Things are beginning to look up for the Nameless Detective. He has got his private detective license back, and his girlfriend Kerry too. In fact, his Things are beginning to look up for the Nameless Detective. He has got his private detective license back, and his girlfriend Kerry too. In fact, his only worry is his old friend, the San Franciso ex-cop Eberhardt, who wants to be his business partner. Nameless is used to being a lone wolf; besides, he fears that, whatever decision he makes will further strain their already frayed friendship.
But he puts such worries on the backburner when he begins to work a new case. His mission: to find a hobo—an honest-to-god old fashioned bindlestiff—amid the railroad yards and hobo jungles of Southern California. He has inherited a little money, and his daughter wants to make sure he knows about it.
Sounds relatively simple, doesn’t it? But of course it isn’t. Nameless delves further into the case, and, although he fails to find the bindlestiff, he uncovers a series of complicated family motives, an old murder, and some new suspicions too, which seem to center on an out-of-the-way railroad museum.
This is a romantic book, bringing together Pronzini’s affections for the old detective pulp magazines and the knights of the road. The mystery is solid, the characters are interesting, and the book concludes with an exciting—and delightfully ghastly—action sequence....more
Sometimes I turn giddy when I sense I am reading a classic. I feel impelled, as if by a great force, by an old god who could perhaps kill me, but it i Sometimes I turn giddy when I sense I am reading a classic. I feel impelled, as if by a great force, by an old god who could perhaps kill me, but it is a god who is ridden by genius, a genius who knows how to ride.
I felt like this when I first read Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Millennium Approaches. First produced in 1991, Angels is set in 1985 in New York City, during the period when AIDS—a problem in the gay community for at least half a decade—began to be recognized by the general public. It tells the story of four men: openly gay decorator Prior Walter, who is afraid of the process of dying of AIDs, and the loneliness and enlightenment it brings; Louis Ironson, Prior’s lover, who is afraid of the sordidness of death itself and the experience of watching someone die; the recently diagnosed, closeted Roy Cohn, the influential right-wing lawyer, who fears the loss of political influence stemming from the label “homosexual”; and Roy’s protegee Joe Pitt, the unhappy married Mormon lawyer, who is afraid of just about everything: his melancholy wife, his cynical career, his sexual identity, his very self.
From the beginning, the play bursts forth with vivid language and memorable characters, and soon, although it never loses its edge, it breaks the bounds of realism and glories in hallucinatory revelation. Joe’s wife Harper, in a fantasy drug haze, visits Antarctica: Roy Coen converses with the on-stage character Ethel Rosenberg, whose execution he engineered a generation before; and Prior—like a young Ebeneezer Scrooge in a gay “Christmas Carol”—receives visits from two of his ancestors (each named Prior) and The Angel of America herself.
The play is a wild congeries of sensation, filled with searing confrontations, witty dialogue, ambitious expressionistic effects, and almost impossible staging. Yet never for a minute do you sense that Kushner lacks control over his materials: each character is finely etched, with a distinctive voice, and the pace and tone, though continually shifting, always seems connected to the overarching themes, the greater melody.
I look forward eagerly to Angels in America, Part II.
Here is an excerpt that gives a good idea of the poetry and depth of Kushner’s language. Prior, diagnosed with AIDS, tells his lover Louis an old family anecdote:
PRIOR: One of my ancestors was a ship’s captain who made money bringing whale oil to Europe and returning with immigrants—Irish mostly, packed in tight, so many dollars per head. The last ship he captained foundered off the coast of Nova Scotia in a winter tempest and sank to the bottom. He went down with the ship—La Grande Geste—but his crew took seventy women and kids in the ship’s only longboat, this big, open rowboat, and when the weather got too rough, and they thought the boat was overcrowded, the crew started lifting people up and hurling them into the sea. Until they got the ballast right. They walked up and down the longboat, eyes to the waterline, and when the boat rode low in the water they’d grab the nearest passenger and throw them into the sea. The boat was leaky, see; seventy people; they arrived in Halifax with nine people on board.
LOUIS: Jesus.
PRIOR: I think about that story a lot now. People in a boat, waiting, terrified, while implacable unsmiling men, irresistibly strong, seize . . . maybe the person next to you, maybe you, and with no warning at all, with time only for a quick intake of air you are pitched into freezing, turbulent water and salt and darkness to drown.
First published in Amazing (1954), Philip K. Dick’s “Small Town” features Verne Haskel, a Walter Mitty type character, but Dick’s story has none of Ja First published in Amazing (1954), Philip K. Dick’s “Small Town” features Verne Haskel, a Walter Mitty type character, but Dick’s story has none of James Thurber’s sweetness. Haskel, alienated both from wife and work, habitually takes refuge in the basement where he devotes himself to his hobby: the construction of a exact replica of Woodlawn, the town where he lives, as the background for his model train set. Then one day, an idea occurs to him: why not alter the model town to make it better? He becomes the city-planner and benevolent dictator of mini-Woodlawn. But then, things start to go wrong.
As Dick remarked a quarter of a century later, in an anthology of his stories called The Golden Man (1980), “A defeated small person . . . may be a mask for thanatos: the antagonist of life; he may not secretly wish to rule; he may wish to destroy.”...more
The Broken Sword is an essential work of heroic fantasy, as important to the development of the genre as Eddison and Tolkien, Howard and Leiber. If it The Broken Sword is an essential work of heroic fantasy, as important to the development of the genre as Eddison and Tolkien, Howard and Leiber. If it is neglected today, that is partly because it is unique: it stands alone, not part of a multi-volume saga or the trilogies that are fashionable today. But it is also neglected, I believe, because it is a cold book, literally cold in its setting (most of it takes place in winter), but metaphorically cold as well. It is a grim tale, full of hardship and scant of pity, worthy of the old Scandinavian sagas that inspired it.
It tells of the struggle between Skafloc, a human child raised by elves, and of the changeling Valgard (half elf, half troll) left behind in his place. The two are destined to battle each other in the great war between the elves and the trolls, and the Broken Sword—a god’s gift to the infant Skafloc—is fated to determine the course of their dark destiny.
Michael Moorcock loved his book as a boy, and considered it superior to Tolkien. His elf-King Elric of Melnibone, and his fateful sword Stormbringer, would never have existed—at least not in their present form—without the influence of Poul Anderson’s Skafloc and The Broken Sword.
Please don’t let my comment about how cold this book is dissuade you from reading it. I enjoyed this book, and—although its overall impression is a cold one—it contains much variety. Its three most prominent worlds—of the humans, the elves, and the trolls—are each distinctively realized, with their own pleasures and dangers, and the gods, the goblins, the devils and the witches add much to the mix. In addition, the doomed love between Skafloc and Freda is frankly sensual and tender (and heat up the whole novel—even in the dead of winter—just a bit)....more
First published in Fantastic Universe (October-November 1953), “Planet of Transients” is set on earth long after a nuclear war has dramatically altere First published in Fantastic Universe (October-November 1953), “Planet of Transients” is set on earth long after a nuclear war has dramatically altered both the physical atmosphere and the daily lives of the few remaining survivors. It features a hero dressed in a helmet and protective suit, carrying his own supply of individual oxygen. He is one of the few who have managed to survive in an old Pennsylvania mine, deep under earth, and he is looking for any sign of people like himself in the ruins of the city of New York.
At first, although he finds no unaltered human beings, he finds plenty of varieties of mutated humans who have adapted themselves to the surface: the flap-rabbits, the toads, the bugs, the runners, and the worms—to name just a few. Eventually, though, he encounters a few human who have acquired an old rocket and are planning to leave the earth, possibly forever. From them, he acquires a new perspective on what it means to be a “transient” on the earth.
This is an excellent story. Although the surroundings are grim, the tale itself is gentle, understated, and quietly philosophical. In spite of this—perhaps because of it?—it is as radically transformative as any of Dick’s more “mind-blowing” fictions, firmly orienting the reader away from the past and toward whatever future may come....more
Browbeaten into seeing a detective by her best friend Jane, Elvis Cole’s client Ellen Lang is still reluctant. She doesn’t wish to cause any trouble f Browbeaten into seeing a detective by her best friend Jane, Elvis Cole’s client Ellen Lang is still reluctant. She doesn’t wish to cause any trouble for her husband Mort—even though he’s cheating on her, even though he has threatened to leave. But now Mort has disappeared, and their son Perry has disappeared with him.
Elvis signs on to find them both, and soon discovers that talent agent Mort, desperate to keep his failing business afloat, has become involved with sketchy people with even sketchier connections. Before long Ellen’s apartment is ransacked, a death and another disappearance follow, and Elvis realizes he has a dangerous case on his hands.
I’m almost two-thirds done with my re-reading of Robert Parker’s Spenser series, and I’ve been looking around for another series to read once I’m done. After this first Elvis Cole mystery, I think I’ve found what I need. Crais clearly loves his Spenser, and has adopted many of Parker’s tricks and tropes: wisecracks, sharp scenic descriptions with random bystanders, great tough guy dialog, detailed (too detailed!) descriptions of meals, and even a cute animal (not a dog like Pearl this time, but instead a feral cat that drinks beer.)
Cole is much like Spenser too: a smart-ass with a smart-mouth who is still essentially a boy scout, a man with few illusions who yet strives to be a boy’s version of a knightly hero. The Disney décor of Elvis’ office makes his boyishness clear right away: his desk is covered with Jiminy Cricket figurines, and one of his walls sports a Pinnochio clock, whose eyes move disconcertingly from side to side. And Cole is aware of this boyishness: “I have quite a charming smile,” Elvis says, “Like Peter Pan. Innocent, but with the touch of the rake.” And when Elvis the boyish hard-ass needs an even harder-ass than himself, he calls on his own personal “Hawk” Joe Pike, tight-lipped gun store proprietor and mercenary-for-hire.
I found these similarities to Parker attractive, but if you find them both imitative and irritating, hang on at least until you reach the last half of the book. The plot gets darker, the writing less derivative, and the book concludes with a dramatic attack by the good guys on the bad guys—one of the best sustained action sequences I’ve read in a long time....more
This tale is unique in the Lovecraft canon, for it was ghost-written for Harry Houdini at the request of J.C. Henneberger, the owner of Weird Tales, w This tale is unique in the Lovecraft canon, for it was ghost-written for Harry Houdini at the request of J.C. Henneberger, the owner of Weird Tales, which published it in the May-June-July issue of 1924. Henneberger was trying to boost readership, the “Ask Houdini” advice column he had instituted was popular, and the two short stories supposed written by the great magician had gain favorable attention as well. What could be better—Henneberger reasoned—than a true life adventure of Houdini’s, the tale of how he escaped being bound and dropped from a rope into the heart of the Great Pyramid itself?
The story features a lot of padding, and not terribly much tension. Lovecraft must have spent some time at the local library, in the travel and mythology sections, because the tale begins with a typical tour of Cairo and the desert, and soon shifts to a fairly traditional exposition of Egyptian religious lore and symbology. But when Houdini lies bound in the depths of the pyramid, alternating periods of nightmare and waking, the narrative takes a distinctively Lovecraftian turn.
Some say this story reminds them of “The Shunned House,” which Lovecraft completed later the same year, and they certainly share some of the same cosmic atmosphere. But I instead was struck by two things: 1) how H.H.’s explorations in the pyramidal dark evoke the first half of Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and 2) how the procession of beast-headed gods observed by Houdini resembles the march of the frog-fish of Innsmouth.
Here for your enjoyment is a bit of the aforementioned procession:
The tramping drew nearer—heaven save me from the sound of those feet and paws and hooves and pads and talons as it commenced to acquire detail! Down limitless reaches of sunless pavement a spark of light flickered in the malodorous wind, and I drew behind the enormous circumference of a Cyclopic column that I might escape for a while the horror that was stalking million-footed toward me through gigantic hypostyles of inhuman dread and phobic antiquity. The flickers increased, and the tramping and dissonant rhythm grew sickeningly loud. In the quivering orange light there stood faintly forth a scene of such stony awe that I gasped from a sheer wonder that conquered even fear and repulsion. Bases of columns whose middles were higher than human sight . . . mere bases of things that must each dwarf the Eiffel Tower to insignificance . . . hieroglyphics carved by unthinkable hands in caverns where daylight can be only a remote legend. . . .
I would not look at the marching things. That I desperately resolved as I heard their creaking joints and nitrous wheezing above the dead music and the dead tramping. It was merciful that they did not speak . . . but God! their crazy torches began to cast shadows on the surface of those stupendous columns. Heaven take it away! Hippopotami should not have human hands and carry torches . . . men should not have the heads of crocodiles. . . .
This has always been one of the Lovecraft tales I liked best, and I recently learned that it was the only story of Lovecraft’s that Robert Aickman—the This has always been one of the Lovecraft tales I liked best, and I recently learned that it was the only story of Lovecraft’s that Robert Aickman—the English master of modern terror—liked at all. I can see why. Aickman favored obliqueness and indirection in his tales of the uncanny, and for once, in “Eric Zann,” Lovecraft does too, producing a small, understated tale of horror that keeps the adjectives and exclamation points at a minimum, and let’s the reader scare himself.
“The Music of Eric Zann,” first published in National Amateur (1922), is about a university student who becomes intrigued by his fellow tenant, eccentric old cellist Eric Zann, who plays strange discordant music late at night. The old man, after much reluctance, allows the young man to listen, but the music he plays for him is not the same stuff he plays when alone. Finally, one night, he does play his secret music, and the university man learns, to his horror, who and what Zann plays the music for.
I like the entire story, but perhaps my favorite part is the beginning, with the nightmarish, distorted description of the decrepit old street (presumably in Paris) where the narrator lives. Although I cannot prove Lovecraft ever saw it, I suspect this passage owes something to the classic German film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which was released in the United States more than six months before Lovecraft composed his tale:
I have never seen another street as narrow and steep as the Rue d’Auseil. It was almost a cliff, closed to all vehicles, consisting in several places of flights of steps, and ending at the top in a lofty ivied wall. Its paving was irregular, sometimes stone slabs, sometimes cobblestones, and sometimes bare earth with struggling greenish-grey vegetation. The houses were tall, peaked-roofed, incredibly old, and crazily leaning backward, forward, and sidewise. Occasionally an opposite pair, both leaning forward, almost met across the street like an arch; and certainly they kept most of the light from the ground below. There were a few overhead bridges from house to house across the street.
The inhabitants of that street impressed me peculiarly. At first I thought it was because they were all silent and reticent; but later decided it was because they were all very old....
Dragonfire is another entertaining entry in Bill Pronzini’s Nameless Detective series. In the last entry, our private eye suffered a series of misfort Dragonfire is another entertaining entry in Bill Pronzini’s Nameless Detective series. In the last entry, our private eye suffered a series of misfortunes which caused him to be deprived of Kerry his love, his license, and the lustre of his good reputation. In this installment, while having a cookout dinner wit his friend Lieutenant Eberhardt of the San Francisco police, he becomes a case of collateral damage. An assassination attempt upon Eberhardt puts the lieutenant into a coma, and Nameless is left with many wounds, not far from death himself, hampered by a partially paralyzed hand.
Consumed with bitterness and anger, Nameless sets out to find the person responsible. Soon his search leads him into the narrow sides streets of Chinatown and forces him to face some unpleasant facts about his friend of many years.
The Chinatown sequences are fine, handled with a maximum of exotic atmosphere yet a minimum number of cliches. The ending is downbeat, and at first I didn’t like it, but then I realized that it was an appropriate conclusion to this particular adventure, for it helps rid our hero of his anger, and restores him—scarred but healed—to his world....more
This Spenser adventure has its moments, but I don’t think the novel itself quite succeeds. This is because its principal narrative is too slight for a This Spenser adventure has its moments, but I don’t think the novel itself quite succeeds. This is because its principal narrative is too slight for a novel, and Parker cannot find enough complications to enrich it and fashion it into something gripping and memorable.
Black English professor Robinson Nevins seeks Spenser’s help in investigating why he failed to receive tenure. He thinks it has something to with the rumors that he may gay, and the suspicion that he may have contributed to the suicide of a student gay activist who is rumored to have been his lover.
The adventure takes a few interesting turns, first into the practice of “outing,” and later into the world of white racism, but the story of Nevins and his enemies never really comes together. Parker is forced to add another totally unrelated subplot (his subplots are usually at least tangentially related) and a few longer-than-necessary descriptions of random individuals inhabiting the landscape and Spenser preparing food. Even worse, the subplot itself is not interesting, involving a particularly irritating and needy old “friend” of Susan’s named KC Roth. (It’s cool that Susan gets to sock her in the jaw, later in the book, but even that didn’t help like the subplot better.)
Of course, there’s no such thing as a really bad Spenser, but Hush Money is pretty close....more
First published in Imagination (October 1953), “The Impossible Planet” is a Dick classic. Its theme—an earth made unrecognizable through military, ind First published in Imagination (October 1953), “The Impossible Planet” is a Dick classic. Its theme—an earth made unrecognizable through military, industrial, and ecological disaster—is a common one, and the story itself has none of the outrageous imaginative twists and turns that often characterize Dick’s work. It succeeds for another reason: it is as simple and powerful as a myth. No folktale could be told with less adornment; if the prophet Jeremiah wrote short stories, they might have turn out like this.
Mrs. Gordon, 350 years old, deaf, and near death, has one last request: she wants to purchase a ticket to Earth, the planet from which the life of the galaxy sprang, the planet from which her grandfather traveled to Riga many centuries ago. The crew of the space ship tries to reason with her, for everybody knows that Earth is a myth, a legendary place of origin with no proof of existence. But the old lady insists, and she has plenty of money, so the pilot does a little research and decides to take her to the nearest and closest destination he can find: Emphor III, a planet with one moon, the third of nine, orbiting around a single sun. But it is not the paradise Mrs. Gordon was anticipating; its surface has been ravaged by years of strip mining and other commercial operations.
The ending is perhaps a little too pat, but it doesn’t take away from the haunting impression left by the tale itself, the fate of the old lady and the fate of her robot servant.
Two Trains Running is a unique and pleasing play. Written a few years after the most intense and concentrated works of "The Pittsburgh Cycle," it is m Two Trains Running is a unique and pleasing play. Written a few years after the most intense and concentrated works of "The Pittsburgh Cycle," it is mellow, even autumnal, in its mood. Like Wilson’s other plays, it contains the materials of tragedy, but here his characters are less relentless, reality less intractable, and the promise of some kind of happiness—a muted, yet authentic happiness--is allowed to survive. It reminds me a little of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale: the calm after tragedy, the peace after pain.
The play centers around a restaurant in the Pittsburgh Hill District and the people who congregate there, including the hardworking owner Memphis, his waitress Risa, the numbers runner Wolf, old man Holloway, the prosperous undertaker and property owner Mr. West, Sterling, a volatile young man just out of prison, and Hambone, a brain-damaged man who repeats the same phrase over and over: “I want my ham. He gonna give me my ham.”
Perhaps the reason these characters survive is that, unlike many of Wilson’s characters— Troy Maxson in Fences, for example—Memphis, Sterling and the others learn to be content with what is possible. They have what Undertaker West would call a “little cup” as opposed to a “ten-gallon bucket” philosophy:
STERLING: I'm gonna get me two or three Cadillacs like you. Get Risa to be my woman and I'll be alright. That's all a man need is a pocketful of money, a Cadillac, and a good woman. That's all he need on the surface. I ain't gonna talk about that other part of satisfaction. But I got sense enough to know it's there. I know if you get the surface it don't mean nothing unless you got the other. I know that, Mr. West. Sometimes I think I'll just take the woman part. And then sometimes that don't seem like it's enough.
WEST: That's cause you walking around here with a tengallon bucket. Somebody put a little cupful in and you get mad cause it's empty. You can't go through life carrying a ten-gallon bucket. Get you a little cup. That's all you need. Get you a little cup and somebody put a little bit in and it's half full. That ten-gallon bucket ain't never gonna be full. Carry you a little cup through life and you'll never be disappointed. I'll tell you what my daddy told me. I was a young man just finding my way through life. I told him I wanted to find me a woman and go away and get me a ranch and raise horses like my grandaddy. I was still waiting around to find the woman. He told me to get the ranch first and the woman would come. And he was right. I never did get me the ranch, but he was right.
Remember all those liars in the ‘60’s who claimed they bought Playboy for the interviews?
Pulp fiction nerds like me knew they must be lying, because Remember all those liars in the ‘60’s who claimed they bought Playboy for the interviews?
Pulp fiction nerds like me knew they must be lying, because we knew what Playboy was really good for, namely, all those wonderful short stories: the fantasy, the science fiction, and the horror. And we nerds owed it all to Ray Russell.
Russell began working for Hugh Hefner as an editor in the 50’s, and filled Playboy's pages with some of the best popular writers of the time: Henry Slesar, Frederic Brown, Kurt Vonnegut ("Welcome to the Monkey House" was first published in Playboy), Frederik Pohl, Theodore Sturgeon, Richard Matheson, Jack Finney, Robert Bloch and Charles Beaumont. Nowhere else in America could you find such talent—except possibly in The Twilight Zone—and it might never have happened without editor Ray Russell.
But Ray Russell was more than an editor: he was a writer of horror fiction as well. His exorcism novel The Case Against Satan (1962) pre-dated William Blatty’s The Exorcist by a decade, and his three novellas of gothic horror—Sardonicus (a nobleman cursed with a permanent rictus), Sagittarius (Dr. Jekyll plus the Paris Grand Guignol), Sanguinarius (the written confession of bloody Elizabeth Bathory)—constitute a worthy achievement in themselves. Add to these three novellas four middling tales of terror and an excellent introduction by film director Guillermo del Toro, and Haunted Castles turns out to be a satisfying collection.
I could nitpick if I wished. Russell often relies too much on name-dropping as a substitute for atmosphere, and of the four short tales included here only “Comet Wine” has much to recommend it. Still the novellas, particularly Sardonicus, are terrifying and memorable. True, unlike their first appearances in Playboy, you will find no centerfolds nearby. But then you always read Playboy for the fiction, now, didn’t you?...more
“Adjustment Team”, first published in Orbit Science Fiction (Sept.-Oct. 1954), is perhaps my favorite Dick short story of all. (I vacillate between “A “Adjustment Team”, first published in Orbit Science Fiction (Sept.-Oct. 1954), is perhaps my favorite Dick short story of all. (I vacillate between “Adjustment Team” and “The Father Thing.”) At any rate, it certainly has the Dickian quality I love most: the ability to permanently alter the way you perceive and judge the world around you.
The story sounds crazy even in summary, and, yes, it is certainly crazy. It tells of Ed Fletcher, a man whose life is altered forever early one morning because a dog (or a being called a summoner which we laymen refer to as a “dog”) barks a “summoning order” just one minute too late, and instead of receiving “A Friend With a Car” at his front door, Ed receives instead "An Insurance Salesman." As a consequence, Ed reaches his office late, and witnesses what no man or woman is ever supposed to witness: an Adjustment Team altering the small details of reality—just little bits, here and there—in order for human progress to occur. It’s not Ed’s fault, but Ed has seen plenty he should not see. What must the Adjustment Team do now?
This story convinced me of its reality the first time I read it, and sometimes, turning a corner, I think I see the Adjustment Team out of the corner of my eye, walking away—self-possessed, anonymous—having altered the time stream, slightly and forever, one more time.
Maybe I’m too gullible, maybe The Adjustment Team can’t alter reality. But there’s one thing for sure: reading Philip K. Dick can definitely alter your mind....more
In the afterward, Robert Bly—who is better at arranging and then commenting on other poets’ work than anyone I know—remarks that Ignatow has “an unusu In the afterward, Robert Bly—who is better at arranging and then commenting on other poets’ work than anyone I know—remarks that Ignatow has “an unusual openness to the consciousness of the collective.” This observation is brilliant, and extraordinarily helpful for an understanding of Ignatow’s work, but it is misleading too, especially if you think of “the collective” as an underground museum crowded with archetypes: the Great Mother, the Maiden, the Crone, the Wiseman, the Trickster, etc.
No. Better you should think of “the collective” as “the stuff that collects,’ the residue of all the human fear and desire left over in the city, after the work, and the eating, and the sex, and the dreaming is over and done. Ignatow is the guy who sticks in his rubber tube and siphons until his brain is full, just enough for a poem. And then his brain—a unique organ created expressly for the purpose—turns “the collective” into stuff like this:
I SEE A TRUCK
I see a truck moving down a parade, people getting up after to follow, dragging a leg. On a corner a cop stands idly swinging his club, the sidewalk jammed with mothers and baby carriages. No one screams or speaks. From the tail end of the truck a priest and a rabbi intone their prayers, a jazz band bringing up the rear, surrounded by dancers and lovers. A bell rings and a paymaster drives through, his wagon filled with pay envelopes he hands out, even to those lying dead or fornicating on the ground. It is a holiday called “Working for a Living.”
AND THAT NIGHT
A photo is taken of the family enjoying the sunshine from behind in your flat as you sit reading the papers and clobbers you. You never find out why or who, you just lean back and die. The sunshine is gone too, the photograph gets into the news. You bring up a family in three small rooms, this crazy man comes along to finish it off.
THE BAGEL
I stopped to pick up the bagel rolling away in the wind, annoyed with myself for having dropped it as if it were a portent. Faster and faster it rolled, with me running after it, bent low, gritting my teeth, and I found myself doubled over and rolling down the street head over heels, one complete somersault after another, like a bagel and strangely happy with myself.
“The Temple” (1920), first published in Weird Tales (September 1925), is presented to the reader as the text of a manuscript found in a bottle off the “The Temple” (1920), first published in Weird Tales (September 1925), is presented to the reader as the text of a manuscript found in a bottle off the coast of Yucatan, an ocean adventure narrative composed by U-Boat Commander Karl Heinrich near the end of World War I. Like “Dagon,” (1917) it is one of Lovecraft’s early submerged city narratives, but it lacks “Dagon”’s poetic concentration and gains no narrative power from its length.
I think, though, that this tale has been pummeled a bit too much by its critics. True, the narrator is an irritating ubermensch, contemptuous of all things unGerman and convinced of the purity of his Teutonic iron will, but there is nevertheless considerable irony in his iron. His Teutonic will eventually collapses completely as he drifts to his watery death surrounded by the mysteriously glowing ruins of the ancient metropolis, but an even greater irony suffuses a statement he makes earlier in his explorations:
On August 16 I effected an exit from the U-29, and laboriously made my way through the ruined and mud-choked streets to the ancient river. I found no skeletons or other human remains, but gleaned a wealth of archaeological lore from sculptures and coins. Of this I cannot now speak save to utter my awe at a culture in the full noon of glory when cave-dwellers roamed Europe and the Nile flowed unwatched to the sea.
This man from what he thinks of as a superior culture realizes his ancestors were mere cavemmen when this culture was in “the full noon of glory," and he can say nothing “save to utter [his] awe.”...more
First published in Startling Stories (Winter 1955), “Human is...” takes a typical sci-fi cliché and turns it on its head, manipulating the reader so t First published in Startling Stories (Winter 1955), “Human is...” takes a typical sci-fi cliché and turns it on its head, manipulating the reader so that he (or she) desires an ending that science fiction convention—indeed, American society itself—habitually condemns. It leaves his readers to re-evaluate their values, and hope for better science fiction, and a better American society too.
Jill Herrick’s husband Lester is a difficult man to live with. Not only has he banned Jill’s nephew Gus from further viists (although Jill delights in Lester, and obviously loves children), but he is also a workaholic, humorless and unromantic. After he returns from a mission to planet Rexor IV, however, Lester appears to be greatly change. He delights in the company of little Gus, and he speak—and acts—like a typical romantic straight out of an an old-fashioned book. But then Jill—and others—begin to wonder: is Lester really still Lester, or is the being who claims to be Lester really a Rexorian in disguise?
This story has something to say about McCarthyism, and Witch Hunts, as well as about the romantic impulse in literature and unhappy marriages, but at is core it asks a question about what it means to be human: is it a question of what we look like, of our genetic make-up, or is it simpler—and deeper--than that? Is is a question of basic “humanity”? Is “human is” what “human does”?...more
I loved this novel. It is certainly my favorite so far in the Nameless Detective series, a series I’m enjoying more and more with each successive volu I loved this novel. It is certainly my favorite so far in the Nameless Detective series, a series I’m enjoying more and more with each successive volume. The only thing that keeps me from giving it my highest rating is that I fear I may be overreacting just a little. After all, it is not exactly a genre classic, particularly when it comes to style. Still it is an excellent private eye novel, unusual in its structure, and a bit of a tour de force. I think I’ll wait to see if I feel guilty, and later give it five stars.
Our hero, the paunchy, fifty-something Nameless Detective—a serious romantic and a collector of classic pulp fiction—is awash in a sea of minor and major irritations. He’s got a new office he’s not sure he likes, his best friend police detective Eberhardt is in a black mood since his wife left him, Kerry the young woman he loves is refusing to commit, and her father—an old pulp writer who Nameless calls Ivan the Terrible—is doing everything he can to sabotage their relationship.
In addition to all the emotional upheaval, Nameless has not one case to resolve but three: a tail on a husband (the wife is convinced he’s stealing from her business and supporting a girlfriend), a subpoena to be served on a beautiful alcoholic celebrity socialite who is writing a tell-all book, and a job guarding wedding presents at a wealthy estate in Marin County. Can Nameless concentrate on the tasks at hand, and survive his personal problems too?
What Pronzini has done is take what are virtually three short stories (each something Hammett’s Continental Op might have seen assigned to), and combine them into a connected narrative which involves the reader not only because two of them lead to murder and all three are interesting puzzles (each one is a variation on the “locked room”problem!), but because we care about the detective who is solving them and the place he occupies within the novel's world.
In addition, there’s something in the way Nameless tells his story that is unique to this particular novel, an air of comic melancholy which reminds me (just a little) of Ziggy. In this book, Nameless just can’t get a break—even though he solves all those locked room puzzles!—and his plight and his pained frustration makes me love him, whereas I only liked him before....more
”A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two do
”A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.” —Randall Jarrell
“If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?” —Emily Dickinson
These are two of my favorite statements about poetry, and, if they are any guide, Bill Knott’s The Naomi Poems, Book One: Corpse and Beans deserves to be considers as a first-class book. Sure, the contents are uneven (the longer the poem, the weaker it seems to be), the presentation is sensational (Knott claims the poems were written by “St. Geraud,” whom he describes as “a virgin and a suicide"), but lightning strikes here, the top of the reader’s head is taken off, at least six, maybe a dozen times in the sixty page book. They are almost all small lightning strikes (I mean the poems are short), but they are real, devastating lightning strikes nonetheless.
Here are six of my favorite lightning strikes. Get the book and find some of your own:
POEM for Maria Helz
When our hands are alone, they open, like faces. There is no shore to their opening.
* * * * *
GOODBYE
if you are alive when you read this, close your eyes. I am under their lids, growing black.
* * * * *
POEM
The only response to a child’s grave is to lie down before it and play dead
* * * * *
AFTER THE BURIAL
After the burial I alone stood by till a workman came to shovel the dirt back into the hole. There was some left over, the dirt she’d displaced, and they wheeled it off. Drawn, not knowing why, I followed at a distance. Coming to a small backlot, they dumped it, then left. I walked over. It made a small mound. And all around her, similar mounds. Pure cones of joy! First gifts from the dead! I fell to my knees before it, and fell forward on my hands into it . . . to the elbows, like washwater. . . . For the first time, I became empty enough to cry for her.
* * * * *
DEATH
Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest. They will place my hands like this. It will look as though I am flying into myself.
* * * * *
SLEEP
We brush the other, invisible moon. Its caves come out and carry us inside.
Because I hate spoilers, but also have a visceral loathing for spoiler alerts, I can’t say much about this wonderful book without giving too much of i Because I hate spoilers, but also have a visceral loathing for spoiler alerts, I can’t say much about this wonderful book without giving too much of it away. But if I’m careful, I think I can say something.
It tells us the story of Hugh Densmore, a young doctor with an internship at U.C.L.A., who—in the summer of 1962—is driving through the New Mexico desert on his way to a niece’s wedding in Phoenix. Against his better judgment, he picks up a young girl hitchhiking in an isolated spot, and this one act, innocent though imprudent, eventually leads him to be suspected of murder.
At first, it is hard to like Hugh, for, although he is an upright, well-behaved young man, he seems overly scrupulous, too concerned with appearances and affronts to his dignity to be a sympathetic character. But then, about a quarter of the way through the novel, we learn one simple fact about Hugh which Dorothy Hughes has been withholding from her reader, and this fact makes us look at Hugh’s character and his dilemma from a different angle.
Viewed in one way, Hughes’ authorial reticence is a detective writer’s stunt, similar to Christie’s celebrated omission in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, but it is really much richer than that. It is an opportunity for the reader to reevaluate his assumptions and prejudices, and to see the facts in the case of Hugh Densmore—indeed American society itself—from an entirely new perspective.
Dorothy B. Hughes is well known, at least among mystery buffs, as the author of the novel In a Lonely Place, which was adapted into a memorable—but very different—movie. But this book is just as good—perhaps better—and should be remembered as well....more
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