Thomas Parker – Page 11

After Forty Years: The War of the Worlds Revisited

Saturday, December 20, 2014 Thomas Parker Comments 5 comments

It’s that time of year, friends, the time when we look back in sorrow on the New Year’s resolutions that drooped and faded before the first bloom of spring, and when we start to formulate the resolutions that we know we’re really going to keep this time, dammit. I generally don’t make new year’s resolutions myself, for the reasons implied above, but last year I did — I decided that 2014 would be the year of rereading.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve discovered that even as I’m reading more than ever, I almost never do any re-reading. There are just so many books, both enticing new ones and old ones that I’ve always meant to get around to and never have (you know, all those great books, old and new, that you find out about whenever you visit a certain website which shall remain nameless).

When I finish one book and reach for another, the pressure exerted by both the never-ceasing pile up of the present and the still-unexplored past seems to weigh overwhelmingly in favor of the as-yet-unread. Rereading falls by the wayside.

This is in sharp contrast to my adolescent days, when I would regularly reread my favorite books, some of them many times. (I’ve probably read Robert Heinlein’s Have Space Suit, Will Travel and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Gods of Mars eight or ten times each, for instance.)

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Gold, Frankincense, Myrrh… and Ectoplasm?! Ghost Stories for Christmas

Tuesday, December 2, 2014 Thomas Parker Comments 2 comments

Now that we have passed the point of no return (also known as Thanksgiving), we have plunged irrevocably into the Christmas season, that time of the year which is richest in traditions, be they old or new, religious or secular, serious or lighthearted, shared with millions worldwide or kept hidden behind closed doors and reserved for the private humiliation of those we hold dearest.

Decorating a tree with lights and ornaments, kissing under the mistletoe, hanging stockings, singing carols — these widespread traditions are the instantly recognizable emblems of the season, while other rituals are restricted for a select circle. For one household the season’s signifier may be listening to Dad read the nativity story from the Gospel of Luke, for another group it may be gathering around the television to watch It’s a Wonderful Life, while for yet another family it may be nervously edging away as Uncle Carl begins his annual Yuletide disquisition on America’s inexorable slide into socialism.

Traditions come and traditions go, however. An observance that has largely faded from view is the once-widespread custom of reading ghost stories on Christmas Eve. As with many Christmas traditions, this one began in Victorian England. Of course long before the Victorians, Christmas was associated with the miraculous and the supernatural, but during those middle and later years of the nineteenth century, the season became explicitly linked with the overtly ghostly as well.

The Victorian era was the high-water mark of the traditional ghost story, which was a staple of the magazines and inexpensive books that vied for the attention of an expanding and prosperous middle class. These publications were hungry for content, and ghost stories helped fill that need. Some of the form’s greatest masters — Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Amelia Edwards, Mary Braddon, Edith Nesbit, and M.R. James, among many others — wrote during this period.

However, it was Charles Dickens who was, more than any other person, responsible for the identification of one particular time of year — the Christmas season — with the explicitly ghostly. Dickens loved a good ghost story; he had, in the words of his friend and biographer, John Forster, “something of a hankering after them.”

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The Hardy Boys Meet M.R. James: The Supernatural Mysteries of John Bellairs

Friday, November 28, 2014 Thomas Parker Comments 4 comments

In the world of publishing today, books written for children and young adults are the tails that are increasingly wagging the dog, especially when those books also fall into the horror, fantasy, or science fiction categories. Many mainstream or “literary” authors would probably sell their souls to Voldemort for the kind of success that J.K. Rowling achieved with her Harry Potter books, though Thomas Pynchon or Phillip Roth pushing Harry from his place atop the bestseller lists would be rather like a Marxist literary critic becoming a judge on Dancing With the Stars. (That’s something I’d like to see, actually.)

One relatively new aspect in this ascendance of what is called YA (or young adult) fiction is its popularity with older readers. Where in previous years some might be embarassed to be seen reading books written for younger readers, now there is nothing unusual in seeing people with jobs, mortgages, and children of their own eagerly perusing The Hunger Games or Twilight.

And why not? (Well, I could give you a big why not for Twilight, but that’s another matter.) Good writing comes in all sorts of packages, and there are plenty of legitimate pleasures to be had in reading the best YA books.

However, in sorting through the many worthwhile reads available in this era of new-found YA respectability, it is easy to overlook work that was written before the current boom; some fine authors of only twenty or thirty years ago are now unjustly neglected, their reputations eclipsed by those who are fortunate enough to still be alive and producing new work in this YA golden age (a golden age of cultural visibility and publishing advances, if nothing else.)

One such writer who perhaps came just a little too early was the once highly popular writer of children’s supernatural mysteries, John Bellairs, who died in 1991.

If Bellairs is remembered by fantastic fiction readers at all, it is for his single adult novel, the superb and eccentric fantasy The Face in the Frost, which was published to little notice in 1969. (Though in his 1973 history of the genre, Imaginary Worlds, the ever-perceptive Lin Carter hailed it as “one of the best fantasy novels to appear since The Lord of the Rings.”)

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One Shot, One Story: Clark Ashton Smith

Wednesday, October 8, 2014 Thomas Parker Comments 13 comments

The other day, I was talking to a friend of mine who happens to be a pastor, and I took the opportunity to ask him a deep theological question: “If you had to choose one player to take one shot, with eight tenths of a second on the clock and the game on the line — to save your life — who would you choose?” (My friend, in addition to being an ordained minister, is also, like me, a devoted acolyte in the Church of the NBA.)

This is of course the sort of dangerous question that led to the Reformation and the Thirty Year’s War. Happily in this case no violence ensued, though his pick was Larry Bird and mine was Michael Jordan. Hey, if he wants to die while I live, that’s his business. (It helps a little that the first choice of each was the second choice of the other.)

What does this have to do with “Adventures in Fantasy Literature,” the avowed purview of Black Gate, you ask? Just this — it got me thinking about one of my favorite fantasists, one whom not enough lovers of the fantastic are acquainted with: Clark Ashton Smith. There are one hundred and fourteen stories in the five volumes of The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith. If I had a reader, willing but uninitiated, and had to pick one of those stories to introduce Smith with, (to save my life!) which one would it be?

Smith is a writer who can benefit from such an introduction; though he was one of the “Three Musketeers” of Weird Tales in its 1930’s heyday, he remains much less known than the other two-thirds of the trio. You could fill a phone book with the names of imitators of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, but, as Ray Bradbury said, Smith is “a special writer for special tastes; his fame was lonely.”

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These Robots Are Revolting: Magnus, Robot Fighter 4000 A.D.

Sunday, September 14, 2014 Thomas Parker Comments 3 comments

I had thousands of comic books when I was a kid (heck, I’ve got thousands of them now), but I never had a single Gold Key book — I avoided them like the plague. I didn’t like their painted covers; I didn’t like their series based on flop Irwin Allen TV shows like Land of the Giants and Time Tunnel; I didn’t like that Superman or Green Lantern were nowhere to be found in their stories.

I wheedled hard to get that twelve or fifteen cents (that’s what comic books cost in my day, Sonny), and was determined to be discriminating with it. Yes, even as a kid, I was a snob — a trash snob, but a snob.

Recently, however, in a spirit of scientific investigation, I picked up the first two Dark Horse paperback collections of Magnus Robot Fighter 4000 A.D. The books collect the first fourteen issues of Magnus that Gold Key published between 1963 and 1966. Dark Horse has done a superior job with these beautifully-produced volumes; in addition to the original stories, they feature appreciative introductions by Mike Royer and Steve Rude, samples of original concept art, and the covers that I so disliked as a kid.

Most importantly, the reproduction of the comic pages themselves is first-rate. The coloring is especially good; it’s clean and sharp without being overpoweringly bright, as some of DC’s Archive books have been. (The non-glossy paper used is a big plus in this regard.)

So the wrapping is nice — what about the present? Who the heck is this Magnus guy, anyway?

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Hell to Pay: The Devil and Daniel Webster in Print and on Film

Sunday, September 7, 2014 Thomas Parker Comments 5 comments

Is there any place more melancholy than the graveyard of forgotten writers? While the reputations of even major literary figures can wax and wane, for genuinely innovative or influential authors, critical rebounds, if not assured, are at least possible. (Hemingway, anyone?)

But permanent eclipse seems to be the fate of the facile, ambitious middlebrow who was highly popular and overpraised during his or her prime. Once this kind of writer is no longer around to hold the stage with new work, a spell seems to be broken and often a speedy and ruthless (if not embarrassed) re-evaluation occurs, resulting in a quick trip to oblivion and a complete disappearance from the public consciousness. John O’Hara, Dorothy Parker, Irwin Shaw — where are you now? Often it’s not even a matter of an “official” verdict by the critical establishment — it’s simply that a few years pass and no one reads the writer anymore.

One victim of this kind of reaction was Stephen Vincent Benét. A prolific producer of poetry and fiction from the 1920’s up until his death from a heart attack in 1943, Benét was both highly regarded by critics and popular with the wider public. His epic narrative poem of the American Civil War, John Brown’s Body, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929, and there was a time when countless readers were familiar with his widely-anthologized story “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” a bit of nostalgic, patriotic Americana that blends history, the tall tale, and the supernatural into a fluent and beguiling concoction.

Published in 1936, “The Devil and Daniel Webster” tells the story of one Jabez Stone, a hard-working but struggling New Hampshire farmer. “He wasn’t a bad man to start with, but he was an unlucky man. If he planted corn, he got borers; if he planted potatoes, he got blight. He had good-enough land, but it didn’t prosper him; he had a decent wife and children, but the more children he had, the less there was to feed them.”

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The Scorpion Revealed: The Adventures of Captain Marvel, Chapter Twelve: Captain Marvel’s Secret

Wednesday, August 6, 2014 Thomas Parker Comments 5 comments

Hurry up and get in here! Be careful you don’t trip walking down the aisle — the lights have already gone down and they’ll be ready to start any minute. You’re late, but still in luck, because there’s one last seat left, over there on the right — see it? Now that we’re all in our places with bright shining faces, we’re ready for our story’s finale. Sit tight because here it comes — The Adventures of Captain Marvel, last chapter: “Captain Marvel’s Secret.”

Three title cards semi-coherently sum up last week’s action. “Captain Marvel — Rescues the Malcolm Expedition from a trap set by the Scorpion.” “Billy Batson — Refuses to enter the tomb to get Dr. Lang’s lens.” “Rahman Bar — Plans to arouse the natives against the expedition.” And now, for the final time, let’s shout together the mystic syllables that will bring down the magic lightning bolt and transform you into one of the greatest of all superheroes, Captain Marvel — Shazam!

Returning to the conclusion of last week’s chapter, Malcolm and Bentley, having recovered the hidden lens, stand outside the tomb chamber where Betty and Whitey are trapped, while Billy and Tal Chotali dither outside the tomb itself. The whole place is being shaken to pieces due to the eruption of the volcanic mountain Scorpio. “Scorpio is angry because unbelievers have entered the tomb,” Tal Chotali tells Billy. Actually, we know that Rahman Bar has caused the eruption by diverting a river into the crater, which, as everyone knows, acts as a volcano emetic.

As the shaking increases in intensity, Billy tries to run into the tomb to help his friends inside, but is held back by Tal Chotali. Everyone in the tomb — Malcolm, Bentley, Betty, Whitey — is doomed, hopelessly doomed!

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Into the Tomb: The Adventures of Captain Marvel, Chapter Eleven: Valley of Death

Wednesday, July 30, 2014 Thomas Parker Comments 2 comments

Ah, the excitement in the theater is palpable as we near the end of our journey and today’s eleventh chapter in The Adventures of Captain Marvel, “Valley of Death,” begins to flicker across the screen. Because the seats are largely filled with sweaty elementary school children, something else is palpable too — whew! Baths and showers are definitely called for when you get home, kids…

Today’s title cards summarizing Chapter Ten will, as always, enlighten the enlightenable and confuse the confusable. (Or maybe it’s the other way around.) “Malcolm — Is shipwrecked on a reef off the coast of Siam.” “Captain Marvel — Rescues Malcolm’s party and the crew from the S.S. Carfax.” “Betty — Is left aboard ship by the Scorpion.” Now it’s time for the word we’ve come to know so well, though I’m sure only a few of you remember exactly what the letters mean. Me? Of course I know… but, uh, we’ve no time to waste with trivia… Shazam!

A flashback to the previous cliffhanger puts us with Billy and the unconscious Betty on board the sinking Carfax (and if the title card says it’s the Carfax, that’s good enough for me). As the ship goes down and water pours into Betty’s cabin, Billy gets himself and Betty off the doomed vessel (a judicious cut ensures that we don’t quite see how) and manages to swim to shore with the buoyant secretary in tow. It’s a good thing he decided to skip band camp last summer and take those swimming lessons at the YMCA.

Once on dry ground, Betty relates how an unknown assailant struck her from behind. “Why would anyone want to kill you?” Billy asks. “He must have been after my section of the map; he took my handbag,” Betty replies. Everyone seems satisfied with this explanation. This is 1941 and it won’t do to entertain the idea that the Scorpion just wanted the purse. But what of the map? It wasn’t in the bag — “It’s in a waterproof envelope pinned inside my jacket.” At this news, Bentley looks like a kid who wanted the big new Hot Wheels set for Christmas and instead got one of those last-resort toys that isn’t even really a toy, like a grip-strengthener.

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Confessions Of a Cormanite

Saturday, July 26, 2014 Thomas Parker Comments 5 comments

Graham Greene once said that the books that influence us the most are not the ones that we “seriously” or systematically read in adulthood, but are rather those first books we seek out in our youth and that we read for the simple love of reading.

He wrote, “In later life, we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what is in our minds already.” But when we are children, “all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and like the fortune-teller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water they influence the future.” This has been true of my own reading, and I would also assert that for those who love film, it equally applies to the movies that they watched early in their lives.

Movie buffs come in countless varieties; there’s a great variation in their degrees of passion and in the objects of their devotion. Some bring offerings of ice to the shrine of a Kubrick or an Antionioni, and others make blood sacrifices on the altar of a Scorsese or a Peckinpah. Some soar with Hawks while others go to Welles for their refreshment. One group bows silently before Buster Keaton and the next sings songs of praise to Judy Garland.

Now, I am a movie buff and I have been given tremendous pleasure by the artists I just mentioned and by many others. I love Lubistch, would stay up late for Sturges, have been beguiled by Bunel, am wild for Wilder… but none of these immortals occupy the place closest to my heart.

Get me away from the art house, put away the beautifully illustrated coffee table book on the Masterpieces of Swedish Cinema, send home the educated — but dull — guest whose favorite Woody Allen film is Interiors (please!) or who saw The English Patient three times, and leave me alone in my sanctuary — my darkened living room at 2:00 am, lit only by the restless images that pass across the television screen, images selected for no one’s pleasure but my own, and the truth will at last emerge. I am a Cormanite.

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Headed For a Watery Grave: The Adventures of Captain Marvel, Chapter Ten: Doom Ship

Tuesday, July 22, 2014 Thomas Parker Comments 0 Comment

I’m glad to see that you’ve gotten here early — as we near the end of our saga, seats are going to be at a premium, and you’re fast running out of opportunities to see Frank Coughlan Jr. and Tom Tyler perform their mystic switcheroo. I mean, once this silly thing is out of the theater, it’ll be forever relegated to the realm of nostalgic memory — it’s not like anyone will be able to watch it at home sixty years from now! That would be magic…

And so, while we still have the chance, let’s join the ragged remains of the Malcolm Scientific Expedition in their struggle against the malific machinations of the sinister Scorpion in this week’s chapter of The Adventures of Captain Marvel, “Doom Ship.” Shazam! (Cough, cough…)

Pay close attention to this week’s title cards, recapping Chapter Nine; there will be a quiz after the main feature. “The Scorpion — Forces Doctor Lang to reveal the hiding place of his lens.” “Doctor Lang — Gives Betty the combination to his safe.” “Captain Marvel — Tries to warn Betty of a death trap at Lang’s home.” “Billy Batson — And Betty decide to get the lens.” Now to pick up where we left off…

Last week, we left Billy and Betty standing in front of the late Doctor Lang’s safe, unaware that two tommy guns were aimed at their backs, primed to fire as soon as the safe is opened. (They’re also unaware that Barnett and two other Scorpion men are watching them from hiding.) Just as Billy turns the safe’s dial to the last number, but before he can open the door, Barnett and his boys emerge from behind the drapes.

One of them shoves Betty out of the way. She slams against the wall and is knocked out (by the serial’s end, this woman will have suffered more concussions than Brett Favre) and then he slugs Billy on the head with a gun, laying the intrepid broadcaster out cold.

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