Dreamsongs Volume 1 (2004) by George R. R. Martin

Dreamsongs Volume 1 (2004) by George R. R. Martin:

This collection is generous and generously gifted with lengthy, illuminating essays by George R.R. Martin. Originally released in one volume in 2003, breaking it up into two volumes definitely helps with actually reading it without being crushed.

Volume 1 covers Martin's career from his days writing for the amateur press in the 1960's to the greatest days of his success as a writer of short stories and novellas in the mid-1980's. I think Martin was a better writer of predominantly science-fictional stories than he is a fantasy novelist, but your results may vary. In any event, this is a fine introduction to Martin's work for those who haven't read much beyond his A Song of Ice and Fire. 

The stories:

"Only Kids Are Afraid of the Dark (1967): Almost juvenilia. Superhero stuff for an amateur press.
"The Fortress" (1960s): A short story submitted as an essay in a history course. Interesting.
"And Death His Legacy" (1960s): Started life as the first in a projected series about a billionaire super-assassin before transforming into a cautionary tale about the limits of political violence.
"The Hero" (1971): Martin's first professional sale, a stinger about the future of warfare.
"The Exit to San Breta" (1972): Science fiction ghost story. Minor but enjoyable.
"The Second Kind of Loneliness" (1972): From Martin's short-lived "Star Ring" series, a meditation on isolation and madness.
"With Morning Comes Mistfall" (1973): An entry in Martin's loose-knit far-future history of humanity dubbed "A Thousand Worlds." Martin's first truly top-notch story.
"A Song for Lya" (1974): Martin's second top-notch sf story, also set in the Thousand Worlds universe, explores an alien religion and its strange attraction for some humans.
"This Tower of Ashes" (1976): More of a character piece set on yet another of the Thousand Worlds. Bad spiders!
"And Seven Times Never Kill Man" (1975): The title comes from Kipling; Martin's notes indicate that he parodies Gordon R. Dickson's Dorsai series in specific (and militaristic sf in general) here. Thousand Worlds.
"The Stone City" (1977): A more Lovecraftian or Clark Ashton Smith-style take on the Thousand Worlds. Really a subtle piece of cosmic, science-fictional horror.
"Bitterblooms" (1977): A more fabulistic piece set on one of the more isolated Thousand Worlds of humanity.
"The Way of Cross and Dragon" (1979): Excellent sf story exploring religion and its mutations in the far future of the Thousand Worlds.
"The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr" (1976): Universe-hopping fantasy story was meant to start a series. It didn't, though Martin would re-use elements in his 1990's pilot "Doorways" (see Dreamsongs Volume 2).
"The Ice Dragon" (1980): Martin is pretty sure he created the idea of a literal ice dragon here. Not part of the Game of Thrones universe, though there are some similarities.
"In the Lost Lands" (1982: Another first piece in a never-continued series, set in a world that combines traditional sword-and-sorcery elements with post-apocalyptic settings.
"Meathouse Man" (1976): The most mournful and disturbing of Martin's three 'Corpse-Handler' sf stories is sometimes viewed as a precursor to Splatterpunk.
"Remembering Melody" (1981): Precise 'traditional' horror story.
"Sandkings" (1979): My favourite of Martin's stories, a terrific novella of science-fictional horror that features a thoroughly rotten protagonist and a fascinating alien species, the eponymous Sandkings. Also meant to be part of a series!
"Nightflyers" (1976/1980): Fine science-fictional horror novella set in the far-future Thousand Worlds timeline was thoroughly misused in both a 1980's movie and the recent SyFy Channel series.
"The Monkey Treatment" (1983): Somewhat traditional 'Be careful what you wish for' horror.
"The Pear-Shaped Man" (1987): Nice horror piece does not go quite where the reader fears it will. It goes someplace way more disturbing!

Overall: Highly recommended.

Cold Hand in Mine by Robert Aickman

REVIEW 

Two by Aickman

The Unsettled Dust (1990/ This edition 2014) by Robert Aickman, containing the following stories: "Bind Your Hair" (1964); "No Stronger Than a Flower" (1966); "Ravissante" (1968); "The Cicerones" (1967); "The Houses of the Russians" (1968); "The Next Glade" (1980); "The Stains" (1980) [Winner, 1981 British Fantasy Award] ; and "The Unsettled Dust" (1968); with an Introduction by Richard T. Kelly and an Afterword by Graham and Heather Smith: 

The Unsettled Dust is a bit of a curiosity in Faber and Faber's recent four-volume reissue of Robert Aickman collections as The Unsettled Dust is a posthumous reprint collection that duplicates one story from both F&F's Dark Entries AND The Wine-Dark Sea reissues ("Bind Your Hair") and two more from just The Wine-Dark Sea ("The Stains" and "The Next Glade"). Given that the F&F volumes are now the only Robert Aickman short-story collections available in mass-market editions, little or no duplication among collections would be ideal.

Nonetheless, any in-print, readily available Aickman is good. He's the master of a fairly rarefied type of ghost story, one for which he preferred the term "strange story." His stories will enthrall a (relatively) small readership. Most of Aickman's stories are too subtle for most readers, leaving them unmoved and confused as to Aickman's importance. And that's fine. He's one of the Boss Levels of horror/weird fiction. 

Those who like him, like him a lot -- but not liking him doesn't make one a 'bad' reader. Indeed, Aickman's hypercritical views caused him to dislike or dismiss many stories and writers considered by many (including myself) to be classics and masters -- almost the entire oeuvre of M.R. James, much of Henry James, all of H.P. Lovecraft, to name three writers whom Aickman found seriously wanting. So if you find Robert Aickman seriously wanting, you're just following in the footsteps of... Robert Aickman.

The stories here are mostly excellent. The one misfire is "No Stronger Than a Flower," a strange story about female vanity that seems both dated and obnoxiously sexist. But that's more than offset by the strange and disturbing wonders of such stories as "The Cicerones." That story is almost a short model of the Aickman approach: the events of the story are rendered clearly and precisely, but no emphatic explanations are offered as to why things are happening. It's immensely disturbing. So, too, "The Stains," in which horror, romantic rapture, and erotic fixation combine in a story about a recently widowed man who falls in love with... well, that's a good question.

In all, this is probably the best Faber and Faber volume to introduce yourself or others to Aickman, covering as it does more than a decade of Aickman's best stories. And when you've read them, please explain to me what the Hell is actually going on in "The Stains." Or "The Cicerones." Highly recommended.

Dark Entries (1964/ This edition 2014) by Robert Aickman, containing the following stories: "The School Friend" (1964); "Ringing the Changes" (1955); "Choice of Weapons" (1964); "The Waiting Room" (1956); "The View" (1951); and "Bind Your Hair" (1964); with an Introduction by Richard T. Kelly and an Afterword by Ramsey Campbell: This is Faber and Faber's reissue of weird-fiction master Robert Aickman's first solo collection of short stories, novelettes, and novels. 

Aickman amazes insofar as it's very difficult to distinguish between stories written in 1950 and stories written in 1979: his style and subject matter emerge seemingly fully grown and developed. Obviously, they didn't really -- Aickman started publishing in his 30's, after years of work on his art.

For all the strange and disturbing mystery of Aickman's stories and the cool, detailed nature of his prose, Aickman nonetheless often took tired horror tropes and rendered them fresh and new by re-investing them with that unexplained mystery rendered so cleanly and clearly that one feels as if one has simply missed an explanation somewhere in the story: Aickman doesn't create mystery with obfuscations of prose style. You're watching a magic trick performed without smoke and without mirrors.

Take "Ringing the Changes." It's a zombie story. But what a zombie story! Or "The School Friend": is it a Jekyll and Hyde story? Sort of. "The Waiting Room" seems like a traditional ghost story until one gets to the ghosts, whose behaviour is both inert and cosmically threatening. "Bind your Hair" makes witchcraft scary and mysterious. 


These are great, mid-career stories from one of weird and horror fiction's prickly, mysterious greats. Highly recommended.

Hitchcock, Ballard, ... Gad?

Dial 'M' for Murder: adapted by Frederick Knott from his own stage play; directed by Alfred Hitchcock; starring Ray Milland (Tony Wendice); Grace Kelly (Margot Wendice), Robert Cummings (Mark Halliday), John Williams (Chief Inspector Hubbard), and Anthony Dawson (Swann) (1954): Mostly minor Hitchcock has the cast but lacks a top-rate script: if you didn't know it was based on a play, you'd figure it out by the second act. Ray Milland's cunning plan to kill wife Grace Kelly by proxy turns out to have too many moving parts -- or perhaps too few. It's a nice time waster, and all of the leads are fine, including John Williams as an increasingly Columbo-esque English policeman. Originally shown in 3-D, only the repeated establishment of an extreme foreground in most shots overtly acknowledges the process. Lightly recommended.

The Wedding Ringer: written by Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender; directed by Jeremy Garelick; starring Kevin Hart (Jimmy Callahan), Josh Gad (Doug Harris), Kaley Cuoco (Gretchen Palmer), and Jorge Garcia (Lurch) (2015): Sloppy but engaging buddy comedy manages to graft the narrative apparatus of a Heist movie onto a wedding scenario. Josh Gad plays a lovable, insanely wealthy tax attorney who has no friends -- not even one to be the Best Man at his wedding. Enter Kevin Hart as a man who sells his services as a Best Man to the friendless. And the services of whatever people he can round up to fill the roles of Gad's imaginary groomsmen, Gad having invented and named those groomsmen and the imaginary Best Man to his fiancee and the wedding planner prior to engaging Hart's services. There are rough spots and sections that fall flat, but overall this is a decent, lightweight comedy buoyed by the charms of both Hart and Gad. Recommended.

The Terminal Beach (1964) by J.G. Ballard, containing the following stories: A Question of Re-Entry  (1963); The Drowned Giant  (1964); End-Game  (1963); The Illuminated Man  (1964); The Reptile Enclosure  (1963); The Delta at Sunset  (1964); The Terminal Beach  (1964); Deep End  (1961); The Volcano Dances  (1964); Billennium  (1961); The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon  (1964); and The Lost Leonardo  (1964).

Icy, engaging collection of early 1960's short stories from J.G. Ballard. Many of the stories are at least nominally science fiction. All of them are Weird, though in several cases this Weirdness is entirely a question of tone: nothing overtly fantastic or science-fictional occurs in five of the twelve stories. Nonetheless, even those stories disturb one enough that they straddle the line between the strange and the horrific.

Ballard was only a couple of years away from his avant-garde, experimental period. None of the stories included here are challenging in a structural sense. Several challenge the reader's perceptions of genre, however, along with one's ability to navigate subjective narration and altered states of consciousness. Ballard's concern with the fragility of the human psyche manifests itself again and again in various ways. So, too, the apocalypse, always observed in a cool and somewhat detached manner by either his narrators or the third-person narrative voice. 

But as dry and cool a voice as Ballard can be, behind all those narrative masks exists the mind of an aesthete. The end of the world (if that's what it is) is a hauntingly beautiful place in "The Illuminated Man." Thoughts on art, and the art of Leonardo da Vinci, dominate the quietly horrifying "The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon" and the jolly fantasy "The Lost Leonardo."   And a description of the decay of the body of a mysterious giant takes up the bulk of "The Drowned Giant," a description that haunts and troubles even as the story questions the very nature of the fantastic and people's reactions to unusual events. 

One could call "The Drowned Giant" a horror story about familiarization and the ever-encroaching Un-fantastic. So too "The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon" and "The Delta at Sunset" with their mentally disturbed narrators seeking an escape into a fantastically distorted hallucination that surpasses the 'real' world in scope and beauty, the same 'real' world that reduces the drowned giant to a debased and dismantled normativity. In all, a fine collection. Highly recommended.

China Town

Perdido Street Station by China Mieville (2000): China Mieville's second novel takes us to the strange world of Bas-Lag and the strange, sprawling city of New Crobuzon. One could see Mieville as having gone back to the time before the genre divisions established by the commercial demands of publishing were in force, back to the early 20th century, when science fiction and science fantasy and dark fantasy were non-existent distinctions. 

New Crobuzon, vast and London-like and filled with humans and a wide variety of other sentient species, is one of those places where both magic and science work. It's a crowded, vibrant place that combines elements of Dickensian London and steampunk. It's also a partial dystopia thanks to its ruthless ruling class. There's freedom in New Crobuzon right up until the point one makes trouble for the government. The secret police are everywhere, quashing unionization and making deals with organized crime.

Mieville has a density of imagination that crams Perdido Street Station with memorable characters, species, and events. The plot is pure entertainment, the outlines familiar: a plucky group of misfits must battle a terrible enemy. Mieville's attention to detail makes that familiar plot hum, though, and his wild imaginings make it sing. His socialist concerns also make for some scenes unusual to fantasy and science fiction -- celebrations of the working class, a protagonist who's an overweight intellectual, and a fascinating off-beat coda that both defies and rewards expectations.

Is there a tradition Mieville works within? To some extent, yes. A world of both science fiction and fantasy is the world of the Mars novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, among many others. Mieville's dense, often eclectic diction in concert with this mashed-up world of science and magic and the grotesque recalls the works of Clark Ashton Smith, Jack Vance, Tim Powers, Michael Shea, Fritz Leiber, and Michael Moorcock.

But this is all Mieville's world, in the same way that The Lord of the Rings is both high fantasy and its own Tolkien genre, all its own. That's how it works with great writers: they're a genre of one. The characters are compelling, flawed, and occasionally heart-breaking. There are asides and references that suggest the vastness of the world Mieville has imagined. There are terrifically exciting sections, including a climax that goes on for about a hundred pages without losing either momentum or invention. There's sorrow as keen as anything, genre or otherwise. There's an awesome super-Spider and a terrified ambassador from Hell. 

And there's a pack of truly terrible, superbly imagined  monsters, set upon New Crobuzon in a manner which recalls so, so many real-world governmental perversities involving drugs, guns, organized crime, and a corrupt political system. This is neither a world with a Chosen One nor a rightful king. And the heavy lifting, with all its costs, will be done by beings excluded from the heights of society. Some of them may even otherwise be terrible, terrible people.

There are flaws, of course, piffling for the most part. My one larger complaint involves Mieville's need to keep throwing in new species and new sub-plots, a need which results in a bit of clutter in the middle section. A relatively lengthy bit pitting one truly odd species against the monsters of  the novel is the apotheosis of this problem -- it advances the plot not one whit, and seems to be there because Mieville really, really wanted to introduce this cool, malevolent species and then pit it against the far more malevolent monsters.

In all, this is a great novel, regardless of genre. There's a keenness to it, even an anger at The Way Things Are Here, that nonetheless never becomes didactic, never detracts from the singularity of Mieville's fully realized, vibrant, awful Secondary World. Highly recommended.

J.G. Ballard and the Decaying Future

The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (1978) by J.G. Ballard (Introduction by Anthony Burgess), containing the following stories: "The Concentration City" (1957); "Manhole 69" (1957); "The Voices of Time" (1960); "Chronopolis" (1960); "Billennium" (1961); "Deep End" (1961); "The Overloaded Man" (1961); "The Subliminal Man" (1962); "Thirteen for Centaurus" (1962); "End Game" (1962); "The Cage of Sand" (1962); "The Garden of Time" (1962); "The Drowned Giant" (1964); "The Terminal Beach" (1964); "The Atrocity Exhibition" (1966); "The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D" (1967); "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" (1966); "Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy" (1967); and "Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan" (1968)

The great British writer J.G. Ballard had a writing career that spanned more than 50 years before his death in 2009. He turned some of his experiences as a boy in a WWII Japanese internment camp in China into the 1980's novel Empire of the Sun, filmed by Steven Spielberg in the late 1980's. His odd late 1960's novel Crash, about people who are sexually aroused by car crashes and the wounds caused by them, was oddly filmed by David Cronenberg in 1996. Well, there's some range right there. He also wrote more than a dozen other novels in a variety of genres.

Ballard was also a prolific and terrific short-story writer, beginning in the 1950's. This volume, originally published in the 1970's, obviously omits Ballard's later work. There is a two-volume Complete Stories in print for those who want more.

Ballard was one of those nominally science-fiction writers who really transcended genres because of his stylistic, thematic, and structural complexity. The stories included here would be in many cases classified as 'Weird' now, or even as horror in a couple of cases. Absurdism, cut-and-paste, dystopia, fable, fin de siecle fantasy -- they're all here, often in the same story. Philip K. Dick and M. John Harrison's works are probably most like Ballard's, and as those two writers aren't much alike at all... well, you get the idea. These are J.G. Ballard stories, and they're mostly terrific.

Ballard's concerns throughout these stories touch upon certain things again and again. Many of the futures he depicts are run-down, sometimes to absurdly satiric and telling degrees. The stories set in the then-present-day, or the then-near future, often portray increasingly mechanized and bureaucraticized societies. "The Subliminal Man," for example, may not be a perfect prediction of the future as seen from the early 1960's, but many of its observations and extrapolations of the future of cars, advertising, and industrial America are somewhat harrowingly spot on. 

Certainly many of these stories qualify as science fiction. Some of them even have rocket ships in them! Though generally those rocket ships are either shams or occupied by dead astronauts. Strange ideas bubble and bend. 

But as weird as some of the ideas get in the stories that are science fiction, most contain enough actual science to seem plausible, if not possible. Ballard wasn't a writer of 'hard science fiction,' but he had a broad knowledge of both the hard and soft sciences. And when dealing with science and technology, his interests remained focused on the personal, social, and cultural effects of changed circumstances caused by scientifically enabled innovation and exploration. Many of the stories go beyond the initial effects of innovation and exploration all the way to the other end -- to the exhaustion of an idea, its depletion, or in a couple of cases (most notably in "Chronopolis") to humanity's Bartleby-esque decision to not do a thing, or to stop doing it.

The more apocalyptic science-fiction stories show worlds slowly grinding out in decay and over-population, in new diseases, in infinite ranks of urban development, in the loss of all water on Earth. There aren't really many heroes in Ballard's work -- if so, they're supporting characters, and they're either already dead or about to be. His people are set off against the Sublime Giganticism of Time and Space; so, too, is humanity so set off. They are all dwarfed. They are not going to win. But they may not lose, either.

As downbeat as the stories can be, they're not depressing. Ballard's wit keeps things from bottoming out, as do the cleverness of his ideas and the occasional stubborn refusal of some of his characters to simply lie down and die. They keep going, seeking understanding, until they're overwhelmed or finally gifted with some chance out from a terrible situation. Some of the stories are funny -- "Billennium" is a surprisingly jaunty story about over-population and the ways in which human concepts of spaciousness and privacy are endlessly malleable. 

Striking images abound, whether of infinite cities or cloud-carving gliders or Martian dunes brought home to Florida. "The Drowned Giant" seems more like a Gabriel Garcia Marquez story than anything else, but with a British spin. "The Garden of Time" seems like a less baroquely written Clark Ashton Smith or Jack Vance story set in a weirdly magical, decayed, medieval setting of the far future's Dying Earth. An endless wave of barbarians advance on a beautiful house, a beautiful garden, a beautiful couple. 'When' and 'why' aren't questions that the story will answer. The imagery and the melancholy of the story, a melancholy for the dying future, set the Sublime and the nostalgic against each other.

And the late 1960's stories that end the volume, including "The Atrocity Exhibition" (1966), "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" (1966), "Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy" (1967), and "Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan" (1968) see Ballard moving into the fragmented, cut-and-paste, self-reflexive world of post-modernism (and William S. Burroughs). They're also very funny at points. Especially the one about Ronald Reagan, the image of whose head, affixed to female bodies, inspires elevated lust in Republican loins. And when you replace an image's genitalia with an image of Reagan's head -- well, watch out! Highly recommended.

Year's Best Weird Fiction Volume 1 (2013/Published 2014): edited by Laird Barron and Michael Kelly

Year's Best Weird Fiction Volume 1 (2013/Published 2014): edited by Laird Barron and Michael Kelly, containing the following stories:

• The Nineteenth Step by Simon Strantzas: Not so much a story as an opening that's missing a middle and an end. 
• Swim Wants to Know If It's as Bad as Swim Thinks by Paul G. Tremblay: Sharp and nasty character study suddenly turns into a vaguely observed (and possibly completely subjective) invasion of Lovecraftian horrors.
• Dr. Blood and the Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron by A. C. Wise: Well, it's sort of funny, and it sort of feels like something that was written in about 1970 for the magazine Weird Heroes, given that the genre tropes it spoofs are all very, very, very old. 
• The Year of the Rat by Chen Qiufan: Nice dystopian satire in translation from the Chinese would be pretty much at home in an issue of Galaxy magazine from 1955.
• Olimpia's Ghost by Sofia Samatar: Something to do with Sigmund Freud but I never really cared what or why.
• Furnace by Livia Llewellyn: Solid bit of weird horror reminds me a lot of late-career Thomas Ligotti...which makes a lot of sense when you realize that it's from a Ligotti tribute anthology.
• Shall I Whisper to You of Moonlight, of Sorrow, of Pieces of Us? by Damien Walters Grintalis: The pomposity of the title has literally erased the story from my memory. Honestly, it's like an episode title from Season 3 of Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda.
• Bor Urus by John Langan: Typically solid Langan piece with a really spooky, disturbingly dream-like climax.
• A Quest of Dream by W. H. Pugmire: A tip of the hat to H.P. Lovecraft's Dream-Cycle stories. There's really only one W.H. Pugmire story, a sort of Swinburne-meets-early-Lovecraft fragment, and this is another one of those. Enjoyable, rotted twee.
• The Krakatoan by Maria Dahvana Headley: Promising start, completely goofy weird ending.
• The Girl in the Blue Coat by Anna Taborska: Solidly written and observed ghost story of the Holocaust.
• (he) Dreams of Lovecraftian Horror... by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.: No memory of this.
• In Limbo by Jeffrey Thomas: Twilight Zone-like set-up for a keenly observed character study. Very reminiscent of a lot of stories that appeared in Charles Grant's Shadows anthologies in the 1970's and 1980's.
• A Cavern of Redbrick by Richard Gavin: Very nice weird tale with a disturbing either/or conclusion that offers closure without a definitive answer to what just happened.
• Eyes Exchange Bank by Scott Nicolay: Really the 900-pound gorilla of this anthology super-collides splatterpunk and kitchen-sink horror with some great riffs on Poe and the Decadents.
• Fox Into Lady by Anne-Sylvie Salzman: Mostly unpleasant, amorphous, mythy.
• Like Feather, Like Bone by Kristi DeMeester: Story fragment about some gross stuff.
• A Terror by Jeffrey Ford: Excellent period piece depicts Emily Dickinson's first meeting with Death.
• Success by Michael Blumlein: I could imagine this story as having been written by someone like Robert Sheckley or Cyril Kornbluth and published in a 1957 issue of Galaxy magazine, only at about one-third the length. As is, it's almost monstrously attenuated.
• Moonstruck by Karin Tidbeck: A sort of inert bit of dark fantasy shading into a postmodern folk story.
• The Key to Your Heart is Made of Brass by John R. Fultz: This one, enjoyable as it is, would be more enjoyable if it were the script to a Heavy Metal/Metal Hurlant comic-book story from 1979, preferably illustrated by some very baroque and murky European comics artist of the time.
• No Breather in the World But Thee by Jeff VanderMeer: The usually subtle and understated VanderMeer cuts loose, to increasingly dire and unengaging effect. It may be a satire of weird-fiction tropes the writer has grown tired of. It's sort of a rubbery, pointless, "shocking" mess.

Barron casts the net so wide for his definition of the Weird in his introduction that the term becomes almost meaningless. And the extraordinarily broad reach of the contents bear this out. It seems less like an attempt to come up with a new genre and more like a land grab. Nonetheless, there's a lot of good stuff here. In all: recommended, a little lightly. 

The Crime-fighting Horse of Newfoundland and the Mummy That Sank the TITANIC

The World's Strangest Mysteries by Rupert Furneaux (1962): I bought this paperback on a lark, figuring it would be chock-full of loopiness. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that for books of this type, it's surprisingly even-handed. It's certainly no Cosmos, but neither is it like modern-day History Channel stupidity.

Obviously, much of the material explored here has become dated -- the book is more than 50 years old, after all. Nonetheless, sections on Kaspar Hauser, the Man in the Silk Mask, Anastasia, and other mysterious figures lay out and evaluate the various cases for who these people were or weren't.

We also get some stories of things that would turn out to be hoaxes after the book's publication (the infamous Brass Plate of California being one of them), or that were always hoaxes if one knew where to look for decent information (Welcome to Oak Island, suckers!). The book may be wrong in its conclusions about some of these things, but there is an argumentative process at work: Furneaux isn't completely gullible and accepting.

Well, OK, sections on the Loch Ness Monster and the Yeti seem to have been thrown together, though Furneaux at least explains the overall reasoning for why they may exist (which is to say, cryptids were still showing up in 1961 with some regularity).

His section on the Shakespeare authorship (non)controversy is solid, though he appears ignorant of the simple fact that we know more about the life of Shakespeare than we do of virtually any other person of his socioeconomic class from the same time period: his was not a mysteriously under-chronicled life, and Furneaux repeats some misinformation about the Shakespeare statue in Stratford-Upon-Avon (and seems ignorant of the fact that the "second bed" was actually the best bed to will somebody -- as the guest bed, it hadn't been used).

Overall, fun stuff, with some interesting mysteries to follow up from other sources. Worth picking up if you see it lying around in a used bookstore for a fair price. It's also deceptively long, hailing as it does from a time when the paperback publishers tried to save money on paper by printing everything in tiny, tiny type. Recommended.

The Strange and Uncanny by John Macklin (1967): I'm pretty sure I read this unsourced compendium of weird, 'true' stories when I was about ten. And ten is pretty much the Golden Age for this sort of book. Now we can just download these strange sorts of tales directly from the Internet into our neocortexes. Truly this is a disturbing universe.

One can assess the probably verity of its contents by noting that it rehashes the completely fabricated story of Princess Amen-Ra and her mummy's role in the sinking of the Titanic, a story that still pops up a lot in stories about unexplained mysteries. Alan Moore even offered a version of it in the graphic novel From Hell.

However, more because of the ridiculous claims of the book than despite them, there's a lot of fun to be had. I can see how some of the stories creeped me out when I was a lad (including that of the malevolent Egyptian mummy). Others are actually reined in a bit too much for maximum enjoyment. If a story tells me that a demon killed someone, I'd like to discover that the guy was ripped apart by an invisible assailant. I don't want to learn that he was found with a single gunshot wound to the head. Pistol-packing demons would be cool in certain circumstances, but they lack a certain oomph in this situation.

Some of the 'true' stories here bear remarkable resemblances to fictional ghost stories I've encountered. And there's absolute no sourcing here -- no notes, no bibliography. Ah, well. You get to read about the telepathic, precognitive Newfoundland horse called Lady Wonder, who helped police in that province solve a couple of missing persons cases. Is this true? I'll have to look it up. Recommended.