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Vintage Treasures: Midnight Pleasures by Robert Bloch

Vintage Treasures: Midnight Pleasures by Robert Bloch

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Midnight Pleasures Robert Bloch-smallRobert Bloch isn’t a name that gets tossed around much these days. Even before his death in 1994, he was primarily known as the author of Psycho, and this one fact overshadowed most of his other accomplishments.

But Bloch was also the author of hundreds of short stories, and over 30 novels, virtually all of which are out of print today. He was one of the most gifted and prolific short story writers in the horror field, and his best short stories are compact treasures. He won a Hugo Award for his 1958 story “That Hell-Bound Train,” and multiple Bram Stoker awards (for the 1993 collection The Early Fears, the novelette “The Scent of Vinegar,” and his 1993 memoir Once Around the Bloch.)

He received a World Fantasy Award in 1975 for Lifetime Achievement, and a Lifetime Achievement Bram Stoker Award in 1990.

Bloch was also one of the youngest members of The Lovecraft Circle, those writers who corresponded with and often consciously emulated H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft was one of the first to encourage Bloch’s writing, and a lot of Bloch’s early work for the pulps was Cthulhu Mythos fiction (most of which was gathered in his 1981 collection Mysteries of the Worm.)

Midnight Pleasures is one of Bloch’s last fiction collections (two more appeared before his death: Fear and Trembling in 1989, and The Early Fears in 1994). It’s a fine sample of late horror fiction from one of the best short story writers the genre has seen.

It was nominated for a 1987 Bram Stoker Award for Fiction Collection (it lost out to The Essential Ellison). It contains chiefly later short work, dating from 1977-1985, published in anthologies like New Terrors 2, Shadows, Masques, Analog Yearbook, Dark Forces, Chrysalis 3, and others.

It also includes one pulp story (from the August 1939 issue of Weird Tales), and two stories that appear here for the first time: “Comeback” and “Die–Nasty.”

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The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series: The Young Magicians edited by Lin Carter

The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series: The Young Magicians edited by Lin Carter

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Young MagiciansThe Young Magicians
Lin Carter, ed.
Ballantine Books
October 1969, 280p. $0.95
Cover art by Sheryl Slavitt

I apologize for having taken so long to get this post done. I’ve been on the road for over half the weekends since the end of April, mostly family trips for graduations or dive meets my son was competing in. I thought I would have a little more time when the second summer session started since I would be teaching, but that hasn’t exactly been the case. (No, I have no idea why I would have thought that.)

But I’m back, and I would like to thank John for his patience. I’m tanned; I’m rested; I’m ready. Well, I’m tanned at any rate. And I’ve got a pretty darned good anthology to tell you about.

A number of people, myself included, have said that Lin Carter’s legacy will ultimately not be his writing or his Conan pastiches, but the work he did on the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. It’s hard in this day and age of ebooks and specialty presses to remember how hard fantasy was to find on bookstore shelves in the late 1960s. The commercial fantasy boom wasn’t far off, but it hadn’t gotten there. It was possible to read just about all of the titles that were easily available at the time.

The Young Magicians was a companion volume to Dragons, Elves, and Heroes with both of them being published in October 1969. That volume contained examples of imaginary world fantasy beginning with folktales and sagas and ending with William Morris. In The Young Magicians, Carter starts with Morris and provides samples of fantasy from more contemporary writers, ending with Lin Carter himself.

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Looking at The Dukes of Hazzard as a Fantasy Story

Looking at The Dukes of Hazzard as a Fantasy Story

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Dukeseps13132yuI’m not a cranky old man, but I generally consider most stuff shown on network TV after my 15th birthday to be not worth the effort to press the buttons on the remote… or worth the effort to get cable.

But I had a lot of really good experiences with TV before I turned 15. The choices were pretty limited, but the more I talk to my 10 year old, the more I realize there were oases of TV magic in my youth.

Battlestar Galactica in 1978. Buck Rogers in 1980. M.A.S.H. for my entire youth. Knight Rider. Starblazers. Battle of the Planets. Most Saturday morning cartoons. Manimal… hahaha. Just kidding. That was cancelled for good reason.

Wanting my son to have some magic oases too, I found myself unqualified to offer him anything other than what I had when I was young. And recently I was musing about our Friday nights, and what I might have been doing 30 years earlier, and I realized that for a good five years, I’d watched The Dukes of Hazzard every Friday at my grandmother’s house. I decided to try to relive some of my childhood while offering something new to my son’s.

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The Omnibus Volumes of Andre Norton, Part One

The Omnibus Volumes of Andre Norton, Part One

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Darkness and Dawn-small

If you’re like me, you enjoy vintage science fiction and fantasy, and tracking down old paperbacks to add to your collection. But nothing beats the convenience of having those fragile old books available in a modern reprint. Unless it’s having multiple books in a single omnibus volume, under a great new cover, for the price of a single paperback. When that happens, we like to make some noise about it here — especially when the books involved are true classics of the genre.

That’s why we end up talking about Baen so much. Last week it was the trio of Baen’s Murray Leinster omnibus volumes; before that it was their seven volumes featuring James H. Schmitz. Today, I’d like to take a look at three of the many omnibus volumes collecting some of the best work of Andre Norton, published by Baen last decade.

First up is Darkness and Dawn, which collects perhaps the first Andre Norton book I ever laid eyes on, in my elementary school library in Kentville, Nova Scotia: Daybreak—2250 A.D.

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Vintage Treasures: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

Vintage Treasures: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

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We Have Always Lived in the Castle-small We Have Always Lived in the Castle back-small

It’s been at least 25 years since I read Shirley Jackson’s classic We Have Always Lived in the Castle. But it’s the kind of book that sticks in your mind.

I won’t say much about the plot, other than that it deals with the three surviving members of the Blackwood family: Merricat, a practicing witch, her elder sister Constance, who has not left their home for six years, and their deranged Uncle Julian. All three live in a large house, far from the neighboring village. Not so very long ago there were seven members of the family — until someone put a fatal dose of arsenic in the sugar bowl one night. Constance was acquitted of the murders and returned home, where her sister Merricat protects her from the sneers and curiosity of the townspeople. Their days pass in quiet isolation… until a new danger appears, in the shape of their mysterious cousin Charles.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is one of the most famous examples of “Southern Gothic,” and one of works that made Shirley Jackson famous. It was published three years before her death. There have been over a dozen editions, but my favorite is the 1963 paperback above, with the gorgeous and spooky cover by William Teason. You can usually find copies available online for under $10.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle was published in hardcover by The Viking Press in 1962, and reprinted in paperback by Popular Library in October 1963. The paperback is 173 pages, priced at sixty cents.

The Books of Tanith Lee: Companions on the Road

The Books of Tanith Lee: Companions on the Road

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Companions on the Road back-small Companions on the Road spine-small Companions on the Road-small

We’re continuing with our look at the extraordinary 40-year career of Tanith Lee, who passed away on May 24th. So far we’ve covered 13 novels and three collections; today I’d like to look at the slender 1979 paperback Companions on the Road, which I think has been unjustly neglected over the last four decades.

Companions on the Road collects two novellas, Companions on the Road (1975) and The Winter Players (1976). Both were originally published as chapbooks in the UK by Macmillan, with covers by Juliet Stanwell Smith (see below). For their US release as a paperback original, they were collected into a single volume from Bantam titled Companions of the Road: Wondrous Tales of Adventure and Quest, with a wraparound cover by Lou Feck (click on the images above for bigger versions).

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The Omnibus Volumes of Murray Leinster

The Omnibus Volumes of Murray Leinster

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Med Ship-small Planets of Adventure-small A Logic Named Joe-small

Last week, in my article on The Omnibus Volumes of James H. Schmitz, I noted how Eric Flint edited seven omnibus volumes collecting the science fiction of James H. Schmitz, starting in 2000. Those books were successful enough that Eric expanded his project to include other great SF and fantasy writers of the mid-20th Century.

And boy, did he expand it. By the time he was done, Baen had published volumes dedicated to A. E. Van Vogt, Michael Shea, Howard L. Myers, Keith Laumer, Randall Garrett, Christopher Anvil, Cordwainer Smith, Lois McMaster Bujold, A. Bertam Chandler, P.C. Hogdell, Andre Norton, and many others. Today I want to look at the three volumes dedicated to Murray Leinster, “The Dean of Science Fiction,” whose work I think still has enormous appeal even today.

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Vintage Treasures: The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins and 25 Other Ghost Stories

Vintage Treasures: The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins and 25 Other Ghost Stories

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The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins and 25 Other Ghost Stories-small The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins and 25 Other Ghost Stories-back-small

The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins and 25 Other Ghost Stories is one of the oldest paperbacks I own. It is, in fact, one of the oldest fantasy paperbacks produced in the United States. It was published in 1941, just two years after Pocket Books released the first paperbacks in 1939, revolutionizing the American publishing industry. And like a lot of old things, it’s a little strange and doesn’t do things in a familiar way.

For one thing, as it was one of the first paperback anthologies ever produced, apparently no one thought the name of the editor was important. Some folks assume it was W. L. Parker, who wrote the intro, and others assume W. Bob Holland, but no one is really sure.

Also, it’s called The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins and 25 Other Ghost Stories not because it contains The Haunted Hotel (by Wilkie Collins) and twenty-five more stories about ghosts, but because it’s actually a mash-up of two previously published books: the novel The Haunted Hotel (by Wilkie Collins), and Twenty-Five Ghost Stories. So naturally, the page numbering re-starts halfway through the book. In the early days of paperbacks, publishers were trying all kinds of wacky things. Except original titles, apparently. Because, hey, let’s not go crazy.

And another thing. Have a look at the strange back cover (click for a bigger image). Today, we think of the back cover as, you know, a great place to tell prospective buyers a little about the book in their hands. In 1941, you mostly told readers what the hell a paperback book was. You imparted critical information, like “opaque paper,” “delightful flexibility in handling,” and “stained on all three sides with fast book dyes.” It’s easy to mock the primitive publishers of 1941 today, but let’s face it — if they hadn’t sold their early readers on paperbacks, you and I would be reading books exclusively in hardcover and clay tablets.

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Bill Ward on Poul Anderson’s “Thud and Blunder” — Thirty Years Later

Bill Ward on Poul Anderson’s “Thud and Blunder” — Thirty Years Later

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Swords Against Darkness III-smallNearly seven years ago, Bill Ward wrote “On Thud and Blunder — Thirty Years Later,” one of the first articles ever posted at BlackGate.com. Here’s what he said, in part.

It’s been thirty years since Poul Anderson wrote his essay on the need for realism in heroic fantasy, ‘On Thud and Blunder,’ which you can read in its entirety at the SFWA site, and I think it holds up well even though the genre — and the perception of it — has changed greatly. ‘On Thud and Blunder’ originally appeared in the third installment of Andrew Offutt’s classic anthology series Swords Against Darkness; though it was in the excellent, if unimaginatively named, collection of Anderson’s called Fantasy that I first encountered it. But already at the time of my reading a whole generation of writers had made a name for themselves by following the dictates of realism and common sense in designing their fantasy worlds.

The essay begins with a satire of the genre that features a barbarian cleaving through armor with a fifty-pound sword and riding a horse as if it were a motorbike, among other ridiculous things. It’s the kind of thing that gave heroic fantasy and sword and sorcery a bad name, and perhaps the sort of thing that meant it would soon be eclipsed by a rising tide of ‘high fantasy’ in the eighties and nineties. But, in 1978, hf — as Anderson terms heroic fantasy in an abbreviation that seems to have never caught on — was an emerging star.

In the Comments section, James Enge wrote, “Thanks for this: I’m a big Anderson fan and it’s a pleasure to reread this article… it’s still the authentic points of concrete imagination that strike deep, and Anderson was a past master at those.”

Read the complete article here. We’ll be presenting more classic articles from BG‘s rich history over the next few months.

Discovering Robert E. Howard: Frank Schildiner on Solomon Kane

Discovering Robert E. Howard: Frank Schildiner on Solomon Kane

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Kane_MoonMartial arts expert Frank Shildiner has forgotten more about Adventure Pulp than I’ve ever known. His writings have included new tales starring  pulp characters Richard Knight and Thunder Jim Wade (if you’re a Doc Savage fan, you should check big Jim out).

Solomon Kane is probably Robert E. Howard’s second best-known character after a certain well-muscled barbarian, and one which influenced Frank very early on. So, I turned to Frank for a look at the puritan sword slinger, as Black Gate continues its summer look at Robert E. Howard.

Solomon Kane. I can still remember when I first read the name. I was 11 and looking through books and comics at a flea market, my mother one row over looking through the Robin Cook section. I pulled a slim paperback from the pile, the cover showing a cold eyed Puritan staring at me with open condemnation (at least that’s how I interpreted the visual). But then I read the name… SOLOMON KANE. And there wasn’t a prayer on Earth of getting me to let go of this book that day.

And that first short story, “Red Shadows,” changed me forever. I became a fan for all things Robert E. Howard, but especially Solomon Kane. Caught by the enemy he’d chased from Europe into Africa, Kane looked up at this man he’d hounded relentlessly for years, and the following thought summed up why this hero became my favorite.

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