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Vintage Treasures: The Casebook of Carnacki The Ghost Finder by William Hope Hodgson

Vintage Treasures: The Casebook of Carnacki The Ghost Finder by William Hope Hodgson

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the-casebook-of-carnacki-the-ghost-finderWilliam Hope Hodgson is almost unique among his contemporaries: his most famous novels, The House on the Borderland and The Night Land, have been continuously in print for the better part of the last hundred years. H.P. Lovecraft described The Night Land, first published in 1912, as “one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written.”

But Hodgson wrote many other highly-respected works of horror and dark fantasy, and here his publication history is a little more spotty. Perhaps chief among them are the tales of Carnacki The Ghost Finder, a supernatural detective who came up against horrors that would have made Van Helsing blanche. I’m pleased to say that the Wordsworth Tales of Mystery And The Supernatural have not let us down, and in 2006 they brought the complete collection back in print in a handsome and inexpensive edition.

“‘I saw something terrible rising up through the middle of the ‘defence’. It rose with a steady movement. I saw it pale and huge through the whirling funnel of cloud – a monstrous pallid snout rising out of that unknowable abyss. It rose higher and higher. Through a thinning of the cloud I saw one small eye… a pig’s eye with a sort of vile understanding shining at the back of it.”

Thomas Carnacki is a ghost finder, an Edwardian psychic detective, investigating a wide range of terrifying hauntings presented in the nine stories in this complete collection… Encountering such spine-chilling phenomena as ‘The Whistling Room’, the life-threatening dangers of the phantom steed in ‘The Horse of the Invisible’ and the demons from the outside world in ‘The Hog’, Carnacki is constantly challenged by spiritual forces beyond our knowledge. To complicate matters, he encounters human skullduggery also. Armed with a camera, his Electric Pentacle and various ancient tomes on magic, Carnacki faces the various dangers his supernatural investigations present with great courage.

Josh Reynolds explored the career of Carnacki The Ghost Finder in greater detail as part of The Nightmare Men series last year.

We’ve covered ten volumes in the Wordsworth Tales of Mystery And The Supernatural series so far:

The Crimson Blind and Other Stories by H.D. Everett
Couching at the Door by D.K. Broster
The Casebook of Carnacki The Ghost Finder by William Hope Hodgson
The Beast with Five Fingers by W.F. Harvey
The Power of Darkness — Tales of Terror, by Edith Nesbit
Alice and Claude Askew’s Aylmer Vance, The Ghost-Seer
The Black Veil & Other Tales of Supernatural Sleuths edited by Mark Valentine
Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S. Whitehead
Sherlock Holmes: The Game’s Afoot, edited by David Stuart Davies
The Casebook of Sexton Blake, edited by David Stuart Davies

There’s plenty more to come, so stay tuned.

The Casebook of Carnacki The Ghost Finder by William Hope Hodgson was published in 2006 by Wordsworth Editions. It is 191 pages in paperback priced at $6.99. There is no digital edition.

Weird Tales Meets Planet Stories in Space Eldritch

Weird Tales Meets Planet Stories in Space Eldritch

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space-eldritch-smallI stumbled on this little beauty today while browsing the latest Kindle releases on Amazon.

The cover art by Carter Reid is spectacular, and the contents — seven original novelettes and novellas of Lovecraftian pulp space opera — look pretty darn promising too. Contributors include Huge and Nebula nominee Brad R. Torgersen, Schlock Mercenary-creator Howard Tayler, and Michael R. Collings (The Slab, The House Beyond the Hill). Here’s the complete TOC:

Foreword, by Larry Correia
“Arise Thou Niarlat From Thy Rest,” by D.J. Butler
“Space Opera,“ by Michael R. Collings
“The Menace Under Mars,” by Nathan Shumate
“Gods in Darkness,” by David J. West
“The Shadows of Titan,” by Carter Reid and Brad R. Torgersen
“The Fury in the Void,” by Robert J. Defendi
“Flight of the Runewright,” by Howard Tayler

The whole package looks professional — although the lack of an editor credit admittedly diminishes the effect somewhat. Still, I’m willing to give this one a chance.

You can sample the first thousand words of each tale at Cold Fusion Media.

Space Eldrich was published on December 14, 2012 by Cold Fusion Media. It is 248 pages in trade paperback for $13,99; and is also available as an ebook for just $5.99 from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 11: John Carter of Mars

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 11: John Carter of Mars

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john-carter-of-mars-canaveralSo it ends here, not with a climatic epic, but with a bit of house cleaning almost fifteen years after the author’s death. The final book in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s career-spanning Barsoom saga is a slender volume containing two unrelated novellas.

I’ve called this review series “Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars,” but that title is a smidgeon deceiving when discussing the two stories here. One doesn’t take place on Mars, and the other was not written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. My apologies going forward.

Our Saga: The adventures of Earthman John Carter, his progeny, and sundry other natives and visitors, on the planet Mars, known to its inhabitants as Barsoom. A dry and slowly dying world, Barsoom contains four different human civilizations, one non-human one, a scattering of science among swashbuckling, and a plethora of religions, mystery cities, and strange beasts. The series spans 1912 to 1964 with nine novels, one volume of linked novellas, and two unrelated novellas.

Today’s Installment: John Carter of Mars (1964)

Previous Installments: A Princess of Mars (1912), The Gods of Mars (1913), The Warlord of Mars (1913–14), Thuvia, Maid of Mars (1916), The Chessmen of Mars (1922), The Master Mind of Mars (1927), A Fighting Man of Mars (1930), Swords of Mars (1934–35), Synthetic Men of Mars (1938), Llana of Gathol (1941)

The Backstory

Edgar Rice Burroughs died in 1950, two years after the publication of Llana of Gathol. Two novellas from the Mars series remained orphaned, having only appeared in magazines: “The Skeleton Men of Jupiter” and “John Carter and the Giant of Mars.” It wasn’t until 1964 that Canaveral Press published them together under the deceivingly archetypal title John Carter of Mars.

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Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1950: A Retro-Review

Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1950: A Retro-Review

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galaxy-science-fiction-november-1950-smallI’m slowly making my way through my collection of Galaxy Science Fiction, continuing with the second issue, dated November 1950.

“Honeymoon in Hell” by Fredric Brown: In the futuristic year of 1962, due to some unknown cause, all of Earth’s babies are born as females. With their own ideas running out, the U.S. government turns to Junior – the largest cybernetic computer in the nation. The computer hypothesizes there could be something local to the planet causing the issue.

It suggests testing the theory by sending married couples to the moon – to see if conception in a different environment would produce males. The government chooses Ray Carmody, a former rocket pilot who was one of the few people ever to land on the moon.

To Carmody’s dismay, the U.S. teams up with Russia for the first of multiple missions, and he is married remotely to Anna Borisovna, also a rocket pilot. They land separately in Hell Crater and begin assembling a shelter, but their work is interrupted by unexpected arrivals.

This is a story that gives away its age with numerous details, but it moves along really well. It’s an interesting idea, and I liked how the plot unfolded.

“Forgotten Missionary” by Isaac Asimov: Humans land on Saybrook’s Planet, taking caution to establish a barrier between themselves and the indigenous species. Because they must. The previous explorers, under Saybrook’s guidance, found that the planet was like a single organism, and it wanted to add new species to its body. Given the opportunity, the planet’s organisms could impregnate other species, which would later birth scions with green patches of fur where their eyes should be.

When the barrier fails for a brief moment, one of the planet’s organisms sneaks aboard, disguising itself as part of the ship. Its mission is to wait until it encounters the humans’ home world before affecting all other specimens of life – otherwise, the humans would simply destroy themselves as their first explorers had.

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Vintage Treasures: Solomon Kane: Skulls in the Stars

Vintage Treasures: Solomon Kane: Skulls in the Stars

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skulls-in-the-starsBack in October, I featured the Robert E. Howard collection Solomon Kane: The Hills of the Dead, the second of two Bantam paperbacks published in the late 70s. The first was Skulls in the Stars, released in 1978.

The Solomon Kane tales are some of my best-loved Howard fiction. “The Skull in the Stars” was one of the first Robert E. Howard tales I ever read, and for many years it was my favorite of his short stories.

He was the Puritan, who flinched not from the gates of Hell. Tall, gaunt, hollowed-eyed in his opposition to the forces of darkness, he defied the devil himself. Kane, cold, steely-nerved duelist, snatched his long rapier from its sheath and thrust it into the heart of evil. Ghoulish laughter follows him. Foul horror haunts his way. Kane, a man whose blood quickens with adventure. Kane, a man more dangerous than a famished wolf.

These slender paperbacks both have fold-out cover art (click on the image at right for the full version). The art is uncredited for this volume, but some sources claim it is Jeff Jones, and the style seems right to me. While the contents aren’t pure Howard (both books contain fragments completed by Ramsey Campbell), it’s a pleasure to see both the poetry and Cambell’s introductions. Here’s the complete TOC:

“The World of Solomon Kane” by J. Ramsey Campbell
“Skulls in the Stars”
“The Right Hand of Doom”
“Red Shadows”
“Rattle of Bones”
“The Castle of the Devil” (Completed by Ramsey Campbell)
“The Moon of Skulls”
“The One Black Stain” (poem)
“Blades of the Brotherhood”

Solomon Kane: Skulls in the Stars was published in paperback by Bantam Books in December, 1978. It is 178 pages, with a cover price of $1.95.

Analog, July 1961: A Retro-Review

Analog, July 1961: A Retro-Review

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analog-july-1961This is one of the earlier issues after Astounding completed its name-change to Analog. (The issues from February through September 1960 showed both titles on the cover – so October 1960 was the first purely Analog issue.)

Its Table of Contents is familiar to readers of the magazine even to the present day – there’s an editorial, there’s In Times to Come, there’s The Reference Library (book reviews), there’s the letter column (Brass Tacks). There is also a Science Fact article, and a serial, two novelettes, and two short stories.

The only item you won’t find in most present-day issues is The Analytical Laboratory, which ranks the stories from the issue two months earlier based on reader votes. (This was discontinued some time after I became a subscriber in the ’70s – I remember sending in my postcard with my votes a number of times.)

At any rate, for the April issue the number one story was the opening of Clifford Simak’s serial “The Fisherman”, better known these days by the book title, Time is the Simplest Thing.

The cover shows an asteroid mining setup. It’s by Thomas, who did a few covers for Analog in 1961 and 1962, and nothing much else I can find. I don’t even know his first name. Interiors are by Douglas, John Schoenherr, and H. R. Van Dongen.

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Vintage Treasures: The Beast with Five Fingers by W.F. Harvey

Vintage Treasures: The Beast with Five Fingers by W.F. Harvey

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the-beast-with-five-fingersTwo weeks ago, I mentioned The Power of Darkness: Tales of Terror, by Edith Nesbit, a volume in the Wordsworth Tales of Mystery And The Supernatural (or, as we prefer to call it, TOMAToS).

I first discovered Wordsworth’s excellent Tales of Mystery And The Supernatural line, believe it or not, wandering the floor at the Windy City Pulp and Paperback show in Chicago with fellow pulp aficionados Howard Andrew Jones and John C. Hocking. We’d just passed a dealer selling omnibus collections of Ki-Gor reprints — which heartily tempted Howard, let me tell you — when Hocking became distracted by a thick volume on display amidst a vast sea of books: The Beast With Five Fingers, by W.F. Harvey.

I’d never heard of Harvey, although he’s fairly well-known in pulp circles for the short story that became The Beast With Five Fingers, a 1946 creeping-hand horror flick starring Peter Lorre. Hocking’s excitement had nothing to do with the cover story however, and everything to do with “The Clock,” which he described as one of the finest horror stories ever written. That was enough for me, and I took home a copy.

Hocking is not alone in his admiration. In Gahan Wilson’s anthology Favorite Tales of Horror, which includes “The Clock,” Wilson famously wrote:

I think that for sheer menace this is the most powerful story I have ever read, though exactly what it is that is menacing, and exactly what it is menacing to do are entirely mysterious.

I’m happy to say that the story lives up to its reputation. It’s a tiny marvel, splendidly written, about a mysterious and macabre encounter in an abandoned home. Or is it? Like much of the best gothic fiction, exactly what happened is open to interpretation.

But there’s more to The Beast with Five Fingers than just “The Clock” — much more — and I’m happy to say I’ve been enjoying the entire book. (If you’re not the patient sort, however, the complete text of “The Clock” is available online.)

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New Treasures: Pax Britannia: Pax Omega, by Al Ewing

New Treasures: Pax Britannia: Pax Omega, by Al Ewing

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pax-omega-smallI have a weakness for pulp fiction. There aren’t a lot of practitioners of true pulp fantasy today — as opposed to pulp parody, which seems to be all too common.

A notable exception is Al Ewing, whose first novel of the Pax Britannia series, El Sombra, featured stormtroopers from the Ultimate Reich, mechanized horrors terrorizing a small Mexican town, and the torture-parlors of Master Minus and his Palace Of Beautiful Thoughts. The second installment, Gods of Manhattan, introduced The Blood Spider, Doc Thunder, and the monstrous plans of the Meccha-Fuhrer, set against the backdrop of the steam-powered city of tomorrow, New York USS. The final volume of the trilogy, Pax Omega, arrived this spring and sounds like the most intriguing of the bunch.

Doc Thunder’s last stand against a deadly foe whose true identity will shock you to your core! El Sombra’s final battle against the forces of the Ultimate Reich! The Locomotive Man in a showdown with cosmic science on the prairies of the Old West! Jackson Steele defends the 25th Century against the massed armies of the Space Satan! A duel of minds in the mystery palaces of One Million AD! Blazing steam-pulp sci-fi the way you crave it! From the Big Bang to the End Of Time — eleven tales from Pax Britannia’s past, present and distant future combine into one star-spanning saga set to shake the universe to its foundations –- or destroy it!

That’s a lot of exclamation marks. But when your sentences include words like Ultimate Reich and Space Satan, I guess they look kinda naked without ’em.

I don’t have the other two volumes, and I wonder if I can start with this one. I’ll give it a try and let you know.

Pax Britannia: Pax Omega was published by Abaddon in April, 2012. It is 266 pages in trade paperback for $9.99, or $5.99 for the digital edition.

Vintage Treasures: The Case of the Marble Monster

Vintage Treasures: The Case of the Marble Monster

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the-case-of-the-marble-monster-smallWhen you have kids, I think it’s inevitable that you want them to read the books you loved most as a child. You parents out there know what I’m talking about. And be honest. It’s not enough for them to just read ’em, is it? No. You want your kids to love those books, the same way you did.

I’ve had pretty spotty luck, frankly. Couldn’t get any of my children interested in Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, for example. Sometimes I despair for future generations. I had a bit more luck with my teenage boys and the classic SF and fantasy of my own early teens, such as Dune and Lord of Light.  (Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy was a complete bust, however).

But in terms of reaching all three of my kids, both boys and my 13-year old daughter? Almost impossible.

Except for a few slender volumes from Scholastic Books, that is. Scholastic Books were some of the great treasures of my childhood, and I loved them with a fierce passion. Norman Bridwell’s How To Care For Your Monster, John Peterson’s The Secret Hide-Out, Bertrand R. Brinley’s The Mad Scientist’s Club, Robert McCloskey’s Homer Price, and especially Lester Del Rey’s The Runaway Robot… these were the books I devoured again and again as a child. And the ones that most shaped my future reading tastes, now that I look back on it.

I’ve been able to interest all of my kids in at least one or two. And as you might expect, they disagree on which one is the best. The only one to receive universal praise is a thin collection of short stories originally published in 1961: I.G. Edmonds’s The Case of the Marble Monster.

The Case of the Marble Monster collects the tales of the legendary Judge Ooka, the 17th-century Japanese samurai in the service of the Tokugawa shogunate. Even if you’ve never heard of Ōoka Tadasuke, you’ve almost certainly heard of his cases, some of the most famous legal decisions in history. They include “The Case of the Stolen Smell,” in which an obnoxious innkeeper accuses a poor student of stealing the smell of his food, and ”The Case of the Bound Statue,” in which Ooka is asked to uncover the thief of a cartload of cloth, and he orders a statue of Jizo (a stone guardian) to be bound and arrested for dereliction of duty. All three of my children are in agreement that The Case of the Marble Monster is a fabulous book, and I can’t argue with their judgment. The tales have been passed down for hundreds of years, and it’s not hard to see why.

The Case of the Marble Monster was published by Scholastic Books in 1961. It was 45 cents in paperback for a slender 112 pages; you can buy copies on e-Bay for roughly ten times that. It’s well worth it.

Venture, March 1957: A Retro-Review

Venture, March 1957: A Retro-Review

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venture-science-fiction-march-1957-smallAnother magazine from 1957, at the cusp of the Space Age, though this one appeared several months before Sputnik. Venture was a companion magazine to F&SF, intended to focus on pure Science Fiction. Ten bi-monthly issues appeared beginning in January 1957. It was revived in 1969, and six quarterly issues appeared from May 1969 through August 1970. I’ve always thought it a shame they couldn’t (it would seem) make a go of it, though I must say I’d never read a copy until now.

The look and feel of the magazine is similar to F&SF: 132 pages (including the covers), same font and column layout. Unlike F&SF, there are interior illustrations (by John Giunta). There are no features except for a sort of editorial (called “Venturings”) on the inside front cover.

The cover illustration, for Leigh Brackett’s “The Queer Ones”, is by Dick Shelton and it’s a bit odd: in two colors (red and olive green, plus black and white), showing a woman shooting a sort of raygun. It does accurately (if in a slightly symbolic way) depict a scene from the story.

As I said, no features, so let’s get right to the fiction. The stories are:

“Too Soon to Die” by Tom Godwin (15,100 words)
“The Lady was a Tramp” by Rose Sharon (6,700 words)
“Friend for Life” by Gordon R. Dickson (5,200 words)
“The Queer Ones” by Leigh Brackett (14,000 words)
“Blind Alley” by Charles L. Fontenay (2,600 words)
“Vengeance for Nikolai” by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (7,700 words)

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