest this did not hold my attention much and I zoned out constantly while reading it.
The Mines of Falun - E.T.A. Hoffmann - from The Best Tales of Hoffmann
A young man who has been a sailor becomes sick of that life, and various signs and experiences point him to the life of a miner. He goes to a mining town and not only becomes a skilled miner but falls in love with the daughter of a prominent citizen of the town, though the forces that brought him to the mine may not let him be happy and peaceful. This was much better than the previous Hoffmann story, and there's a powerful evocation of both sadness and enchantment. However, it is soaked in Romanticism as well, and I feel that I've somewhat outgrown it, and it certainly didn't have as big an effect on me as in my previous reading.
The Artificial Nigger - Flannery O'Connor - from Collected Works
Mr. Head lives with his grandson, Nelson, in the backwoods of the American south. The grandfather decides to take his grandson to the city (unnamed, but likely Atlanta) for a day, so that the grandson will both satisfy his curiosity and be scared off enough by the big bad city that he will not want to escape there when he grows older. Mr. Head tries to present a wise and clever attitude, but in reality he is the one that is the most intimidated by the city, and has very little clue of what he is doing there; which means that the two very quickly get lost.
The most poignant moment is when Mr. Head decides to 'teach a lesson' to Nelson by abandoning him while he naps. Nelson panics when he wakes up and runs into an old woman on the sidewalk and knocks her over, and she begins screaming about injuries and money and calling the police. When Mr. Head happens on the scene and Nelson clings to him, Mr. Head denies knowing the child, a very clear echo of how Peter denied Christ before the crucifixion.
Incidentally, the title of the story refers to those statues of black people in poses such as fishing or eating a watermelon. As Mr. Head says when they come upon one in a rich suburban neighbourhood, "They ain't got enough real ones here. They got to have an artificial one." I think that in the story the trip city functions as a representation of our experience in life, how it can be strange and sad and violent, but at the same time opens us up to insights we would not get in any other manner.
'Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but this time he knew that there were no words in the world that could name it. He understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children. He understood it was all a man could carry into his death to give his Maker and he suddenly burned with shame that he had so little of it to take with him. He stood appalled, judging himself with the thoroughness of God, while the action of mercy covered his pride like a flame and consumed it. He had never thought himself a great sinner before but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time, when he had conceived in his own heart the sin of Adam, until the present, when he had denied poor Nelson. He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that moment to enter Paradise. (pg.230) The Lame Shall Enter First - Flannery O'Connor - from Collected WorksSheppard is a widowed father with one son, Norton. Sheppard also volunteers on the weekends helping delinquent youths, and gets to know a club-footed boy named Johnson, who he invites into his home when Johnson gets out on probation. While Sheppard is a well-meaning atheist, and tries to raise his son the same way, Johnson has been raised by his grandfather with a fire-and-brimstone Christianity, and rejects psychological and sociological explanations for his own behaviour, instead insisting that he does what he does because he is a sinner and going to hell, unless he repents to Jesus. In a lot of ways, this story foreshadows the structure of O'Connor's second and final novel, The Violent Bear it Away. The father is the epitome of the modern mindset, believing in nothing while trying to perform as many good works as possible, contrasted with someone who does evil but has consciousness of that evil far beyond simply material terms. The reader finds themselves asking, is it better to be a well-intentioned do-gooder rooted in nothing but the material world in front of one's nose, or someone who hurts others and themselves but in whose soul there is still the spark of potential for salvation? I think that in the conclusion of the story O'Connor is saying that Sheppard's attitude was well-meaning but ultimately futile, because he had cut himself off from the source of divine, unconditional love that he could have spread not only to Johnson, but to his own son. The Dream of a Ridiculous Man: A Fantastic Story - Fyodor Doestoevsky - from The Eternal Husband and Other StoriesThe narrator is walking home late one night when he resolves that this will be the night that he kills himself, as he has long planned to do. A small girl runs into the street crying and pleads for his help, but he ignores anything she tries to say and chases her away. When he is back home he sits down and sets his revolver down in front of himself, but as he is pondering things he drifts off to sleep. In this dream he shoots himself, but remains conscious as he has a funeral and is buried, and then is taken by some spirit through space, to another sun and another planet orbiting it, which is just like earth except that the Fall of Man has not happened, and everyone lives in peace with each other and with the rest of creation. However, the narrator's very presence there corrupts them, and they slowly but surely begin to resemble the world we know. The narrator then awakens and immediately devotes himself to the belief that an ideal world is something possible and real, even though he may be the only one to believe it, and even though everyone labels him a ridiculous man. Can't say much else about this story other than it's great.
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The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age (1967)
by Stanislaw Lem, translated by Michael Kandel, illustrated by Daniel Mroz
236 pages - Avon Books
A series of stories chronicling the adventures of Trurl and Klapaucius, two constructors of fantastical technological inventions who are themselves robots. A lot of these stories are structured similarly to fables or fairy tales, with features such as tyrant kings and horrible monsters to slay and conclusions that bring everything back to the way it was at the start.
It's a bit hard to call this 'science fiction' as most of the references to anything to do with science, math, or technology seem to be thrown in just to feature some long words. There's certainly a very casual approach to storytelling, with events such as seeing someone waving from a planet as a character is travelling in space, or creating a robot by throwing some transistors and machine oil into a pot and boiling it and letting it sit for a few days - if this book wasn't written by a science fiction writer, I'm sure most people would think of it as very condescending to the genre. Not that there isn't a way that something like this could be whimsical or magical, but most of the stories are just really dry and dull and don't have much in the way of humour or individual personal character or moral value - things that can make folk or fairy tales delightful. I couldn't even tell the main two characters apart at all.
It just got more dull and frustrating as it went on, and I decided to just drop the book about 160 pages in.
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The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque (1998)
by Joyce Carol Oates
323 pages - Plume
A collection of stories by Joyce Carol Oates. Some of these are what you could think of as her standard kind of story, while others are more dream-like, or have more of an obvious element of fantasy or horror. Twenty-seven stories are included, grouped into five sections; which is a way Oates often arranges her short story collections, though it's up to the reader to guess at the common theme in each grouping.
Some of the highlights are: "██████" about the recall of a childhood experience that contains a lot of incomplete, confused, and missing memories; "Labor Day" about a missing child in a beachfront community; and "Unprintable" in which an abortion-rights activist attends a function on her birthday, and thinks about how her own parents had desired to abort her, while she is also haunted by her own aborted fetuses, and those of the women she has counseled.
But, I think the most remarkable story here is "The Affliction", which is a really powerful metaphorical story. On the surface it's about a person with a strange physical mutation that's extremely painful, but that he finds a way to turn into something else. What it's a metaphor for is pretty clear to me, but I think it's probably best discovered by each individual reading the story.
Not every story here is wonderful, but quite a few of them are; it's a very strong collection, and I have to marvel in admiration at how Oates can just kick out high quality story after story after story.
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The Guardian has published a new short story by A.L. Kennedy - Saturday Teatime. For those that like that kind of thing, it will be the kind of thing that they like.
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Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (1944)
edited by Herbert A. Wise & Phyllis Cerf Wagner
1034 pages - The Modern Library
This large anthology is split into two sections; the first quarter of the book contains "Tales of Terror" while the remaining three-quarters is classified under "Tales of the Supernatural". The constraints of the selection seem to be that all of the authors are born in the 19th century (give or take a couple of years) and all but a couple of the authors originally wrote their tales in English.
I haven't seen anything but praise for this collection, many considering it the anthology of older horror stories. Which made the reading of it somewhat disappointing, because overall I thought it was just mediocre. Perhaps that's because I've read some of these stories before; but as I went on to the next story I felt like it was as likely to bore me as engage me. I don't like how a lot of people criticize older things out of hand as being too slow or too boring, so I was surprised to come to the conclusion that I think one of the main problems with this book is its stodginess. For a lot of the stories to be effective, you would have to find horrific the thought of things such as paganism, primitive humanity, or miscegenation. A lot of these stories are rooted in the fear of the displacement of a sort of insular world of white, anglo-saxon, protestants; a fear that is far less effective in the 21st century as much of that world has indeed changed so much to become something else entirely.
There were still some good stories here; I especially enjoyed the ones by Saki, and am planning to read more of his work. Other impressive stories were "La Grande Breteche" by Balzac, "A Terribly Strange Bed" by Wilkie Collins, "The Boarded Window" by Ambrose Bierce, "Rappaccini's Daughter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, "What Was It?" by Fitz O'Brien, "How Love Came to Professor Guildea" by Robert Hichens, "The Celestial Omnibus" by E.M. Forster, "The Ghost Ship" by Richard Middleton, "The Sailor-Boy's Tale" by Isak Dinesen, and several others. But overall I had high hopes coming into this collection, and while I know what it feels like getting my socks knocked off, this wasn't it.
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Now and Forever: Somewhere a Band Is Playing & Leviathan '99 (2007)
by Ray Bradbury
209 pages - William Morrow
Ray Bradbury continues to clean out his dusty filing cabinets by presenting two novellas that had their origin many decades ago. It's a slight book that could probably be half as thick as it is now if it weren't for the generous spacing, chapter breaks, and wide margins.
Somewhere a Band Is Playing was inspired by Bradbury's attempt to write a screenplay for Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. A newspaper reporter gets off a train at a small town in Arizona, and finds it both idyllic in beauty and unsettling because there are no children to be found, and apparently no deaths. This is the better of the two stories.
Leviathan '99 takes place in 2099, and is basically the Moby Dick story transplanted into space; a fairly stereotypical spaceship crew chasing an immense white comet. Bradbury has a strong tie to Melville's most famous novel, as he wrote the screenplay to John Huston's excellent film of Moby Dick. But this particular story is pretty much a one-trick pony, and doesn't offer much other than transcribing a whaling story into a space-opera story. Apparently, Leviathan '99 was originally a radio play by Bradbury that was eventually performed by, among others, Christopher Lee.
As probably everyone that knows me knows, I'm a really big fan of Ray Bradbury. But the odd thing about Bradbury's career is that his creative output really changed over the years. It feels like almost two different authors when you look at his 'golden age' output of the 50s, and compare it to the style of writing he's used in the past few decades. Unfortunately these stories are more reminiscent of the latter, with overly-poetic language that just fizzles, and a lack of attention to nuts-and-bolts storytelling. I guess it's better that Bradbury supervises the editing and publishing of his previously-unpublished material, rather than someone else doing it after he passes on, but all this mediocre stuff was originally unpublished for a reason.
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The Illustrated Man (1951)
by Ray Bradbury
186 pages - Bantam Spectra
A collection of stories that uses the framing device of the narrator, a drifter, meeting a man who is covered with tattoos; tattoos that start to move when you look at them, each one telling a story. Some of the more remarkable stories here are "The Veldt", featuring two spoiled children whose maliciousness towards their parents becomes absorbed by their virtual reality playroom, "The Long Rain" about a group of survivors of a crash on Venus that try to make it through an environment that is a never-ending monsoon, "No Particular Night or Morning" about an astronaut who slips into psychosis as he tries to only believe in things he can immediately see and touch, "The Concrete Mixer" about a Martian invasion which is easily absorbed into modern consumerist America, and "The Rocket" in which a poor man takes his children on a week-long tour of the solar system in a junked shell of a rocket that never leaves the ground.
This is a pretty good collection, but I don't think I'd class it among my favourite works of Ray Bradbury. A handful of stories here are also repeated in other collections, which leads to something of an over-familiarity, and I also think that too many of these stories are of the same 'shiny rocket blasting off' type, and that weakens the collection as a whole, even when the story is something of a parody. A few of these tales were made into a mostly disappointing movie released in 1969; a new Illustrated Man film is in the planning stages, and is going to be helmed by the same person that made 300 and the soon-to-be-released Watchmen adaptation.
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The Martian Chronicles (1958)
by Ray Bradbury
267 pages - Time Inc.
Somewhere in between a collection of short stories and a novel, this book uses a series of stories to track the colonization of Mars by humans. Mars here is very much fictional, with a breathable atmosphere, water-filled canals, and most impressively a race of Martians who are many tens of thousands of years old, and have already left behind many ancient dead cities before they are almost entirely wiped out by new diseases from Earth. Near the end of the book nuclear war on Earth seems inevitable, and the continued existence of civilization on either planet is put in doubt.
This book is so amazing. It reminds me of why Bradbury was my favourite author for so many years. Just the writing itself is fantastic, but the imagination behind the stories is even more impressive. This is obviously not a history that could ever really take place, but is metaphor, mythology, and dream. The one thing I was surprised by in re-reading this is that a few of the Mars stories by Bradbury that I was expecting aren't even in this book; I only realized later that they're in other collections, even though they take place in the same chronology.
There was apparently a disappointing television mini-series based on this book, as well as at least one adaptation that I remember on Ray Bradbury Theater, but while I was reading this I was thinking that the only way it might be possible to do this book justice would be to use the rotoscoping technique found in animated movies such as Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. That would be something to see.
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Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories: The Complete Ghost Stories of M. R. James, Volume 1
by M. R. James
288 pages - Penguin Classics
Montague Rhodes James was a scholar and teacher who is most popularly known for the ghost stories he wrote. This collection contains his first two books, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904) and More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911). James was concerned with crafting 'classic English ghost stories', which for him meant a subdued atmosphere and no overt violence, sex, or gore, and subtle chills rather than anything outrageous.
My favourite stories here were "The Mezzotint", "The Ash-Tree", and "Mr. Humphries and His Inheritance", which is about a man who inherits a mansion with a very peculiar hedge maze. Though, I have to be honest and say that I probably wanted to like this book more than I actually did. A lot of the stories are just dull and dry and spend a lot of time talking around the story. I can't count the number of times I picked up this book feeling fairly alert, and then drifted off to sleep after just getting a few pages farther on.
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Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce
199 pages - Dover Publications
The introduction to this book, written by E. F. Bleiler, paints a portrait of Bierce as a very unpleasant man, full of anger, hatred, misanthropy, and devoid of much sense. In fact, the introduction is so negative that I put this book away for a while before getting into the stories, as it didn't sound like it would really have much value. However, when I did finally end up reading it, I was pleasantly surprised at how good many of the stories were: well-written, imaginative, deep, and affecting.
Many of these stories take place in the American west, which is a fresh change from the usual ghost story trappings of England or New England. Also very refreshing is Bierce's spare, direct prose; most of these stories are 10 pages long or less, but that space is used very effectively, as Bierce can create a world and set it alive with movement in a single eloquent paragraph. There is also a depth that is sometimes explored in these stories, of metaphysical speculation, emotional feeling, moral values, that makes it ridiculous to think that the author was only the arrogant rude jerk of the introduction - there had to be another side.
"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is probably the most famous story here. Among those I really enjoyed were "Moxon's Master", which is about the creation of a chess-playing automaton that takes on a life of its own, "Beyond the Wall", an eerie ghost story set in shabby decay, "The Suitable Surroundings", about a dare to read a horror story in the most appropriate setting, "John Bartine's Watch", a one-trick story with a pretty good trick, and "An Inhabitant of Carcosa", which is a very otherworldly tale of an ancient spirit walking through a graveyard. Also included are what seem to be 'factual' items from Bierce's newspaper reporting, such as sections entitled "Some Haunted Houses" and "Mysterious Disappearances" - ironic, because Bierce eventually Mysteriously Disappeared himself.
There's a few stories here that are maybe a bit overwritten, and try a bit too hard for a clever laugh, but mostly they are lean and mean tales that explore various states of dread. In a way, this struck me as the sort of thing that H. P. Lovecraft wished he could have written if he had been a more discerning and vicious self-editor. Powerful stuff.
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Cathedral: Stories (1983)
by Raymond Carver
228 pages - Vintage Contemporaries
A collection of twelve short stories by an author who is purported to be a master of the form. Most of these follow the same design: characters are introduced, something moderately good is happening to them, and then disaster looms on the horizon but they don't do anything, not even lift a finger, though they could easily avoid it. It's all written in a 'minimalistic' style, that just makes it seem like the author doesn't really care about any of this, or find it at all interesting. Some slang terms and racial epithets are thrown in to try and make it sound all 'tough' and 'street', but it's just lame.
This was a really bad book. I think it personifies everything I intensely dislike about modern literature. A parody of this would be indistinguishable from the real thing. For me, a big part of the excitement of reading is the focus, passion, intensity, and interest that the author displays; things that can be transmitted over to the reader. If the author sounds like he might as well just be drinking himself into a stupor while watching TV, then why should the reader care? I was reminded of the time when Flannery O'Connor was asked if school discourages young writers; she replied, "It doesn't discourage enough of them."
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Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904)
by Lafcadio Hearn
240 pages - Charles E. Tuttle Company
Lafcadio Hearn was born and raised in Europe and America, but he moved to Japan and immersed himself in its culture, writing numerous books on the Japanese that were successful in Japan and abroad. Kwaidan translates as 'Weird Tales' and that's exactly what these are. Stories of ghosts, goblins, wandering souls and restless dreams, culled from folktale and legend.
The collection is supplemented with a collection of three "Insect-Studies" on butterflies, mosquitoes, and ants. The ants section unfortunately ends the otherwise-enjoyable collection on a sour note, because it is entirely different in tone. Hearn not only considers ant society superior to human society, but believes that humanity needs to evolve in the direction of ants, and we would be all better off if we just did the right thing automatically, without personal choice or responsibility. This also includes trying to find a way, from birth, to eliminate sexual characteristics and behaviour from the majority. It's unfortunate that an otherwise enjoyable book is ruined by such unpleasant crackpot notions tacked on at the end.
An excellent Japanese film, Kwaidan, was made from four of Hearn's stories; two of which are taken from this collection.
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Endangered Species (1989)
by Gene Wolfe
506 pages - Tor
This is a collection of 34 short stories, which average about 20 pages in length. Most of them could be described as having an aspect of fantasy or science fiction, though some are relatively straightforward, and others are just plain odd. Two stories, "The Map" and "The Cat" both take place in the same world as Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series, and several other stories here are linked together. A lot of these stories play around with the conventions of genre storytelling, as evidenced just by their titles ("The Last Thrilling Wonder Story", "The HORARS of War", "Our Neighbour by David Copperfield", "When I Was Ming the Merciless").
My favourite story here was probably "Procreation" (which is actually split into three stories: "Creation", "Re-creation" and "The Sister's Account"), a brief tale that is both humourous and beautifully profound. "The Headless Man" seems to start off ridiculous, but ends up to be quite moving, and "Kevin Malone" is an eerie story of a down-on-their luck couple who get jobs to act as the wealthy inhabitants of a large mansion, as long as they ask no questions.
"The Detective of Dreams" probably deserves special mention, because not only does Wolfe call it one of his own favourite stories, but many others consider it to embody his clearest statement of purpose. In it, the detective-narrator investigates the case of three people who are haunted by re-occurring dreams; dreams which relate to faults in their own lives, and also involve a central figure who they are convinced is causing these dreams (though never named, it is obviously Jesus Christ). The detective is charged with 'destroying' this tormentor, and does so, after he identifies Him, by going to church and receiving Holy Communion. I remember reading an article quite a while ago that contrasted the writings of Protestants with those of Catholics, and it noted that whereas the Protestant tendency is to regard the relationship with God as something that separates the person from others and indeed the entire world, the Catholic view is that it is through experience of the world and community with others that a person discovers God (a comparison which is perhaps more 'interesting' than 'right-on-the-money'). Wolfe here strongly articulates his own Catholic faith, where he not only treats created reality as being full of signs and meaning, but even the dreams that we are sent.
There are some good stories here, and some mediocre ones, but I can't say that this is really a knock-your-socks-off collection.
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