9 X 13

Weird Legacies (1977) edited by Mike Ashley, containing the following stories: "Skulls in the Stars" (1929) by Robert E. Howard; "The Three Marked Pennies" (1934) by Mary Elizabeth Counselman; "He That Hath Wings" (1938) by Edmond Hamilton; "The Distortion Out Of Space" (1934) by Francis Flagg; "The Utmost Abomination (1973) by Lin Carter and Clark Ashton Smith; "Eternal Rediffusion" (1973) by Eric Frank Russell and Leslie J. Johnson; "The Ducker"(1943) by Ray Bradbury; "The Black Kiss" (1937) by Henry Kuttner and Robert Bloch; and "The Survivor" (1954) by H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth.

Enjoyable, brief anthology of stories previously published in the venerable Weird Tales (originally 1923-1954, with several brief revivals since then). Robert Bloch supplies a nice little introduction while anthologist Mike Ashley gives the reader lengthy, informative notes before and sometimes after the nine stories. The two 1973 anomalies in the story appearance dates come from Lin Carter finishing a much older Clark Ashton Smith fragment for the brief 1970's revival of Weird Tales and a rejected 1940's Eric Frank Russell/Leslie Johnson story that also appeared in the 1970's revival.

For such a short anthology, Weird Legacies possesses impressive range. All of the original Weird Tales writers who got high marks in the readers' polls in the magazine appear here with the exception of Seabury Quinn, whom Ashley promises will appear in a later (non-existent, so far as I can tell) anthology. 

Kuttner and Bloch's "The Black Kiss" is a revelation, an excellent, unsettling bit of aquatic horror with certain similarities to H.P. Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" from two correspondents with H.P.L.. August Derleth's literal-minded expansion of a Lovecraft fragment, "The Survivor," is perhaps too similar, and inferior, to the Bloch/Kuttner piece to profitably appear here. Lin Carter's Smith expansion offers an interesting pastiche of Smith's ornate, baroque writing style, but it too offers too much of the same thing as it concludes.

The other stories are more in line with the excellence of "The Black Kiss," with a solid Solomon Kane story from Robert E. Howard and Edmond Hamilton's elegiac tale of a winged mutant leading the way. "The Three Marked Pennies", one of the most popular Weird Tales stories ever, seems like a Twilight Zone bit super-collided with a conte cruel. It is indeed memorable. The Francis Flagg piece is interesting as a Lovecraftian riff with an ending more suited to the Horta episode of Star Trek. A somewhat atypical Ray Bradbury story set on the battlefields of WWII and the truly odd, metaphysical "Eternal Rediffusion" round out the selection. Recommended.

Montage!

Hitchcock: adapted by John J. McLaughlin from the book by Stephen Rebello; directed by Sacha Gervasi; starring Anthony Hopkins (Alfred Hitchcock), Helen Mirren (Alma Reville Hitchcock), Scarlett Johansson (Janet Leigh), Danny Huston (Whitfield Cook), Toni Collette (Peggy Robertson), Michael Stuhlbarg (Lew Wasserman), James D'Arcy (Anthony Perkins), Jessica Biel (Vera Miles), and Michael Wincott (Ed Gein) (2012): While it plays somewhat fast and loose with the facts, Hitchcock is an enjoyable look at the making of Psycho. The movie was a gamble at the time, which is why Hitchcock funded it himself. And he would ultimately reap the benefits: adjusted for inflation, Psycho would have a $350 million North American gross in 2015... on an adjusted budget of $10 million.

Anthony Hopkins, fat suit and all, makes for a relatively fun Hitchcock, and Helen Mirren is also good as his wife Alma, who worked on all of his films though often without credit. Scarlett Johansson doesn't look much like Janet Leigh, but she's fine in the role. The movie mixes the personal travails of Hitch and Alma with the challenge of adapting Robert Bloch's Psycho when the film censors will allow neither nudity nor graphic violence. Even showing the toilet in Marion Crane's hotel room was a scandalous deal at the time because apparently Americans had never seen toilets before. Oh, censorship board!

As with most films about artists, we never really get a particularly good sense of what made Hitchcock great other than Following His Gut and Believing In Himself. We do get a montage of Hitchcock performing montage at the end (which is to say, editing), as he whips Psycho into shape in the editing room. The artistic process is otherwise pretty much glossed over, which is a shame given Hitchcock's meticulous nature when it came to the technical aspects of great film-making. Virtually all great directors are great technicians. But if you want to know how Hitchcock actually thought, pick up Hitchcock/Truffaut. Recommended.

Night Shift: written by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel; directed by Ron Howard; starring Henry Winkler (Chuck), Michael Keaton (Bill), Shelley Long (Belinda), Gina Hecht (Charlotte) and Richard Belzer (Pig) (1982): Ron Howard's first comedy as a director pretty much introduced both Shelley Long and Michael Keaton to the world. It also gave the Fonz one of his few good lead roles in a film, as the introverted, nebbishy night shift supervisor at a New York morgue who almost inadvertantly ends up running a prostitution ring out the morgue. Cue the montage of money rolling in, women trying on clothes, and Michael Keaton being zany.

Michael Keaton plays the Wacky Spirit of Life and Shelley Long plays the Hooker with a Heart of Gold. It all holds up pretty well. It should be shown whenever someone wants to make a case for legalizing prostitution. That Richard Belzer plays a gangster named Pig is pretty funny. And Kevin Costner wanders through as a frat boy at a party. Howard and his screenwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel would follow this with their break-out hit Splash. In any case, be prepared for casual nudity. And yes, underground sex clubs were and are a thing in New York. Recommended.

Unspeakable Cults

Shudder Again (1993): edited by Michele Slung, containing the following stories:

Aphra (1993) by Nancy A. Collins
Eye of the Lynx (1983) by Thomas Ligotti
Heavy-Set (1964) by Ray Bradbury
Mr. Wrong (1975) by Elizabeth Jane Howard
The Runaway Lovers (1967) by Ray Russell
The First Time (1993) by David Kuehls
The Ceremony (1897) by Arthur Machen
The Nature of the Evidence (1923) by May Sinclair
The Face of Helene Bournouw (1960) by Harlan Ellison
A Host of Furious Fancies (1980) by J. G. Ballard
When the Red Storm Comes: Or, The History of a Young Lady's Awakening to Her Nature (1993) by Sarah Smith
Ravissante (1968) by Robert Aickman
A Birthday (1987) by Lisa Tuttle
The Crooked Man (1955) by Charles Beaumont
On the Lake of Last Wishes (1993) by Claudia O'Keefe
Again (1981) by Ramsey Campbell
Kin to Love (1937) by T. H. White
Same Time, Same Place (1963) by Mervyn Peake
The Model (1975) by Robert Bloch
Silver Circus (1927) by A. E. Coppard
Honeymoon (1931) by Clement Wood
The Parasite (1894) by Arthur Conan Doyle.

Solid, enjoyable mix of original and reprinted short fiction in a sequel to Michele Slung's earlier anthology entitled I Shudder At Your Touch. The anthologies focus on horror stories with some element of sexual or romantic horror. The sexual elements tend to be subtle and understated in most of the stories, at least when it comes to graphic sex scenes. That doesn't mean that the stories can't be disturbing.

Among the reprints, we get both supernatural and non-supernatural horror, along with one mostly non-horrific ghost story, "The Nature of the Evidence" by May Sinclair. Slung does a really nice job finding suitable but under-reprinted stories for the anthology. She also supplies lengthy introductions that contextualize the stories without giving away plot points.

One of the highlights is Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Parasite," written by the creator of Sherlock Holmes before he'd become a public believer in the paranormal. It trades gratifyingly on the Holmesian -- its narrator is a solid rationalist forced to believe in psychic phenomena by being mentally attacked by the human 'parasite' of the title. Like much good horror, the story operates on parallel tracks of the figurative and the literal. Our narrator is under psychic attack, but he's also a stand-in for anyone who has in some way lost control of his own mind, through no fault of his own. 

The stories original to this volume are a bit more uneven. David Kuehls' "The First Time" is an interesting case. Its horrific yet jokey punchline requires an elaborate science-fictional set-up. And the content of that punchline is disturbing enough that the whole story seems too slight for the horror it ends with, an EC shock-short that turns something truly malign into a cause for hilarity. On the other hand, Nancy Collins' "Aphra," in which a man falls into a very physical relationship with a human skeleton he buys at a yard sale, manages to strike the right tone of obsession and Poe-esque necrophiliac lunacy.

In all, this is a pretty good anthology. Readers looking for a weird wankbook will be disappointed, though. I hope. Recommended.

Brief Curtains

Beyond the Curtain of Dark (1967/1972): edited by Peter Haining, containing the following stories:

Lizzie Borden Took an Axe... (1946) by Robert Bloch: Interesting but a bit long and fairly obvious; a sort of thematic companion piece to Bloch's earlier, superior "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper."
The Snail Watcher (1964) by Patricia Highsmith: Brilliant, gross, and very short from the creator of the talented Tom Ripley.
Chickamauga (1889) by Ambrose Bierce: Haunting and horrible tale of war as observed by a child.
At Last, the True Story of Frankenstein (1965) by Harry Harrison: A mostly funny, EC Comics-like entry in the school of 'that story was actually sorta true!'
Fever Dream (1948) by Ray Bradbury: A creepy tale of infection still resonates with body-fear in the Age of Ebola.
The Other Celia (1957) by Theodore Sturgeon: A fascinating character study of a voyeuristic loner and the strange fellow lodger in a boarding house whose oddities attract his attention.
The Oval Portrait (1842) by Edgar Allan Poe: Short-short from Poe, and not all that rewarding.
The Monster-Maker (1887) by W. C. Morrow: One crazy scientific monster story from the late Victorian Age.
Come and Go Mad by Fredric Brown: Brilliant piece of science-fictional paranoia, and an unusually long story from the often terse Brown, one of the two or three absolute masters of the shock-short.
The Survivor (1954) by H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth: Derleth expands brief notes from Lovecraft into a story. You will see the ending coming. Fun but derivative.
The Ancestor (1957) by H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth: Derleth expands brief notes from Lovecraft into another story. You will see the ending coming. Also fun but derivative.
The Mortal Immortal (1833) by Mary Shelley: A melancholy non-Frankensteinian work from Shelley. The ending suggests a possible future team-up between the eponymous protagonist and the Creature.
Dr. Heidegger's Experiment (1837) by Nathaniel Hawthorne: One of Hawthorne's funnier excursions into a bleak assessment of human character.
By These Presents (1953) by Henry Kuttner: Clever deal-with-the-devil story.
Whosits Disease (1962) by Henry Slesar: Brief and disposable.
King Pest (1835) by Edgar Allan Poe: Another of Poe's less-anthologized works is a funny-nightmarish walkabout in a plague-ridden port town. The extreme physical oddities of most of the characters, and the oddly jolly, macabre situation of the story suggest Tim Burton.
Mayaya's Little Green Men (1946) by Harold Lawlor: Very much telegraphed and pointlessly nasty.
For the Blood Is the Life (1905) by F. Marion Crawford: Maybe the prolific Crawford's oddest horror story, with a really striking revelation of a ghost as seen from afar.
The Human Chair (1925/translated from the Japanese 1956) by Edogawa Rampo: Very creepy little tale from a Japanese master of horror.
The Fortunes of Sir Robert Ardagh (1838) by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: The great Le Fanu plays with narrative points of view.
Return to the Sabbath (1938) by Robert Bloch: Relatively early Bloch melds Hollywood and the Satanic in an early indication of how Bloch's horror writing would develop.
The Will of Luke Carlowe (1906) by Clive Pemberton: You will see the ending coming.
Eyes Do More Than See (1965) by Isaac Asimov: Nifty and unusual inclusion of a science-fiction story set in a far, far future in which humanity has evolved into immortal energy beings.

Typically eclectic and wide-ranging anthology from the prolific anthologist Peter Haining. Not everything hits hard, but the breadth and occasional rarity of the selections make it a worthwhile read. Recommended.

His Dark Materials

Psycho: adapted by Joseph Stefano from the novel by Robert Bloch; directed by Alfred Hitchcock; starring Anthony Perkins (Norman Bates), Janet Leigh (Marion Crane), Vera Miles (Lila Crane), John Gavin (Sam Loomis), and Martin Balsam (Arboghast) (1960): Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece still shines undiminished, a sinister puzzle-box. Taken from an already strong source (Robert Bloch's novel of the same name), Psycho improved upon it by making hotel-owner and mother-aficianado Norman Bates thin and sympathetic.

It's the movie's generation of sympathy for Norman I'll deal with here. Anthony Perkins should have won some sort of acting Oscar for this performance. Jittery, occasionally creepy, put-upon, repressed: and a lot of other emotions, all of them pitch perfect.

Camerawork amplifies the greatness of the performance, again and again staging Norman Bates in an inferior position to other male characters. One great blink-and-miss-it moment shows Perkins flinching almost unnoticeably as Martin Balsam's private detective deliberately leans into Norman's envelope of private space. The camerawork runs parallel to similar set-ups involving Janet Leigh's Marion Crane, her space invaded by lecherous oil-men and looming, sun-glass-obscured cops. Crane and Bates are twins in many ways, light and dark.

Oh, and it's the first American movie to show the inside of the bowl while a toilet flushes. Really, how much more do you want? A nearly subliminal use of a skull superimposed on a major character's head? One of the most distinctive scores of all time? Highly recommended.

When We Was Weird

More Weird Tales edited by Peter Haining (Collected 1975) containing the following stories, poems, and essays:

The Valley Was Still (1939) by Manly Wade Wellman; A Weird Prophecy [It Happened to Me] by Ken Gary; Winter Night [It Happened to Me] by Alice Olsen; San Francisco [It Happened to Me] (1940) by Caroline Evans; Heart of Atlantan (1940) by Nictzin Dyalhis; The Phantom Slayer (1942) by Fritz Leiber; The Beasts of Barsac (1944) by Robert Bloch; Bang! You're Dead! (1944) by Ray Bradbury; Cellmate (1947) by Theodore Sturgeon; The Familiars by H. P. Lovecraft; The Pigeon-Flyers (1943) by H. P. Lovecraft; Roman Remains (1948) by Algernon Blackwood; Displaced Person (1948) by Eric Frank Russell; To the Chimera (1924) by Clark Ashton Smith; From the Vasty Deep (1949) by H. Russell Wakefield; The Shot-Tower Ghost (1949) by Mary Elizabeth Counselman; Take the Z-Train (1950) by Allison V. Harding; The Little Red Owl (1951) by Margaret St. Clair; Ooze (1923) by Anthony M. Rud.

Peter Haining probably edited about a thousand anthologies in his lifetime. This, the second half of a hardcover collecting stories from pulp magazine Weird Tales' first iteration, which ran from 1923 to the early 1950's, is a very good one.

Weird Tales was the first true American pulp magazine devoted to fantasy, horror, and science fiction. Its heyday was the 1920's and early 1930's, but it still offered a viable market for short-story writers right up until its death during The Great Dying of the pulps in the late 1940's and early 1950's.

Haining does a nice job of finding stories from female writers, of which Weird Tales had more than a few, and of offering reprints of some of the non-fiction features of the magazine (It Happened to Me and the letters column The Eyrie), along with some decent poems from writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith (who really was a good poet), and Conan creator Robert E. Howard.

Haining also seemed to have an eye on what had been collected before, as the Fritz Leiber, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Bloch, and Ray Bradbury selections are relatively little-known. Leiber's "The Phantom Slayer" is the strongest from one of those four stalwarts, an urban nightmare that characterizes Leiber's reimagining of the horror genre in the 1940's as something set in urban landscapes bleak and otherwise, where people try and sometimes fail to connect with one another.

Among the lesser known writers, the improbably named Nictzin Dyalhis offers an enjoyable lost-world story much in the vein of Clark Ashton Smith and A. Merrit. Margaret St. Clair, a fairly well-known genre author of the 1940's and 1950's, impresses with the childhood fantasy nightmare "The Little Red Owl," which essentially pits a psychopathic uncle against a fictional character. The anthology finishes with a story from the first issue of Weird Tales, "Ooze," a fun story of amoebas gone wrong. Or is that amobae? Recommended.

My Long Zombie Nightmare

Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead, edited by John Skipp (2010) containing the following stories:

* ? Lazarus (1906) by Leonid Andreyev,
* ". . . Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields"(1929) by William B. Seabrook,
* The Return of Timmy Baterman (1983) by Stephen King,
* ? The Emissary (1947) by Ray Bradbury,
? A Case of the Stubborns (1976) by Robert Bloch,
* ? It (1940) by Theodore Sturgeon,
* Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed (2007) by Steve Duffy,
Bitter Grounds (2003) by Neil Gaiman,
* ? Sea Oak (1998) by George Saunders,
* The Late Shift (1980) by Dennis Etchison,
A Zombie's Lament (2010) by S. G. Browne,
Best Served Cold (2010) by Justine Musk,
The Dead Gather on the Bridge to Seattle (2010) by Adam Golaski
The Quarantine Act (2010) by Mehitobel Wilson
The Good Parts (1989) by Les Daniels,
Bodies and Heads (1989) by Steve Rasnic Tem,
* On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks (1989) by Joe R. Lansdale,
* Like Pavlov's Dogs (1989) by Steven R. Boyett,
* Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy (1989) by David J. Schow,
The Visitor (1998) by Jack Ketchum,
The Prince of Nox (1992) by Kathe Koja,
Call Me Doctor by Eric Shapiro,
* The Great Wall: A Story from the Zombie War (2007) by Max Brooks,
Calcutta, Lord of Nerves (1992) by Poppy Z. Brite,
God Save the Queen (2006) by John Skipp and Marc Levinthal,
Eat Me (1989) by Robert R. McCammon,
We Will Rebuild (2010) by Cody Goodfellow,
Sparks Fly Upward (2005) by Lisa Morton,
Lemon Knives 'N' Cockroaches (2010) by Carlton Mellick III,
* Zaambi (2006) by Terry Morgan and Christopher Morgan,
The Zombies of Madison County (1997) by Douglas E. Winter,
Dead Like Me (2000) by Adam-Troy Castro.

Six months later and I'm finally finished this anthology. Now I know how the survivors of a zombie apocalypse feel. There are a number of good and/or historically relevant stories here. I starred them. There are a number of stories that I wouldn't classify as zonbie stories because while they feature dead people walking, I wouldn't classify 'dead people walking' as the sole determinant of zombieism. I question-marked those.

The rest run the gamut from perfectly OK to dreadful, but being a nice fellow, I didn't indicate which ones are which. I must say, I'm exhausted by boundary-pushing hyperviolence, especially when it's linked to sex. I just don't care and I'm not scared. There's a surprisingly low 'fun' level here. Zombies are serious business. So serious that I don't remember what half these stories were about. They've all vanished into the eternal slurry of the walking dead, of what the walking dead leave behind.

But you know what? Zombies aren't a horror trope that can support all that much seriousness or social commentary. I think George Romero's Dawn of the Dead beautifully shows how much heavy lifting the zombie can do, and how much that heavy lifting must be leavened with humour and pathos. Not recommended except for the zombie obsessive.

New Terrors

New Terrors II, edited by Ramsey Campbell (1980; 1984), containing:

Sun City by Lisa Tuttle; Time to Laugh by Joan Aiken; Bridal Suite by Graham Masterton; The Miraculous Cairn by Christopher Priest; The Rubber Room by Robert Bloch; Drama In Five Acts by Giles Gordon; The Initiation by Jack Sullivan; Lucille Would Have Known by John Frederick Burke; The Funny Face Murders by R. A. Lafferty; Femme Fatale by Marianne Leconte; Can You Still See Me? by Margaret Dickson; One Way Out by Felice Picano; The Ice Monkey by M. John Harrison; Symbiote by Andrew J. Offutt and Across the Water to Skye by Charles L. Grant.

Second half of Campbell's British New Terrors anthology of original horror stories divided for American paperback publication. The stories range from the solid and familiarly M.R. Jamesian "Lucille Would Have Known" (though James never wrote a ghost story about bus tours) to the brooding, Kafkaesque "The Miraculous Cairn" and the post-modern prose-poem "Drama in Five Acts." Range is indeed what we have here, without sacrificing terror, horror or the occasional gross-out seen most prominently in "Bridal Suite." "Symbiote" and the grotesque "Femme Fatale."

Several of the stories are almost perfectly representative of their authors, especially M. John Harrison's "The Ice Monkey" -- suggestive but ultimately nebulous terror set in a relentlessly broken urban wasteland counterpointed with the dangerous Sublime of nature --and R.A. Lafferty's weird-ass, Chestertonian "The Funny Face Murders." Old masters like Aiken, Bloch and Lafferty rub shoulders here with both the up-and-coming (Masterson, Tuttle, Harrison and Priest) and the relatively obscure to the horror genre (Dickson, Picano and Gordon). In all, a wide-ranging and often deeply disturbing anthology. Or at least half of one. Highly recommended.

Planet Lovecraft

Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos, edited by Robert M. Price (1992): This is a lovely historical exercise by editor Price, as it collects about 20 stories in the Lovecraft mode, primarily from the 1920's, 1930's and 1940's, when Lovecraft's widespread Affinity Group, created in large part by Lovecraft's own inexhaustible letter-writing to aspiring writers asking for advice, was still in its infancy. Never has so peculiar a writer-as-person been so generous of his time with other writers. It's all part of the weirdness of HPL.

Price does a nice job selecting little- or never-before-anthologized stories by both significant writers working with Lovecraft's concepts and cosmology (August Derleth, Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard, Henry Kuttner, Clark Ashton Smith) and by writers whose names and stories have been long forgotten. I can't say as I was scared by the stories here, but a lot of them do evoke that existential dread and instability that is one of the hallmarks of the "cosmic horror" that Lovecraft tended to prefer.

Price's lengthy introduction is also invaluable, as it sets forth both a timeline for extra-Lovecraftian additions to the Cthulhu Mythos and an explanation of the manner in which certain writers and editors (most notably Derleth, Lovecraft's unbelievably important literary executor and Boswell in all but title) helped shape the Mythos after Lovecraft's death in 1937, giving it the now-familiar shape and hierarchy it didn't have during Lovecraft's lifetime.

And there were turfwars over Lovecraft's legacy -- Derleth was quite possessive of the Mythos, for good and ill, though overwhelmingly good: without the publishing house, Arkham House, Derleth initially created to preserve Lovecraft's work in hardcover, both Lovecraft and a lot of other fantasy writers might have vanished forever before the early 1960's boom in fantasy brought them widespread renown and paperback sales for the first time in their careers.

If Lovecraft's work now seems potentially immortal -- and possibly the single most important American fantasy corpus of the 20th century -- then Derleth deserves a lion's share of the credit. Often compared to Edgar Allan Poe, HPL possessed one major, posthumous difference from Poe: he had a great and tireless champion of his work taking care of it. Highly recommended.