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New Treasures: The Black Spaniel and Other Strange Stories by Robert Hichens

New Treasures: The Black Spaniel and Other Strange Stories by Robert Hichens

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The Black Spaniel and Other Strange Stories (Stark House, November 1, 2023)

Stark House has performed an extraordinary service for lovers of classic weird fiction with their excellent line of Stark House Supernatural Classics, which has returned forgotten tales by Algernon Blackwood, Robert W. Chambers, and many others into print in handsome and inexpensive paperback editions. They’ve produced more than a dozen titles over the last seventeen years, with no sign of slowing.

Stark House doesn’t specialize in supernatural fiction. Their bread and butter is their Black Gat Book line, which includes dozens of classic crime novels. They also have a terrific Film Noir Classic imprint, Stark House Crime Classics, and an extensive Stark House Science Fiction catalog, which includes titles by Mike Ashley, Storm Constantine, Barry Malzberg, Bill Pronzini, and many others.

These days I tend to be interested in overlooked writers, and recently that includes the prolific Robert Hichens, who wrote primarily in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, and who produced a great deal of celebrated weird fiction. Stark House has produced three collections of his short work, including The Black Spaniel and Other Strange Stories, published just last week.

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The Sorcerer and the Novelist: W. Somerset Maugham’s The Magician

The Sorcerer and the Novelist: W. Somerset Maugham’s The Magician

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Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley, poet, mountaineer, religious mystic and self-proclaimed prophet, member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, drug addict, braggart, sexual adventurer, the self-named “Beast 666” and, according to the popular press, “The Wickedest Man in the World,” was one of the most notorious and controversial figures of his era and remains so even today, three quarters of a century after his death.

W. Somerset Maugham, physician, world-traveler, wildly successful playwright (at one time he had four plays appearing in London’s West End theaters simultaneously) and sometime British secret agent, prolific short story writer and novelist, author of such acclaimed works as Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, and The Razor’s Edge, was one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century.

These two very different men may seem an unlikely pair, but Maugham met Crowley in Paris in 1905 and (like virtually everyone who encountered the man) was strongly impressed by him. In Maugham’s case the impression was a highly negative one, though he did concede that the occultist had some unique qualities, so much so that he made a thinly-disguised Crowley the central figure in his 1907 novel, The Magician.

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Vintage Treasures: Tales By Moonlight edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson

Vintage Treasures: Tales By Moonlight edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson

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Tales by Moonlight, volumes One and Two (Tor, January 1985
and July 1989). Covers by Mark E. Rogers and Jill Bauman

Jessica Amanda Salmonson has produced only a handful of anthologies, but they are all highly regarded. Her first, Amazons!, won the World Fantasy Award in 1980, and the two Heroic Visions volumes she edited in the mid-80s are still enjoyed and discussed today, with an original Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser novella by Fritz Leiber, plus terrific sword and sorcery tales by Jane Yolen, Phyllis Ann Karr, F. M. Busby, Alan Dean Foster, Robert Silverberg, Joanna Russ, Michael Bishop, Keith Roberts, Ellen Kushner, Avram Davidson, Manly Wade Wellman, Grania Davis, and Thomas Ligotti.

Salmonson’s held in such high regard that I recently decided to investigate her two Tales by Moonlight anthologies, published by Tor in the late 80s, and I’m very glad I did. They contain a rich assembly of talent, including Thomas Ligotti, Ruth Berman, H. P. Lovecraft, Janet Fox, Steve Rasnic Tem, W. Paul Ganley, Spider Robinson, John Varley, Charles L. Grant, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Jayge Carr, W. H. Pugmire, Ramsey Campbell, Joseph Payne Brennan, Phyllis Ann Karr, Eileen Gunn, and many more.

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I Was A Teenage Abomination from Another Dimension: The Inhabitant of the Lake & Other Unwelcome Tenants by Ramsey Campbell

I Was A Teenage Abomination from Another Dimension: The Inhabitant of the Lake & Other Unwelcome Tenants by Ramsey Campbell

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Original Arkham House cover

Dear Mr. Campbell,

I have received your stories, but I have had time to read only one or two of them. I don’t want to comment on them in extended fashion until I’ve read all, but I do think them competent. However, there is one alteration I think you should definitely make; Mr. Wandrei would insist on it, and that is to remove your stories from the Lovecraft milieu. I mean, keep the Gods, the Books, etc., but establish your own place. This would give the stories vastly more authenticity as an addition to the Mythos rather than pastiche pieces, and it might then be possible for us to consider their book publication in a limited edition over here.

What I suggest you do is establish a setting in a coastal area of England and create your own British milieu. This would not appreciably change your stories, but it would give them a much needed new setting and would not, in the reader’s mind, invite a direct comparison with Lovecraft, for in such a comparison they would not show up as well as if you had your own setting and place-names for the tales.

August Derleth to Ramsey Campbell, 6 October, 1961

Inspired by HP Lovecraft’s stories to write his own tales of cosmic horror, at the age of fifteen, Ramsey Campbell was encouraged by friends to submit them to August Derleth and Arkham House. He did, and the rest was horror fiction history. Taking Derleth’s advice to heart, he created his own version of Lovecraft Country; a drear and haunted region of the Severn Valley wedged between the cities of Bristol and Gloucester and the western edge of the Cotswolds.

The Arkham House collection, originally titled The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants was released in 1964 when Campbell was eighteen. They may not be the best Lovecraft-inspired stories, and they’re definitely not Campbell’s best stories, but they are good fun and well worth a read.

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Terror at Sea, Nightmares on the Beach: The Year’s Best Horror Stories XIV, edited by Karl Edward Wagner

Terror at Sea, Nightmares on the Beach: The Year’s Best Horror Stories XIV, edited by Karl Edward Wagner

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The Year’s Best Horror Stories XIV (DAW Books, October 1986). Cover by Michael Whelan

The Year’s Best Horror Stories XIV was the fourteenth in the DAW Year’s Best Horror series and the seventh volume edited by the great Karl Edward Wagner (d. 1994). The book was copyrighted and printed in 1986. This volume marked Michael Whelan’s eleventh cover for the series, which presents a pretty horrifying monster-in-the-closet, something out of any 11-year old’s worst nightmares! The cover layout is the most marked design change yet in the series. The format and font are very different from previous volumes, and the colon and word “Series” have been dropped completely. Why? Briefer I suppose.

Volume XIV contains nineteen different authors. All male but one. Eleven were American, six were British, and there is again the returning Canadian author, Vincent McHardy and returning German-born but American author, David J. Schow. Thirteen of these stories came from professional magazines. Three came from anthologies, one from a fanzine, one from a convention program, and one from a chapbook.

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What if a UFO Landed in a Bar?Alien Island by T. L. Sherred

What if a UFO Landed in a Bar?Alien Island by T. L. Sherred

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Alien Island (Ballantine Books, January 1970). Cover by Carol Inouye.

Here’s my latest look at a little-remembered 1970s novel, T. L. Sherred’s Alien Island, which appeared in the very first month of the 1970s. These days T. L. Sherred is remembered for a single story, his SF Hall of Fame novella “E For Effort.” It’s a great story, and a deeply cynical one, so much so that there are those who claim that it was not chosen by John W. Campbell for Astounding, but by someone else in Campbell’s absence. (I’m skeptical myself — Campbell was a VERY hands-on editor, and he also chose to reprint “E for Effort” in The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology. And he was definitely known to publish good stories that seemed to run counter to his own ideology.)

Sherred published three other stories in the early 1950s: “Cure, Guaranteed,” “Eye for Iniquity,” and “Cue for Quiet,” and then fell silent (save for a story, “See for Yourself,” in Escapade in 1961, that I have not seen) until the 1970s. The novel at hand was published in 1970, and in 1972 Harlan Ellison included “Bounty” in Again, Dangerous Visions; and “Not Bach” appeared in the very well-regarded fanzine Outworlds.

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The Complete Version of John C. Hocking’s Conan: Black Starlight is Now Available

The Complete Version of John C. Hocking’s Conan: Black Starlight is Now Available

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Conan: Black Starlight (Titan Books, October 17, 2023)

The name John C. Hocking is well known to long-time Black Gate readers. He published several terrific stories in the print version of the magazine, including two tales in his Brand the Viking series, and the opening stories in his popular Archivist series, “A River Through Darkness and Light” and “Vestments of Pestilence,” which was continued in Skelos and Weirdbook. He’s also launched a brand new series, the King’s Blade tales, in Tales From the Magician’s Skull, edited by Howard Andrew Jones.

I was delighted to see that John had been commissioned to write a serialized novella for Marvel’s high-profile relaunch of Conan The Barbarian in 2019. Conan: Black Starlight was published in installments in the first twelve issues of the comic, and now the entire story has been collected by Titan in a single handsome volume.

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The Mystery of Alan Burt Akers, Author of The Dray Prescot Series

The Mystery of Alan Burt Akers, Author of The Dray Prescot Series

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The first eight Dray Prescot books (DAW Books, 1972-1975).
Covers by Josh Kirby, Tim Kirk, Jack Gaughan, and Richard Hescox

As I started collecting and reading the Dray Prescot series of Sword & Planet novels, I tried to find out more about the author: Alan Burt Akers. The early books, published by DAW books starting in 1973, had no description or details of Akers, although they had ample details on Dray Prescot, who supposedly had recorded his adventures on tapes, which Akers then transcribed.

At the time I was sure Alan Burt Akers was a real person. It was many years before I learned the truth. Akers was a pseudonym for Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1921-2005). I don’t know why he chose that particular pseudonym, although I noted that it included all three parts of the name, and I was sure this was an homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs and Otis Adelbert Kline.

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New Treasures: Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez

New Treasures: Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez

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Our Share of Night (Hogarth, February 7, 2023)

I first heard of Mariana Enriquez in Adam Nevill’s 2022 Black Gate article, Five Great International Horror Collections, in which he celebrates “a sense of encountering original, innately weird creative visions for the first time” in the work of Luigi Musolino, Anders Fager, Attila Veres, and two collections from Enriquez, Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. Here’s the paragraph that grabbed my attention.

Argentinian Mariana Enriquez has been celebrated the world over, and I can see why from the quality of her writing. But I am surprised because her work is weird, not at all mainstream. How often does that kind of success come to a writer of quality weird? Almost never (because how many traditional publishers ever get excited about it?). I am heartened that it is possible. “Adela’s House” from Things We Lost in the Fire became an immediate favourite. Disturbing, sensory, unpredictable stories.

Enriquez’s fourth novel, her first to be translated into English, Our Share of Night, was published in hardcover by Hogarth this year, and I think the time is finally right for me to jump on board this train.

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Feminine Horror Works Better: A Darker Shade of Noir edited by Joyce Carol Oates

Feminine Horror Works Better: A Darker Shade of Noir edited by Joyce Carol Oates

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A Darker Shade of Noir (Akashic Books, August 22, 2023)

Among the plethora of new anthologies of horror stories continuously produced by little-known editors, minor authors and obscure publishers, where very few tales are worth reading, here’s finally an above average anthology. Devoted to so called “body horror” and including only women authors, the volume is edited by Joyce Carol Oates, a well respected, famous writer herself, who certainly demonstrates her good taste in her selection of the stories.

Her insightful and detailed Introduction is a sort of commentary on the material, but for the purposes of this review I’ll focus on the tales that especially impressed me.

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