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Creeping Dread and Strange Melancholy: Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies by John Langan

Creeping Dread and Strange Melancholy: Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies by John Langan

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Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies (Word Horde, July 5, 2022). Cover by Matthew Jaffe

I consume a lot of literature from a lot of genres: everything from the vibrant, mystical fantasies of Tolkien to the grim blood-and-thunder of McCarthy, and more besides. But it is with horror fiction that I find myself at both my pickiest and my most ravenous. The horror I enjoy, I love. The horror I do not enjoy, I hardly stomach. So, when I find a horror author I consistently enjoy, I try to read their works in the manner a man stranded upon a lee shore might parcel out his last bits of hardtack and beef: a piece at a time, savoring each moment, drawing it out as long as possible.

John Langan’s work does not afford me that parsimony. A veteran of horror and other speculative genres since the publication of his first story, “On Skua Island,” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 2001, I devour his words wherever and whenever I find them. His latest collection, Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies continued this long tradition of literary gluttony.

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Random Review: “Reconciliation” by Fredric Brown

Random Review: “Reconciliation” by Fredric Brown

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Cover by Kohs
Cover by Kohs

Fredric Brown was known for doing two things quite well. He was a master of the twist ending, science fiction’s O. Henry, if you like, and he was prolific with extremely short stories, flash fiction in modern parlance. Combining the two is not particularly easy, but since one aspect of flash fiction is “its ability to hint at or imply a larger story,” according to Robert Swartwood, the fact that the author needs to use words sparingly means that they have to imply a great deal of the plot, characters, and setting, leaving the stories rife for misinterpretation or misdirection.

One of Brown’s pieces of flash fiction is “Reconciliation,” which first appeared in Browns’ collection Angels and Spaceships. In only 311 words, Brown tells the story of a couple whose marriage is falling apart. John has come to view his unnamed wife as someone who only married him for his money and hangs around with women whom he dislikes. His wife denies that his money has anything to do with their relationship, but feels humiliated by the fact that John has had an affair and is positive that he will have future affairs, a fact that he confirms.

Brown has captured the vitriol and hate of two people stuck in a relationship that can only be headed for an ending, whether separation, divorce, or murder.

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Random Reviews: “Shadow in the City” by Dean Wesley Smith

Random Reviews: “Shadow in the City” by Dean Wesley Smith

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Cover by G-Force Design
Cover by G-Force Design

Dean Wesley Smith wrote “Shadow in the City” for the anthology Stars: Original Stories Based on the Songs of Janis Ian. Ian, a longtime science fiction fan, had attended the Worldcon in 2001 and became friends with several authors over the next several years, including Mike Resnick, with whom she edited this anthology in 2003.  Smith’s story is inspired by Ian’s song “Here in the City,” from her 1999 album Unreleased 2: Take No Prisoners.

Set in the aftermath of a calamity that has depopulated the Pacific Northwest, if not the entire world, Carey Noack has been living alone for four years near the Oregon coast when she decides it is time to return to Portland to see if anyone is living in the city, or at least to retrieve some of the belongings from her old apartment. In Portland, Toby Landel is living in a penthouse apartment he has commandeered surrounded by surveillance equipment he set up around town in hopes of finding someone else living in the otherwise deserted city.

Although both are looking for other people, they are also aware of the danger of finding someone else. Toby’s one discovery of a person moving through Portland since the catastrophe resulted in him not revealing himself for fear that the transient would just as likely kill him as anything else. The tension of the story comes, in part, from Carey and Toby’s concerns once they realize that there actually is someone else around.

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Future Treasures: The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 14, edited by Ellen Datlow

Future Treasures: The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 14, edited by Ellen Datlow

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The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Fourteen (Night Shade, December 20, 2022)

Here we are again. Ellen Datlow — arguably the most famous editor of horror short fiction in the world — has released her latest Best Horror anthology featuring her annual selection of tales, plus an invaluable overview of what happened last year in horror (books, magazines, awards etc.)

The present volume collects twenty-four stories and, once again, is a juicy treat for any lover of the genre.

I will focus on my own favorites, most of which were already among my own personal selection from the year 2021, while others had escaped my attention as a simple reader.

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New Treasures: Shattered Dreams by Ulff Lehmann

New Treasures: Shattered Dreams by Ulff Lehmann

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Shattered Dreams by Ulff Lehmann (Crossroad Press, March 16, 2018)

Shattered Walls, Book 4 of Ulff Lehmann’s Light in the Dark Book series, released this November, 2022. This post reviews Book 1, Shattered Dreams, to lure dark fantasy readers into the Dark. Do you like Tolkien-esque worlds with a unique perspective, perhaps sprinkled with Grimdark battle and horror? Shattered Dreams will whet your appetite. It’s a fresh, dark spin on traditional fiction.  You’ll be thrown into a mire of fractured perspectives and nightmares, and Lehmann controls the process of refining it all with a host of characters (the cursed Drangar Ralgon stealing the limelight). You’ll enjoy this if you enjoy mysteries, brutal melee, and Elvin worlds.

Shattered Dreams Cover Blurb

Epic Fantasy filled to the brim with Grimdark Reality.

If one looks too long into the abyss, the abyss looks back. Drangar Ralgon has been avoiding the abyss’s gaze for far too long and now he turns to face it. For a hundred years the young kingdom of Danastaer has thrived in peace. Now their northern neighbor, mighty Chanastardh, has begun a cunning invasion. Thrust into events far beyond his control, the mercenary Drangar Ralgon flees his solitary life as a shepherd to evade the coming war and take responsibility for his crimes.

In Dunthiochagh, Danastaer’s oldest city, the holy warrior Kildanor uncovers the enemy’s plans for invasion. As ancient forces reach forth to shape the world once more, the sorceress Ealisaid wakes from a century of hibernation only to realize the Dunthiochagh she knew is no more. Magic, believed long gone, returns, and with it comes an elven wizard sent to recover a dangerous secret.

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Random Reviews: “Why Do You Think They Call It Middle Earth?” by Susan Casper

Random Reviews: “Why Do You Think They Call It Middle Earth?” by Susan Casper

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Cover by Larry Elmore
Cover by Larry Elmore

Because I’ve been asked about the process by which I’ve been selecting stories for the Random Review series, I thought I’d take a moment to explain how the stories are selected.

I have a database of approximately 42,000 short stories that I own sorted by story title. When it comes time for me to select a story to review as part of this series, I role several dice (mostly ten sided) to determine which story should be read. I cross reference the numbers that come up on the die with the database to see what story I’ll be reviewing.  This week I rolled 40,278, which turned out to be Susan Casper’s short story “Why Do You Think They Call It Middle Earth?”

One of the things I hoped to get out of this series, from a personal point of view, was to discover authors and short stories that I’ve owned and have never read. Of course, I also hoped to share those discoveries, good or bad, with the readers of Black Gate.

Casper’s story is told from Emily Prentiss’s point of view, a thoroughly unlikable, self-absorbed woman who prides herself on her no-holds-barred attitude in the boardroom. While berating a homeless man one day, she falls through a crack in the earth and finds herself in a fantastic realm, intent on finding someone who will pay for her misfortune.

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Random Reviews: “In the Company of Heroes” by Diane Duane

Random Reviews: “In the Company of Heroes” by Diane Duane

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Cover by Bob Warner
Cover by Bob Warner

Diane Duane’s short story “In the Company of Heroes” appeared in Past Perfect, one of the numerous anthologies Martin H. Greenberg co-edited for DAW Books, this time with Larry Segriff. Originally published in 2001, Duane’s story is one of a dozen time travel stories in the book, and she reprinted it a decade later as the lead story in her collection Uptown Local and Other Interventions.

Robert Willingden is an incredibly wealthy and powerful man who has a hole in his life. Much like Charles Foster Kane, he lost the one thing he cared about as a child.  Unlike Kane, he knew exactly what happened to it. His parents had always denigrated his love of comics and he hid them in the attic, carefully retrieving them one at a time to read and then smuggle back to their safe spot until the night there was a fire in the attic. Although the comics made it through the fire, they were lost to a thief who used the hole in the attic caused by the flames to steal his treasure.

He hatched his plan when a priceless clock he owned was damaged. Taking it to a renowned clockmaker in Lucerne, Switzerland, the clockmaker, Uli, indicated the he did more than simply repair clocks and might be able to help Willingden stop the thief from ever having the chance to steal the long missing comics.

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Random Reviews: “In the Bookshadow” by Marianne de Pierres

Random Reviews: “In the Bookshadow” by Marianne de Pierres

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Cover by John Picacio

In 2002, Greg Ketter, the owner of Minneapolis’ DreamHaven Books, published the original anthology Shelf Life: Fantastic Stories Celebrating Bookstores. The anthology includes one of my favorite stories, P.D. Cacek’s “A Book, By Its Cover.” It also included sixteen other stories, and, while I have re-read Cacek’s story over the years, I haven’t necessarily re-read many of the other stories since the book was originally published. While the book includes work by major names such as Neil Gaiman, Gene Wolfe, Charles de Lint, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, and Harlan Ellison, it also contains stories by less well-known names, including Marianne de Pierres, who had only published a handful of stories when Shelf Life came out, although she has proven to be more prolific in the years since.

Her contribution of Shelf Life is the story “In the Bookshadow,” which explores some of the more marginal customers at a bookstore. Anyone who has worked in retail knows that there are a variety of customer types.  Most come and, make their purchases, and leave, the presence only noted by the brief exchange at the cash register. Others are star customers. The staff knows them and looks forward to their visits. They are personable, spend a lot of money, and make the employees feel as if they are doing a real service. De Pierres’ protagonist is the employee who takes care of the marginal customers who give everyone else the willies.

When she begins to start seeing things out of the corner of her eye in the bookstore, she points them out to the customers, who don’t confirm her visions, but also appear to be doing something to protect her from the strange entities that seem to appear when nobody else is around.

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Some Tales from Night’s Plutonian Shore: My Favorite Edgar Allan Poe Stories

Some Tales from Night’s Plutonian Shore: My Favorite Edgar Allan Poe Stories

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I do not have a precise memory of when I first read one of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales. Perhaps it was a bowdlerized version of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” perhaps “Some Words With a Mummy” in one of my grandmother’s Reader’s Digest omnibuses. It might have been the Classic Comics version of “The Pit and the Pendulum.” I definitely saw most of the Roger Corman movie adaptations with Vincent Price on the 4:30 Movie on ABC. I know I picked up a copy of Scholastic Book’s collection, Eight Tales of Terror, at a used book sale at Our Lady of Good Counsel. The important thing is, Edgar Allan Poe‘s creations have been with me as a reader of the weird and the fantastic from my earliest days.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve actually read any of Poe’s stories, so, as the Halloween season is upon us, it seems the proper time to return to them. I had no doubt I would still enjoy them, but I really had no idea just how good and groundbreaking they really are. Lovecraft, in his seminal essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature” stated that by focusing on the psychological and not the Gothic, “Poe’s spectres thus acquired a convincing malignity possessed by none of their predecessors, and established a new standard of realism in the annals of literary horror.” I don’t think it’s an overstatement. There are few boogeymen or vampires here; instead, it’s mostly warped and broken minds, the sadism of the vengeful, and the nightmares of the delirious.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is credited with creating the detective story (he didn’t), the modern short story (he was one of the earliest American practitioners of the form), and contemporary horror fiction (he helped). His life was plagued by misfortune and missteps and to this day, his death at the unfortunate young age of forty remains a mystery, though it has been attributed to alcoholism, drug addiction, syphilis, and even murder. Whatever the circumstances of his life, his work remains one of the pinnacles of American writing, of Romanticism, and of weird fiction.

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Quatro-Decadal Review: Asimov’s Science Fiction, November 1989, edited by Gardner Dozois

Quatro-Decadal Review: Asimov’s Science Fiction, November 1989, edited by Gardner Dozois

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An unappealing cover by Wayne Barlowe, more on that in a second

After the somewhat uninspiring November 1989 Analog, I turned next to Asimov’s, and found it to be pretty good.

Editorial — “Half Done” by Isaac Asimov

Starting with the quote ‘Half done is hardly begun,’ Isaac Asimov (That’s Dr. Asimov, if you’re nasty) jumps into looking at how we conceptualize and compare time. Starting with the fact the Earth is 15 billion years old, half of that is 7.5 billion years, before our solar system existed by easily 3 billion years. Earth itself comes into play 4.6 billion years ago., and half of that, 2.3 billion Earth life is just prokaryotes. At 1.4 eukaryotic cells start showing up. Half of that, 700 million years ago, the highest life is just worms, nothing that even has shells.

The exercise is to show how rapidly things start to change. Leading to the question of how long can it go on? How do we get off on setting stories in the future. On thinking we can even realistically do it?

While reading this essay I could not shake the knowledge that Asimov had four years of life left.

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